The Chinese Mythology Mash-Up expansion pack is coming to Minecraft: Console Edition on October 4th. Unlike most of the official DLC bits for the console version of Mojang’s building game, this new pack features a pre-made world instead of just dumping themed assets into a random setting. The Chinese Mythology Mash-Up is built around the kind of imagery you’d expect in a blocky recreation of Journey to the West. Serpentine dragons, jade columns, and pandas everywhere. The game’s user interface even changes within the DLC to imperial red and gold. Minecraft: Console Edition will also be updated for free on October 4th with polar bears, beets, craftable banners, and new arctic biomes.
The Pocket and Windows 10 versions of Minecraft are getting some love as well. The Boss Update tweaks some boss monsters in the game and presents Add-Ons, a feature meant for tinkerers. Add-Ons allow players to adjust game values, mix effects, and even create scenarios like a castle siege or an alien invasion. The Boss Update will launch on October 18th.
Planet Coaster from Frontier Devlopments is still in early access, but in this video, the developers show off what’s really important in a spiritual successor to RollerCoaster Tycoon. Is it a deep economic system? Ride physics algorithms? Accurate seasonal foot traffic simulation? The correct answer is none of the above. It’s the ability to invoke every player’s inner Imagineer.
So, yeah, there’s a finally a space battle in Star Wars Battlefront. The Death Star DLC adds this:
A new three-phased mode in which Rebels attempt to destroy an Imperial Star Destroyer in order to clear space for a GR-75 and its brave Rebel boarding party. Then, these Rebels participating in an assault on the Death Star in hopes of rescuing R2-D2 before, finally, attempting to destroy the Death Star itself with the help of Luke Skywalker.
Admit it, you had to look up GR-75. You know you did. And I bet you were all, like, “oh, that’s what that thing is called?”
But before you can blow up a Death Star, you have to shoot a lot of stormtroopers. And if you’re like me, it can be confusing distinguishing the stormtroopers from the rebels in the heat of an FPS. If I had a nickel every time I died because I thought some stormtrooper not wearing his helmet was actually a rebel, I would be able to buy the season’s pass for all the DLC.
But no more! In the update accompanying the DLC, stormtrooper helmets are mandatory. They can’t run around bare-headed trying to confuse guys like me. The rationale for this change? According to the patch notes:
With the arrival of the Imperial Officers, the certification for Stormtroopers to remove their helmets in combat has been withdrawn.
Of course, there are also safety concerns. If helmets were optional in Star Wars, this scene would have played out very differently.
It’s been over twenty years since Richard Garfield and Wizards of the Coast unleashed Magic: The Gathering, and despite the game’s reputation as a money-sink, the veteran game designer thinks gaming is out of control. In a lengthy Game Player’s Manifesto, Garfield details the ways in which “skinnerware” – games designed to exploit addiction – are a detriment to the industry in the long run. The two key elements of skinnerware, according to him, are when a game’s transactions target a tiny portion of the player population (whales) and that purchases are open-ended. He likens these kinds of games to bars serving free alcohol, then charging increasingly higher prices for drinks to the most alcoholic patrons. In Garfield’s assessment, these games are harming the industry because they put pressure on designers to create systems that maximize the whales’ buy-in over actual engaging and interesting gameplay.
I believe it is time to send a message to game designers and publishers. As a game player I will not play or promote games that I believe are subsidizing free or inexpensive play with exploitation of addictive players. As a game designer I will no longer work with publishers that are trying to make my designs into skinnerware.
It’s not the first such declaration from a game designer, but it’s an interesting statement from someone that many would accuse of creating one of the most well-known skinnerware systems in the world.
It’s been a little more than six months since Tom Clancy’s The Division launched and big changes are afoot. Ubisoft has heard the complaints, collected data, and analyzed the information. They agree that The Division needs some attention. The upcoming 1.4 update leans hard into what the developers term “the importance of gunplay” and making progression more intuitive. Character boosting stats like Firearms, Stamina and Electronics, for example, will be on every piece of loot you equip in the endgame tiers, so gear management more closely resembles the journey in the early part of the game. The Division’s all-important firearms are being walloped with the balance stick so oddities like sub-machine guns outperforming assault rifles won’t be as common. There’s a long and detailed set of data the developers have to back up these decisions, including a few charts. Who doesn’t love charts?
Want to build for the highest possible damage? That’s perfectly fine, but you’ll end up with a gun that might have a big recoil or a small magazine. Or if you prefer, you can build a weapon that is incredibly stable and precise, but you’ll have to sacrifice raw damage. It means that there will be more skill involved in using the weapons, just like in a regular shooter and during the level 1-30 experience, and our hope is that it will lead to much more variety and less cookie cutter weapon setups.
