Rainbow Six Siege’s Year Two is about to start. Ubisoft’s tactical team shooter is getting another eight operators and four maps set in Spain, Hong Kong, Poland, and South Korea throughout 2017. The first update, Operation Velvet Shell, will add two characters that screw with the game’s established strategies via magical powers. Mira can create one-way firing windows in walls like a sorceress with a shotgun, and Jackal can track enemy footsteps to their source using what can only be described as witchcraft.
The game’s creative director Xavier Marquis revealed to PC Gamer that Ubisoft plans on bringing the total count of operators to at least fifty, with “aspirations of reaching twice that amount” over its lifetime. The game already has 28 character classes, and the developers plan on adding eight more in year two, leaving players with at least a couple more years of collecting virtual shooter men. Since Ubisoft is already leaning on superpowers for their newest operator additions, how long will it be before characters from For Honor start showing up in Rainbow Six Siege like Blizzard’s cross-promotional efforts?
Stardock’s and Oxide Games’ high-performance PC real-time strategy game, Ashes of the Singularity, and the standalone expansion, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, have been on parallel development paths since the expansion launched in November of last year. The developers’ intent was that the base game would be the more casual-friendly title, while the expansion would focus on the hard-core RTS audience.
According to Stardock’s Brad Wardell the games’ code will be merged with the next update, making things simpler for the developers. The benefit for base game owners is that they will get most of the quality-of-life improvements the expansion brought. But that’s not all! People who participated in the early access program for the base game will actually get Escalation added to their Steam libraries for free. Owners of Escalation will get all future DLC for free, if they purchase the game before the next update. Founders, the brave souls that pre-purchased Ashes to get the base game and all future DLC, will get the sequel to Escalation for free.
Thus, putting Escalation and the base game on equal footing, we can see which game has more players. Ashes or Escalation. I know you hard-core RTS players are convinced that Escalation will win. Don’t be so sure. I love them both but it’s Ashes, not Escalation, that my friends tend to prefer for LAN parties due to the relative simplicity.
Ashes of the Singularity’s 1.51 update and Escalation’s 2.1 update is scheduled to be released on February 16. The free upgrades will be available on that date to qualifying owners.
The universe is expanding! So holds the theory that everything is moving outward and away from each other. You’re already slightly farther away from the center of the universe than when the day started. Science! Soon, both Galactic Civilizations 3 and Stellaris will grow as well. More science!
Galactic Civilizations 3: Crusade, features improvements to the core concept of “civilizations” in the game. Stardock is adding a new campaign, new alien civilizations, a new graphics engine, and a new resource system with this expansion. Espionage will offer options for sneaky rulers, and an economy based on the citizens themselves should please the economists out there. Additionally, Crusade changes planetary invasions into interactive tactical challenges instead of being a mostly hands-off affair.
The revamped invasion system in Crusade allows a citizen to be trained as a soldier in order to invade worlds. Strategic and challenging, invasions will require careful planning as you train your legions and determine which tile to attack first. Be careful not to forget to defend your own worlds from your enemies, too!
Galactic Civilizations 3: Crusade is coming in the Spring for Windows PC and will cost $19.99.
Stellaris: Utopia will go big for construction and social engineering. Megastructures like Dyson Spheres, ringworlds, and outlet malls will be all the rage for advanced space-faring cultures. Utopia will also give players new tools to use in their galactic bureaucracies including rights for citizenship, traditions to ease expansion, and bonuses for rapid exploration. The expansion will also allow would-be emperors to guide their factions through evolution.
As your species advances and gains new traditions, it can choose how it wants to evolve as it is further enlightened. You can choose between a biological path, a psionic path or a synthetic path, with various options within these broad categories.
No pricing or launch date has been announced for Stellaris: Utopia.
The video above details the best ways to kill people in Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3, except it misses the best method. A bow and arrow. You can get a set in the season pass for the game, and you can snag the whole package for free if you pre-order. CI Games announced the discount offer that will give early bird buyers the $30 season pass at no additional cost, if they’re willing to open their wallets before the official launch date.
