Electronic Arts has partially backpedaled on Hero prices in Star Wars: Battlefront II. Reacting to strong negative criticism from gamers with early access to the game, EA has announced drastic changes to the in-game pricing of multiplayer hero characters. According to the post from DICE’s John Wasilczyk, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader will now be available for 15,000 in-game credits (down from 60,000 credits) while Emperor Palpatine, Chewbacca, and Princess Leia will now cost 10,000 credits (originally 40,000 credits) and finally Iden Versio, the main character from the game’s single player campaign, will only cost 5,000 credits instead of 20,000. It’s a welcome change for gamers that did not relish the idea of playing for 40 hours to unlock one new Hero.
But there’s a wrinkle. Game Informer’s Andrew Reiner reports that his post-campaign reward was reduced following the changes. Before the latest update, he earned 20,000 credits for completing the campaign, but after the update, his credit prize was reduced to 5,000. EA says the credit payout was reduced because the intent of the prize was that players should use it to purchase their first hero – Iden Versio. Since her price was reduced from 20,000 to 5,000, the reward was diminished to match. It makes sense on that level, but the fact that players get a credit reward and are prompted to purchase a hero instead of just being given one as an unlock illustrates the way a business model can take over a game experience. The goal here isn’t to reward a player’s accomplishment. It’s to get them to try the in-game store system and participate in the loot box economy. The first hit is always free!
Bethesda and MachineGames have announced the full contents of the season pass for Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. There’s nine more hours of righteous Nazi killing coming in The Freedom Chronicles. If you pre-ordered the game or are a season pass owner, you may have already gotten a taste of the future content thanks to Episode Zero which launched on November 8th and introduced Joseph Stallion, Jessica Valiant, and Gerald Wilkins. On December 14th, we’ll get The Adventures of Gunslinger Joe, featuring the best sports hero since Augustus “Cole Train” Cole. On January 30th, we’ll see the stealthy secrets of The Diaries of Agent Silent Death. Finally, sometime in March of next year, the square-jawed action heroics of The Amazing Deeds of Captain Wilkins will be released. That’s three new murdering menaces on their way! Lieutenant Aldo Raine just might get his Nazi scalps after all.
Rockstar has changed the player’s interrogation options in the remaster for L.A. Noire. In the video for the upcoming Nintendo Switch version of Rockstar’s hard-boiled detective game, the old Truth, Doubt, and Lie choices have been replaced with Good Cop, Bad Cop, and Accuse. Rockstar has confirmed that these changes will also be present in the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One remasters. Maybe Detective Cole Phelps won’t be such an accidental ass to witnesses now.
If you’ve had enough of orcs and elves, The Creative Assembly would like to remind you that they don’t just make cracking good games set in the Warhammer universe. They also make games based on history. I know that’s not as fun as lizard-men riding on lizard cavalry, but bashing legions of sweaty Roman warriors against one another can have its charms, too. 2013’s Total War: Rome II still has a dedicated fanbase that relishes the relatively simpler battles of Julia versus Junia with nary a vortex of chaos energy in sight.
Thankfully, parts of The Creative Assembly want to get back to man on man action. Empire Divided is an upcoming campaign pack for Total War: Rome II featuring the third century crisis and the dangers of cults, plagues, and banditry during a time of infighting and disunion. The DLC campaign will have ten playable factions, new victory conditions, and special story events. Empire Divided will launch on November 30th.
Even if you don’t feel like paying for more Rome II, there will be something new for you. A free Power and Politics update is also launching on the 30th that will revamp many of the game’s systems. It aims to make political intrigue more, well, intriguing. Poltical parties will have loyalty status properties that will influence their effectiveness on the campaign map. Parties will control provinces within the empire, and low loyalty can cause all sorts of problems, right down to a party seceding from your rule. The free update will also bring a user interface overhaul, graphical improvements, and balance changes.
That’s the Totokia War Club. Originally created and used in Fiji, it can be yours in Battlefield 1 for free when you log into the game anytime after November 8th. The giveaway is part of Electronic Arts’ celebration for the release of Star Wars: Battlefront II. There’s all sorts of cross-game promotional stuff in there. FIFA 18 and NHL 18 players can get free Star Wars jerseys for their Ultimate Teams. NBA LIVE 18 fans can participate in Inferno Squad themed multiplayer events to unlock Star Wars uniforms.
But back to that war club. How, exactly, does the traditional “pineapple club” link to Battlefront II? Sharp-eyed nerds should notice the resemblance to the Tusken Raiders’ gaffi stick. There’s your connection. Add a few sci-fi doodads to the totokia and you get a Gaffi stick any desert bandits would be proud to lift over their heads.
The normally accepted theory on how ancient Egyptians hauled the immense stones to the tops of the pyramids as they were being built is via humongous external ramps, some over a mile long, that allowed them to scoot up to the heights needed. The main problem with that theory is that no one has ever found any evidence of those ramps. An alternate, and controversial, theory put forth by French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin in 2007 is that the Egyptians built the pyramids from the inside-out using a spiral system of ramps and chambers that were repurposed into burial rooms as the builders worked up. Unfortunately, we haven’t actually mapped the interior of the pyramids enough to confirm or deny Houdin’s theory.
