Platinum Games has updated its Wonderful 101 blog with yet another post. You can find it here. Today’s update covers the game’s Wonderful Missions.
Splinter Cell: Blacklist launched last month in the US. Having been on the market for about a week, the game did fairly well. Total sales were under 300,000, though we don’t have the specifics.
Unfortunately, it would appear that Blacklist did terribly (that may be putting it mildly) on Wii U. According to NeoGAF poster “creamsugar”, who has pretty much always been spot on with NPD data, just 1.6 percent of the title’s sales came from the Wii U version. This would put Blacklist’s Wii U sales under 5,000 – a paltry figure, to be sure.
Expect a whole lot more of Bravely Default in the future. Going forward, producer Tomoya Asano hopes to launch “a product relating to Bravely Default every year.”
Asano comment comes from a recent Famitsu interview. He didn’t necessarily say that we’ll be seeing a new mainline entry each year, so we can probably count on things such as spinoffs.
Most gamers expected Activision to come out with a new entry in the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare sub-series this year. That was the plan initially, though things turned out differently in the end.
Speaking with Game Informer, executive producer Mark Rubin said Infinity Ward started out with this year’s Call of Duty game as Modern Warfare 4. After determining that the story arc was complete following Modern Warfare 3, however, the project eventually morphed into Ghosts.
According to Rubin:
“People felt really strongly that they liked the way you as a player can connect to the world you know day-to-day. So the idea of staying modern became a key point. Let’s not do ‘Space Guns on Jupiter.’ Let’s do real weapons that we know in a world we’re familiar with. And then it became, do we do Modern Warfare 4? And that was the game for a little while. Because we said, we’ll stay modern, we’ll do Modern Warfare 4! But then it was like, well, we kind of finished the story in Modern Warfare 3. That arc is done.”
It’s not too often that you see a female protagonist in a video game. When Shantae was in development over a decade ago, this was even no prominent.
And so it shouldn’t be too surprising to hear that for the first Shantae, WayForward was asked – likely by publishers – to put the character on the back-burner in favor for a male hero. According to the studio’s Matt Bozon, even though WayForward lost “many, many battles early on”, the team didn’t budge “and never made Shantae the 2nd playable character”.
“We had many, many battles early on and lost. But we stuck to our guns and never made Shantae the 2nd playable character next to a male hero (it was suggested many times). So I like to think we softened the game biz up a bit.”
