Is there anything better in Final Fantasy XV than Prompto’s delightful pictures? They capture the buddy road trip goofiness of a bunch of dudes hanging out, having adventures, high-fiving each other, and generally being a gaggle of lovable lunkheads. There’s an update for Final Fantasy XV coming on December 22nd that adds a free Holiday Pack DLC which includes a New Game Plus feature and themed photo frames for Prompto’s shutterbug hobby. It’s exactly what this bro-tastic posse of tourists needs. There’s also a couple of in-game goodies like a ticket that will transport the player’s party to a time-limited Moogle Chocobo Carnival in January. Owners of the season pass will have access to a premium version of the Holiday Pack that adds more special loot like a Ring of Resistance and a Stamina Badge.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 on PC now offers a way for players to host their own private servers for multiplayer. Update 18 for Black Ops 3 comes with a dedicated server tool for unranked multiplayer. Hosts can manage who plays on the server, match rules, the map rotation, and even use custom assets. Speaking of new assets, the update includes more content from the campaign and zombies maps for use by custom map creators. Instructions for the server tool are here.
In related news, Treyarch revealed that more content would be coming to Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 in 2017 for everyone. Developers Dan Bunting and Jason Blundell hinted that there is something called “Newton’s Crookbook” coming which likely involves Gobblegum crafting.
Although the new hotness of Infinite Warfare and the retro hotness of Modern Warfare Remastered are the primary push for Activision’s Call of Duty studios, it’s always good when the older titles remain supported. On PC, the Black Ops series remains the most popular of the Call of Duty entries, and Black Ops 3 in particular, is still the most played installment on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Dishonored 2 has a lot of ways to kill enemies, but half of them will be locked away until a second playthrough with a different character. Empress Emily Kaldwin can’t do everything Corvo Attano can, and vice versa. Until now. There’s a beta patch available for the PC version of the game that adds a New Game Plus feature. The main addition in the update is the ability to choose Corvo or Emily and create your own suite of powers out of all the available abilities. Give Emily dominion over murderous rats, or let Corvo turn into a living shadow! All you have to do is beat the game once and New Game Plus will be available from the main menu. This new mode will also let you re-assign all the Runes you collected in the previous game.
Although it’s only available in beta on PC now, the New Game Plus update will launch for all platforms on December 19th. This is the first of two planned free content updates for Dishonored 2. The second update should arrive in January and will contain custom difficulty settings and a mission select menu.
I’m not really good at math, but here are the raw numbers. American Truck Simulator used to be at a scale of 1:35. With today’s update, it’s at a scale of 1:20. According to the developers at SCS Software, this means the maps are 1.75 times larger. I think they need to check their work. By my math, 1:35 minus 1:20 means the maps are :15 larger. Maybe it’s a metric thing. They’re European.
Math errors aside, this is a Big Deal. A fundamental part of level design, and especially open-world design, is the density of stuff. Which is directly related to the size of the maps. On one end of the scale, you have Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, which squeezed the Caribbean Sea into a tightly packed pond of concentrated naval action. On the other end of the scale, you have the original Battlezone in 1980, which didn’t have a single thing in it no matter how many quarters you spent looking for something. So when a developer releases a game and later says, “Uh, we’re going to rework the world to make it this much bigger, it’s going to have an effect on the gameplay experience.
And in the case of a laidback truck driving simulation like American Truck Simulator, more open space is appropriate. In Europe, everything is close together. That’s why they have so many wars. So Europe should have a high map density. You drive a half hour out of Paris and you’re practically in Warsaw. But going from Los Angeles to Las Vegas? It’s like playing Battlezone.
Mostly I’m just glad to have more room to drag that big-ass trailer around without constantly scraping other cars. In the words of Moe Howard, “Spread out!”
The Overwatch Winter Wonderland seasonal event is now live. Special loot boxes with Christmas-themed cosmetic skins and items will be available to earn (or buy) until January 2nd. There’s also a special instagib 6v6 mode called Mei’s Snowball Offensive that replaces the ice queen’s weapon with a single shot snowball gun. If the popularity of previous Overwatch skins are any indicator, we should see a brisk uptick in Overwatch porn with the new outfits.
