Clandestiny for Mac OSX goes on sale tomorrow!
Graeme Devine has revealed on Twitter that his first game under his new venture GRL Games will be going on sale tomorrow in the Mac App Store. Clandestiny is a puzzle game in the third person with a classic cartoon artstyle. Be on the look out for the game tomorrow, if you have a Mac be sure to try it out!
Robot Entertainment signs off from Age Community
January 3rd 2011 marks the day when Robot Entertainment officially retires from Age Community both the forum support and the support for ESO. Robot took over the support for Age Community and ESO shortly after Ensemble closed its doors In February 2009, the support in place at Robot was similar to the support offered at Ensemble. Microsoft has decided to take operations of Age 3 in house and will be lead by some of the same Community team behind Age of Empires Online plus a dedicated community administrator for Age Community.
Age Community has been updated with an announcement as follows:
Microsoft Colonizes Age of Empires III Support
As of today January 3rd, 2011, Microsoft Game Studios will officially be taking over support for Age of Empires III. All support emails and forum issues should be directed to MGS, as well as ESO maintenance and any other issues related to Age of Empires III. Robot Entertainment will be assisting Microsoft during the transition period, but will not remain active on the forums as an official support presence.
Robot Entertainment has been very proud to handle all maintenance and support for Age of Empires III while developing Age of Empires Online.
The Microsoft Games Community team that will be handling all support is:
It is a shame to see Robot Entertainment depart from Age 3 support. I am sure many were hoping for some extra balance changes for “The Asian Dynasties” expansion. I imagine no further patches for Age 3 will be forthcoming. As owner of Age of Empires, Microsoft is free to manage their communities in any way they please and have decided to take over operations themselves. This news should not be taken to the affect that Robot Entertainment is no longer willing to serve the community, I am certain they would of happily continued support if asked. Robot are continuing development with Age of Empires Online plus are hard at work on their secret Game 2.0 project. We might be seeing less of Robot on the forums but there is some great content to come both in the form of games and community! Stay tuned!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
It’s that time again, the time to be festive and jolly – it will soon be Christmas and our favourite Ensemble-lites are busy working away at Robot, Zynga, Windstorm and GRL Games. 2011 is sure to bring lots of excitement; I expect we will see glimpses of Robot Entertainment’s secret Game 2.0 project next year, perhaps at PAX East. Windstorm Studios is also sure to release further information about Dusty’s project. Graeme Devine’s newest venture GRL Games will be in full swing with the release of Clandestiny for Mac OSX.
Ensemble Studios staff are out there and are still making great games for us to enjoy. Two studios, Bonfire and NewToy were recently acquired by social gaming giant Zynga, no doubt they are very excited to bring out new games with the extra resources Zynga can bring them. Be sure to be on the lookout for announcements.
Sticking with tradition Robot Entertainment have published their Christmas card for 2010 take a look at that on theRobot Entertainment homepage.
Remember-EnsembleStudios.com has some plans for 2011 too, blogging will return in 2011 with some exciting projects! See you on the other side!
Microsoft to take over Age Community
Unfortunately, the time as come for Robot Entertainment so sign off on Age Community and hand over day to day support for community operations to Microsoft Games Studios. The transition starts today, with Ryz0n 
taking the reins as community support moderator. Ryzon commented:
The folks here at MGS are transitioning into supporting the AOE community. Along those lines, I’ll be working on forum administration, account support, and generally keeping everything running as well as possible. Our goal, as we move through the transition period, is to make the user experience change very little and have the service chug along without any issues into the foreseeable future. I’ll be coming up to speed and working with Robot on the community, server issues, and support for the titles.
The writing has been on the wall for Age Community being migrated to Microsoft since the Robot Entertainment lead Halo Wars community was transitioned and then shut down by Microsoft. Similarly the upcoming Age of Empires Online is being handled by Microsoft and not Robot Entertainment’s community team. With the news that Age Community is now being taken over by Microsoft this means that Robot is no longer handling any of Ensemble’s communities, despite having worked on patches and with many of the bot’s being the original developers of those games.
Presumably the reason behind the decision could be due to Microsoft’s reluctance to have outside developers, such as Robot Entertainment managing communities for games which Microsoft owns the rights too. Previously this would have been a non issue under Ensemble Studios being part of Microsoft but with Robot now on the outside as a third party things are not so clear. Currently there is no official word on why Robot is not managing any of the Age of Empires communities going forward.
Hopefully we will see Robot Entertainment spring back into action with a super new community website for its Game 2.0 project which may make some kind of appearance at PAX East.
One can only hope Microsoft do a better job with Age Community than the new defunct HaloWars.com.
