Blizzard deliberately makes new players use terrible Hearthstone cards. Ben Brode, senior game designer on Hearthstone, discusses some of the strategy behind basic card design in the above video. In the presentation, Brode argues that the really awful cards given to new players in the basic set serve to educate. In response to the common accusation that Blizzard handicaps the basic deck to motivate people to pay for the expansion sets, Brode argues that the real imbalance comes from the gap in skill. The expansion decks have weak cards as well, but a more knowledgeable player will know to either avoid using them, or they can turn a card’s weakness into a strength by using it with another card’s special power. The newer player will struggle with the underpowered cards until they learn more about the game through play. Beyond that, Brode argues that the basic deck has very powerful, competitive cards as well.
We give new players Truesilver Champion, Fireball, Frostbolt, Flamestrike, Consecrate. That’s definitely intentional. We want new players to have some great cards. We want high level decks to include basic cards also. Just because there are bad cards in the basic set, it doesn’t mean we’re trying to make sure we give players really bad cards to start out with. That’s not our intention, but we do also want them to feel a feeling of progression and to learn what cards to put in the deck. Some good choices, some bad choices.
Hearthstone, or Baby’s First CCG, is free-to-play and available to download here.
CD Projekt RED has released the first images of the Blood and Wine expansion for The Witcher 3. In the upcoming DLC, the wandering monster hunter leaves the muddy swamps and dark woods of the base game and travels south to the idyllic environs of Toussaint. It’s a nice change for the gloomy witcher. The Blood and Wine DLC is the second installment of the game’s season pass bundle and promises a substantial helping of new content in early 2016.
Blood and Wine is a 20-hour tale that will introduce the all-new in-game region of Toussaint, will take Geralt to a land untainted by war, where an atmosphere of carefree indulgence and knightly ritual masks an ancient, bloody secret.
Check out the (rather large) new images after the jump.Continue reading →
That’s Eagle Flight, Ubisoft’s first game made for virtual reality systems. Assassin’s Creed’s eagle vision taken to the inevitable end. Now you can be the eagle, soaring over towers, racing, and collecting thingamajigs. No need to parkour about. Just fly using the magic of VR and a painfully contrived backstory.
Set 50 years after humanity’s complete disappearance from Earth, Eagle Flight will feature a single-player experience with diverse missions and collectibles to uncover, as well as multiplayer modes for up to six players.
Eagle Flight will be available in 2016 for PlayStation VR on PlayStation 4, and for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive on PC.
The Game Awards 2015, the Geoff Keighley produced industry awards show, was on last night. If you watched, you may have seen one of the most incredible spectacles that has occurred in a videogame promotion, but it wasn’t anything planned. Double Fine announcing the start of funding for Psychonauts 2 was a long-rumored reveal. CD Projekt RED taking home awards for Best Developer, Best RPG, and Game of the Year for The Witcher 3 was predictable. Even the news that Telltale was making a Batman game with Warner Bros. as well as a three-part series for The Walking Dead: Michonne was just okay. Rocket League finally coming to Xbox One was long overdue. Shadow Complex: Remastered being a free download on PC was a pleasant surprise. An extended preview of Rock Band VR by Harmonix and Oculus including an on-stage boost by Palmer Luckey was endearingly awkward. Repeated segments with back stage guests talking about Star Wars Battlefront were clumsy and annoying. The show as scripted was the usual collection of marketing and fluff. Mostly harmless.
If that’s all there had been to the show, you could easily dismiss it for its obvious commercial ties. Luckily, there was something better than the trailers, announcements, or thank you speeches. The big event was this amazing moment. After awarding Best Action/Adventure Game to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and letting Kiefer Sutherland accept the honor in designer Hideo Kojima’s place, host Geoff Keighley took a few moments to publicly chastise publisher Konami.
“Mr. Kojima had every intention of being with us tonight, but unfortunately he was informed by a lawyer representing Konami just recently that he would not be allowed to travel to tonight’s award ceremony to accept any awards. He’s still under an employment contract. It’s disappointing and it’s inconceivable to me that an artist like Hideo would not be allowed to come here and celebrate with his peers and his fellow teammates.”
