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Capcom plans to sell 3.9 million more copies of Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate
Alongside Capcom's financial report for the 2013 fiscal year yesterday, in which it revealed an increase in net income by 15.9 percent year-over-year, it also offered some projections for the upcoming financial year (ending March 31, 2015). Given the continued success of its Monster Hunter brand, Capcom projected sales of Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate to reach 3.9 million units in North America, Europe, Japan and other Asian countries. The game will reach the west in early 2015. Additionally, Capcom reported that its strategy for mobile includes the launch of Monster Hunter Freedom Unite on iOS this month. The PSP game went free for PlayStation Plus users in March. Capcom also plans to launch another mobile game in the series this year called Monster Hunter Smart. The company noted strategies for PC in Japan and other parts of Asia, namely by introducing the beta phase of Monster Hunter Online as well as Breath of Fire 6 this summer. The latter was announced in August 2013 for PC, iOS and Android, whereas the former is the result of an April 2013 partnership between Capcom and Tencent to bring the free-to-play MMO to PC players in China. Lastly, Capcom mentioned plans to "develop titles exclusively for online games," specifically mentioning Deep Down for PS4, a free-to-play game first announced in September. [Image: Capcom]
Stay up to speed with WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm
Looking for the best approach to a certain boss? How about gearing guides for all flavors of 85s, whether you just hit the level cap, are working your way through rep rewards and heroics, or are already digging into raiding? What if you're just getting around to figuring out best practices for your newly 85 alt? WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm has you covered! We add fresh links every week to keep you up to date with the latest tips, tricks and strategies for the Cataclysm era. Here's what's new from the most recent weeks: Best class tips Cataclysm tanking for warriors, part 1 / part 2 / part 3 / part 4 Blood DK Tanking 101 Protection Paladin 101 Shadow Priest 101 Best gear Pre-raid gear for resto shaman Gear your tankadin for heroics Gear your tankadin for raids Raid-level gear for DKs Best raid tactics Raiding Blackwing Descent as a shadow priest, part 1 / part 2 / part 3 Raiding strategies for feral cats, part 1 / part 2 / part 3 Priest healing strategies Ascendant Council Cho'gall Maloriak and Nefarian Chimaeron and Atramedes Holy paladin healing strategies for Bastion of Twilight, part 1 / part 2 The enhancement shaman guide to Nefarian Best practices for healing heroic Chimaeron A Blackwing Descent healing playbook Healing heroic Halfus More Blackwing Descent and the Prestor legacy There's much, much more where this came from -- get the whole scoop on WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm! World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.
WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm helps you track down game details
Looking for the best approach to a certain boss? How about gearing guides for all your level-capped characters at their various levels of play: new 85s, heroic instancing and raiding? What if you're just getting around to figuring out best practices for your newly 85 alt? WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm has you covered! We add fresh links every week to keep you up to date with the latest tips, tricks and strategies for the Cataclysm era. Here's what's new from the most recent weeks: Blizzard's Tom Chilton discusses Cataclysm design, talent and zone revamps Bear weapons, trinkets and relics Datamining Cataclysm's legendary staff Entering the Bastion of Twilight as a balance druid Top 10 trinkets for the pre-raiding shadow priest Warlock strategies for Cho'gall Gearing your feral cat for raiding, part 3 and part 2 Balance druid strategies for the Twilight Ascendant Council Level 85 shadow priest gear Warlock strategies for the Twilight Ascendant Council Holy paladins tips for healing Chimaeron Balance druid strategies for Cho'gall Read WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.
EVE Evolved: Incursion guide -- Fleet setup and tanking
In last week's EVE Evolved, I gave my first impressions of EVE Online's newest group PvE activity based on a cautious first night spent at an incursion in Obray. The Sansha incursions have been running for over a week now, and players have come up with some clearly effective strategies for clearing the sites. Many groups are now tackling the incursions in relative safety, and yet every incursion still sees several ill-prepared fleets decimated at the hands of Sansha's ships. Incursions throw some difficult challenges at players, with focus fire melting vulnerable targets, energy neutralisers and ECM disabling your support ships, and bomber frigates wreaking havoc on large hulls. In some encounters, Sansha's Nation will even use deployable remote repair platforms and other structures to its advantage and will call in random reinforcement waves if your group is too slow. With the right fleet composition and strategy, however, all of those challenges can be overcome with ease. It seems that what players need most right now is a solid guide to tackling incursions. Over the next few editions of the EVE Evolved column, I'll be smashing my way through EVE's incursions to compile a comprehensive guide from the ground up. In this week's first part of the guide, we get the ball rolling with vital information on incursion fleet composition and tanking strategies. This part of the guide is aimed mainly at those interested in Vanguard-level sites, but the fleet setup and tanking strategies described are fundamental to all encounter sizes. In this week's EVE Evolved, I tackle the fundamentals of incursion fleet design and tanking, which should be enough to help your group jump right into 10-man Vanguard encounters.
