Loot crates are coming to Rocket League and they won’t be using the Steam back-end. It’s actually been rumored for a few weeks that Psyonix would be adding a cosmetic loot system similar to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive or Overwatch, but a Reddit user uncovered data in the latest patch that seemed to show images of a crate and key. Psyonix vice president Jeremy Dunham confirmed the images as being legitimate and confessed that they were related to an upcoming loot feature. Scheduled for an official reveal next month, Dunham was quick to point out that the loot system will be for cosmetic items only and the studio would not be using Steam’s back-end system.
There will be no Steam Marketplace integration with crates. We are definitely aware of the problems related to third-party gambling in other games and we are not interested in taking that approach.
Steam has recently been embroiled in various gambling controversies due to shady sites trading and betting on CS:GO loot. While concerns over gambling is good copy, Psyonix would likely use their own loot system anyway since their game is available on consoles as well as PC.
No one not involved with the development of the game can really say how much money free-to-play Pokemon Go is bringing in for Nintendo, but it’s obvious that the game is a success in terms of capturing (pun intended) a big audience. Investor analysts estimate the game is nabbing $3 million to $5 million a day, and the prospects for sustained revenue are good enough to make Nintendo’s stock jump over 25 points.
The really stunning thing about Pokemon Go is how quickly it’s seeped into the public consciousness. Like a digital pocket monster superimposed on a camera image, Pokemon Go is already layering itself onto our reality. From countless memes on Twitter and Facebook, to real robberies being committed on Pokemon hunters, the game is everywhere. Because of the way the game tends to gather people physically near real-life landmarks, avid Pokemon Go players are winding up in sometimes humorous, and sometimes scary places. Perfect fodder for social media! After all, what’s funnier than nerds mingling with Hell’s Angels?
Evolve is going free-to-play on PC. Starting today, the Evolve Stage 2 update turns Turtle Rock Studio’s 4v1 alien monster hunting shooter into a free-to-play game. Studio co-founders Chris Ashton and Phil Robb revealed the change to fans late yesterday, saying the business model needed to be overhauled for Evolve to successfully re-launch. Although the game was well-received during E3 and other previews, the negative reception at launch caught the team by surprise.
Sure, there were some good reviews. There were also bad reviews. Yes, there was excitement. There was also disappointment – for players and for us. The DLC shitstorm hit full force and washed away people’s enthusiasm, dragging us further and further from that first magical pick-up-and-play experience.
The course correction comes with immense changes to the gameplay experience as well. The force dome, used to catch the alien player, will now be an ability that any character can activate instead of being limited to the Trapper class. Respawns for the hunters will be on a timer that grows as the match progresses, instead of being on a set rotation. Monsters have more health to and begin with enough skill points at the start of a match to use four abilities right away.
Players that previously purchased Evolve prior to the re-launch will be rewarded for their patronage with various cosmetic goodies and everything unlocked in their accounts will carry over. Turtle Rock added that while they’d like to bring the same changes to console, the beta period on PC will allow them to work out any issues prior to working on the other versions.
Team Fortress 2 now has competitive matchmaking and player levels. The Meet Your Match update for Valve’s venerable team shooter adds ranked matchmaking, special medals, titles, a new Pass Time mode, and three new community maps. The main feature of the update is long-requested 6v6 ranked mode that separates aspiring pros from casual peons.
Climb the comp mode ranks to earn up to 18 titles and badges. Track all of your match and ongoing stats in-game. You can even earn stat medals by scoring in the top percentile of all players in your rank.
According to the FAQ, players will need a premium Team Fortress 2 account to participate in ranked games. Legacy Steam accounts that paid for the Team Fortress 2 prior to its change to a free-to-play title are automatically considered premium. Newer accounts must purchase something from the in-game store for the upgrade.
Gamers have racked up over 100 million hours of gameplay in backwards compatible Xbox 360 games. This, according to Microsoft, is to date since the feature rolled out in November of 2015. With the New Xbox One Experience update owners of the Xbox One can play selected Xbox 360 games they already own on the newer console either digitally or by using their old discs. Popular titles like Fallout 3, Gears of War, and Call of Duty: Black Ops have been snatched up by players eager to relive the heady days of the last console generation as soon as they were added to the service.
The full list of backwards compatible games has grown steadily, but significant entries like Crackdown and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion remain absent. While gamers clamor for these missing games, Microsoft and the publishers have chosen to stay quiet, saving their announcements for maximum value. The latest being no exception. At long last, Rockstar’s cowboy magnum opus, Red Dead Redemption is coming to backwards compatibility.