Universal Studios amusement parks and Nintendo are teaming up to bring Mario to life. Super Nintendo World, a special Nintendo-themed area of Universal Studios Japan, was revealed on Twitter. The theme park area will feature “gameplay, heroes and villains” from Nintendo’s most famous videogames. The companies hope to have Super Nintendo World open for visitors in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. It will cost an estimated $430 million to build.
Nintendo characters and the worlds they inhabit will be re-created at the highest level of quality through the strong partnership between Mr. Shigeru Miyamoto, Creative Fellow at Nintendo, and Mark Woodbury, President of Universal Creative, renowned for creative and technical excellence.
Similar Nintendo theme park additions are planned for Universal Orlando and Universal Studios Hollywood, but no specifics have been given. The partnership between Universal and Nintendo was first announced in May.
The match ends and congratulations! You got a loot box reward! Do you click the button to unlock the chest? Do you scrap it? If you don’t get what you wanted, do you dole out some real-world money for some more turns at the slot machine? If only you knew what the odds were of getting that rare skin. Thanks to a new law in China, you might. (Translation available here.) Beginning May 1st, 2017, any company issuing virtual prizes with random rewards, like cosmetic skins that might pop out of loot chests, must publicly post the draw probabilities for each prize, and the draw results must be available for public review for at least 90 days.
China’s stance seems to be that if you’re going to have gambling mechanics in your game, then you’ll be subject to the same kinds of laws that regulate gambling in their country. In this case, companies will have to openly state the odds of winning, something most videogame loot reward schemes do not currently do.
This law may have far-reaching effects in the rest of the world for a lot of videogame companies. Unless publishers create specific rewards and odds tables for their games in China, (which may be more trouble than its worth) we could all start seeing exactly how rare that one mega-ultra-legendary skin is in the game. Regardless, like similar regulations for gambling, it’s doubtful that this will put any crimp in the brisk business of rolling the virtual dice.
When nostalgic players of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered played the game, some were disappointed to see that the game’s revamped multiplayer was missing a few iconic maps. The all-important Crash was present, but where were Showdown, Pipeline, Bloc, Countdown, Strike, and Wet Works? Everyone just needed a little patience. All six missing maps are coming to the game, along with Winter Crash, a version of Crash festooned with Christmas decorations. The free update will also include the Gun Game and Hardpoint game modes. The December update will launch for everyone on the 13th.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered is still only available in the Legacy Edition bundle with Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Activision continues to say that they have no plans to sell it separately.
You could go to jail for programming a wallhack in South Korea. PVPLive reports that the South Korean parliament has just passed an amendment to a law protecting the videogame industry. The amendment makes it illegal to make or distribute programs that are not allowed by a videogame publisher’s terms of service. The law is intended to directly attack the rampant cheating in South Korean online gaming. The possible punishments include monetary fines and up to five years in prison. Riot and Blizzard must be pleased.
How different would How the Grinch Stole Christmas be if instead of being infused with the holiday spirit, the titular green goblin was garroted to death by Agent 47? Would Cindy Lou Who be as cheerful about her returned presents? Probably not, but Whoville never had to contend with international conspiracies or assassin groups for hire. IO Interactive is releasing a free Holiday Hoarders mission to celebrate the season of giving. It’s a Christmas-themed rework of the Paris level, but instead of a fashion emergency, Agent 47 must stop two thieves from nicking all the presents. The developers encourage players to enjoy the free content and donate to the World Cancer Research Fund if they want to pay it forward.
The Holiday Hoarders mission will be released for free on December 13th.
You might have thought the release of American Truck Simulator would mean Euro Truck Simulator is old and busted, America is the new hotness. That’s how it works with sequels. In with the new, out with the old. Euro truck drivers can still play in their old world, but the developers at SCS Software have moved on to the New World, right?
Not so! Today they added France. The whole country. $20 gets you the Viva La France DLC. Euro Truck Simulator 2 now includes France, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Italy, Holland, and the UK (pending Brexit). American Truck Simulator includes California and a chunk of Arizona. Who’s the new hotness now?