For more details and discussion check out the thread on Age Community: http://forum.agecommunity.com/forums/thread/905469.aspx
Graeme Devine’s GRL Games working on “Clandestiny” port to Mac OSX
Graeme Devine’s newest venture, GRL Games is off to a flying start quickly announcing its first title after revealing its formation a few weeks ago. Kotaku has reported that GRL Games is working on a port of the classic 1996 game “Clandestiny” which was developed by Trilobyte a studio founded by Graeme Devine many years ago! Clandestiny is a puzzle game in the third person with a classic cartoon artstyle. You can get a feel on the port by checking out the below video.
The game will be ported to the Mac OSX platform very, very soon. In just a few weeks infact with January 6th being the launch date! Keep your eyes peeled for more news on Graeme’s first release under GRL Games.
Robot’s heading East!
Robot Entertainment have recently announced that they will have their very own presence at next years PAX East in Boston from March 9th to March 12th 2011. PAX East is a festival where video game developers from all over come together for exhibitions and to show off some of their latest work. With a bunch of Robot’s heading up to the festival we could see some brand new work from inside the Robot factory. Based on the contents of Robot’s latest blog it would seem Robot may have its own independent stall and not part of Microsoft Game Studios which means they may be free to potentially talk about projects other than Age of Empires Online – in other words there could well be some news about Game 2.0!
If you live in or near Boston then why not think about attending? Details about PAX and how you can get tickets can be found at: https://v2.interactiveticketing.com/tickets/t27_2011_pax_east_100913d157/form_purchase.php?step=intro
For details and discussion about Robot and PAX East check out the Robot Entertainment blog: http://www.robotentertainment.com/blog/detail/Mark-your-Calendars-PAX-East
Graeme Devine leaves Apple to start his own game development studio
Ensemblite spotters all over the world may remember that after Ensemble Studios closed, passionate game developer Graeme Devine who was part Lead Designer / Lead Writer on Halo Wars went on to work on a mystery project at Apple. Details about Graeme’s work at Apple has been scarce and it still very much remains a mystery.
Late last week however, Graeme announced to Kotaku that he is now leaving Apple to set up his own game development venture titled GRL Games. As of last Friday it was Graeme’s last day at Apple and he shares some details about the kind of things he was doing at Apple:
“My job there was basically to make gaming on the iOS devices fantastic, basically that meant looking at the technologies involved and making sure the software played well with the hardware, to look at upcoming hardware/API and say ‘Yup, that is a good thing’.”
Reflecting on his decision to leave Apple Graeme comments that were no hard feelings, he simply felt the best place for him in the industry is a place where he can be involved in the development of games.
” I wanted to get back to the actual business of making games and while I loved my time, the people, and the platform I worked on at Apple I am ultimately a game designer that wants to make games”
Graeme has now formed GRL games, his new venture which targets the iOS as a platform for new gaming innovations. Having been close to Apple for so long Graeme is in the perfect position to design fantastic gaming applications on the Apple platform. So keep your eyes peeled for news about Graeme’s new venture – GRL Games! Infact you can rest yours eyes over to the first clue about what the new game will be as Kotaku revealed this early tease:
I have a feeling some of you might know what this is! 🙂
343 Industries reverses decision to shut down Halo Wars stat tracking
A few weeks after the shocking announcement that 343 were planning to completely shut down the Halo Wars community website, forums and stat tracking which resulted in fury from Halo Wars fans and press coverage it would appear that 343 Industries have hit the gear into reverse. Cocopjojo has today announced on the Official Halo Wars forums that 343 no longer plans to remove stat tracking and the forthcoming title update will not remove this feature from the game. Cocopjojo announced as follows:
Good news, everyone: Plans have changed and Halo Wars stat-tracking will continue to be supported after all. In other words, you, the Halo Wars fans, spoke and we listened. 343 Industries and Waypoint are in the process of investigating alternate ways of continuing to support Halo Wars stat-tracking, and while exact plans have yet to be formalized, Halo Wars fans can rest assured that they will continue to be able to access their game statistics online.
This is indeed good news, but I wouldn’t be taken in too much by “you, the Halo Wars fans, spoke and we listened”. One might point out a well-managed community would be one where the community leaders are in sync with the community’s needs, sadly this was not the case with Halo Wars and 343. With 343 having recently launched their own new set of forums at www.xbox.com/halo they are no doubt keen to move discussion over to that website instead of having satellite websites like HaloWars.com. However, it was totally unnecessary to cripple the Halo Wars community in the process and it is pleasing to see that 343 have now understood this and taken the community unrest on board.
It’s not all good news though…
343 still plans to close the HaloWars.com forum, at least, that’s how it would appear from a further statement:
The forums may stay in a read-only mode after the 15th but I’m not sure. I’d still act as though they’ll disappear and start moving your discussion over to Halo Waypoint, which some of you have already done, thank you. 🙂
I would suggest that a better strategy would be to keep the HaloWars.com website and its community forums running and let people naturally move over to Waypoint if they feel the needs be. HaloWars.com has been open since October 2006 when the site looked a little like this:
Can anyone remember this?
