Valve’s virtual reality solution is The Vive and it’s made by HTC. We knew Valve had a VR project in the works, but what everyone was wondering was who Valve would partner with to manufacture the consumer device. HTC is the answer. At their press event in Barcelona, HTC unveiled The Vive VR system and announced Valve as their primary partner. Don’t expect Valve’s involvement to result in a headset from the Portal 2 design book. The device looks like something Doc Brown would wear in the bathroom.
Did you play Assassin’s Creed: Unity and feel like you got shorted on the Abstergo storyline? Miss Desmond Miles? Good news! Ubisoft heard your complaints and assured gamers that they’ll be cramming more modern-day antics into future Assassin’s Creed games. Lead writer Darby McDevitt revealed that the use of Monteriggioni in Assassin’s Creed 2’s past and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood’s future may be a template for how the team would like to handle Abstergo antics. Fans of the way Unity handled the issue by toning down the Abstergo storyline entirely should brace for disappointment.
“I’ve been working the past two years, with all the other writers, on getting a great document together on the First Civilization. We created 500, 600, 700 years worth of history that we hope to start teasing out for the next 10, 20 years or however long we’re around.”
Although the next Assassin’s Creed game hasn’t been officially announced, rumor has it that it will be set in Victorian London.
Battlefield: Hardline enters the world of live-action theater with their cops and robbers saga called Get a Piece of the Action. Electronic Arts’ UK division produced it, so the film is less hardboiled crime war and more tea time of misdemeanors. While I appreciate the effort, these folks don’t even have guns. That’s not Battlefield!
Battlefield: Hardline launches on March 17th for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC. EA Access members can start playing the game on March 12th for 10 hours.
Patch 2.2.0 is bringing a lot of good stuff to Diablo III, but something bad must come with every good. In this case, it’s a new “platinum” in-game currency that players can purchase with real-world money which can be used to buy cosmetic items and boosts. In other words, Diablo III is getting microtransactions. Blizzard was quick to point out that this was experimental and not coming to the North American or European regions for now.
We recognize that many players have expressed an interest in microtransactions being added to Diablo III. While we may explore this model in some regions, we have no immediate plans to implement such purchases or the aforementioned features anytime soon for the Americas region.
That discontinued real-money auction house is going to start looking really good once platinum trading shows up in Battle.net chat.
Fast & Furious isn’t generally what you think of when you play any of the Forza games. Microsoft’s serious sim racer generally has a brightly-lit (some say bland) aesthetic that doesn’t mesh well with the neon high-five street hustling action movie series. Need for Speed is probably the closest game to Fast & Furious, but they’ve got their own movie. Despite Forza’s obvious disconnect to blockbuster popcorn movies, Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious is on its way. It’s a standalone game coming to Xbox One and Xbox 360 on March 27th meant to tie-in with the release of the Fast & Furious 7 movie. Grab it before April 10th and it will be free. Past that date, it will cost $10 to experience the melding of bland and boom.
Oy vey! Back in January, Rockstar announced a slight delay to the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V, pushing the launch date back to March. Well, it’s been pushed back again. This time, Rockstar says the PC version of the open-world crime sim isn’t launching until April 14th. By way of a small apology, the developer is offering another $200k for use in GTA Online to pre-order customers.
Oh, Heists are still coming. No, really. They are. Rockstar promises.
Lionsgate and Telltale are partnering. Lionsgate has made a significant investment in Telltale Games, and they will be producing interactive media together. As part of the deal, Lionsgate’s CEO Jon Feltheimer will take a seat on Telltale’s board of directors. According to Telltale’s, Kevin Bruner, their first project will be something they’re calling a Super Show, which boils down to more episodic games, but cross-produced with live-action media. You have to give Bruner credit for having some lofty goals.
Our goal is to create products that have a legitimate chance of winning both a Golden Globe and a Game of the Year.
That could take the place of the EGOT. Imagine the accolades from Doritos and Mountain Dew that would come with that!
Steam Controllers, Steam Machines, and now we’re looking at SteamVR. In a small, almost stealthy notice, Valve announced that they will be showing off some of their hardware projects at GDC 2015, including something called SteamVR. While Oculus Rift piffles about with Facebook and the NBA, Valve seems ready to hop into the growing VR space with their own setup. Steam VR is part of a “family of entertainment devices” according to Valve. See? While everyone was watching Sony and Microsoft battle over control of the living room, Valve ran around straight to the den. Like Oculus, Valve is reaching out to the community to start working on stuff to actually use with their hardware.
With the introduction of SteamVR hardware, Valve is actively seeking VR content creators. Are you a developer or publisher interested in experiencing the new SteamVR hardware?
Interested in trying the SteamVR Dev Kit? Space is limited – schedule your demo today!
GDC 2015 starts on March 2nd. Previous glimpses of Valve’s experimental work in VR headsets have been limited.
Creative Assembly has announced the Longbeards Culture Pack DLC for Total War: Attila which will be released on the 26th. The DLC comes with three Germanic factions: the Burgundians, Alamans, and Langobards. It’s not just unit roster changes and cosmetic skins, either. The DLC includes unique campaign events and story beats.
Playing as these factions will present you with a new series of linked narrative events. The Lay Of Ybor is delivered in the style of a Germanic Saga, in which you direct the actions of a fabled hero through a series of branching narrative choices. As the story draws to its conclusion, Ybor himself becomes available as a general for your armies, complete with traits that mirror the choices you made.
