Valve is getting out of the movie business. In the latest Steam announcement, Valve explains that they are removing the “Video” category in the Steam store, and disabling the non-gaming entries for purchase. Gaming-related videos will be moved to the pages for the specific games they feature, or will be available via search and recommendations. Customers that have films in their account libraries will still be able to access their purchases going forward.
The first non-gaming video offered on Steam was Motivational Growth, a 104-minute science fiction comedy from Devolver Digital Films. It was released on Valve’s service in March 2015.
Frostburn Studios has announced the final major content patch for Heroes of Newerth. The 4.7.3 update, scheduled for the 26th of this month, will mark the last hurrah for the almost ten-year-old MOBA. The developers say any future updates will be minor ones, with just balance changes and bug fixes.
“Tributes to certain staff members have been put into some item flavour tooltips to thank them for all their hard work throughout the game!”
Once considered the most formidable competitor to League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth was unable to maintain its status in the tournament scene, and over the years the player base has dwindled. While there is a core of dedicated players, this announcement will likely mark the end of days for many.
Where’s Costume Quest 3? It’s been five years since Costume Quest 2 popped out of Double Fine Productions and fans have been wanting a return to the imaginative world of Halloween costume fantasy and candy collecting ever since. Frederator Studios, the animation producers behind Adventure Time and Fairly OddParents, are serving up their first Amazon Prime series with Costume Quest, beginning on March 8th. It is based on the games.
It may not be Costume Quest 3, but the cartoon has an Uber-Lincoln, and nougat gives monsters power. Not a bad turn for the franchise that started as a Double Fine internal game-jam idea.
Daybreak Game Company is delaying PlanetSide Arena again. The mega-multiplayer shooter that will offer 500-player team deathmatch and battle royale modes was originally supposed to launch on January 29th for PC, but that was delayed just before that date to March. Now, the launch is shifting to sometime in summer to coincide with the PlayStation 4 release. As part of the announcement, Daybreak is generously refunding all Steam pre-orders.
“We believe that delivering the most polished version of PlanetSide Arena that meets these expectations, on both platforms, outweighs any other consideration.”
While there’s no mention of the competition, it’s got to be hard to watch something like Apex Legends come out in your target market and immediately jump to 25 million players within a week of its surprise free-to-play launch. It was going to be hard enough to go against PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Black Ops 4, and Fortnite, and now you have to contend with this beast? Time to give everything another look!
I like you a lot Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. I even picked you as my 2018 Game of the Year in a large field of really good games. You kept me engaged for fifty-ish hours schlepping across ancient Greece with Kassandra’s wit and strength, so you’d think I’d enjoy more of that. It seems churlish of me to complain about getting generous post-release content, but a firehose of Yoo-hoo chocolate drink will still result in a drowning.
New game plus and a level cap increase from 70 to 99 is coming in the February update. You’re trying to kill me, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
SteamVR, the virtual reality control system from Valve for Steam, has been beta updated thanks to data gleaned from Beat Saber players. According to Valve, they coded “sanity checks” into their tracking system based on what they thought was the upper limit of physical motion. Exceeding those checks caused errors as the system interpreted that data as tracking mistakes.
“It turns out that a properly motivated human using a light enough controller could go faster (3600 degrees/sec!) than we thought.”
Beat Saber players were turning their hands from palms up to palms down, and vice versa, in 50 milliseconds. Add that to the same pile as “the four-minute mile will never be broken.”
Tender, a new app that supposedly matches you with potential “soulmates” via blood, seems to be linked to Vampire: The Masquerade. The site is in “beta” but there’s a short personality quiz and it appears more will be added. The web app is owned by Paradox Interactive and you can even register with your current Paradox account.
The advertisement is featured in an entry on Trust No More, (which may be part of this alternate-reality “advergame”) and ties to “secret” memos from Jobe Preston, the (most likely) fictional CEO of Tender. TNM also has some codes and images to decipher.
Paradox Interactive purchased White Wolf Publishing, the owners of the Vampire license, in 2015.
I have no idea what’s going on in the trailer for Bandai Namco’s God Eater 3. I didn’t play the first or second game, and none of this looks like anything I’d want to spend time learning, but that J-rock anthem is dope. There are monsters? A lingerie-and-monocle wearing librarian? A teen wearing manacles? I don’t know what the Ash Aragami are, and I suspect the ideas in my head are better than anything I’d see in the game, but check out those sick riffs.
God Eater 3 is available now on PlayStation 4 and Steam.
Microsoft is planning to make Xbox Live available for Android, Apple iOS, and Nintendo Switch. Thanks to an overly descriptive tease for a session at GDC 2019, (that’s since been edited to be much less revealing) we now know that Microsoft is ready to start talking about this vision of the future.
