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Gears of War 4 will have a revenue scheme that apes other popular multiplayer games. In an interview with Gamespot, Rod Fergusson, of The Coalition, revealed that the game will have item crates as well as a rotating set of multiplayer maps. The item crates can be purchased or earned through play, and will offer a random assortment of cosmetic items like weapon skins. New multiplayer maps will be released one per month for a year post-launch and will be free for everyone. Like MOBA heroes, the free maps will rotate into and out of the official play list on a regular schedule. Players will only need to purchase the maps if they want them available permanently in their custom games.

I feel like that paradigm of cards is really clear to understand for collectibles. We had weapon skins and character skins [in Gears of War 3], so that idea of collecting cards is just easily understood. It felt like it adds some engagement, it’s not “Oh, I like Tiger Stripe. I bought Tiger Stripe. I’m done.” I like the idea of why you buy Magic: The Gathering booster packs. If I could just buy the one card I want then I’m out, then you lose it, right?

There’s some excitement around that. I think Hearthstone is brilliant at it. That idea of the glow, and the voice, and the excitement about being like, “I want to open packs, and I want to be a part of that engagement.” That’s the same thing we’re trying to do here. The notion that everything is earnable just through play means the only reason you would ever use real money is you want to accelerate it. We’re going to be balanced to where you’re going to be constantly getting crates, or enough credits to get crates through the game, so it really is just about your choice.

Gears of War 4 will launch on October 11th.

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Zen Studios’ latest pinball tables have been mostly bright colorful affairs full of fluttering cheerfulness, swashbuckling, derring-do, adventure, and other qualities befitting a company enjoying lots of success with Disney properties like Star Wars and Marvel. I shouldn’t complain given the embarrassment of riches we’ve enjoyed, but even a set of Force Awakened tables couldn’t hold my interest for long. Given that Force Awakened is itself an homage to original Star Wars, the Force Awakened tables aren’t that far removed from what we’ve already got. If I’m going to pull a plunger and Star Wars it, I’d just as soon work on my scores for the Empire Strikes Back, Starfighter Assault, or Boba Fett tables.

But now Zen is working with a whole new studio and a whole new tone. Aliens vs Pinball — cute title, that — will include three tables. From the announcement:

* Join Ellen Ripley as she confronts her nightmares and help the Colonial Marines rid LV-426 of its Alien infestation in Aliens Pinball
* Watch out for the merciless Alien stalking you on the Alien: Isolation pinball table
* Defeat Xenomorphs and rise in Yautja society on the Alien vs. Predator table

Considering what a fantastic job Creative Assembly did with Alien: Isolation in every area but gameplay, I’m even looking forward to that table. You can get a good long look at the Aliens Pinball table in this trailer. More importantly, you can listen to it. Those aren’t voice actors trying to sound like characters from the movie. Those are actual lines from the actual actors from the actual movie.

Aliens vs Pinball will be available on April 26th, which is Alien Day, of course. You knew that, right? Alien Day? Because April 26th is 4/26. 426, you know. As in LV-426. Don’t worry, I had to look that up myself. It will be released on all non-Nintendo platforms. Until Zen lets me rebind the flippers to anything other than the Playstation controller’s mushy shoulder buttons, you’ll find my high scores on the Vita.

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Look, you’re not getting the Chaos faction for free in Creative Assembly’s Total War: Warhammer. That’s not happening. The Chaos Warriors race pack is a separate thing that you have to purchase either as a pre-order bonus or as post-launch DLC. It’s an unpopular decision for fans of the Warhammer property, but publisher SEGA knows that you’re going to end up getting it anyway. It’s Chaos! You’re not going to play a Warhammer game without them. Here’s what they will do for you to make you feel a bit better: They’re going to give you some other new race for free. According to the official Future Content Blog, Creative Assembly promises to give you “free-LC” (yuck) for this game like they’ve done for past Warhammer titles.

Last but not least, towards the end of the year we will add a new playable race to the game, including new Legendary Lords, magic items, quest chains, and units.

With only four (five if you count Chaos) playable races announced, there’s a lot of options for another faction in the game. You could have Elves, Dark Elves, Lizardmen, those other humans with slightly different weapons, or any of a dozen other fantasy races. Not the Skaven. They have their own game.

Total War: Warhammer will launch on Steam on May 24th.