Starting on Friday, every Red Dead Redemption Xbox 360 owner will be able to play the game directly on their Xbox One, regardless of which version of the game they own (Red Dead Redemption, Undead Nightmare and Red Dead Redemption: Game of the Year Edition). And for those who have yet to experience it, the game will be available to purchase on Friday from the Games Store on Xbox One.
Red Dead Redemption currently has a reduced price in Microsoft’s Ultimate Game Sale.
Some prominent Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players were accused of posting deceptive videos related to a site they apparently own on which people can wager cosmetic CS:GO skins. These personalities claimed to have found this site that lets them put up their CS:GO weapon skins against others and win easy money since some of the skins are potentially worth hundreds of real dollars. Unfortunately, the videos failed to disclose that it wasn’t so much that the hosts “found” the site, but actually “founded” it. They were registered as co-owners since the company’s inception. In the wake of the scandal, another popular YouTube CS:GO player made a troubling confession admitting to showing rigged bets in his CS:GO skin wagering videos for another similar site. Ugly all around.
While these specific incidents may break various truth-in-advertising laws, and raise questions about the legitimacy of the supposedly random payouts, they also highlight an issue that has been growing since Team Fortress 2 started the cosmetic skin craze. Steam has become a catalyst for underage gambling. Because these in-game cosmetic skins don’t have a fixed monetary price, the in-game random distribution of them through loot drops or boxes defy conventional gambling laws. At the same time, the rarer skins hold high value and can be traded for Steam items (including other skins) that do have cash worth. Thus you end up with lucrative businesses like the CS:GO betting sites that encourage gambling for kids as young as thirteen.
While Valve doesn’t directly participate in this grey industry, a pending lawsuit accuses the company of turning a blind eye to the business and facilitating the corruption of minors by allowing these third-party sites to use Steam’s data. The suit further alleges that Valve benefits from the betting by gaining a percentage of the skin value traded during each transaction.
War is a bloody business. War in Warhammer is doubly bloody. Knights get eviscerated. Footmen get crushed. Goblins get pasted. It’s odd then that Creative Assembly’s Total War: Warhammer is so relatively bloodless. The Blood for the Blood God DLC changes that by adding blood effects to the mighty clashes of armies on the battlefields. Like previous Total War games, a “blood pack” DLC is what the developers use to add gore to the title after launch. For $2.99, you can have all the blood spurts, dismemberment, gibbing, and spatter you imagined a meeting of Orcs and Vampire Counts should have.
Creative Assembly does caution that using the DLC may raise the age rating of the game in some territories.
It’s another crowd-funding drive for a modern version of an old game. Wait! Don’t go yet! This is System Shock as done by Night Dive Studios. I know you’ve seen this all before. A beloved game redone in Unity. A Kickstarter with a lot of buzz. Pledge rewards. A studio staffed with industry vets. Even Chris Avellone is involved as a consultant. (Does this guy ever sleep?) A promise to stay true to the original vision, while using all the latest and greatest tech. What’s going to make this different from previous efforts like it? It may end in disappointment, but you have to give the developers credit for letting their work speak for itself.
There’s a free playable demo out now. This new version of System Shock is scheduled for a late 2017 release, and there’s already a demo to check out! It’s pre-alpha, so stuff might (and probably will) change, but what have you got to lose but a few minutes of your life? It’s got to be better than being attacked by rapid cyber-monkeys.
Civilization V is coming to schools. Firaxis Games and Take Two Interactive is partnering with GlassLab Inc. to bring a version of Civilization V to classrooms. CivilizationEDU, an education-focused build of the popular strategy game, will feature analytics and a teacher dashboard that will allow educators to check student progress, give interactive help, and coordinate sessions. The software will also offer lesson plans to teachers based on the gameplay reflecting real historical situations.
“For the past 25 years, we’ve found that one of the fun secrets of Civilization is learning while you play.”
World War II was fought over wine near Tokyo in 1922 when France invaded the Aztec city of Chicago.