This was followed with a live performance of “Quiet’s Theme” sung by Stefanie Joosten, the voice actor for the character in the game. The falling out between Konami and Hideo Kojima began shortly after the announcement of the now cancelled Silent Hills, and culminated in the studio head’s apparent dismissal and muzzling despite the publisher saying he is “on extended vacation.” Konami has declined to comment on The Game Awards 2015 dust-up.
The first free content package for Warhammer: Vermintide has launched. Sigmar’s Blessing comes to Fatshark’s fantasy take on Left 4 Dead today. New items, weapon traits, and a host of fixes and balance changes are part of the patch. A new loot altar will appear at the in-game inn, so players can try to influence what goodies they get at the end of a match. According to the developers, it’s the first of many updates planned for the game. Fatshark says they’re working on adding a private mode to the game, so solo players can attempt to take on the hordes alone, as well as a survival mode for endless waves of enemies. Never have rat-men been so generous.
Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide is available on Steam.
Way back in 1995, Bandai Namco’s Ridge Racer on the original PlayStation featured a Galaga-style arcade mini-game in its loading screen. It was a simple way to give players something to do during their wait. Unfortunately for gamers, Namco patented the idea of presenting an “auxiliary” game while the main game was being loaded, killing the concept for most developers. For the last twenty years, you’ve been staring at loading bars and little orbs filling up instead of playing something because no one wanted to pay Namco for the right to do something else. Some games like FIFA and Battlefront have skirted around the patent by presenting mini-games that were essentially small slices of the main game, but giving players a mini-game that was substantially different from the rest of the code during a loading screen would’ve infringed on the patent.
That patent has expired. As outlined by the Loading Screen Game Jam, developers are now free to get creative during their loading screens. The progress bar can be a game on its own. Loading screen achievements! Loading screen DLC! Loading screen season passes!
Shooting aliens? Fun. Creating functions, pivot tables, and formulas in Microsoft Excel? Not fun. But what if you could shoot aliens in Excel? A budding programmer has melded both worlds in EXLCOM. Redditor “ccruzi” made the unholy union while learning to program Visual Basic. Only the tactical portion of the game is present, but for something that shouldn’t exist, it’s surprisingly deep. There are troopers and aliens, special abilities, loadouts, and even a rudimentary map editor. Tell your boss you’re working on a spreadsheet. You wouldn’t be lying.
If you’re already sick of the snow planet, forest planet, lava planet, and Arizona in Star Wars Battlefront, then Electronic Arts and DICE have some good news for all the Rebels and Imperials trudging through the same four environments. Customers that pre-ordered Star Wars Battlefront will get The Battle of Jakku DLC tomorrow. It’s another desert environment, but this one is less red and rocky than the one already in the game, and it has a bunch of spaceship wreckage strewn around. The free DLC features two maps and a new Turning Point game mode that pits twenty Rebel players against twenty Imperials.
The Rebels spawn in and need to locate three control points in Imperial control and try to capture one of these. The clock is ticking, but if the Rebels succeed with a capture additional time will be added and new control points will be available for capture. Moving through these increasingly challenging checkpoints, the ultimate goal is the Empire’s base where the final stand will take place.
Fans of the franchise will recognize the Jakku aftermath from the trailers for the upcoming movie. The game version takes place during the original trilogy timeline, which means you’ll still have to deal with Boba Fett laying waste to everyone. Players that did not pre-order the game will still get the Battle of Jakku DLC for free, just a bit later on December 8th.
We at Quarter to Three wish you and your loved ones a happy Thanksgiving! Eat well, be merry, and don’t stress out if you’re going shopping this weekend. In fact, as one of your entertainment sites of choice, we recommend staying home to play a videogame about discovering New Worlds, get a favorite boardgame to the table, or watch an entirely frivolous movie. You can shop next week after all the fuss has died down.
It seems the wizards at Creative Assembly have been busy. Even with development on Total War: Warhammer continuing steadily, they’ve been working on an expansion for Total War: Attila that’s set to release on December 10th. The Age of Charlemagne moves the game forward in time from the end of the Roman Empire to the dawn of the Middle Ages. The campaign pack puts the player on an all-new strategic map in the Europe of 768 AD with eight playable factions. New technologies, new buildings, and a new snazzy Middle Ages user interface come with the expansion.
