Tag Archives: frontier studios

Finally – FINALLY – we get to play with the infamous Skittles. Microsoft was showing off Kinectimals along with all the other Kinect launch titles at its Play Day in Cologne last week.

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Frontier has announced that LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias will be released on WiiWare in the US on October 19.

“The original LostWinds was embraced by the US, and the sequel has major new gameplay features and improvements across the board,” said David Braben in the press release.

“After the incredible reception in Europe for Winter of the Melodias, we’re excited to see what the American reaction will be.”

We can’t wait.

Watch it on EGTV. There’s a good chunk of play in there, showing wind-driven helicopter things, snowy bits, water puzzles and more.

No date for the Frontier WiiWare sequel as yet.

Elite is 25 this month, worryingly, and to celebrate Frontier’s launched a new website and a bunch of promo stuff.

Creator David Braben’s going to be taking questions through Twitter for a chat on Wednesday, September 23. Follow this to get involved. You can win t-shirts if you get a response to your question, and there’s a grand prize of a signed bit of artwork.

PR after the break.

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Square Enix is to publish Frontier’s LostWinds in Japan, the company’s confirmed.

“Square Enix is a very successful, development-led organization with a total commitment to quality,” said Frontier boss David Braben.

“Frontier shares those same core ideals and we are very pleased to be doing business together. Square Enix’s strength in Japan will give LostWinds the chance to shine there, as it has done elsewhere.”

LostWinds topped the WiiWare charts in both the US and Europe upon launch of the new distribution system in May 2008.

Press release after the link.

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Frontier boss David Braben has stepped up his campaign against secondhand games sales, telling Eurogamer at Game City in Nottingham that retailers are essentially fiddling the trade.

“The shops are not giving us a way of distinguishing between pre-owned and new,” he said. “So the shops are essentially defrauding the industry.”

Braben added: “We’ve got a lot of retailers eating our lunch and refusing to sell full-priced games.

“I’ve been in a shop where I’ve tried to buy a copy of a relatively recent game, and I’ve taken an empty box off the shelf and they’ve given me a pre-owned copy. That, I think, is disgraceful.

“Not holding stock of new games, substituting them with pre-owned games at the same or much the same price… That is really destroying the shelf-life of our games.”

There’s more through there. None of it’s pretty.

Secondhand games sales are hurting single-player games, Frontier’s David Braben has told GI. Goddamn those secondhand games.

“I think it’s really damaging to the single-player experience,” he said. “Games like BioShock and Assassin’s Creed, where they’re perfectly valid games, but once you’ve played them they go into the pre-owned section.”

“The sales don’t reflect the actual sales of people playing them because someone has gone out and bought, at almost the same price, a pre-owned copy because they couldn’t get an original. It’s very frustrating that they don’t carry that stock any more.”

More though there.

Speaking to VG247, Frontier’s David Braben has revealed that “deep and dark” space game Elite 4 was intended to be not one product, but two.

“It was originally conceived as two different projects, where there’d be one online and one not,” Braben told us in Brighton earlier this month. “Two separate games set in the same world. Whether it [was going to be] in the same package or not is another matter.”

The LostWinds developer also said that there’s currently no competitor to the game’s primary mechanic.

“For the way the game mechanic works, there isn’t any current competition, but the obvious ones people think of are, I don’t know, EVE Online for example,” he said.

Braben told us that he hadn’t play EVE at all, and also said that he hasn’t seen NetDevil’s Jumpgate Evolution.

“Not really, no,” he said, when asked if he considered space-based MMOs in general to be competitive to Elite 4.

“But it’s also the way they play, and these things can change with time. We’ve got some very specific ideas.”

Intriguing. No date, consoles being considered. And nothing else.

Frontier’s David Braben has told VG247 that console versions of Elite 4 are being considered.

“We are looking at console, yes,” said the developer, speaking in Brighton earlier this month.

Braben, however, refused to be drawn on specifics on the next installment in the classic space exploration franchise, calling it “very, very deep and dark” and explaining that it’s been in development for so long because of resource issues.

“I know, I know, and it becomes a running joke: I’m fully aware of that,” he said when asked about the title’s extended work period.

“The problem with Elite is that we started a project then stopped it. That’s the problem that’s happened. It’s the sort of game we have to get absolutely right. It’s got to be brilliant.”

No date on this as yet. Braben’s also working on The Outsider and “other projects we haven’t announced yet.”

Speaking to VG247 at Develop, Frontier’s David Braben confirmed that there are no plans in place to bring WiiWare smash LostWinds to either Live or PSN, but that the UK developer has other plans for downloadable 360 and PS3 content.

“Not at the moment, no,” he said when asked if LostWinds would make it to other consoles.

“But be will be supporting Live and PSN with something else… We at Frontier have this really fun [forum] called Game of the Week. That gets so many rich ideas – we’ve got this rich bucket of ideas – that it makes sense to do a project that’s appropriate to a platform.”

Braben refused to be drawn on the identity of any game for PSN or Live, saying only that he “can’t talk about it” at the moment.

Frontier had a good experience with using WiiWare as the distribution platform for platform adventure LostWinds, with Nintendo confirming the game as the most downloaded on the service in Europe.

Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long to find out what David’s up to here.

Everyone knows Frontier’s going to do a LostWinds sequel, right? From the sound of it, so does Frontier.

“We’d be stupid not to look at the LostWinds world,” studio boss David Braben told VG247. “But we’re not announcing anything yet.”

Stupid indeed. Press surrouding the WiiWare adventure was “positive,” to say the least.

“I was pleasantly surprised,” said Braben of the reaction to the game. “One of the problems of writing games is that you’re expecting to do well, because it’s your baby and you love it, but I’m very pleased with what we did.”

Braben said the development of LostWinds took him back to the good old days of bedroom coding.

“It reminds me of development a long time ago, where three or four months seemed like a long time,” he said.

Don’t be vastly shocked if you hear about a sequel sooner rather than later.

Speaking at Develop in Brighton today, Frontier boss David Braben’s given the first solid details on The Outsider, saying the game is an open-world action title based on the story of a framed cop.

“Obviously, we’d be mad not to consider GTA as competition because of the open-world nature, but in terms of the story-telling, I’ve not really seen people that are in that [place] yet, but I think that will come. I do think we’re genuinely innovating there,” he told VG247 today when asked which games he’d consider competitive to the secretive project.

“The themes: there are a lot of other where you get agents accused of terrible things. Certainly in cinema that’s very common.”

Braben added: “We’ve worked a long time on technology, and it’s been in game development now for more than a year.”

He described it as being pitched at the 18-35 year-old male.

“Yes, very much,” when asked if that was the target audience. “We’re writing the game for the sort of people that are working on it. You will get a game that’s very rewarding to play.

“It’s a very, very exciting project for us. It brings in some really interesting new issues to game development. It’s fantastic. Just dealing with a story that’s genuinely open presents lots of new challenges.

It’s open-world, but it’s getting the story [right]. If you think of most stories they’re very linear with the occasional branch: it’s not like that.”

The developer boss wouldn’t be drawn on a release date, saying he wants to keep the title under wraps to prevent fatigue.

“That’s intentional,” he said of the lack of information on the game. “We don’t want to put lots and lots of news about something in advance. It’s good to drip a bit out.”

The Outsider has previously been confirmed as an Xbox 360, PS3 and PC release.

Speaking to the BBC, Frontier boss David Braben has slammed British university games courses, saying the huge majority of them do not prepare students for the rigours of development.

“95% of video gaming degrees are simply not fit for purpose. Without some sort of common standard, like Skillset accreditation, these degrees are a waste of time for all concerned.”

He added: “We are facing a serious decline in the quality of graduates looking to enter the industry. The dearth of maths, physics and computer science graduates is hitting us hard.”

Braben is one of the members of industry campaign body “Games Up?”, a group pushing the UK’s Parliament to actually do something about anything related to games, other than putting different-coloured stickers on them.

More through the link.

Frontier’s David Braben is unsurprisingly very happy about the response LostWinds has been getting across the board.

“‘Pleased’ is an understatement,” he told GI of the reaction from critics and fans.

“The reaction has been exceptional – from both reviewers, which is very pleasing, and also the user reviews are extremely high – we’ve also had very many people who have taken the time to email us directly with their entirely positive feedback, which is very appreciated.”

The cutesy adventure launched in Europe alongside WiiWare last night. More quotes through the link.

That was quick. Frontier’s site’s carrying confirmation of a second LostWinds title and is allowing you to sign up for upcoming info on the game.

Click here to REGISTER FOR ADVANCE INFORMATION on Frontier’s forthcoming LostWinds sequel containing amazing new gameplay as Toku and Enril’s incredible adventure to save Mistralis continues – Frontier is registered under the UK’s Data Protection Act and won’t use your details for any other reason.

LostWinds launched alongside WiiWare in the US yesterday, and is attracting a fair amount of attention for being actually “good”. Thanks, GoNintendo.

It’s tiny, but it says what you wanted to hear: Frontier’s LostWinds is worth your money. Of course it is. The WiiWare game launched yesterday alongside the service in the US. The piece’s conclusion:

The lack of a map and short length aside, this game is great and should definitely be a part of any Wii owners library. It is one of those games where you can just stop, relax, and just soak up the atmosphere. The future of Wii Ware looks good if games like LostWinds will continue to come out on the service.

More through the link.

Just in case you’d forgotten, LostWinds is launching alongside WiiWare in the US today.

The Frontier-developed adventure is a definite star in the service’s launch line-up, featuring “Toku, a young boy who is the only one who can help you in your quest to release a curse placed on the stunningly presented, magical land of Mistralis.”

You cannot say fairer than that. Press release after the link.

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Speaking to videogaming247, Frontier head David Braben has confirmed that the company’s just-announced project, LostWinds, will be released alongside Nintendo’s WiiWare download service.

“It’s a WiiWare launch title,” he said. “Yes, we do have [an idea of when it's coming out], but if you want release dates for WiiWare I would talk directly to Nintendo. We can’t give out that information other than say we’re planning to be a WiiWare launch title.”

Braben added, “Just on that point: Nintendo are very sensitive about it.”

WiiWare was apparently confirmed for a May 12 release date in the US today. We’re still waiting for a European launch date for the service.