Get a first look at the SDK to enable game developers to connect players between iOS, Android, and Switch in addition to Xbox and any game in the Microsoft Store on Windows PCs.
While there has been some work on this front already, this would seem to go much farther than just signing into your Xbox Live profile in Minecraft on the Switch or Android platforms. The session description implies they are looking to allow non-Xbox games to use Xbox Live features, for example, giving players Xbox achievements in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
Interestingly, PlayStation is not mentioned in the panel text. The lack of a PlayStation call out shouldn’t be surprising considering the intense rivalry between Sony and Microsoft in the gaming space.
If you’re enjoying Apex Legends, the surprise launch free-to-play battle royale game from Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment, there is a caveat you should keep in mind. While the developers are working on cross-play so friends on different systems can play with each other, producer Drew McCoy confirmed to Eurogamer that cross-progress, or cross-purchasing on different systems, will not happen. Unfortunately for players that like to migrate from console to PC and back as their situation permits, the studio says that it’s not technically possible due to the way the game was built. This means you will likely want to commit to your platform of choice before spending any real money on in-game cosmetics.
McCoy also explained a couple of the more puzzling aspects of the game. You don’t get a Titan in Apex Legends or any parkour shenanigans, despite the game being part of the “Titanfall universe,” because both systems were just too darned awesome for battle royale.
“The choice to not have those came about because of play-testing against our goals: to have a strategic, learnable, masterable, deep game.”
What about those of us that liked the high learning curve of Titanfall? It may be disappointing that this is what we get instead of a proper Titanfall 3, but there’s slim hope we’ll get something. Vince Zampella, Respawn’s CEO, teased some encouragement, and EA’s Andrew Wilson told investors in the company’s earnings call that Respawn would use Apex legends to “as a ramp point” to deliver a “premium” Titanfall experience later in 2019.
Wargroove, Chucklefish’s homage to Advance Wars, has already broken even on its development costs according to the studio. That’s pretty good for a game that’s only been out for a few days. Apparently, there’s a market for simplified war games with cutesy art and throwback pixel graphics outside of Nintendo’s platforms. You blew it, Big N.
Chucklefish now turns to its future plans for the game. Bug-fixing, some quality-of-life improvements, and possibly a bit of DLC. Where is the cat general, Wargroove?
Are you missing your Piranha Plant code for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for the Nintendo Switch? Maybe you have the code, but the wily plant hasn’t shown up in your game? You’re not alone. Trust Nintendo to make getting a DLC character needlessly confusing.
It’s all in the support page. If you purchased a digital copy of Smash before today, you should’ve already gotten a code emailed to you. If you purchased a physical copy, you needed to have registered the game with MyNintendo to get a code. Those messages are going out in batches. But some folks haven’t gotten a code, or they’ve entered their code, and the DLC still hasn’t shown up. It’s all a bit of a mess in the support forums as Smash fans clamour for their free character.
The next scheduled DLC character for Smash Ultimate is Joker from Persona 5, but he costs $5, and hopefully there will be less confusion around his release.
NetEase has purchased a minority share in Quantic Dream. Thanks to this new partnership, the Paris-based studio will be able to take their unique game ethos to platforms outside of Sony’s PlayStation universe after making exclusive games for the past 12 years. CEOs David Cage and Guillaume de Fondaumiére told VentureBeat that the deal wasn’t just about funding. They wanted a strategic partner that could help them grow into a global studio with access to the next generation of multimedia gaming.
We see that the storytelling and emotive experiences that we pioneered are now a part of most triple-A titles. Even television has begun experimenting with concepts that we’ve focused on for many years.
According to Cage and Fondaumiére, the recent employee accusations of sexual harassment, crunch, and a toxic environment at the studio, were false. They cited their diverse team and a favorable review by new investor NetEase as evidence of innocence.
SCS Software is finally adding my state to American Truck Simulator. Washington State will complete the western coast in the game, allowing intrepid road warriors a scenic drive up Highway 101, or a less scenic commute down the traffic-choked corridor of Interstate 5.
As with most cities in the Truck Simulator games, virtual Seattle will likely be a condensed facsimile of the Emerald City, but it has to be better than the puny version in The Crew or its sequel. There, it was an anemic handful of streets and an unconvincing scatter of landmarks.
Citing development issues, Nintendo is starting over on Metroid Prime 4. In the above video, Shinya Takahashi, Nintendo’s head of development, explains that the company didn’t feel the game was living up to their standards, and that they are essentially scrapping their work to start from scratch. Takahashi warns fans that it will be “a long road” back and the decision wasn’t lightly made.