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Publisher Electronic Arts and developer Respawn Entertainment are teasing Titanfall 2. It’s a jungle, robot legs, a drop pod, and a gloriously large robot-sword. Is there anything less practical in futuristic warfare than hand-to-hand weapons being used by giant mechs? Not if decades of science fiction movies have taught me right!

Titanfall 2 will be shown during Electronic Arts’ EA Play event that will happen on June 12th.

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Offworld Trading Company, the economic real-time strategy game from Mohawk Games, is launching on April 28th. Not that it should matter to you because you’ve been playing the game since it hit beta status, right? Soren Johnson’s take on Martian stock manipulation and industrial sabotage has been delightfully playable for over a year, but now with a coat of polish and balance, we can expect even greater things. The addition of a story campaign and daily challenges sound like good reasons to get cracking on shorting stock and making buddy-buddy with business mercenaries.

Four big businesses are vying for all of the resources and control on Mars. Learn about what brought them there and how they intend to drive their competition into the ground and come out on top.

Offworld Trading Company is available on Steam for Windows PC.

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Thanks to all the trash and trash business model clogging up my iPad, I’m so disenchanted with the iOS as a gaming platform that I can hardly recall a time when I used to see a cool little PC game and think “I wish that was on the iPad”. But occasionally, a vague memory of that sentiment burbles up. For example, Axes and Acres would be a perfect fit for dinking around on my iPad in the waiting room of the dentist’s office when I can’t play it on my PC (stay tuned for more on that videogame boardgame, which was just released today).

But then someone actually goes and ports his cool little PC game to the iOS. Now I have to remind myself what I did with my iPad. Is it in the garage with my copy of that Tony Hawk skateboarding game? Underneath all my copies of Game Informer in the attic? In the spot reserved for the Oculus Rift I can’t be arsed to get yet? Nope, there it is next to my Friends VHS tapes! Do I still even have a cord to charge it?

I’m prepping my iPad for actual gaming again for when Scott Brodie releases the just announced updated version of Hero Generations.

[Hero Generations] ReGen was created because of the overwhelming demand we’ve received for a phone and tablet version of Hero Generations. But this isn’t just a port. We’re also taking a lot of the ideas and feedback we’ve received from fans of the original game, and integrating them into one kick-ass, definitive remake of HG.

From the screenshots, Hero Generations might look like your garden variety rogue-like. It is no such thing. You don’t level up a character so much as you level up the maps. Your heroes develop cities and beat back monsters over the course of multiple generations. One of the improvements Brodie intends is a large connected map rather than interconnected separate screens. Great idea. Hopefully it will make it easier to wrap your head around how the game progresses. A tricky part of the learning curve is figuring out that your dynasty has to strike out beyond the first map and, hopefully, not die out.

Here’s Brodie’s stream of an early build, which opens with a demonstration of how to flee a battle: “I’m going to run away from this guy because he is huge and we are young.” The non-iOS version of Heroes Generation is available on Steam. Some dude over there wrote this review:

This is not your father’s roguelike. It’s your grandfather’s roguelike. And his father’s before his. And his father’s before his.

Such a clever concept, so refreshingly different from the usual dungeon crawls. It reminds me of a line from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: “For all the points on the compass, there is only one direction. And time is its only measure.”

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Remember when Syd Mead and Ridley Scott told us the future would be a drizzly nighttime dystopia with flashes of neon? Remember how we all agreed for several decades that, yep, that’s what it’s gonna be like, all right? The bright color and quaint tilt-shift aesthetic of Tokyo 42 has other ideas.

Tokyo 42 will be released not soon enough.

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https://youtu.be/HjASHR7F79Q

The trailer for Fallout 4’s next DLC features a bunch of cool stuff, but everything that matters is at the 1:10 mark. Mirelurks are scary, super mutants can be formidable, and deathclaws are intimidating, but kitties are where it’s at. Just like in real life, a cat in Fallout 4 can sleep through a firefight, scamper between melee combatants, and generally just not care about the lumbering half-ton of powered armor nearby. The guy in the video doesn’t know how close he came to dying when the cat jumped out.

The Wasteland Workshop DLC for Fallout 4 will launch on April 12th for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. It is part of the season pass, and will be available separately.

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Eugen Systems’ real-time strategy game R.U.S.E. is no longer available for purchase digitally. The game has been de-listed from Steam and Ubisoft’s own storefront. While current owners can download and play the game, you won’t be able to buy the game unless you find a dusty retail copy somewhere. From Ubisoft’s explanation, it doesn’t sound like the situation will be fixed in the near future.

