Snoop Dogg is coming to Call of Duty: Ghosts. Forget Michael Myers or the Predator. Who else could’ve played Huggy Bear in the 2004 Starsky & Hutch movie? That’s right. Only Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr – AKA Snoop Dogg! His dulcet tones will be coming to Call of Duty: Ghosts in a Snoop Dogg Voice Pack for $2.99 on April 22nd for the Xbox One and Xbox 360. Infinity Ward and Activision will be adding a few DLC packs on the same day. Play as John “Soap” MacTavish in multiplayer for $3.99, or be Simon “Classic Ghost” Riley for $1.99. Add a bunch of garish skins to your weapons for $1.99 each. Finally, the Drill Instructor Voice Pack features R. Lee Ermey gently encouraging players to exercise good sportsmanship for $2.99.
What I wouldn’t give for a voice pack with R. Lee Ermey reading Snoop Dogg’s lines!
Star Citizen, the hype-fueled money train from Roberts Space Industries, just had a successful showing at PAX East, and reached $42 million in pledges and purchases. What do backers get for helping the ambitious space-jockey simulator reach such a high number? An in-game towel, of course!
Other goals unlocked include additional updates to the “Observist Guide” universe encyclopedia, and a way to access it in-game. The next goal at $44 million will enable the development team to add a stellar cartography room to the hangar module.
CCP Games has cancelled World of Darkness. The game was supposed to be a massively multiplayer roleplaying game based on the Vampire: The Masquerade universe. The announcement ends the troubled vampire-themed MMO by laying off personnel in the Atlanta studio and moving remaining team members to support EVE Online. CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson expressed his regrets.
To our current and former employees and fans of World of Darkness, I am truly sorry that we could not deliver the experience that we aspired to make. We dreamed of a game that would transport you completely into the sweeping fantasy of World of Darkness, but had to admit that our efforts were falling regretfully short. One day I hope we will make it up to you.
World of Darkness had been in development since 2006 when CCP Games purchased publisher White Wolf. Development of the MMO was plagued with setbacks. In mid-2012 senior producer Chris McDonough admitted to fans that much of CCP’s resources were invested in DUST 514. In December 2013, CCP confirmed layoffs at the Atlanta studio.
For every new sincere AAA, big-budget, remake or spiritual successor to a beloved franchise that we get, there’s at least one announcement like this one. Age of Empires is coming back as a multiplayer mobile game. Age of Empires: World Domination shrinks the real-time strategy game down to this.
With over 100 legendary heroes to choose from, create your ultimate battle unit with distinct troop types! Create your own empire with structures from history’s greatest civilizations.
“Pre-registration” is open now. Age of Wonders: World Domination will launch this Summer.
Firaxis and 2K Games have announced the next installment of their Civilization strategy games. Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth was revealed at PAX East. The game will build on the framework of Civilization, but the time frame is the far future. According to the teaser video, humanity seeks to build a new home on other planets. PC Gamer interviewed lead designers Will Miller and David McDonough to talk about the obvious influences.
David McDonough: I grew up on the Civ games. Like you, I played Alpha Centauri until my eyes bled. When we very first got the option to make the game, to us it was making a game about the idea of Alpha Centauri, the idea of the future of humanity. That as expressed by a Civ game, we sort of figured out. Part of that was inspired by Alpha Centauri, part of it was inspired by the Civ legacy, and part of it just invented. Civ is about the history of mankind, it travels ground that everybody knows already. This game is about the future, which nobody knows, so we get to make it up. That’s where I started.
Will Miller: Yeah, the influence of Alpha Centauri will be apparent, but it’s in winks and nods – it’s an homage to that game – this game really is meant to be our version of the place that game sat when it came out. It’s our version of this idea of mankind in space, and we started with that perspective of the fiction and the narrative, and also of Civ V. Civ V has enjoyed a huge success. There are lots of parts of that game that people really like, and we’re building on the Civ V technology, so we took a lot of influences from that as well. If you’re a Civ V player, you’ll feel right at home.
Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth is scheduled to launch in the Fall of this year. Since the game will support modding, work on the Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang mod has probably already begun.
Blizzard’s free-to-play collectible card game is getting a single-player adventure mode. The Curse of Naxxramas: A Hearthstone Adventure was unveiled at PAX East. Based on the Naxxramas location in World of Warcraft, players will card-flop their way through five wings of the dungeon, defeat bosses, and collect unique cards. The 30 new cards can be used in the multiplayer portion of Hearthstone once you’ve added them to your decks. Curse of Naxxramas will be played on a new game board and will be released in weekly installments.
