The normally accepted theory on how ancient Egyptians hauled the immense stones to the tops of the pyramids as they were being built is via humongous external ramps, some over a mile long, that allowed them to scoot up to the heights needed. The main problem with that theory is that no one has ever found any evidence of those ramps. An alternate, and controversial, theory put forth by French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin in 2007 is that the Egyptians built the pyramids from the inside-out using a spiral system of ramps and chambers that were repurposed into burial rooms as the builders worked up. Unfortunately, we haven’t actually mapped the interior of the pyramids enough to confirm or deny Houdin’s theory.
Last week, Nature published details of a newly discovered large inaccessible chamber in the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Although no one has been able to confirm what the chamber might contain or what its purpose was, its existence was predicted by Houdin’s construction theory.
Here’s where Assassin’s Creed: Origins comes into the story. The newly discovered chamber in Khufu’s pyramid is already in the game! Ubisoft’s developers consulted with Houdin and used his pyramid schematics as a spingboard for their in-game models. His inside-out theory lined up nicely with the team’s gameplay goals. According to what they told Kotaku, the developers bet on Houdin as “the most credible” of sources.
Say what you will of the game’s flaws, but that’s some impressive synchronicity. If the developers got that right, maybe we should watch out for mummies and giant serpent attacks in the future?
Earlier in the year, Activision and Sledgehammer Games had announced that opening loot boxes in Call of Duty: WWII would have incentives for spectators, but we didn’t know how it would work. Thanks to some early footage posted on Reddit, we can now see that the process for opening loot crates in the game may be one of the slickest sequences of its kind made to appeal to gamer vanity.
Loot crates literally fall from the sky in the game’s multiplayer social space as a Supply Drop. Anyone standing near the event can watch as the crate bursts open and prizes fly up to be revealed. Loot contents are visible to everyone in the area, presumably to maximize excitement and envy.
Activision claims all loot offered will be cosmetic only, but if true, that would be a change from the past few Call of Duty games that did eventually offer loot crate exclusive weapons. Call of Duty: WWII launches tomorrow.
Today Zen Studios announced what everyone with a Switch hopes will be announced for every game ever made: a Switch version of Pinball FX3 is on the way!
Pinball FX3 hits the system on Tuesday, November 14, 2017. In addition to evolving the groundbreaking approach to community gaming that has come to define Zen’s series for a full decade, Pinball FX3 takes full advantage of the Nintendo Switch console’s revolutionary capabilities with exclusive features like vertical play orientation and HD rumble support. Thirty tables are available at launch, with more playable content and features to be added in the months to come.
The vertical play feature will be particularly welcome to those of us who Zen Pinballed on the Vita, where the rectangular screen was ideal for a full-frame top-down view of the table. But then comes the bit about 30 tables. I have 68 tables in my PC version of Pinball FX3. Why are fewer than half making the cut? Hmm, let’s peruse the list of announced Switch tables:
Universal Classics™ Pinball (Back to the Future™, E.T.™, Jaws™); Aliens vs. Pinball (Aliens, Alien vs. Predator, Alien: Isolation); Balls of Glory (Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, Archer, American Dad!); Portal; The Walking Dead; Sorcerer’s Lair (free); Zen Classics (Shaman, Tesla, El Dorado, V12); Core Collection (Pasha, Rome, Biolab, Secrets of the Deep); Medieval Pack (Epic Quest, Excalibur); Sci-Fi Pack (Mars, Paranormal, Earth Defense); Iron & Steel (Wild West Rampage, CastleStorm)
There seem to be some conspicuous omissions in there, all properties belonging to a single entity. For what it’s worth, on the Nintendo Wii, the Star Wars tables were released as a separate game with its own progression based on building up your choice of Light Side points or Dark Side points. Maybe there’s something like that in store for the Star Wars and Marvel tables? Or maybe they’ll be sold separately later? Or maybe Disney is taking their balls and going home, so to speak.
Pinball FX3 is also getting a new carnival themed table and a Greek mythology table on November 14th. Both of which be available for the Switch.
You can pet cats in Assassin’s Creed: Origins. There is no button to “pet cat.” Just crouch next to one and your Bayek will automatically reach out and give the feline a good rubbing. Good kitty! You cannot, however, pet dogs in the game. Crouch all you want next to a canine and Bayek will just sit there hunched over, ready for assassinating, while Fido runs off. Bad doggy!
