Hello Games has updated No Man’s Sky with seasonal reward tracks. The Expeditions update adds a few changes like a revamped scanning process for missions, improved AI on enemies, and Twitch drops, but the stars of the 3.3 patch are the expeditions themselves. They’re basically the equivalent of battle passes or seasonal challenges in other games. These time-limited community events start everyone off on the same point in the No Man’s Sky universe with an assortment of equipment and supplies. As players progress through milestones and phases, they can unlock in-game rewards.
Once an expedition ends, you can choose to continue with your games, but you won’t unlock any more goodies for that expedition. It will be time to move on to the next set of challenges and hoard resources to your heart’s content.
Frictional has released an update for Amnesia: Rebirth that turns it into a danger-free exploration game. Adventure Mode turns off monster aggression, turns up the lighting in dark rooms, removes the player character’s fear mechanic, and adds a few more puzzles to pad out the spelunking. Now, even grandma can play, and it probably makes reaction videos a lot less annoying since there’s nothing to scream at.
“With Adventure Mode we hope that new players, that have a hard time handling horror as a genre, will get to experience Tasi’s story.”
According to the developers, the Safe Mode they implemented in their previous game, SOMA, was quite popular. The new Adventure Mode for Amnesia: Rebirth goes quite a bit farther than just neutering monsters. Brightening environments and removing any fear reactions really changes the game from from one genre to another.
After forty turns of searching for the Psi-Fish I’m supposed to defeat, and whose dwellings are supposed to be abundant, and with whom I’m supposed to be at war, I have found no Psi-Fish. I have explored enough of the map to discover three NPC factions and their dwellings. A map this size should have three NPC factions, and I’ve found Therians, Forgotten, and Paragon. If there are Psi-Fish here, they’re a fourth faction tucked into tiny pockets of unexplored territory. It seems unlikely.
But just to verify that something is broken, I looked up how to unfog the map using a cheat code. The situation is that dire. I have resorted to cheat codes! Sure enough, there are no Psi-Fish on this map. It is Psi-Fish-less. My mission to capture two Psi-Fish dwellings is literally impossible.
Cue the Lalo Schifrin!
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Tom Chick and Kelly Wand finally see Nomadland and they both agree that it’s no Monster Hunter.
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Psi-Fish owned sectors are Abundant! Psi-Fish make more Demands! Psi-Fish start at War with you!
So said the intel briefing for Angelus, a planet supposedly lousy with psionic extradimensional fish. These fish have breached our dimension, bringing with them Void storms and deposits of cosmite. Our empire’s Penumbra faction wants us to wipe out two Psi-Fish dwellings. At which point, I’ve confirmed that we can declare “mission accomplished” and pack it in. This isn’t going to be like the hopperhound fiasco on Virginia, where I ended up having to burn the whole planet because I misinterpreted my orders. Which happens. You can’t make an empire without burning a few planets. But now we’re here to do a job and then call it a day, which will secure the Void Lure for our empire, which will let us recruit Psi-Fish during later missions. “Capable Pets,” the Psynumbra told us when they named the mission.
So where are all the Psi-Fish at?
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Croteam has released a new update for their 15-year-old Serious Sam 2, and it’s a beefy one. The 2.90 update adds a Beam Gun weapon, a flamethrower, rocket-jumping, sprinting, and all guns can be dual-wielded. The patch also gives players twelve new multiplayer arenas where they can old-school fight. It’s a bounty of additions to a game most thought would be static forevermore due to its age.
The update comes via Nathan Brown, a modder that became a Croteam developer in 2012. It’s part of the series’ 20th Anniversary Celebrations. It’s just the excuse I need to run backwards while headless monsters scream at me.
Microsoft has rebranded their gaming network from Xbox Live to the more plain-sounding Xbox network. Microsoft confirmed the change to The Verge and explained that the move was made to distinguish the service from the subscription plan. It’s the end of an 18-year-old moniker.
In January, Microsoft had announced plans to increase the price of Xbox Live Gold, but the company was forced to backtrack after subscribers let their displeasure be known. In fact, Microsoft not only reversed the price hike, they promised to drop the need for Xbox Live Gold for players to access free-to-play multiplayer games.
Mike Pollmann is raiding tombs, Tom Chick is syndicating Eternal Love, and Hassan Lopez is worshipping a lizard in the garden.
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There’s a whole cottage industry of explanation videos that recap and break down the deeper meaning behind movies, books, and games. Stuff like “The Ending of Tenet Explained” or “27 Hints You Missed in WandaVision” are dime-a-dozen on YouTube. Sometimes they have a nugget of wisdom, but usually they’re the most facile examinations possible. Watch a few Tenet videos and tell me what percentage actually bring enlightenment. If you got to the end of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s main campaign and thought, “Wait. What?” then this video from Ubisoft may be for you.