Curse of Naxxramas will open its gates over the course of 5 weeks, opening wing by wing. The first wing of Curse of Naxxramas, The Arachnid Quarter, will be available free for all Hearthstone players. If you wish to venture further into Naxxramas to collect all of the new cards for your collection, each wing besides the Arachnid Quarter can be purchased with in-game gold or real money, whichever you prefer.
Final pricing and a release date have not been set yet for the later “wings” of the expansion, but Blizzard did confirm that it will launch on PC, Mac, and iPad simultaneously. Hearthstone is available for free through Battle.net.
Security is an issue in gaming. Between Steam, GOG, Origin, Uplay, Xbox Live, PlayStation Plus, Battle.net, and any free-to-play games a person may play, it’s easy to rack up a handful of logins and passwords. Heck, just about everyone has a Gmail login that ties into any number of other services. Periodically, one of these companies will experience a breach of security and everyone that uses the service will need to go through the rigmarole of changing their login information. It’s annoying, but there’s little to do beyond sigh and get on with it.
So what happens when a flaw is found that compromises a good portion of the internet? Get ready to spend a lot of time changing passwords. Meet Heartbleed. It’s a seriously terrible encryption vulnerability that potentially allows hackers to access a long list of supposedly secure websites. (This XKCD comic explains the issue better than anything I could summarize.) Everything from banking to social networks could be at risk. More importantly for gamers, many game services are vulnerable to Heartbleed. My achievements! My in-game gold! This list has the Heartbleed security status of many gaming services.
You could throw your hands up and resign yourself to an evening of drudgery, or you could have fun with it. Make a game out of changing passwords! That’s what I’m doing. Assign a point value to the vulnerability and add them up. 10 points for a game service like Steam or Origin. 5 points for a financial site. 3 points for a social network. Subtract a point for every free-to-play game. How many passwords do you have to change? Compare your Heartbleed score with your friends. My score is 27!
Titanfall is getting an update today that adds private matches and a host of balance changes. It’s always nice to see patch notes that explain the developer’s reasoning behind the changes they’re implementing. For example, a particularly hard progression challenge is getting nerfed based on player feedback. Players will only need to kill 5 ejecting pilots instead of 50 to fulfill the “Gooser” challenge going forward. Killing an ejecting pilot isn’t easy. You have to have some skill and luck to be in the right place at the right time to pull it off. It’s like waiting to spear toast with a fork as it pops out of the toaster – if the kitchen appliance was 50 feet tall and shooting at you.
We had a couple of design goals for Regeneration. One was to give players a structured way to discover and experience ways of playing the game they might not have otherwise tried on their own. The second was to recognize players’ mastery of various skills, going beyond just ‘time played’. We went a bit too far with this challenge, especially considering the unique conditions that have to be met just to have the opportunity to get a kill on an ejecting Pilot. We understand some players have already completed the challenge, or have already earned more than the new requirement so we will be internally noting those players so we can recognize their accomplishments in a future game update.
Those kind of patch notes are interesting to read. It’s a small peek into the minds of the game designers and certainly more engaging than a list of bullet points.
Sony Online Entertainment has revealed H1Z1, their post-apocalyptic survival MMO. The free-to-play title puts players into a decaying “middle-America” 15 years after an outbreak of the H1Z1 virus has turned most of the population into flesh-eating zombies. Players will be able to scavenge for supplies, trade items, craft weapons, and eventually build shelters. Groups of players will be able to cooperate or fight each other for survival. If it all sounds a bit familiar – *cough DayZ cough* – SOE president John Smedley assures people that their version of the zombified world will offer something the other games cannot. SOE’s proprietary Forgelight engine can handle 2,000 players in a single instance which he hopes will create the kind of interactions that genre aficionados have been craving.
“To use a simple reference I’m sure everyone interested in this game will get… we want our players to make Woodbury from The Walking Dead if they want to,” he said. “Or take over a prison. Or fix an old car so you and your friends (yeah we have multiplayer vehicles) can run zombies and players over mercilessly, and revel in the sheer delight of hearing a zombie scream as you light it on fire, or craft a gun to take down your friends and enemies alike.”