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is facing an uphill fight in China thanks to a negative recommendation from a leading censorship advisory group. The China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association, working in conjunction with the official Chinese government’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television issued a statement on Battlegrounds that accuses the game of being too violent and “deviates from the values of socialism” according to a translation from Bloomberg. It is an early sign that the game will not likely get an official license for sale in China.
“This basically spells the death sentence for PUBG in China,” said Benjamin Wu, an analyst at Shanghai-based consultancy Pacific Epoch.
The SAPPRFT previously recommended that lone survivor multiplayer games not be allowed in China and discourages local development of such games. Honour of Kings, a Korean multiplayer survival game published by Tencent, is the most popular game in the genre in China. It slipped into the country before the SAPPRFT ruling and remains on sale with little to no competition in the country.
Visceral Games was shut down by its owner and publisher Electronic Arts on October 17th. The Star Wars action adventure game they were working on, code-named Project Ragtag, was canceled and workers either went to other EA positions or looking for employment. Visceral’s Star Wars game was going to be modeled after Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series, but until now the public has never known much about it other than a quick snippet of video during EA’s E3 2016 presentation. Kotaku spoke to former and current EA employees, including Visceral sources, and uncovered some details. The ambitious single-player game put the player into the shoes of Dodger, a Han Solo styled rascal, and his ragtag (get it?) crew of ne’er-do-wells. Set between the movies A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, Ragtag would focus on the seedier criminal elements of Star Wars. Heists, Hutts, and hand blasters.
What killed Ragtag? A little bit of this and a little bit of that. According to Kotaku’s sources, game director Amy Hennig’s project design was maybe too ambitious for the understaffed studio, while simultaneously being too conservative for EA’s strategic plans. The game was just too expensive, too complicated, and EA wasn’t going to see the kind of monetary return they needed to keep their shareholders happy.
“EA executives are like, ‘FIFA Ultimate Team makes a billion dollars a year.’ Where’s your version of that?”
After Star Wars: Battlefront shipped and EA shifted to the more profitable games-as-service model, the writing was on the wall for Ragtag. Dodger and company were done. EA’s announcement of both the game’s and the studio’s demise included a note that EA Vancouver had taken over the project and shifted the design to a “broader experience” for players.
LawBreakers, Boss Key Productions’ multiplayer hero shooter, hasn’t exactly set the gaming world on fire. Despite already releasing two new maps, adding a competitive mode, and jiggering with mechanics in some pretty drastic ways since its August launch, Boss Key just hasn’t been able to attract the players that some other new multiplayer games have garnered. According to studio head Cliff Bleszinski, it’s all part of the plan. He wants steady growth like Rocket League or Warframe – games that built their healthy communities over extended periods. As he explains to GamesIndustry, his studio knows the hierarchy of gaming and isn’t looking to fight that particular battle just yet.
“I want to carve out my space and be Pepsi or RC Cola of that market – I’m not going to be Coke because Overwatch has too much of a stranglehold.”
While acknowledging some early mistakes in marketing, Bleszinski feels the best way to grow his game’s audience is to keep plugging away at updates, continue to produce content, and concentrate on promoting the game correctly. You can find a copy of the LawBreakers content roadmap here.
Twitch is now offering loot boxes with temporary emotes as prizes. Every time you spend 250 Bits on a Cheer, you will unlock a Halloween crate with one of six zombie emotes that can be used through the rest of the year. Collect all six, and you’ll unlock a permanent Zombie Lord Kappa emote, but you’ll probably need to wade through more than six crates since repeats aren’t worth anything. It’s time-limited crate availability coupled to the variant chase mechanic. Imagine it. You could spend Bits on Cheers to get Twitch loot boxes while watching your favorite streamer spectate in Call of Duty: World War 2 viewing other people opening their in-game loot boxes. If infinite regress is real, the cosmic voyager might say “It’s loot boxes all the way down!”
Twitch’s Halloween Crates will be available until November 3rd.