Citing the “long-term investment” in the community, CI Games CEO Marek Tyminski committed to supporting the game with additional content throughout the year. The season pass will include two single player story expansions, two multiplayer maps, an exclusive in-game vehicle, a special sniper rifle and the all-important compound bow and arrows.
Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 will launch on PC and PlayStation 4 on the 4th of April.
Vvardenfell is coming to The Elder Scrolls Online. ZeniMax Online Studios announced The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind expansion. Parts of the dark elves’ territory have been available to players in ESO, but the Morrowind addition will open up an area the developers say is equal in size to the MMO’s base game. It’s full of giant mushrooms and volcanoes. Luckily for everyone, The Elder Scrolls Online is set about 700 years before the Red Mountain exploded, so there will be plenty of Cliff Racer action. Along with the new play space, Morrowind will feature a new character class in the form of the Warden. The Warden gets a War-Bear and uses druid magic to fight enemies. He’s like Grizzly Adams with spells.
The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind expansion will cost $40 for current players, or $60 for a new player bundle that includes the base game. The expansion is set to launch on June 6th for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.
That image is from Gunman Taco Truck. It’s a post-apocalyptic game in which the player owns the last taco truck in the world. Travel the wasteland, kill mutants, buy cooking supplies, and sell tacos. There’s side-scrolling action and a bit of a simple business sim mixed together. It’s the first game from Romero Games. That’s John and Brenda Romero’s indie studio in Galway, Ireland.
Gunman Taco Truck was based on an idea from the couple’s son, Donovan Brathwaite-Romero, when he was nine years old.
Over 2 years and lots of fun have gone into making Gunman Taco Truck an unforgettable experience, and the realization of Donovan’s dream of making a video game. Donovan has been learning how to code for the past 3 years.
Enter the Gungeon, the room-by-room bullet hell from Dodge Roll and Devolver Digital, now has more firepower. The free Supply Drop update adds 200 new deadly rooms, seven new enemy types, bosses, costumes, a challenge mode, and 33 new guns. John Wick would approve!
Players will come across new guns like the Bullet Gun, a gun shaped like a bullet that shoots guns and those guns shoot bullets, and new companions like Ser Junkan who gains strength and power as you carry more and more literal junk with you through the Gungeon.
Beyond this, Dodge Roll plans to release an expansion later this year or in 2018.
Francis Ford Coppola, the acclaimed director of numerous films like Peggy Sue Got Married and Jack, is helping to create a videogame based on Apocalypse Now. It’s being directed by Montgomery Markland, executive produced by Lawrence Liberty and written by Rob Auten. According to the godfather of The Godfather, the game will be a “psychedelic horror RPG” that puts players into the shoes of Captain Willard on his quest for Colonel Kurtz.
“I dove into the Vietnam War without a parachute. And today I’ve been joined by new daredevils; a team who want to make an interactive version of mine and John Milius’ story that puts you in the middle of the war.”
Fans of 2012’s Spec Ops: The Line can see the obvious potential with adapting Apocalypse Now and its wartime existential horror into a videogame, but according to the report in Glixel, the developers want to downplay the combat aspects and have players think more about the choices Captain Willard had to make in the story.
“In the film when the chief character is killed by a spear and he tries to puncture Willard with the spear that’s sticking through his chest you know that there’s just some kind of visceral hatred and fear. We’re giving players the ability to alter their own versions of the story, what if you didn’t kill the person with the dog? What if you didn’t trade the fuel for time with the Playboy bunnies? All these decisions that are made in the film. The ability to take a really fraught and intense environment, character-centric choices and bring these two things together, that’s the plan.”
American Zoetrope is asking for $900,000 on their Kickstarter for the project.
