If Outlast 2’s frantic scramble through backwoods mutant village horror was just too much for you, there’s a new mode that may tune the game to your liking. The Story Mode update adjusts the game so enemy numbers are decreased and there’s more time for exploration. One of the criticisms of Outlast 2 was that it was paced like a non-stop chase, negating any attempt to appreciate the creeping dread of the plot. Developer Red Barrels cautions that players can still die, there’s just more room to breathe along the way. The studio says the update reinserts content that was cut to get an M rating for the game’s launch as well.
In related news, the game is launching on the Nintendo Switch today. Even Mario fans get to enjoy the hillbilly killer zealots!
Czech boardgame developer Vlaada Chvatil’s Through the Ages is a nearly unplayable masterpiece recreating the sweep of history with a handful of elegantly interlocked systems. It’s hard to learn, even harder to learn to play well, and even harder than that to actually get through a game. Playing Through the Ages competently requires failing Through the Ages several times over, wasting your and your friends’ time when you all could have been playing something you already knew and enjoyed.
For some reason, the boardgame’s publisher figured they’d make an iOS port of Through the Ages. As if. They didn’t have any experience doing videogame ports of boardgames, much less boardgames as sweeping, unmanageable, and esoteric as Through the Ages. It was bound to be a disaster. Instead, in one of last year’s biggest surprises, it was a triumph. It turned Chvatil’s unplayable masterpiece not only into a playable masterpiece, but an accessible masterpiece with a clever and funny tutorial, a built-from-the-ground-up interface that makes information intuitively available, as competent an AI as you want, a set of engaging challenges that will help you flex various ways to play, and smooth multiplayer support for real-time or asynchronous games with friends, enemies, or just strangers. It is the best boardgame port I have ever played.
Today it’s available for the PC with thorough cross-platform support to play with iOS players. It even synchronizes your progress with any challenges you’ve beaten on your iPad. Through the Ages is available on Steam for $16.
Digital Extremes removed a microtransaction from Warframe based primarily on one player’s behavior. Studio manager Sheldon Carter explained in a Noclip interview that the team disabled an “insanely profitable” in-game option to change the fur pattern and color of an animal companion when they realized it enabled gambling. For a little less than a dollar, players could push a button that randomly mixed the appearance of a pet kubrow, a sort of alien dog. The team observed one player that spent over $137 almost immediately in an effort to get his perfect cosmetic mix, which brought the team to an uncomfortable realization.
“Oh my dear God, what have we done? We’ve created a slot machine.”
It took the team a couple of days, but they rolled back the change and disabled the cosmetic mixing button. According to Carter, the behavior was not desired because they’d rather have players support the free-to-play game with transparent and non-predatory purchases.
More Deep Space Nine content is coming to Star Trek Online. Already present in the long-running MMO as a location hub with a few quests, the Victory is Life expansion will add more Gamma Quadrant content including the ability for players to become Jem’Hadar. René Auberjonois, Armin Shimerman, and Nana Visitor will provide voicework for the characters they played on the show. Real DS9 fans want to know if Mark Allen Shepherd will reprise his MVP role as Morn.
Victory is Life for Star Trek Online launches in June.
The hat god looked upon A Hat in Time and rightly decided that the delightful puzzle platformer from Gears for Breakfast needed more hats. And lo, there are now more hats! There’s more of everything thanks to the addition of official mod support. All those user-made levels won’t go to waste either. Playing mods and completing mod levels, will grant Rift Tokens which can be used to purchase new hat flairs, remixes, and more! The cutest platformer in the universe just got an extra oomph of cuteness. It’s almost twee overload.
Don’t take my word for how cute the game was already. Check out the review of A Hat in Time here.
That’s Electronic Arts’ SEED (Search for Extraordinary Experiences Division) showing off their tech demo for Project Pica Pica, a game built with real-time ray-tracing technology. Ray-tracing has been around for decades, but mostly as a way to render light on surfaces for static images or in motion only via very powerful and expensive systems. We probably won’t see consumer games built with this tech for a bit, but it’s an interesting look at the ever-evolving world of computer graphics.
What happens when a music superstar with 36 million Twitter followers hops into a session of Fortnite with one of the most popular videogame streamers in the world? You blow out all the records for Twitch viewership. Late last night renaissance man Drake popped into a game with Tyler “Ninja” Blevins and hit a peak of 607,000 Twitch viewers, easily surpassing the previous high of 388,000. Drake performed well, telling Blevins at one point that he’d only got into the game a “month or two” ago.