The Division’s 1.4 update is supposed to come out in October, and Ubisoft is taking feedback on the announced changes. Players on the PC version will be able to check out the planned changes on the public test server beginning on September 26th.
Meanwhile, Destiny just released Rise of Iron, their latest major expansion since The Taken King. It brings back Gjallarhorn.
NBA 2K17 can’t boast of an insane campaign written by Spike Lee like the previous installment, but it does have comedian and actor Matt Walsh. Everyone’s favorite fictional White House communications director plays a college basketball coach in the early portion of the MyCareer mode. He’s not in the trailer which instead focuses on Michael B. Jordan, Hannibal Buress, and Justice Young, but that seems appropriate for the hapless McLintock. If you’ve been watched the last season of Veep on HBO, you’ll recall that Matt Walsh’s character desperately tried to get hired for a communications position in the National Hockey League, making this role amusing on a meta level. Congratulations, Mike! You kind of made it into a sports league of sorts!
Aaron Covington, the co-writer of Creed, penned the script for this year’s game. NBA 2K17 is available today for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and Windows PC.
Erstwhile Quarter to Three contributor Tony Carnevale attended the Roguelike Celebration this past weekend, which is an actual thing that happened in San Francisco. He recounts the experience here.
I paid $37.92 to attend and filled out my nametag as Tony, Alignment: Chaotic Neutral. For the price of admission, I got a t-shirt, a pair of socks festooned with the @ sign, two similarly themed lapel pins, and the opportunity to see [Michael] Toy, [Glenn] Wichman, and [Ken] Arnold reunite onstage for the first time in 30 years.
Toy, Wichman, and Arnold are Michael Toy, Glen Wichman, and Ken Arnold, the folks who created Rogue back in 1980. Which, for all intents and purposes, was still part of the 70s. But unlike that other game made in the 70s, Pong, their game is still relevant. How many games on Steam have the “ponglike” tag? Carnevale also reports on the advantage of being on UNIX, the problem with talking about permadeath, pudding farming abuses, and why ADOM fans can be really scary.
If you’re playing Frontier Developments’ Elite: Dangerous on a PC that’s behind the power curve, you’re going to be passed by soon. David Braben, CEO and founder of Frontier, warned players that the studio will likely be dropping support for 32-bit systems and graphic cards still using DirectX 10. According to Braben, their data shows that very few players of Elite: Dangerous would be negatively impacted by the shift to higher-end systems.
“As you know, we support leading edge technology like 4K, 8K, VR, and with things like compute shaders in Horizons we really push the boundaries overall, but there are restrictions with Win32 – particularly the amount of memory we can address at one time – and with DX10 in terms of requiring an alternative rendering solution in our code.”
The Steam Hardware Survey supports the idea that the majority of gamers use 64-bit systems with DirectX 10 (or better) video cards, but it’s not a direct measurement of the full Elite: Dangerous audience. David Braben went on to say that the support change would likely not take place for at least six months and that the studio is open to feedback regarding the decision. Time to go shopping for new PC parts, space cowboy!
Ubisoft’s driving MMO The Crew (aka, Tom Chick’s 2014 GOTY) is available for free. There’s just one catch, and it’s the same catch for any game by Ubisoft: you have to install UPlay. As part of some sort of insane “here, have a bunch of free games that don’t suck!” initiative at Ubisoft, they’re giving away a different game every month for seven months. And not giving away as in making them free for that month only. These are yours even past that month. And you don’t have to keep paying for a subscription service to keep your game. It’s yours for free and forever. So long as you have Uplay installed.
I suspect part of the thinking behind giving away The Crew is that Ubisoft hopes to sell you a copy of the Wild Run DLC, which isn’t included in the free giveaway. And I hate to tell you this, but it’s good DLC. It adds a few new types of gameplay and a whole new track of advancement and competition.
However, this free deal only applies to the PC version. Which looks great, especially when you’re accustomed to the console version. I had played — even recently since it’s a game with those kinds of long legs — the Playstation 4 version. But I made the mistake of installing the PC version to “have a real quick look”. And, oops, here I am playing an MMO, realizing all over again that it’s not a grind when it’s a game this good.
Quantric Foundry, an analytics outfit focused on gaming, has published a report breaking down some metrics about competitive videogaming. While it seems intuitive, the results of their report confirms that the older you get, the less competitive multiplayer will appeal to you. While there is a difference between when genders fall out of love with pwning noobs, the most significant factor was age. At about 35 years of age, most players cease being concerned with their kill/death ratio and winning matches and shift their gaming to single-player or cooperative fare.
