Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment has recently announced a partnership with Supergiant Games to publish the upcoming action RPG, Bastion. Slated for a summer 2011 release, this collaboration with Supergiant further exemplifies Warner Bros. commitment and expansion into the digital gaming market, and will be available on Xbox LIVE arcade, with the PC version arriving later this year.
Supergiant Games is a boutique development studio with big goals. Their mission statement reads like a storyboard for success: “To make games that spark players’ imagination like the games they played as kids, while enabling them to share the experience with those they love.” A distribution partnership with Warner Bros. is certainly a healthy step towards these goals.
“We’re thrilled to be working with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment on Bastion,” said Amir Rao, Studio Director of Supergiant Games. “Warner Bros. instantly saw the potential of our original game world and narrative style, and is providing Supergiant Games with the support and autonomy we need to make Bastion an amazing experience.”
Within Bastion, players assume the role of “the Kid,” and are tasked with building a safe haven for himself, as well as loved ones, in a post cataclysmic event. Players are confronted with a host of strange beasts, are able to forge a number of customizable weapons, and gain new powers through a variety of specially-brewed spirits. Keep in mind, no word of microtransactions has been uttered as of yet, but “customizable” and “specially-brewed spirits” sure sounds a whole lot like purchaseable items to me.
The game features all hand-painted environments, available of course in HD, and a dynamically narrated storyline. This narrative reacts to player’s actions in real time, and provides deeper context and meaning to the Kid’s reactions and interactions with the world around him/her.
“We are looking forward to working with Supergiant Games to bring the unique gaming experience in Bastion to all types of players,” said Martin Tremblay, President of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. “We have seen tremendous talent coming from independent development studios and Bastion is a fantastic example of the innovation and imagination in that game space.”
Bastion will be available for consumers to test out at PAX East, which kicks off today and runs through Sunday in Boston, at both the Warner Bros. and Supergiant Games booths. The title has already won the “Best New IP” award at the main PAX event, and selected as one of the “PAX 10,” independent games of the show. Likewise, they’ve already picked up the “Excellence in Audio” and “Excellence in Visual Art” awards from the 2011 Independent Games Festival.
If doubled revenues and 1 million+ new players weren’t enough in the good news department, Paiz also outlined f2p LotRO’s 20 percent return of former players since the conversion. The game has also seen a 300 percent increase in peak concurrency, three times the number of players online at the same time, and a 400 percent increase in total active players.
Previously based on a subscription model, LotRO can be seen as a viable competitor to Blizzard’s king-of-the-hill MMORPG, World of Warcraft, often involving players in similar, if yet different, gameplay and quest lines, series of play. Turbine’s Lord of the Rings Online has won multiple awards, involving players in a rich adventure featuring a massive world of up-to-the-minute graphics and game mechanics. Naturally, as a former subscription based game, LoTRO also includes all the premium features that paying gamers have come to expect over recent history.
Turbine, developers of some of the most frequented MMO’s on the internet including Lord of The Rings Online and the (semi-recent) free-to-play revival of their popular Dungeons and Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited, was founded in 1994, and has raised over $46 million in funding since 1998. Their initial release, Asheron’s Call was published by Microsoft in 1999. Turbine later re-acquired the publishing rights to this title.