THQ Nordic has updated Nexus: The Jupiter Incident with official mod capability. The latest patch for the 2004 real-time strategy game adds Steam Workshop support. There’s not a lot of modding being done yet, but if the internet does what it does best, we should see Star Trek and Star Wars mods right around the time anime porn works it way into the community. That’s if amateur creators can be dragged away from the community in Sins of a Solar Empire, which seems to have become the home of space strategy modding.
THQ Nordic purchased the Nexus franchise from HD Publishing back in September of 2015. The publisher at that time had announced their intention to start work on a sequel as they considered Nexus an “overlooked, hidden gem” of the space strategy genre.
Star Wars Battlefront will get content inspired by Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The Scarif DLC pack recreates the tropical beach landscape shown in trailers for the upcoming movie. Shoretrooper enemies square off against Rebel infiltration teams, while TIE Strikers and S-Wing spacecraft buzz around the recently revealed AT-ACT walkers. New hero characters Jyn Erso and Orson Krennic will bring special powers to the firefights, and players will be able to load up with new weapons and Star Cards. Thanks to the generousity of Electronic Arts and DICE, (or perhaps a co-marketing deal with Disney) the Scarif pack will be a free update! Season pass owners will get access to the content on December 6th, while freeloading moof-milkers will get it on December 20th.
PlayStation VR owners of Star Wars Battlefront will also get a free X-Wing VR Mission with the Scarif DLC.
Although Worms WMD is a welcome return to two-dimensional battlefields for the series, Team17 isn’t afraid of trying new things with the title. The upcoming Liberation update features the first-ever appearance of an aquatic vehicle for the battling annelids. The Drillboat not only turns the death sentence of water into another method of traversing the battlefield, it features an earth-chewing digger on the bow that allows it to grind tunnels out of the landscape. Not even the infamous Concrete Donkey can overcome water! The free update also adds some new weapons, a “war-torn” theme for areas, and new customization items.
The Worms WMD Liberation update is coming to Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Steam on December 7th.
Think back to 2003 when Steam was first required to play Half-Life 2. It was awful, right? This bloated, unnecessary, digital rights management software was a blight on your PC. You just wanted to play basketball with Dog and flirt with Alyx Vance, so why did you need this? What good was it to you? Fast-forward to now and the PC gaming industry is unthinkable without it. In fact, it’s probable that you’ve purchased games that you otherwise never would’ve heard of thanks to Steam.
The same process is happening in China. Lisa Hanson of Niko Partners explains in a Gamasutra blog post that thanks to some unique business conditions, Steam is flourishing in China. Because Steam is required to play Dota 2, and because Steam is puzzlingly exempt from the kind of Chinese government censorship that other software distribution platforms must endure, China’s gamers are gaining access to games they otherwise could not purchase.
The fact that Steam had banned games peaked the curiosity of a few Chinese gamers who wanted to try out this platform and this led to many of them purchasing their second game on Steam, Grand Theft Auto V. Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) already had a huge presence globally and was marketed as the game to experience the American way of life. GTA V had a localized Chinese version and was considerably cheaper than the Western version of the game. The popularity of the game in China led to many live streamers playing the game on their channel and this in turn led to many more creating Steam accounts to buy and play the game.
China is the second largest region for ownership of Grand Theft Auto V on Steam. Hanson notes that in 2015 Steam began accepting Chinese currency and AliPay, the regional equivalent of PayPal, which boosted the popularity of the storefront.
In fact, there are now more than 10 million Steam users in China, which makes it the second largest Steam region. It also allowed the average number of games owned to jump from 2-3 per user all the way up to 11 games owned per user in China. Removing these barriers had a hugely positive impact for game sales on Steam. A Chinese New Year sale went further towards growing the Steam user base.
Tencent, the publisher behind Riot Games, is taking on Steam in China with its own Tencent Games Platform. (Check out a commercial for the service here!) The publishing giant is bringing third-party games to their store from developers and publishers around the world.