The Daily Grind: What do you do when someone just doesn't get it?
Tackling the endgame rush in any game can be a difficult proposition, whether it's the brutality of Final Fantasy XI or the staggered progression of World of Warcraft. It's always made more difficult, however, when someone doesn't understand what he's supposed to be doing. Sometimes, even instructional videos, pseudo-Gregorian chants, and screaming epithets over ventrilo will all fail to get someone to realize that he needs to stay put during Flame Wreath. And there are only so many times a group can take failure when there's an obvious weak link in the chain. On the one hand, we've all had one or two things that we know we ought to do, but we're just not quite capable of doing reliably. On the other, there comes a point when the rest of the group is paying for one person's persistent mistakes. So how do you handle that one guy who can't seem to get what he's supposed to be doing? Do you try and get him kicked out? Kick yourself out pre-emptively? Or do you just resort to blaming him for any and all failures?
15 tips for brand new healers
This article has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. So you're ready to venture into the thankless realm of healing? It's not for the faint of heart. You will be begged to heal an instance you hate and blamed for deaths that aren't your fault, only to lose gear upgrades to DPS -- all in the same run! On the other hand, healing can be a nice diversion from faceroll macro-mashing, and it's definitely nice to have instant dungeon queues. Whether you're changing specs at level 80 to help your guild progression, stepping into The Deadmines as a level 18 healer or twinking out a battleground medic -- here are some helpful hints as you prepare to make those health bars greener.
Playing PixelJunk Shooter Like A Pro 101
Okay, okay, everyone, settle down. Listen, we know there's been a lot of unrest in this, our first ever "How to Get Into the Top 20 Globally in World 1 Stage 1 for PixelJunk Shooter" class. You've been here for three weeks now without ever actually talking Shooter strategies and your whispers are starting to become deafening. "Why does Mr. McElroy take such long naps?" we hear you ask, or, "Why did I have to play $3,000 for this?" On this, our graduation day, we have two messages for you. 1. Watch the video after the break and do exactly that. And 2. The magic was inside you the whole time. Now, if a few of you would just stand on your desks and say, "Oh captain, my captain," we'll be on our way. ... Nobody? Fine. [Via Twitter]
The Daily Quest: Stealing from Icecrown
We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. WoW in an Hour really enjoys doing the new raid weekly quest -- nice raid rewards, under an hour of play. Chill of the Grave has some great suggestions for Death Knight gear to be found in the new 5-mans. HTFTMFW takes you through quick strategies for the first four bosses in Icecrown. Starnaglethron has a declaration of love for the Dungeon Finder (which most of you would probably echo). And finally, Pike has some bad news for you Glyph of Bestial Wrath addicts. There's a new glyph in town and he'll up your DPS. Click here to submit a link to TDQ
The metagame and its importance to MMOs
What is the metagame? It can mean a lot of different things depending on context, but all of the meanings share the sense that the metagame is not the game itself, but something above and affecting the game as a whole. In a casual game of poker, the metagame could be as simple as one of the players having an exceedingly poor poker face which makes betting that much easier. On a more complex scale, you have things such as the entire Band of Brothers incident on EVE Online, which has been called by some as what amounts to a forum war that was fought out over the space of the game. That's a Terrible Idea recently had a post regarding the problem of MMOs as "serious" games due to how they interact with the entire concept of the metagame. As the post outlines, you're first cut out from the endgame by the leveling game, which is changing the variables of the game itself, and when you finally reach the end of the curve most of the strategy involves memorizing specific character builds and raid strategies. The metagame, in this case defined as "the process of strategizing and conceptualizing out of the game," thrives on the viability of different strategies and the necessity of discussion. While there are certainly sites devoted to this sort of theoretical work, they frequently involve simply boiling everything down to a single optimal setup. Take a look at the article (and, if needed, the supplementary piece on terminology), as it's interesting for anyone with an affection for the genre and its overall development.
