The Christmas food is long gone (maybe there is still a slice of fruit cake left somewhere).
Here, on this here NAG website, is your safe space. And I, your humble fellow voyager, will help you set sail on calmer waters: November 2012.
You know, just one month before the world was supposed to end in a huge flood.
The NAG mag issues were still fire though.
Frodo lit up the front page with his phial and Mithril (brick) armour, as LEGO Lord Of The Rings was here to show us that there was more to the hobbit than meets the eye.
I had my own trek across Middle-Earth this past December, if you count trekking through the middle of Mzansi from Gauteng to Knysna.
Except, I did the journey in reverse, if you get what I’m saying 😛
This was the most un-epic thing that has ever happened at Epic Games (besides Fortnite, can I get a hell yeah, Arielle?!) [Ed’s Note: I stopped reading when I saw Fortnite.]
Cliff Bleszinski had up to 2012 been working with the massive developer studio for twenty years, with his greatest achievement surely being the Gears of War franchise.
To call it quits now, especially at the height of the franchise’s popularity, was baffling to say the least.
Could it have been burnout? Or was there more to the story?
Tencent had paid more than ten cents to acquire about 40% of the Epic Games’s business capital (a move with the aim of getting them into the “Games as a service” model and helped fund the Unreal engine and other projects, such as that other abomination years later).
In later interviews, Cliff had also mentioned the frustrations he began to experience when he felt creative differences about pitches he was making for future projects, with some in the company even calling Gears of War a “fluke”.
I’m sorry, but even as someone who is not a Gears fan, thinking that its success was pure luck is Locust Horde propaganda.
It’s at this point where Cliff stopped showing up for work, choosing to stay at his beach house.
Tim Sweeney eventually drove out to him to have an honest conversation about his future at Epic. But by that point, the writing was already on the wall (or in the sand).
Cliffy B would go on to form Boss Key Productions from where they made the revolutionary… Lawbreakers. Not really helping extinguish the fluke accusations here.
Back in 2005, the rights of XCOM had been bought by 2K Games.
It had been a good ten years since the excellent Enemy Unknown, Terror from the Deep and Apocalypse, so the franchise was due for a revamp.
2K had also bought Irrational Games a year later and originally was going to commission Ken Levine’s team to release that along with BioShock, before some gentleman said, “Would you kindly” and Ken was whisked away.
2K would later put two studios, namely Australia and Marin, on the project, with one focusing on the multiplayer portion and the other on the single player.
Set in the 1960s, you would play as government officials surveying and doing recon on alien activity.
The game was revealed at E3 2010 but was alienating (ah c’mon, it was right there!).
The creative leads of the Australian studio also left 2K in 2011, meaning Marin was the sole studio left to see through the project.
After many reworks, delays, another showing at E3 next year and scrapped multiplayer, the game would be released as The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.
In the end, the game was decent enough, with a good story set in the Cold War and its real-time, third-person shooter mechanics being a significant departure from the turn-based tactics of previous XCOM games.
But decent was not going to cut it when Firaxis had released a remake of XCOM: Enemy Unknown mere months earlier (one which got critical acclaim from pretty much everyone).
Guess the unknown enemy was an inside man all along.
It’s at this point in the magazine that maybe 2012 should have flooded the earth.
Because then it would mean you would cling onto the memory that you almost got to see the Star Wars 1313 and Star Wars: First Assault games.
First Assault was meant to be a gritty 8v8 shooter in the same vein as Call of Duty, while 1313 would have you play as a younger Boba Fett, and in a similar style to Bounty Hunter, all those years back, have you track down and capture criminals in the infamous level 1313 of Coruscant.
There was also a game called Wingspan in the making, which would have you fight in galaxy battles from vehicles from The Phantom Menace, before the big, planned release of Battlefront III, which would include all the mechanics of First Assault, Wingspan and more, reviving the long-dead franchise since Pandemic made its last game in 2005.
What happened, you may ask? The evil empire, of course.
No, not that one. Something far worse.
Disney would take over LucasArts, cancel all its current projects before starting their own era of Star Wars, including the sequel trilogy, way too many series to count, the final season of the Clone Wars, and so much more… It’s probably by far the most hated/beloved that Star Wars has been, probably since the prequels (you never know with this crazy fandom).
Also, since then, we have had an entire reboot of the Battlefront series, Pandemic came back (wait, no, sorry, not that Pandemic), and there is still no word on Star Wars 1313.
And finally, the showpiece. Forged in fire, there was one game to rule them all.
HAH! You thought it was gonna be the game this mag is about, didn’t you?
Did you really think you were getting rid of The Dark Lord that easily?
Peter Molyneux (don’t resist him, he is inevitable) had been away from Lionhead Studios for a while and had begun a new studio, namely 22Cans.
The name, according to its crazy creator, would be 22 “experiments” that the studio would work on, before one game and one game only.
The one game to rule them all (seriously, does he not sound like Sauron?).
Was this game Godus? Was that game an experiment? (It certainly felt like a social experiment to all those people who pledged their money on Kickstarter)
Or is the “one” game Masters of Albion? Could it be that long in the making? (does that mean the Fable remake is Frodo?).
Am I going mad from talking about Molyneux all the time?
All jokes aside, this really was a fantastic issue to go through.
At this time in my life, I had just gotten an Xbox 360 for being the top learner in Grade 7, and with that, unlocked a whole generation of games, one of my first being Minecraft.
What’s more, the release schedule of the end of 2012 really was a who’s who in gaming: Far Cry 3, Assassin’s Creed 3, Hitman Absolution, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, LEGO: Lord of the Rings.
Avatar was coming out on Blu-Ray (the only good one in the trilogy), I was sleeping with the light on because of Slenderman and that December I went to Cape Town for the very first time.
If that was the last hurrah before the Mayans said our time was up, I woulda been happy.
Teens, listen up: cherish this part of your gaming life and IRL life.
It will be one of your fondest times to look back on.