SWAT 4 is now available on GOG.com. Mull that over for a minute. You no longer have to pay hundreds of dollars for a rare boxed copy of the game on an auction site to experience one of the best tactical police shooters ever created. The 2005 title from Irrational Games and Sierra was exceedingly hard to find in legitimate ways, but now you can get the gold version bundled with The Stetchkov Syndicate expansion in just a few clicks. Progress!
Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege may be the modern choice for cops versus robbers action, but SWAT 4 comes from a design that emphasized safety and procedure over slamming through floors with explosives and unlocking cosmetic helmets. In single player or cooperative scenarios, SWAT 4 is all about slowly inching forward, peeking around corners, and moving in assault teams through claustrophobic environments while trying to apprehend or neutralize bad guys. You can lose a mission for shooting enemies if they’re not actively threatening you or civilians! Arrest and subdue, not indiscriminate killing, is the order of the day. Imagine abiding by that rule as you rush through the chaos of Rainbow Six Siege’s wall-busting and grenade spam.
GOG.com tracked down a couple of the original folks from Irrational that worked on the game. The interview touches on a few of the choices the team made in development that help SWAT 4 stand the test of time.
Authenticity drove everything, and to that end we learned a lot from our consultant and retired LA SWAT officer, Ken Thatcher. I remember we showed him game footage and he immediately called out the problem of having your gun at your eyes – remember, this was pre-iron sights – because it reduced your vision. It especially bothered him that your gun was sometimes aimed at fellow officers. “You never point the barrel of your weapon at anything you don’t want to die,” he told us, which prompted us to add the low-ready animation, automatically dipping your gun when it panned past another officer.
SWAT 4: Gold Edition on GOG.com comes with The Stetchkov Syndicate add-on campaign and multiplayer is possible through LAN or direct connection.
In 2012, a veritable cannon went off in videogame academia. The paper “Boom, Headshot!“: Effect of Video Game Play and Controller Type on Firing Aim and Accuracy was written by Brad Bushman and Jodi Whitaker at Ohio State University. The paper directly linked improved real-world firearm proficiency with playing violent games that rewarded accuracy like head shots in Resident Evil 4. Thanks to the paper, anti-videogame activists had their “smoking gun” that tied playing videogames to mass shooter murders. Notably, Anders Behring Breivik claimed he practiced killing using Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 before his 2011 rampage in Norway. Bushman went on to co-write a paper linking increased aggression in subjects with extended periods of violent videogame play, further pushing the narrative that games teach people to kill.
Since its publication, “Boom, Headshot!” has been the subject of numerous discussions, some of them calling into question the methodology used. Patrick Markey, author of Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong and Malte Elson, a behavioral psychologist at Ruhr University, questioned the results of “Boom, Headshot!” based on statistical inconsistencies. After years of investigation and debate, “Boom, Headshot!” is being retracted. Although Professor Bushman claims the retraction is a result of a smear campaign by his rivals, Ohio State University admitted that they could not back up the conclusions in the paper since the original data was missing.
You can all go back to shooting Junkrat in the face now.
Today seems like a good day to talk about Ubisoft’s The Division. The dystopian shooter MMO set in a future New York City, broken by plague and economic hardship, streets made into a war zones thanks to roving gangs and totalitarian police, somehow seems fitting now. The good news is that there is a plan to make The Division great again. Premium Credits, a new in-game currency, will be implemented in the upcoming patch 1.6 for purchase with real-world money. Those Premium Credits will be used in a new in-game vanity store. Cosmetic items only, so if you want to get anything more than snazzy new paint schemes, emotes, or clothing textures, you’ll have to grind for it the old fashioned way.
According to Ubisoft, they will not be selling anything for Premium Credits that gives anyone an advantage over other players. Additionally, players will still be able to earn vanity items as normal mission rewards and loot drops. It should be noted that almost exactly a year ago, Ubisoft’s Magnus Jansen told VG247 that they would not have microtransactions for The Division that gave any players a competitive edge.
