Ubisoft has released some details of their support plans for Tom Clancy’s The Division. In a post on the official site, Ubisoft has listed their update schedule as well as the content of the season pass, at least for the first year. There will be two free content updates that will add new end-game activity for multiplayer groups, new loot, and more “features” for the player versus player Dark Zone gameplay. Starting in June, the paid content starts with Underground, an expansion centered on the tunnels and subways of New York, followed by Survival and Last Stand which are even more vaguely described. At least you have some hint of what you pre-ordered now.
Tom Clancy’s The Division launches on March 8th for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC.
These days, you can’t swing a dead skaven without hitting some ill conceived and poorly implemented Warhammer shovelware. Which is too bad, because there’s some really nice stuff out there. Full Control’s turn-based Space Hulk series has a lot of crunchy tactics and satisfying character development squeezed into its claustrophobic corridors, and they’ve spent a couple years pouring a lot of content into it. Regicide’s chess RPG is awfully contrived, but it works about as well as the contrived narrow corridors of a space hulk. On the fantasy side, Vermintide is an excellent rat flavored variation on the Left 4 Dead formula. If you can power through some clunkiness, Mordheim is about as XCOM a Warhammer game as you could ever hope to play.
But how are you supposed to tell the good ones from the terrible ones? How are you supposed to know whether Warhammer: Arcane Magic, a “digital boardgame”, is any good? Is being a port of an iOS game something you should hold against it? Or should you pony up your $4 and give it a shot? Actually, make that $7 given the separately sold missions. The good news is that it’s a decent enough turn-based strategy grind in which your wizards collect spells as they work their way through a campaign.
Greedo is coming to Star Wars Battlefront. The hapless bounty hunter (last seen taking a shot at Han Solo) is part of the Outer Rim DLC package coming later this month for the Electronic Arts shooter. Greedo will be a playable hero character along with Nien Nunb, the Millennium Falcon’s co-pilot from Return of the Jedi. Can we get some love for Lando, EA? New locations like Jabba’s palace and a factory on Sullust are part of the DLC, as well as new weapons and equipment.
The Outer Rim is part of Star Wars Battlefront’s Season Pass. It will also be offered for purchase separately, but pricing has not been disclosed yet.
It’s Super Tuesday in the United States. It’s unfortunately not about caped heroes or gamma radiation boosted warriors. It’s when some of the American people pick their nominees for the upcoming presidential election by voting for their respective parties’ delegates, who then cast votes in the conventions. Then the people get to vote again. But then the delegates’ votes supersede the popular vote. It’s all rather complicated. Luckily there’s a videogame to help make sense of it all. Stardock Entertainment’s The Political Machine 2016 is all about running for President. It gamifies what is already an intensely gamified process.
The long and short of it is that like Madden, pundits use The Political Machine to predict The Big Game. It’s as accurate as the early polling from news sources. What does the data from this year’s game tell us? You can’t stump the Trump, unless you’re holding the general election, in which case, the Democrats are winning. This conflicting news isn’t great for either party. Gamers clearly haven’t gotten the news that they’re supposed to stick to their home tribes.
Forza Motorsport is coming to Windows this spring. In a first for the Microsoft CaRPG series, a PC version of the game is being made. Forza Motorsport 6: Apex is a “curated” free experience for Windows 10. Meant to showcase the strong tie between Xbox and Windows 10, the Microsoft and Turn 10 Studios project will include 63 cars with fully modeled cockpits and damage, 20 tracks from the full game, a career mode, and challenges that will be updated on a regular basis. The game will also feature the signature “Drivatar” AI opponents and “Forzavista” showroom mode.
According to information released during a February 25th Microsoft press event, the game will launch without wheel support, and actual race multiplayer beyond score comparisons may be off the table.
Mojang has updated the combat in Minecraft. The Combat Update has been a long time coming and it features sweeping changes to the game’s fighting. Player strikes no longer happen as fast as you can tap the mouse button. There is now a delay that forces players to time their attacks. To offset this cool-down, shields can be crafted from various materials to block incoming hits. Dual-wielding is now allowed. Swords have a sweep attack, and axes can deal crushing blows. Along with these changes, a host of new materials and items have been added to the game.
The Combat Update is currently only available for the older Java-based version of Minecraft. The Windows 10, console, and mobile versions of the game are still a couple of updates behind, so “old-school” PC players are the only ones that get to experience the new gameplay. The good news is that there are plenty of skin packs to buy on those versions of the game.
