Grave Gamer News & Views — quote

“I’ve become a symbol. I don’t want to be a symbol, responsible for something huge that I don’t understand, that I don’t want to work on, that keeps coming back to me. I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m not a CEO. I’m a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter.”

– Markus ‘Notch’ Persson on selling his studio Mojang to Microsoft for $2.5 billion. His thoughts on the sale and his departure from Mojang can be found here.

“Is Dead Space dead? Not for me it’s not. I love it, the team at Visceral loves it. Having worked on it for seven years, this was a good break for us to try something different.

But there’s a lot of passion about that franchise, not just from me but from others in the company, so I think it’s an IP that’s important for the company. You never know where it’s going to go… I’d definitely be excited about what it would be like on this gen.”

– Steve Papoutsis, Vice President and General Manager, Visceral Games, speaking to Kotaku.

Next-gen technology can set the stage for a stunningly gorgeous and gruesomely stunning Dead Space. Surely this universe has more stories to tell and more Clive Barker-esque nightmares to scrape off your boot.

“I’m not going to fuck around with you like Valve does with Half-Life 3. Look. We know we want it and we know it should exist, but we don’t know what it is yet.

But we are doing things in Borderlands that we’ll announce soon, that are good, and that I think people will be really excited about if you love the franchise.”

– Randy Pitchford, CEO and President of Gearbox Software, updating Polygon on the status of a Borderlands 3.

Oh, Randy. I salute you. You can check out Mr. Pitchford’s full interview with Polygon here. The basic jist is that, no, Gearbox isn’t working on a Borderlands sequel right now because no single great, extravagant, kickass idea has emerged just yet.

Slap that frown off your face, though. With projects like Tales From the Borderlands in gestation, you’ll be back on Pandora faster than you can say “Get ready for bad touch!”

“I’m already exhausted from being involved in the console war (laughs). Metal Gear Solid V is being basically developed on PC. That’s the meaning of multi-platform, multi-generation, multi-device. It was originally planned to be made for the current machines.”

– Hideo Kojima, translated from Dengeki Online

This early out, more than several third-party titles slated for both the PS4 and Xbox One are being developed on high-end PC’s first. Some publishers, like Ubisoft, say the PC counterparts of PS4/Xbox One games will undoubtedly house “next-gen features.”

In Metal Gear Solid V’s case, Kojima admitted the game’s presence on both current and next generation systems may cause the game to look somewhat…dated. “Fox Engine was created with the current generation in mind,” said Kojima. “Maybe with other games that are being created exclusively for next-gen it might look a little behind.”

Kojima Productions still managed to squeeze out 60fps for MGSV on next-gen, so high fives all around.

“Liz is such a different character to Booker, and if we were to just put Booker in a dress, then that would be the most awful betrayal of what we’re doing for Liz, and players would just feel like it was a cheap way out, and that’s not something that we want to do. So we don’t have all of the answers yet for it, but we are very, very, very much aware of all of the dangers that we need to try and avoid.”

- Amanda Jeffrey, Irrational Games Level Designer, Burial at Sea [source]

Returning to Rapture – the famed submerged city equal parts iconic and dystopian – players will finally get the opportunity to view the world through Elizabeth’s eyes in the second helping of Bioshock Infinite’s two-part story add-on, Burial at Sea.

Like the sea is to the sky, playing as the dimensional tear ripping Elizabeth will be a stark contrast to the vigor flinging, bullet blazing Booker DeWitt.  In fact, series brain trust, Ken Levine, says playing as Liz has a lot more in common with a survival horror game than FPS actioner.  Elizabeth will have to use her powers to outsmart, and sometimes completely avoid, Rapture’s – how would Andrew Ryan put it? – unseemly denizens.

Burial at Sea: Episode One, which sees Mr. DeWitt making bully fine friends with Rapture’s plasmids, is set for release in the very near future.  Episode Two, featuring Liz as a playable protagonist, is still in its early developmental stage.  Both add-on’s run $14.99 a piece or free through the Season Pass.