John McTiernan, the celebrated director of Die Hard, Predator, and other smart action films, directed a Ghost Recon: Wildlands commercial. The Red Dot live action trailer above was quietly released last week by Ubisoft in the European market, but it’s only now coming to light that it was helmed by John McTiernan. According to Vulture, it’s the director’s first gig in 14 years.
What happened to McTiernan is a convoluted tale involving a corrupt private investigator, federal wiretapping, and literal plastic explosives. The short of it is that John McTiernan wound up spending about a year in prison, making him persona non grata in many Hollywood negotiations because he was uninsurable as a director. Apparently, that’s changed or he’s found a back door to return to directing. Either way, yippee-ki-yay!
Injustice 2, the sequel to Injustice: The Gods Among Us, will continue the story of a Superman gone insane. In this universe, a grief-stricken Superman decides to up-end over 80 years of comic history by becoming a murderous tyrant. True to its dystopian premise, the game will have pre-order bonuses and alternate editions that offer a larger roster of fighters to savvy or richer buyers.
NetherRealm Studios and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment have revealed that Darkseid, the DC Comics uber-baddie, will be available as a preorder bonus, and Reverse-Flash, Power Girl and John Stewart Green Lantern will be “premier” skins for The Flash, Supergirl, and Green Lantern if you pick up the more expensive Deluxe or Ultimate editions of the game. Comic nerds need not get upset by the flip from Supergirl to Power Girl. According to the developers, these premier skins include new voices, costumes, and dialogue, making them a bit more substantial than the normal fighting game color swap. The Deluxe edition of Injustice 2 will also give owners three planned DLC characters, and the Ultimate edition will grant access to nine future DLC characters. Excelsior!
Injustice 2 launches on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on May 16th.
Civil War, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Secret Wars, Flashpoint, The Infinity Gauntlet, and That One Time Peter Parker Sold His Marriage to the Devil. These are all milestone events in superhero comics that forever changed the makeup of their respective universes. Powers changed, origins were rebooted, and new readers were given an easy way to jump in to the fandom. Like these crossover events, Marvel Heroes’ big update will refresh and redesign almost every aspect of the game.
While the free-to-play superhero Diablo-like from Gazillion will remain an action slugfest, the developers intend the “biggest systems update ever” to update every single hero in one massive patch. The item system gets a thorough shuffle. The way characters move was reviewed. Even the endgame gets an overhaul with the new Infinity System. It’s like when Uncle Ben turned out to have been killed by Sandman all along. Everything you thought was wrong!
Marvel Heroes’ Biggest Update Ever will launch on Thursday, January 19th.
What unique games will the Nintendo Switch have available on its March 3rd launch? There’s Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but it’s still a cross-platform game that will also be available for the Wii U. The same goes with Just Dance 2017. Arms, the spring-fisted fighting game is slated for “Spring 2017” so it will likely miss launch day. Super Mario Odyssey isn’t coming out until the holiday season. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is slated for April 28th, and it’s a remake of the last Mario Kart anyway. No, the two completely Switch-only games confirmed to be available on March 3rd are Super Bomberman R and 1-2-Switch. Bomberman is Bomberman, but 1-2-Switch is something else entirely.
Remember Wii Sports and how everyone immediately grasped the concept of waggling a controller for bowling or boxing? Nintendo sure hopes you do, because they want you to have the same thought process for 1-2-Switch. Using the Switch’s Joy-Con controllers as pretend cow teats, pistol grips, tennis racket handles, and a bevy of similar phallic objects, players square off in minigame waggle contests the likes of which haven’t been seen since Lando Calrissian and Han Solo shimmied their hips in an epic dance battle. It’s Wii Sports again, but instead of being a pack-in to demonstrate the fun and versatility of the hardware, Nintendo wants $50 retail for the experience. Doubtless there will be buyers if only to have something other than the new Zelda game to play, but is this really the push for the Switch?