The Colosseum: Ryzer, the Warlock
The Colosseum takes us inside the world of the Gladiator (Brutal, Vengeful, Merciless, and otherwise), to interview some of the top Arena fighters in the battlegroups. Our goal is to bring a better understanding of the strategy, makeup, and work that goes into dueling it out for fame, fortune, and Netherdrakes.So far, your intrepid Colosseum has brought you a shaman multi-boxer, a rogue, a warrior, a druid, and a hunter. This week, we're looking at a Warlock player -- Ryzer of Shadow Council. The Warlock class itself used to be a great deal more dominant in Season 1 of the Arena. Now in Season 4, of course, it's not been faring so well. Armor penetration, increased tactics for dealing with Fear, and a few nerfs have come together to make the Warlock class a reasonable, but not dominant, Arena class.This is what makes Ryzer's 3v3 team -- SUPER CUTIE FEAR SQUAD -- an interesting team for this week's Colosseum. Comprised of a Druid and two Warlocks, it's a team that definitely leans on its class makeup for some interesting fights. Check out what Ryzer had to say behind the cut.
Magister's Terrace videos
Spoiler alert: this video shows a successful kill of Kael'thas, the final boss of the new 5-man Magister's Terrace in patch 2.4.
The ups and downs of contributing to WoWWiki
Besides news here at WoW Insider, one of my favorite places on the web is over at WoWWiki. The site is a virtual treasure trove of World of Warcraft lore, class information, formulas, and strategies. Back in October the site passed 45,000 articles, and today it stands around 53,000 articles. That's A LOT of content, much more then anyone could possibly hope to read.Where does all this come from?The way community wiki's work (wikis like WoWWiki and Wikipedia) is that everyone who reads them can effectively edit anything in them. If you're looking at the strategy for Zul'Jin and see something that's not right, or that needs to be added, you can do it right on the spot. Of course you have to sign up for an account and make sure what you're putting in is correct, but that takes all of five minutes. User submitted content is critical to the success of a wiki, and WoWWiki is (as I'm sure most of our readers would agree) one of the most successful game wikis out there.
Breakfast topic: Read the strat!
"Read the strat!" It's in every raiding guild's Guild Message of the Day at some point. There's nothing more annoying to raid leaders than to have one person wipe the group because "I didn't know the boss was going to do that." But there are different ways to prepare for a boss fight. When I'm told to read the strat, I usually head over to WoWWiki for a basic overview of the phases and abilities, and then to Bosskillers to figure out what I actually need to do as a rogue (or, on some fights, whether I should actually show up.) A lot of people swear by video strategies, as they can offer an unparalleled view of what the actual fight is like, but I never liked them that much. With everyone else's addons and stuff clogging up the screen, plus the myriad of different perspectives, it can be tough to figure out what the boss is actually doing. One guild I know used the somewhat unusual strategy of getting people from the opposite faction who had killed the boss they were working on to come into their Vent during the raid and talk them through it. When you have to "read the strat", where do you go? What do you think is the best method to learn a new boss fight?
Microsoft DAP said to be part of Xbox-branded product lineup
Some more details have leaked out about Microsoft's unannounced-but-well-known WiFi-enabled digital music player that shed some light on its role in Microsoft's overall home entertainment strategy -- though you'll still have to deal with that blurry pic for now. According to sources cited by The Seattle Times, the upcoming DAP is only one of several offerings that will be part of a larger lineup of Xbox-branded products, which will also include Microsoft's upcoming online media service -- the one that will dupe all your iTunes tracks for free -- and a dedicated software media player. Codenamed Project Argo, this initiative is said to be spearheaded by Xbox co-founder J Allard, and is rumored to support the so-called XNA toolkit for allowing developers to easily port games to multiple platforms -- possibly setting the stage for that heavily-rumored Xbox2Go. There's not too much here that we didn't already know, but it's becoming increasingly clear that Redmond has a definite battle plan for waging war against Apple and others in your living room (and pocket), and that the company is starting to make good on its promise of turning the 360 into a true digital hub.[Via Joystiq]