This Longbeards Culture Pack DLC comes a week after the game’s launch and is not the Viking Forefathers pre-order DLC which has been available for purchase since the game went live. You can imagine howwell the surprise DLC unveiling is going over with the vocal Total War crowd.
Firaxis recently announced the Winter update for Civilization: Beyond Earth. The developers are making wonders and trade routes a little better, while hitting rest of the game with some balance changes. Unfortunately, nothing in the patch notes look like it’s going to really change the game into anything worth playing more than a couple of times. Say what you will about Civilization V’s faults, but that game is at least interesting enough to people that some of them are willing to watch the A.I. play against itself in mammoth computer-only matches. The most interesting thing about Civilization: Beyond Earth’s Winter update is that Firaxis or 2K felt the need to add a news feed to the main menu to advertise DLC as well as a future tie-in to the upcoming Sid Meier’s Starships. Of course, 2K wants players to create and sign-in with their games-as-service boondoggle.
– Added my2K functionality to title, allowing cross-game connectivity and unlocks with other Firaxis titles (starting with Sid Meier’s Starships), along with other future perks
– Added Glacier map that unlocks when signing in to my2K for the first time
You can check out Tom’s thoughts on Civilization: Beyond Earth here.
When Guild Wars 2’s Heart of Thorns expansion was announced, there was a lot of stuff dumped into the info-sphere sans detail. We learned about the MOBA-lite mode and how ArenaNet plans on keeping it short but sweet. Today, we’re covering the new character profession. The Revenant holds to the developer’s philosophy of not just adding more levels onto their game, but instead offering ways to grow vertically.
The new profession’s archetype revolves around mixing up legendary powers from a pool of options. Along with that, Revenants will need to manage the energy cost of their powers’ upkeep, while keeping mind that weapons aren’t tied to the legend power. Get ready to play havoc with your hotbar!
The current active legend will determine the skills on the right half of your skill bar. It’s similar to weapon swapping, but instead it affects your healing, utility, and elite skills. Not only will the legend you select determine your skills, but you’ll have an energy bar tied to your currently invoked legend.
New players to Guild Wars should probably avoid starting a Revenant character until they’ve tried one of the simpler professions first. The basic Warrior or Ranger is right over there on the selection screen.
One of the new features of the Heart of Thorns add-on for Guild Wars 2 is a new player vs. player mode called stronghold. ArenaNet recently revealed details about this mode and it turns out it’s basically a five vs. five MOBA. You can read an overview of stronghold mode here and watch a detailed presentation on an abandoned map in this forty minute video. You’ll note stronghold has all the trappings of a MOBA, with the equivalent of creeps, player roles, lanes, defensive towers, jungling, and resource gathering. That’s the map up there. You can see the lanes. You can also see that it’s got trebuchets. I don’t think trebuchets are a trapping of MOBAs, but they should be.
One of the things that mystifies me about MOBAs is how long they can take. A round of League of Legends takes about twice as long as it should, especially considering the relatively brittle match progression. You’re just knocking down towers, one after the other. There’s none of the fluidity you get in an actual RTS, with base building, variable army composition, and wide-open maps. Do MOBA players really want to push their way down the same lanes for over a half hour? Given the popularity of the genre, I guess they do.
So for all the MOBA trappings of stronghold mode, I’m delighted to hear ArenaNet designer Hugh Norfolk say:
We want to still preserve that feeling that you can play PvP in Guild Wars 2 and you’re not investing some weird amount of time that can be anywhere from ten minutes to thirty minutes to forty minutes or whatever. So we want to preserve time so players can have quick intense battles over a short period of time.
He later estimates that a round of stronghold will last fifteen minutes. That sounds about right to me. I can be finishing up my third round of stronghold while you’re finally getting to the enemy base in your first round of League of Legends!
Gas Guzzlers Extreme, a not-great arcade combat racer from Gamepires, has done what every game does by adding zombies. The Full Metal Zombie DLC puts the undead into the game, thereby pitting weaponized race cars against hordes of slavering zeds. A requisite base defense mode even comes with the new additions. With a dime-a-dozen premise like that, what makes it extreme? Zombie bison, of course! Why settle for just the normal zombified humans, dogs, and assorted boss monsters? Add an undead bison to the mix, and you’ve got something.
Wargaming.net is entering the digital card game genre. World of Tanks Generals is taking beta applications now. It’s a player versus player, free-to-play, online collectible card game. The game has players collecting components of their World War II armies, building decks, and battling each other online. There are artillery pieces, squads of infantry, and other support cards, but like its big brother shooter, the stars of the decks will be American, Russian, and German tanks. Like other popular digital card games, World of Tanks Generals can be played on PC browsers as wells as mobile devices.
This digital card game stuff seems like it could become a big deal.
Make War Not Love 2 is the way Creative Assembly and Relic Entertainment celebrate Valentine’s Day. From today until February 15th, players of these two games have a chance to win fabulous prizes as well as grind their enemies’ bones into dust. By battling in the respective games, players will contribute to a total score. The game with the highest score at the end of the tournament will get free DLC for its players. Fans of Total War: Rome 2 will get the Black Sea Colonies DLC for free, as well as unannounced DLC for the upcoming Total War: Attila if their score ends as the highest. Company of Heroes 2 players will get special Valentine’s skins and decals if they win. Both games have added special achievements that can only be acquired during this contest. It’s Panzers versus trebuchets! Rifle versus gladius!
The Total War: Rome 2 and Company of Heroes 2 games are currently on sale.
