Hi guys,
It’s been exceptionally busy time for us over the past few months as we’ve been working on moving all of the licensed assets through the approvals process and preparing the game to be submitted to Sony and Microsoft for approval – the critical last step before the game goes off to be manufactured. It’s always one of the most challenging times in a game’s development cycle – one made more so this year given we’ve always had our publisher working on the licensing aspect rather than doing it ourselves. We are working with fantastic partners though, which has made a challenging time much easier than it otherwise might have been. The team’s been working very hard and we are all very excited to get the game into your hands.
As most of you know, I’ve just returned from Los Angeles having spent the week at the E3 conference. Had a chance to catch up with Mario and congratulate him and his team on the work they've been doing. 505 had a great meeting room for us away from the show floor, which meant that Matt Lane, the game’s designer, and I were able to park ourselves in comfort without having to compete for attention and volume with the crazy COD, FIFA 12 and StarWars: The Old Republic demos. It was a great experience to show the results of our team’s work to press, to retailers and to the other key partners with whom we will be working this year.
While there’s not a lot publicly available about our game at the moment – which is mostly down to the limitations around our ability to show licensed content in advance of approvals and announcements – it’s clear from our meetings that there’s a great deal of anticipation for this title. It’s easy to forget when you’re in the middle of it how passionate our fans are for Rugby 08 – for instance, we were informed this week that in South Africa you can’t find a copy of Rugby 08 anywhere as nobody trades it in – everyone’s still playing it.
So, expectations are high for what HB’s Rugby on the 360 and PS3 should look like and what it should play like – that was clear to see in the eyes of people who came to see the game. We’re delivering Familiar, Fast, Flowing and Fun gameplay, Online and on the PS3 and 360 for the first time – all in time to be played in the run up to Rugby World Cup 2011. To see the expectation in their eyes turn to excitement by the time they were leaving the room was really rewarding. We literally had to kick some folks out to make room for the next meeting!
We’ll have a number of announcements in the coming weeks ahead, and we’ll have more assets to accompany those announcements, so keep checking in at therugbyforum.com.
Thanks guys,
A.
PS. Apologies if that first gameplay screenshot spooked some of you – what you saw was not a true reflection of what you’d see onscreen – the process of getting the image from the game to your browser (two plus rounds of compression applied to a de-interlaced source image) compromised the quality. We've identified the issue and we won’t be making that mistake again.
This is from Alistair J. of HB Studios and this gives some light on the reason for the poor graphics they released of Rugby World Cup 2011 gameplay.
Sounds like Mario at Sidhe gives the game a thumbs up and this should mean that we will have 2 very playable if not hard to stop playing rugby video games this summer. Thank you HB Studios and Sidhe Interactive!