If that wasn’t enough of a pop-culture confluence, by the end of the night, Pittsburgh Steelers receiver John “JuJu” Smith-Schuster, rapper Travis Scott, and Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom joined the game. It all sounds so amazing that one might think it a prearranged marketing stunt, except for the way the group’s in-game meetup was plagued with technical issues for a good part of the stream. (Drake’s PlayStation tag was apparently too full.) Most of the issues were eventually resolved thanks to judicious use of cross-play between the PlayStation 4 and PC versions of the game. Basically, this may have been the best advertisement for Fortnite ever.
You can check out an archive of the gaming session here.
Sam Barlow, creator of the much-lauded 2015 Her Story mystery game, has released his interactive media update to WarGames. #WarGames, from Barlow and production company Eko, features scrappy young “hacktivists” cracking Gibsons and using hashtags for the forces of good. The player (media interactor?) gets to help the crew and do a lot of passive observation.
The first season is up on Steam, but it’s also available on Eko’s site free with ads.
Jeff Goldblum will appear in Jurassic World Evolution. It’s no Cooking with Jeff Goldblum, but this announcement that he will be present in one form or another as Dr. Ian Malcolm in Frontier’s upcoming dino-theme park sim is almost too cute for words. It’s not clear why Dr. Ian Malcolm would help the player build a new amusement park filled with murderous dinosaur facsimiles from InGen, but with Frontier behind the game we can expect lots of Planet Coaster goodness using the popular Universal Studios license.
Jurassic Park Evolution will release later this year, probably around the time Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom hits theaters.
There is now a subscription option for Dota 2. Dota Plus is an ongoing, uninterrupted evolution of the Battle Passes that Valve would sell during the Majors and The International tournaments. Now that there’s a Pro Circuit featuring games all year long, the Battle Pass concept has changed to keep up. For $4 a month, subscribers will get the ability to level heroes and gain Shards, a new in-game currency, which can be traded in for goodies. They’ll also get access to special challenges for their heroes, and their subscription will allow a “free” entry to each weekend Battle Cup tournament that will otherwise cost $1 per admission ticket. Perhaps the most intriguing offer for subscribers is access to Plus Assistant, a new tool that gathers and analyzes everyone’s build decisions in real-time and offers suggestions for the user’s own build. It’s like having a personal meta-game counselor.
Treyarch and Activision have confirmed Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII. That’s a four to you normal people. In fact, let’s agree to nip this in the bud. We’re going to write that as “Call of Duty: Black Ops 4” or “Blops4” from now on because we’re not crazy.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 will launch on October 12th.
Game developer Playdead, boutique media company iam8bit, and sex toy manufacturer RealDoll have teamed up to create a limited collector’s edition of Inside. The twist is that they’re not telling you what they’ve actually created. For $375, you’ll get the PlayStation 4 version of Inside and “several” other items, with at least one of them presumably being the mysterious thing from RealDoll.
If you’re wondering whether or not you can do with this what you’d normally do with a product from RealDoll, the creators are playing coy. They do note that the package “weighs a surprising amount” and based on the box image featuring silhouettes of the multi-limbed Huddle, we’ll leave the kink-shaming to others.
March marks the twentieth anniversary of the StarCraft franchise. That’s two decades of gathering minerals and constructing additional pylons. Starting today, players can get special StarCraft loot in their Blizzard games. Logging into Overwatch will give you a nifty Ghost skin for Widowmaker. Pop into Diablo III to get a miniature battlecruiser pet. StarCraft II players can get a bunch of skins, a special portrait, and a decal. Old school fans of StarCraft Remastered can get an anniversary user interface skin. Later in the month, playing Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, or Heroes of the Storm will give you celebratory prizes as well. It’s like finding a free cache of vespene gas or an unguarded expansion location.
This time in live action theater, it’s Ubisoft’s Far Cry 5. The bad guy Father Jerome leads his parish and shows how he can hold his own with the likes of Pagan Min and Vaas Montenegro. He so crazy! Someone once said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over while expecting things to change, but I guess this is a case of not messing with a winning formula.
The Entertainment Software Rating Board wants to protect kids, inform parents, and keep their partners rolling in revenue. To that end, the ESRB is proposing a special box label warning customers that a game may have in-game purchases. ESRB president Patricia Vance said the label would be separate from the normal ratings box and content points.
The new label would apply to loot boxes, cosmetic skins, subscriptions, season passes, music, DLC, and in-game currency. Basically, any optional purchase for a game that is done from within the software. According to Vance, the label doesn’t differentiate between offers because parents need simple information.
“It’s very important for us to not harp on loot boxes per se, to make sure that we’re capturing loot boxes, but also other in-game transactions.”
The ESRB feels this is a good first step in addressing the concerns against loot boxes. The organization also does not want to increase a game’s age ratings due to in-game purchase options.