Add Julian Gollop’s once brilliant Chaos Reborn, a precious relic of another time, to the list of games that didn’t have confidence in their original design. Today’s update adds something called law mode. Which drastically overhauls the gameplay without bothering to explain the changes. It’s furthermore how the single-player campaign mode plays now. How does it work? Who knows. The developers can’t be bothered to include an explanation. All I know is that whereas units used to exist in a binary state of either fully alive or fully dead, now they have a hit point bar. Gone are the days of dramatic reversals of fortune at the hands of a ruthlessly random random number generator, which is exactly what random number generators should be. Instead of a dragon dying on a die roll as surely as a rat, now you have to whack away at it. Now I’m calculating attack power vs hit points. I think that’s what I’m doing. Until someone gets around to actually explaining how law mode works, I can’t be sure.
To be fair, this overhaul isn’t mandatory. You can play Chaos Reborn one of two ways. Either the way it was designed, or the way it was redesigned to pander to people who didn’t understand the design. There are advantages to game design being an ongoing process. There are also disadvantages. Chaos Reborn is an example of one of those things.
First they gave us Arizona, then they gave us trucker sex. Now, the very land itself is getting larger in American Truck Simulator. SCS Software says one of the most frequent complaints about their hard-truckin’ sim is that it’s just not big enough. You know how us folks like everything huge? Big Macs. Whoppers. Family size pizza with stuffed crusts. We like ’em big here in The States. The developers are re-scaling the current game from from 1:35 to 1:20, making road distances longer, adjusting time progression, and revamping problem areas. For example, the new version of Golden Gate Bridge in the above image features six lanes of traffic instead of four.
The benefits are clear – you’re going to get a free “take 2” on the West-coast states that you already have in the game, and roomier game world for future expansions. In addition, this expansion will come with new road segments to explore and updated technology for the old roads.
The developers say it will take several months to complete the project, but that they will grow their studio to deal with the additional load while working on the next set of DLC states.
No one likes losing, but sometimes you need to experience loss to learn. Overwatch players don’t like to learn. Or, if they do, they want to learn without loss.
Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan posted a long forum message explaining the ins and outs of Overwatch matchmaking. There’s a little math, some wizardry, and luck involved. The main concern for the developers was that matchmaking should result in the best experience possible for everyone. Buried in the post is an example of how Overwatch players abused the “Avoid This Player” system to make things easier for themselves at the expense of others.
One of the best Widowmaker players in the world complained to us about long queue times. We looked into it and found that hundreds of other players had avoided him (he’s a nice guy – they avoided him because they did not want to play against him, not because of misbehavior). The end result was that it took him an extremely long time to find a match. The worst part was, by the time he finally got a match, he had been waiting so long that the system had “opened up” to lower skill players. Now one of the best Widowmaker players was facing off against players at a lower skill level. As a result, we’ve disabled the Avoid system (the UI will go away in an upcoming patch). The system was designed with the best intent. But the results were pretty disastrous.
In another example of how Overwatch players are big crybabies, a teenage girl in Korea, using the handle Geguri, was completely destroying her opponents by using Zarya to dominate matches. Her performance was so good that she was widely accused of cheating. Blizzard determined she wasn’t a cheat, but Geguri was still being accused of using hacks that Blizzard wasn’t able to detect. It took a live demonstration of her skills at the Nexus Cup to shut her harassers up. Babies!
It’s obvious by now that Crows Crows Crows are playing with form. Rather than push out games in which you shoot or collect things, they create short (free!) experiences that ask players to engage with gaming in subversive ways. The studio, started by William Pugh of The Stanley Parable, has yet to do anything conventionally. Their first game, Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist was about messing with player expectations and anticipation.
Their newest game, The Brave Explorer, The Jungle of Doubt, and The Temple of No is a simple text-based game written in Twine. Beyond being a twee little adventure, the game plays with the way text and formatting work. It’s only a few minutes long and free, so why not let Crows Crows Crows collect some data and run some tests on you?
For some people, the ending of Commander Shepard’s galaxy-spanning journey was a controversial one. The outcry over the perceived weakness of the multiple-choice ending was vocal enough to spur Electronic Arts and BioWare to patch further exposition into the climax and epilogue. Fans wondering how Mass Effect: Andromeda would handle the end of the last game can rest easy. It’s not going to address it. Instead, BioWare’s Aaryon Flynn explained to Eurogamer that Mass Effect: Andromeda’s setting is far enough away in terms of distance and time from The Milky Way, that nothing you did really impacts the new game.
“We’ve done it in such a way that allows all of those decisions you made to remain intact in the canon of the universe, but also allows a new story to begin.”
That’s one way to negate persistent fan theories about star-children and mind wipes.