Smedley promises that H1Z1 will not be “pay-to-win” and he also said that the team will be using the extensive player data from PlanetSide 2 to shape the game before it even launches.
The 4.05 patch has been released for Dominions 4. It’s a significant free update for the strategy game that adds special story events that are more interactive than the random events that you can see during a match. For example, an “unholy flux” could break out in one of your provinces that slowly kills off your population until you bring a priest there to clear it out. Rampaging Northmen could show up all over the map and start raiding provinces! You’ll have to take action to deal with story events directly rather than just letting a random event unfold.
A laundry list of bug fixes and balance changes also come with the update, but you’ll probably be more excited by the Celestial Carp pictured above. He’s one of the three new Pretender gods that have been added. How many other games give you a giant fish diety?
Forza Motorsport 5 is getting a new environment set along the sunny coast of California. The Long Beach circuit will be added to Forza 5 as a free update on April 10th. The new setting will have three tracks for players to race on, including the full course used by the Toyota Grand Prix. According to Turn 10 and Microsoft, the Long Beach circuit will be fully integrated into the game, and events using it will show up in career mode as well as being available for multiplayer racing.
A Long Beach Booster Pack will also launch at the same time that will feature five more cars for players to hoard. The Long Beach Booster Pack will be available at no additional charge to Season Pass owners.
Borderlands 2 is getting a prequel installment on last gen consoles and PCs. Borderlands 2: The Pre-Sequel features four new playable characters shooting and looting on Pandora’s moon. Villainous Handsome Jack’s rise to power as the primary baddie of Borderlands 2 will figure prominently in the plot. Randy Pitchford of Gearbox confirmed that there are no plans for a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One version of the game. He explained the reasoning for keeping the Pre-Sequel strictly lest-gen to Eurogamer.
“Currently there is – between PS3 and Xbox 360 – over 150m installed units worldwide – probably 170m is more realistic. There are fewer Xbox Ones and PS4s than we sold copies of Borderlands 2.”
Borderlands 2: The Pre-Sequel is slated to launch later this year on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PCs.
Marvel’s costumed heroes will be coming to Disney Infinity 2.0 Edition. Disney Interactive released a teaser trailer showing Captain America’s iconic shield flying past current Disney Infinity characters such as Sully and Captain Jack Sparrow. Unfortunately, the short video doesn’t clarify what the 2.0 Edition actually involves. Is it just new figures and a software update to the game, or is it an all-new retail game requiring the purchase of a new figure stand as well?
The Wall Street Journal had reported that Marvel’s superheroes would be integrated to the collectible action figure videogame, but details were scant.
Bohemia Interactive’s Take on Mars is getting a content update that features a manned mission to the red planet. The upcoming Expedition One content update will add a survival and building component to Take on Mars and will change the structure of the game. The game will be divided into two sections. The first half of the game will feature tha current unmanned exploration of Mars via probes and remote-controlled rovers. The latter portion of the game will task players with taking an astronaut to Mars, setting up a habitat, and gathering resources to survive and eventually help establish a martian colony.
“As a studio, we’ve always been obsessed with games that explore topics of human fascination”, said Bohemia Interactive’s CEO, Marek Spanel. “One of those is space exploration. Missions to Mars – from the past, present, and also some ambitious projects for the future – sparked our imagination about what it would be like to be the first human on Mars. We soon felt that this should be the endgame for the Take On Mars campaign.”
The Expedition One content update will be released sometime in Q2 2014. Take on Mars is currently available on Steam early access.
Viscera Cleanup Detail by RuneStorm is now available on Steam early access. The game puts players in the gore-covered boots of a janitor tasked with cleaning up the bloody aftermath of a firefight between an alien horde and a stalwart space soldier. Experience the excitement of swabbing the decks and wringing out mops! Wipe away the gibs! Perhaps it’s a bit of a one-joke experience, but that didn’t stop you from enjoying Goat Simulator for a couple of hours.
It’s your job to clean up the mess, so clean it up you shall! Use your trusty mop, gloves, dispenser machines, plasma laser and sniffer tool to help you get all that blood out of the floor and off the ceiling! You can even try and punch-out if you think you’ve done your job.
If you haven’t already played the spin-off preview title Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior, or the holiday-themed Viscera Cleanup Detail: Santa’s Rampage, then there’s good news! You’ll get both games as well when you purchase access to Viscera Cleanup Detail.