“Due to the expiration of licensing rights over certain military items within the game, R.U.S.E is no longer available for purchase.”

The game has actually been missing in action since December, but neither players nor the game’s developers knew why until now. While R.U.S.E. had issues, it’s an interesting look at what would eventually become Eugen’s Wargame series.

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Microsoft says the company has heard the complaints about Universal Windows Platform Apps, and will take steps to course-correct. At the Build 2016 conference, Xbox honcho Phil Spencer, revealed that some of the issues people (including Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney) noted with Windows 10 Store PC games like Rise of the Tomb Raider and Gears of War: Ultimate Edition would be fixed. The specific points noted hinged on the fact that due to the nature of the way UWP works, user mods, overlays like Steam, disabling vertical sync, and using some graphics processor software, are all currently not possible. Spencer promised that Microsoft is working with engineer partners to enable these features into UWP that PC gamers have enjoyed for years previously.

During the same conference, Microsoft announced that the Xbox Store and Windows 10 Store would merge to present a consistent experience across all Microsoft platforms.

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Formula One World Championship Limited, the rights and licensing arm of the Formula One auto-racing organization, has put the brakes on user-made mods for a number of F1 games. Pretend Race Cars notes that over 30 pages of mods have been removed from the sim racing community site RaceDepartment for the games Automobilista, F1 2013 and F1 2014. Even relatively minor mods like one that returned real-life Martini Racing logos and colors to the games have been removed. Since mods for the current officially licensed game F1 2015 from Codemasters remain untouched, the speculation is that Formula One is pushing the latest licensed product by forcing modders and the community to abandon older titles.

This is not the first time that Formula One has issued demands against sim modders working on older games. In 2014, the organization forced VirtualIR to remove mods for their licensed games.

UPDATE: Automobilista has been de-listed from Steam due to a copyright infringement complaint. The developer’s notice doesn’t confirm if the complaint is related to the F1 modding issue, but they note that until the legal issue is sorted out, they cannot discuss the specifics.

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Two Worlds II, the plucky open-world fantasy roleplaying game from Reality Pump, is getting a significant engine overhaul including user interface improvements, higher resolution detail, achievements, and cooperative multiplayer. Why upgrade a game from 2010? In the announcement, publisher TopWare Interactive revealed that they will be releasing two new DLC installments for the game. Call of the Tenebrae, coming this year, and Shattered Embrace, which will follow afterwards.

In the wake of a rash of disappearances across the land, the Hero receives an unexpected letter from DarPha, compelling him to travel across Antaloor to assist her in solving the mysterious kidnappings. He arrives just in time to see a group of robed figures seemingly murder DarPha before disappearing into a magical portal. The Hero is thrust into a decades old mystery while a new race of horrific, rat-like creatures attempt to destroy Antaloor for good.

In addition to the upgrades for Two Worlds II, fans of the series can look forward to Two Worlds III. According to TopWare, they’ve begun work on the sequel and are planning a development schedule that spans 36 months.

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Right after the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Kotaku published a report alleging that Sony was working on a kind of “PlayStation 4.5” that would be a half-step between the current console and a next-gen hardware target. This console would feature an iterative advance on specifications rather than a complete revision. A little more oomph here and bit more razzamatazz there to make current games play more smoothly, better support PlayStation VR’s graphics-hungry requirements, and take some steps into the 4K resolution space. According to Kotaku’s sources, there wasn’t a clear timetable for when this was coming, but Sony held meetings with developers and publishers to discuss the concept.

Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry says they have independently verified the existence of this iterative console. Their contacts told them it’s being referred to as the PlayStation 4K, and that the machine already exists as a prototype.

The most obvious flaw in this plan is that the audience may not be ready to buy another PlayStation. The PlayStation 4 launched only three years ago, and the console being discussed doesn’t offer much more than a slight upgrade. Unfortunately, if developers and publishers target the hardware of the PlayStation 4.5/4K for their next games, owners of the plain old PlayStation 4 may find themselves left behind.

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Well, well, well, look what showed up today on the Playstation Store! Rockstar’s Bully is now available for $15. The text implies it’s a direct port of the Playstation 2 version, which was available as part of the classics catalog for the PS3. I’m not sure how it might compare to the sketchy remastered edition for the Xbox 360, but surely Sony and Rockstar took the time to do right by the best game of 2006.

Okay, now let’s get Red Dead Redemption playable on my PS4.

After the jump, is Bully really the best game of 2006? Continue reading →

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