If you no longer care about smack-talk and jacking wins from scrubs, congratulations! You made it past your twenties. You probably curse less in public and have responsibilities.
In August, Microsoft made a low-key blog post to announce that the company had acquired Beam. Haven’t heard of Beam? That’s okay. You’re going to hear a lot more about it since the service is coming to Xbox and Windows 10 later this year. Beam is a streaming service for social video game broadcasting like Twitch or YouTube Gaming. Beam’s twist is that it allows viewers to interact with the game being streamed.
Using Minecraft as one example, with Beam you don’t just watch your favorite streamer play, you play along with them. You can give them new challenges and make real-time choices that affect their gameplay, from tool selection to quests to movement; all through simple visual controls.
While certain games like Rise of the Tomb Raider and Choice Chamber had Twitch interactivity, these early efforts relied on the viewers’ chat to vote on actions. Beam allows players to use on-screen controls to mess with a streamer’s game, and those buttons and widgets can be customized for different games. If that’s not impressive enough, Matthew Salsamendi, the CEO and founder of Beam is just 19 years old!
Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding, the enigmatic game revealed at last year’s E3, is an open-world experience with online interactions. Before Hideo Kojima’s appearance at Sony PlayStation’s pre-Tokyo Game Show pree event today, it was assumed that Death Stranding was going to follow the Silent Hill model from which it seemed to be derived. During Kojima’s keynote address, he revealed that Death Stranding, while sharing a healthy dose of Norman Reedus, is actually an open-world action game and not a typical hallway horror game. The black substance seen in the E3 trailer was not oil or X-Files goo, but actually strands representing the connections between players. These “death strands” are a manifestation of the online links players will have as they play the game. Kojima hopes to create a new kind of multiplayer gameplay that’s not specifically adversarial or cooperative.
Death Stranding will launch on PlayStation 4 and PC, but it’s likely going to be a long time before release. Hideo Kojima explained that the studio has only recently begun “full-blown development” on the project.
Blizzard is considering announcer packs for Starcraft II. In a survey sent to selected Starcraft 2 players, celebrity announcer packs are proposed for $3.99 each, along with other DLC options like premium chat emoticons, and cosmetic unit skins. Proposed celebrity voices included Morgan Freeman, Snoop Dogg, and the Hearthstone Innkeeper. Similar voice packs have been a staple DLC for games like Dota 2 and League of Legends for years, but this would be a first for the Starcraft franchise. A Blizzard community manager responded to the original leak with a good-natured chide.
Surprisingly, this would not be the first such gig for Snoop Dogg. His voice talent was featured in an announcer pack DLC for Call of Duty: Ghosts in 2014.
Player made mods for Fallout 4 are awesome. That’s something most people can agree on. The ability to change things like graphical effects, or add new assets, or just shut Preston Garvey up is possible through the extensive modding community. While PC players have been enjoying mods on Bethesda roleplaying games for years, Fallout 4 is the first one that’s offered mods on a console. Mods through the Bethesda.net portal have been available on the Xbox One since May 31st, and the developer had said they were working on mods for the PlayStation 4. Since that time, we’ve been given repeated assurances that Fallout 4 mods on PlayStation 4 were coming. That dream ends today. Bethesda has announced that mods for Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition will not be available on the PlayStation 4.
Like you, we are disappointed by Sony’s decision given the considerable time and effort we have put into this project, and the amount of time our fans have waited for mod support to arrive. We consider this an important initiative and we hope to find other ways user mods can be available for our PlayStation audience. However, until Sony will allow us to offer proper mod support for PS4, that content for Fallout 4 and Skyrim on PlayStation 4 will not be available.
What happened? There are no specifics as to where the breakdown occurred, but as early as July, Bethesda’s Pete Hines expressed frustration on Twitter when asked about the delay. In a more recent interview with Metro UK, Hines declined to blame Sony, but did say that mods for Fallout 4 on PlayStation 4 was “undergoing an evaluation process” outside of his control.
Look, you don’t have to take my word for it. This weekend only, the developers of Homefront: The Revolution will let you get a first-hand look for the price of a 42GB download.
Okay, maybe you already bought it on Steam and got a refund because it had serious performance problems when it was released. Maybe you got a refund because you didn’t realize from the first bits that you’re going to be playing a spirited “hey, get out there with some AI buddies and shoot bad guys to take back territory!” game. Both perfectly valid complaints. But with a passel of patches since release, and without having to worry about exceeding the play time for a refund, you can play Homefront: The Revolution free from now until Sunday afternoon.