Frozenbyte, makers of the Trine games, have a proposition for you. They’ll reduce the launch price of their upcoming stealth game Shadwen based on the number of people that play the demo. It’s hovering at about $26 as of this post, and there are almost four days left for players to game the price down. Like any good stealth action title, Shadwen revels in lethal guards, hiding in shadows, and nifty tools of the trade like grappling hooks and traps. The Frozenbyte twist comes with the use of Trine-like physics and time manipulation. Objects in the game have physical properties and can be used in fiendish ways to knock about or stack to get access to new areas. The physics combined with the time-rewinding and pausing ability means Shadwen can offer some things an Animus-powered memory assassin can’t.
Shadwen is releasing later this year on Windows PC.
Firefight is coming to Halo 5. Between splitscreen co-op and Firefight, it’s a toss-up which mode was more sorely missed by Halo fans when Halo 5 launched. Microsoft and 343 Industries have released a preview of the free content coming to Halo 5 in the year, and included in the announcement is Warzone Firefight.
Among the vast array of new modes coming to Halo over the next several months is one that our fans have repeatedly asked us to deliver – Firefight. The new mode, called “Warzone Firefight”, will bring PvE to Halo 5: Guardians multiplayer and let players battle together against common foes (and truly show off their custom Spartans to boot!) That’s all we’ll say for now, but trust us, we can’t wait to tell you more about Warzone Firefight in the coming months.
This is no splitscreen co-op, but Firefight finally coming back to Halo is a welcome reveal, but you can expect Halo 5’s REQ microtransaction system to play a part. It’s slated for release this year after three other upcoming content drops. The latest free update is Hammer Storm and includes the powerful M6D pistol from Halo: Combat Evolved.
One of Titanfall’s most popular additions for multiplayer shooters were Burn Cards, limited use power-ups that tied into the game’s progression system. A player could use them to unlock special abilities like a force shield, a better weapon, or faster sprinting until their next death. While they aped the look of collectible card game pieces, Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment wisely resisted making them available for purchase as microtransactions.
DOOM from Bethesda and id Software will have its own version of the concept in Hack Modules – limited use multiplayer power-ups tied to player progression. (Bethesda says they are also not tied to microtransactions.) Think of them as developer-approved cheats. Unlike Titanfall’s implementation, DOOM’s Hack Modules are centered around control, or as id’s Marty Stratton explained, giving a leg up to less experienced players.
Stratton likens Hack Modules to the proverbial “court vision” that the very best athletes seem to innately have. “Think of Hack Modules as an emphasized awareness of your surroundings that may, if you utilize it well, make you more effective,” Stratton says. “Good players ‘see’ these things inherently. But none of these affect the game’s balance by changing how powerful your gun is or anything like that.”
DOOM is coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC on May 13th.
When Heroes of Normandie was released for the PC last October, it was supposedly a port of the lively boardgame. With its Nazi zombies, sexy spies, and over-the-top heroic G.I. Joes, the boardgame was a fanciful comic book version of Squad Leader, with just enough crunchy tactics to invoke Squad Leader but not enough brain-busting minutiae to invoke Squad Leader. Squad Leader for dummies who want big colorful tiles with their boardgames and artwork that wouldn’t look out of place on a Topps card.
Slitherine’s PC port added plenty of the stuff you’d expect in a good boardgame port. A clear above-the-board expression of the mechanics! Campaigns! High score lists! Support for online play! Unlockables! Even a rogue-like mode with an economy and persistent units! It looked great. But then you played it and realized something was missing.
The Heroes of Normandie boardgame includes cards that each player can use for unexpected gotchas, helpful boosts, and rules tweaks. Your hand of four cards is just as much a part of the gameplay as the dice, unit stats, and game board. But Sliterine’s port simply pretended the cards didn’t exist. Imagine Chess without the rooks. Monopoly without Park Place. Settlers of Catan without sheep. The Avengers without Iron Man. A fellowship of the Ring without Legolas. Two and a Half Men without Charlie Sheen. A Republican debate without Donald Trump. The Oscars without any black nominees. I can do this all night.
But it’s all moot as of today. The cards have finally been added. It’s technically a beta for now, but as near as I can tell, it works just fine. Which means this is finally a port of Heroes of Normandie and not just a halfway measure.
We had the outstanding Time cover shot of Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey floating sans footwear over a badly faked beach scene, but thanks to the Mobile World Conference, we now have Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg striding confidently into a future full of VR enthusiasts. The moment caught in the image was when Samsung was sneaking Zuckerberg onto the stage for his surprise entrance, walking right past an audience of tech journalists. It’s a nice reminder of how VR can connect and disconnect users at the same time.
Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have a lot of investment in VR technology, being the owners of Oculus. His presence at the show was used to announce his company’s partnership with Samsung and their Gear VR project. Samsung then revealed that they would include a free Gear VR unit for anyone that pre-ordered the Galaxy S7 phone.
HTC finally published the price for their Vive VR system. It’s $799 for the consumer kit that includes the headset, two wireless controllers, a pair of base stations, a Vive Link Box, and a pair of ear buds. That’s $200 more than the previous sticker-shock reveal for the Oculus Rift, but HTC asserted that the expense was due to all the extra hardware. The HTC Vive will come with Job Simulator and Fantastic Contraption VR games. Job Simulator sounds like a real escape from the humdrum daily grind of life. Valve in partnership with HTC, has made a VR Performance Test application available for free on Steam to see if your PC is up to VR’s hardware demands.
Iranian news has been showing footage from this combat engagement in which an alleged Hezbollah sniper kills six Islamic State fighters in less than two minutes. According to some of their press outlets, the sniper is accomplishing this amazing feat of marksmanship with an Iranian-manufactured Arash anti-materiel rifle. The problem is that blurry icon that pops up in the bottom of the screen. It’s the headshot notification from Electronic Arts’ 2010 Medal of Honor game. It’s tough to see because the Iranian video is a mess, but Factually has the breakdown. The good news is that this is probably the most anyone has discussed Medal of Honor in a long time.
More flying! More grappling! More stuff blowing up! The Sky Fortress DLC will bring new challenges, new killing tools, a weaponized wingsuit, and a honking big sky-platform slathered in hostile drones. From the looks of it, the upcoming DLC package just gives folks more of what they experienced in the base game, which isn’t entirely a bad thing. No one was playing Just Cause 3 for its deep story or complicated characters.
The Sky Fortress DLC is coming in March, and is included in the Air, Land and Sea Expansion Pass. The pass owners will get the DLC a week early.
Activision is offering a stripped-down Call of Duty package on PC that only has multiplayer. The Multiplayer Starter Pack allows gamers to get in on the multiplayer portion of Black Ops 3, the latest Call of Duty, for a bargain price of $15. This version of the game gives you the ability to join the versus ranked multiplayer modes and grind to your heart’s content for 55 levels. You’ll get unlock tokens to access weapons, classes, and abilities, you’ll be able to buy Cyptokeys to gamble on bonus items, and you can purchase the DLC map packs to open up more match arenas. This is a limited-time offer that will only be available until February 29th.
There are a couple of points to consider with this offer. Since you can only max out at level 55 and you aren’t able to start over in Prestige levels with this version of the game, players will have to be judicious about their unlocks. There are 75 items to unlock in Black Ops 3, which means you’ll be missing a few wild cards, specialists, or guns. Owners of this limited package also cannot set up custom games with bots or use mod tools once they are released. The cooperative zombies mode and the story campaign are not available to the Starter Pack players. If a gamer decides to continue the level treadmill, they’ll need to purchase the Multiplayer Starter Pack Upgrade which will give them the rest of the game, including the ability to start over in Prestige levels, for $45.
We didn’t care for the story campaign or zombies mode, but the multiplayer portion of Black Ops 3 is arguably one of the best iterations of this style of gameplay. Activision has not said if the Multiplayer Starter Pack offer will come to PlayStation 4 or Xbox One.
Are you one of the brave folks that purchased the Season Pass for Fallout 4? Good news! You’ll finally find out what you get for that money. Bethesda has released some vague information about the DLC that will be bundled into the Season Pass. Automatron, coming in March, will add customizable robot companions and evil robots into the wasteland, including the Robobrain from previous Fallout games. The Wasteland Workshop, coming in April, will give players the ability to catch post-apocalyptic fauna in traps and fight them in arenas, as well as adding more workshop designs. Far Harbor, releasing sometime in May, appears to be the most substantial of the DLC packages coming, offering a whole new area to explore in coastal Maine.
Here’s where things get sketchy. Bethesda feels that the Season Pass is such a good deal, and their coming content is so beefy, that maybe they undervalued it. Starting on March 1st, the price of the Season Pass will increase to $49.99 from its current price of $29.99. It should be noted that Techland executed a similar bump with The Following in December 2015. The Dying Light Season Pass increased by $10, once the developer decided The Following was worth $19.99 by itself. This is the chance for early adopters of the bundle to laugh at the procrastinators. At least until the next deep sale discount.