There’s a Game of the Year edition of Hitman coming. IO Interactive’s announcement brings good news for late adopters and current players. The new edition comes with all of Season One’s content, plus new suits and weapons, a new Patient Zero campaign based around stopping a viral infection, and some new escalation contracts that ramp up the difficulty. The Game of the Year edition is launching on November 7th. If you already own the first season, there will be a $20 upgrade DLC available so you don’t miss out on the clown suit.
The big reveal for people that missed some of the time-limited content is that they’re repeating Season One’s Elusive Contracts. It’s part of the free update to the game for all owners that includes a redesigned user interface, lighting upgrades, and new social features for missions. The encore of the Elusive Contracts will also be time-limited and if you already failed one, you will not be permitted another try. Sorry. No do-overs allowed.
A few original Xbox games will be available tomorrow for the Xbox One. Microsoft confirmed through IGN that thirteen old-school Xbox games, including Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, will be added to the backwards compatibility list on the newer console. As with the current Xbox 360 backwards compatible titles, you can either pop your old disc into your Xbox One and download an update to allow play, or you can purchase a new digital copy through the Xbox Store. You’ll soon be able to enjoy BloodRayne 2 or The King of Fighters Neowave on your gigantic TV in glorious 1080p.
In related news, the Xbox 360 backwards compatible games Halo 3, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Assassin’s Creed are getting Xbox One X enhancement updates on November 7th.
The Pyro has a jetpack. If that information doesn’t make you shudder, that’s probably because you haven’t kept up with Team Fortress 2 in a while. Valve’s daily trickle of information for the Jungle Inferno update for the game revealed a revamp of the Pyro class which includes new weapons, balance changes, and even visual improvements to the Pyro’s flame effects. There’s even a crass new taunt for the Pyro that recreates the time-honored tradition of lighting farts on fire.
The Pyro is a master of the barbecue. The Pyro already has the best character video. The Pryo gave the game a pair of goggles that changes how everything appears to the player. The Pyro has a rocking body. The Pryo now jetpacks into the sky and rains hot flaming death on those below. The Pryo is objectively the best thing in Team Fortress 2 aside from the Sniper’s jar of urine.
The board for Gremlins Inc looks like a swirly looping mess of random spaces. Until you play the game and discover that it’s not. Clockwork Town is a very specific place with a specific layout with specific gameplay implication. It has a hard-to-reach Heaven, a Hell just a short jaunt off the beaten path, and a progression from the courthouse to the treasure vault to the bank to the office. The newly released prisoner will find himself approaching the casino, and he won’t get to the marketplace anytime soon. Like the board for any boardgame, it reveals patterns as you played it. It rewards you as you pay attention to it. It has geography.
Relic Entertainment has updated Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 3 to offer more classic real-time strategy features for players. The Endless Update comes with the usual balance changes and adjustments, three new multiplayer maps, and three new elite units. The free patch also adds some much-requested multiplayer custom match options that bring the game back to its RTS roots and away from the sequel’s reliance on hero management. Players can now toggle elites off, disable doctrines, and not allow global abilities in their matches. The new options don’t turn the game into a full throwback to earlier Dawn of War entries, but they do give players the ability to mostly ignore the most controversial changes to the formula – namely, the way elites work. We’ll see if the changes are enough to bring the community back to WAAAGH.
Dead by Daylight, the other asymmetrical multiplayer horror game, is adding Freddy Krueger to its lineup of horror villains. While Friday the 13th: The Game has been content to putter along with different versions of Jason Vorhees, (Gunny sack Jason! Split hockey mask Jason! Zombie Jason! Jason gone wild!) Behaviour Digital has already nabbed Michael Myers and Leatherface to beef up its group of proprietary knockoff baddies like Generic Killer Farmer and Demonic Scary Old Lady. By adding Freddy Krueger, Dead by Daylight seems to going for a pure quantity pitch. Will players have to wait as long as the movie fans did for the crossover match?
The Russian-made GAZelle Next medium van has a hidden version of Tetris in its dashboard instrument console. Thanks to instructions translated by Jalaopnik, you can see the Easter Egg is tucked away in the software for the little digital screen jammed between the center dials. Turn some knobs, flip some switches, and rev the engine in the right order for the correct amounts, and you too can play a klunky tiny build of everyone’s favorite stacking game on your Russian utility vehicle.
Which Spintires modding team will be the first to add this game-within-a-game feature?