Since 2006 the site has grown hugely and has sizeable fan base with regular community members interacting. In short, why take away something if it’s not broken? It’s not like Halo Waypoint will be able to offer an additional content for Halo Wars. It was promised when 343 took over Halo Wars from Robot Entertainment that “exciting things” were to come but unfortunately no exciting things were ever forthcoming. Halo Wars forumers should be on their guard of the imminent forum closure which may be taking place on December 15th.
Meanwhile, enjoy your access to HaloWars.com stats – a victory for the Halo Wars community!
The full news can be found here: http://www.halowars.com/forums/1/963172/ShowThread.aspx
Zynga acquires NewToy
Since NewToy’s inception they have found huge success from the “with friends” franchise on the iOS platform including chess with friends and words with friends. They also released We Rule in collaboration with ngmoco a kingdom building game similar to Zynga’s FarmVille.
Going forward as part of Zynga the studio will have more funding to complete bigger projects which is exciting for all of NewToy’s fans and followers. Gamasutra reports on a conference call Paul Bettner, founder of NewToy with his brother Dave Bettner as saying:
“Since the first time I met Mark Pincus and we started talking… it has been clear to me that Zynga and Newtoy share the same dream of building a social treasure.”
It looks like NewToy will fit in well with Zynga’s vision. I am certain Zynga will be very pleased with the amazing talent acquired from NewToy. Congratulations to all of NewToy and the Bettner brothers who founded a hugely successfully video game studio, leading up to be acquired by one of today’s major players in mobile gaming, all in these times of financial difficulty with the recession.
Well done NewToy!
End of the road for Halo Wars as Microsoft shuts down community website
Earlier this week Cocopjojo of the Halo Wars community moderation team at 343 Industries announced that they plan to close the Halo Wars community website in its entirety as of December 15th 2010. No doubt this decision is part of Microsoft “exciting plans” for the community.
The announcement reads as follows:
In an effort to provide the Halo Wars community a lively, active, and well-moderated set of forums for discussion, we are soon going to be transitioning the Halo Wars forums to Halo Waypoint’s forums. What this means is that the Halo Wars site will be taken offline and we will ask all of you, if you’d like to continue discussing the game, to do so over at the home for all things Halo, Halo Waypoint.
Reading between the lines a more accurate description of whats happening is that Microsoft want to reduce commitment to the Halo Wars community by closing the entire website down and migrating users to a centralised place where there will be no official category for Halo Wars. Although Microsoft described Waypoint as the “home for all things Halo” Bungie.net will still continue to operate for their Halo titles. Only Ensemble’s Halo Wars community will be closed down making the description of “home for all things Halo” is vastly misleading.
On December 15th all the forum posts and all the site content such as developer blogs and FAQ’s will be removed. I will be creating a back up of as many of the developers blogs as possible over the coming weeks much in the same way Bruce Shelley’s blogs from Ensemble Studios are available here.
Another important point to note is that competitive players who use the HaloWars.com leaderboards and statistics will be very disappointed to hear that when HaloWars.com goes down these statistics will be lost also and wont be coming back. This is undoubtedly part of Microsoft’s efforts to wind down the Halo Wars community by making competitive ranked game play impossible and providing no way for people to view game statistics. Halo Wars was released February 2009 with a meta critic score of 82. The game sold one million units worldwide through March 2009, making it the best-selling console real-time strategy game to date and yet in under 2 years Microsoft is already pulling the plug on the community.
The Halo Wars community has had a rough ride ever since the closure of Ensemble Studios at the hands of Microsoft. Robot Entertainment picked up support for the game shortly after Ensemble closed and produced a number of title updates and DLC. However a year later Microsoft decided yet again to aggravate the Halo Wars community by removing Robot Entertainment from community support and handing operations over to Halo Waypoint. It soon became clear that Halo Waypoint had very little commitment to Halo Wars as the forum became flooded with un-moderated complaints and game bugs with no updates forthcoming. If things couldnt get any worse Microsoft have now taken their anti-Halo Wars community “commitment” to new level by shutting the site down all together.
If there is some good news to come out of all of this, there is going to be a Title Update 5 for Halo Wars, but its not being developed by Robot Entertainment and it is not going to have any balance changes. Instead the long running theatre bug is going to be fixed so that the last two movies will now be playable from the Halo Wars theatre menu. The rest of the changes are to do with the removal of features such as Halo Wars stats tracking and references to HaloWars.com. I think its the first i’ve seen of a title update removing features from the game, but hey, this is Halo Wars.
These are incredibly sad times to be a Halo Wars player. It is interesting to see how Microsoft treats one of its biggest gaming IP’s. Absolutely shocking.