Friends, enemies and opportunity populate a continent tired of conflict, the people eager for peace. Charlemagne finds himself at the head of a new age of education, religion and warfare, and sees all as tools to unite, stabilize… and expand. The Saxons, the Saracens and the Vikings will all have something to say to a man of such ambition. It will take guile, charm, intelligence and ruthlessness to succeed above all others. Charles the Great, King of the Franks, the Father of Europe.
Age of Charlemagne for Total War: Attila is available for pre-order on Steam.
The newest free update for Broforce features characters portrayed by Christopher Lambert. Broden, the lightning-shooting God of Thunder (Raiden from Mortal Kombat) and Brolander, the sword-wielding immortal (from the Highlander movies) are now available to dynamically destroy the pixelated battlefields of Broforce. The Lightning Strikes Twice update also adds random supply drops for players that can give characters ammo, temporary performance boosters, and limited-use weapons for the current level. Developer Free Lives has air-lifted a dose of freedom to the game by adding a Tactical Ops mode that lets players use one Bro character for the duration of a level, instead of changing randomly with every unlock.
Microtransactions and loot drops are coming to Killing Floor 2. The Zed-conomy update adds cosmetic weapon and player skins to Killing Floor 2 that appear in randomly dropped Horazine supply crates. These in-game crates can be unlocked with keys that players may purchase with real-world money. Like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s system, many of the loot items can be traded or bought and sold in the Steam Marketplace. As outlined in the feature’s FAQ, developer Tripwire promises that the loot will be cosmetic only. As for whether or not the game will be going free-to-play as a result of these changes, the developers say it won’t.
We don’t have any current plans to take Killing Floor 2 free to play. As with KF1 our plan is for the Trading Floor to fund future free content and seasonal events available for all players for years to come.
Killing Floor 2 is available on Steam in early access.
There’s a secret harpoon gun in Fallout 4. The weapon is baked in the files of the game and is not enabled, but modder xxdeathknight72xx found it and has brought it out for PC players to use. Using the mod replaces the Railway Rifle that shoots railroad spikes, but it allows you to fire harpoons at enemies – at least until the ammo runs out. It’s unclear why Bethesda discontinued work on the gun, or if the developers plan on officially adding it to the game at a later date. Is it for underwater combat gameplay that was never quite realized?
This is only one of many mods that have already appeared for Fallout 4 despite the official editing tools not being released yet. Some of the most popular mods are a revamped dialogue interface that shows the full responses the player will give, ammunition crafting, and a tool that lets you mess around with some hidden settings.
Amplitude Studios’ Endless Legend is getting another free update today. The Forges of Creation will add Steam Workshop support and improves the intelligence of the opponents. The development team has made Endless Legend compatible with the free map editor Tiled, so creative types can lay out their own devious lands. Forges of Creation also brings the Sister of Mercy hero, and a Guardian Killer unit.
Along with the Forges of Creation, Amplitude will be releasing two content packs for sale. The Lost Tales features 20 new quests for minor factions, and Echoes of Auriga will add seven new music tracks along with some unique in-game items.
Turn 10 and Microsoft has added microtransactions to Forza Motorsport 6. Players can buy in-game tokens used to unlock cars or event modifiers for the racing game with real-world money. Cars can still be unlocked through play, but the tokens offer a shortcut to better cars right away. The game did not launch with this feature, and the developer chose to bury the announcement in a community blog news roundup.
On Saturday, we’ll be activating tokens in Forza Motorsport 6, allowing players to purchase tokens which can be used for in-game items like cars and Mod packs. Players who do not wish to see the token feature in Forza Motorsport 6 menus will have the option to disable this feature from appearing by turning Tokens off in the HUD Options menu.
There’s a new twist. Microtransactions that you can block. The feature’s stealth launch and giving players the ability to turn it off in their games may be a result of Turn 10’s past experience with microtransactions. When a similar system was first revealed for Forza Motorsport 5, the community reacted negatively and the developer was forced to retool the in-game economy to make cars less expensive. The Forza Motorsport 6 token packs are available from 100 tokens for 99 cents (good for one car) to 20,000 tokens for $99.99.