It’s a spoiler-filled hour-long interview with the game’s narrative director, Darby McDevitt, detailing the choices they made in developing Eivor’s path as a Viking. Fair warning. It really is chock full of spoilers, so if you’re going to play the game someday, or you’re still slogging through the main story now, you won’t want the appearance of Elvis or the dinosaur-cloning level spoiled for you.
Does McDevitt give a reason for the way the story just peters out or the unsatisfying epilogue? No, because the story in Valhalla is built around that open world and letting the player continue to explore and grind around England after the credits roll. The script, by necessity, has to take a backseat to the game’s framework. It’s too bad because with a little tweaking, the dinosaur level could’ve meant a lot more than being just a tie-in to Just Dance.
By order of the Wasila Combine — heck, let’s go ahead and make this a religious thing as well — and by the will of the Promethean god, we’re going to uncork our PyrX refineries (pictured) to flood the atmosphere with toxic gas. Actually, I’m not sure if there’s a Promethean god. It seems like there would be a Promethean god. Or at least an ancient civilization that worshipped some god. Whatever the theology or lack thereof, we’re erasing all life on the planet from within the safety of our own territory. This will require a lot less micromanagement than doing it with armies.
500 energy and 50 operational points later — Planetary Purification ain’t cheap — it’s a doomsday party and everyone is invited!
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Okay, I know I said we’d be home by the Dvar equivalent of Christmas. I might have even said turn 50. And here it is, turn 68, we’ve wiped out our fifth hopperhound hive, and we’re still on Virginia. Where we will remain for some time. Let me explain.
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Grand Theft Auto Online’s loading times are notoriously slow. It’s been something of a running joke for nearly a decade that loading into Grand Theft Auto V’s multiplayer mode is excruciating. Even with an SSD in the PC version of the game, it can be multiple minutes of staring at the cloudy cityscape of Los Santos while the game slowly ambles along. Now, Rockstar says improvements are coming thanks to a diligent player.
At the end of February, a fan who goes by the handle “t0st” wrote that they had found a solution that cut GTA Online loading times by up to 70%. (The technical details and sample can be found here.) By eliminating a CPU bottleneck that was demanding calls to verify every single item available in the in-game shops, the game loaded significantly faster. So much faster, in fact, that Rockstar confirmed that they will be using t0st’s findings, which is good news for the company as there are still thousands of daily players that purchase Shark Cards to buy in-game stuff. The faster they can load in is that much faster to spend all their money and buy more in-game cash.
Tom Chick, Jason McMaster, and Nick Diamon haul ass across England, go around in circles, and then get stuck on an island. And that’s just Forza Horizon 4!
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I’m occasionally surprised to hear people who play sci-fi strategy games complain that they don’t want to build their own ships. Since Master of Orion, this has been a fundamental part of the genre. It was the cornerstone of warfare in Brian Reynold’s Alpha Centauri. But it’s especially important in a strategy game that emphasizes tactical combat. And being an Age of Wonders game, Planetfall emphasizes tactical combat. In fact, I’d argue it’s a shell for tactical combat. If you just want to scooch armies around a map and plop buildings into your cities, there are other games better suited to your preferences. Planetfall, like developer Triumph Studios’ previous games, is for people who want to play detailed tactical battles set in the larger context of a 4X. Some designers rightly understand that tactical combat can interfere with the flow of a grand strategy game. But those designers didn’t make Planetfall. People who love tactical combat made Planetfall.
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In anticipation of an influx of new players from the upcoming Netflix anime, this already funded IndieGoGo campaign strives to have modders create a Dota 2 tutorial for newbies. There is an in-game tutorial in Dota 2. It’s bad. This is a fact that even the developers of the game acknowledge. It’s little more than a series of mini challenges to teach basic mechanics. Like many strategy games that have multiple instances of DLC, updates, and balance changes, the Dota 2 tutorial was an outdated joke within a few weeks. Even if you ignore that, the tutorial commits the sin of not actually teaching the game as it’s really played in the multiplayer wilds.
There’s usually two ways to handle an outdated tutorial. Either you ignore it, (the Paradox route) and let new players fend for themselves via YouTube or wikis, or you update the tutorial – an expensive proposition. Fans may have found a third option. Create their own via crowdfunding. There’s only one catch. The campaign’s goal will only create a static tutorial that applies to the current map and balance update. It too, will be doomed to obsolescence in mere weeks.