Last week, Nature published details of a newly discovered large inaccessible chamber in the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Although no one has been able to confirm what the chamber might contain or what its purpose was, its existence was predicted by Houdin’s construction theory.
Here’s where Assassin’s Creed: Origins comes into the story. The newly discovered chamber in Khufu’s pyramid is already in the game! Ubisoft’s developers consulted with Houdin and used his pyramid schematics as a spingboard for their in-game models. His inside-out theory lined up nicely with the team’s gameplay goals. According to what they told Kotaku, the developers bet on Houdin as “the most credible” of sources.
Say what you will of the game’s flaws, but that’s some impressive synchronicity. If the developers got that right, maybe we should watch out for mummies and giant serpent attacks in the future?
Back in 2011, I wrote an article detailing the five Pinball FX tables I’d like to see. They were Star Wars, a Western theme, splatter horror, the Cold War, and Bioshock. Zen Studios must have been paying attention, because nearly half of those tables came out shortly thereafter! You’re welcome, world.
Really, it’s more than half, since there are about twenty Star Wars tables. The Western themed table, Wild West Rampage, is one of my favorites. Although they aren’t technically splatter horror, the Alien, Aliens vs Predator, Doom, and Walking Dead tables are horror enough for me. Which leaves the Bioshock and Cold War tables yet to be realized, so maybe they’re still working on those. Since Zen has already worked with Bethesda, I’ll accept a Prey table instead of a Bioshock table.
“They’re just scavenger hunts,” my friend says. He’s dismissing big-budget open-world AAA games like Assassin’s Creed: Origins. He’s explaining why he doesn’t play them. I’m explaining why he’s totally missing out.
“Well, sure,” I agree. “But the idea is they’re scavenger hunts in really cool places. Imaginative places where you want to spend time. The scavenger hunt is disguised as gameplay, and it’s your reason for being there. The real point of the game is the place, the worldbuilding.”
Many many hours later, I will come to rue these words. Or will I?
Earlier in the year, Activision and Sledgehammer Games had announced that opening loot boxes in Call of Duty: WWII would have incentives for spectators, but we didn’t know how it would work. Thanks to some early footage posted on Reddit, we can now see that the process for opening loot crates in the game may be one of the slickest sequences of its kind made to appeal to gamer vanity.
Loot crates literally fall from the sky in the game’s multiplayer social space as a Supply Drop. Anyone standing near the event can watch as the crate bursts open and prizes fly up to be revealed. Loot contents are visible to everyone in the area, presumably to maximize excitement and envy.
Activision claims all loot offered will be cosmetic only, but if true, that would be a change from the past few Call of Duty games that did eventually offer loot crate exclusive weapons. Call of Duty: WWII launches tomorrow.
Today Zen Studios announced what everyone with a Switch hopes will be announced for every game ever made: a Switch version of Pinball FX3 is on the way!
Pinball FX3 hits the system on Tuesday, November 14, 2017. In addition to evolving the groundbreaking approach to community gaming that has come to define Zen’s series for a full decade, Pinball FX3 takes full advantage of the Nintendo Switch console’s revolutionary capabilities with exclusive features like vertical play orientation and HD rumble support. Thirty tables are available at launch, with more playable content and features to be added in the months to come.
The vertical play feature will be particularly welcome to those of us who Zen Pinballed on the Vita, where the rectangular screen was ideal for a full-frame top-down view of the table. But then comes the bit about 30 tables. I have 68 tables in my PC version of Pinball FX3. Why are fewer than half making the cut? Hmm, let’s peruse the list of announced Switch tables:
Universal Classics™ Pinball (Back to the Future™, E.T.™, Jaws™); Aliens vs. Pinball (Aliens, Alien vs. Predator, Alien: Isolation); Balls of Glory (Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, Archer, American Dad!); Portal; The Walking Dead; Sorcerer’s Lair (free); Zen Classics (Shaman, Tesla, El Dorado, V12); Core Collection (Pasha, Rome, Biolab, Secrets of the Deep); Medieval Pack (Epic Quest, Excalibur); Sci-Fi Pack (Mars, Paranormal, Earth Defense); Iron & Steel (Wild West Rampage, CastleStorm)
There seem to be some conspicuous omissions in there, all properties belonging to a single entity. For what it’s worth, on the Nintendo Wii, the Star Wars tables were released as a separate game with its own progression based on building up your choice of Light Side points or Dark Side points. Maybe there’s something like that in store for the Star Wars and Marvel tables? Or maybe they’ll be sold separately later? Or maybe Disney is taking their balls and going home, so to speak.
Pinball FX3 is also getting a new carnival themed table and a Greek mythology table on November 14th. Both of which be available for the Switch.
The greatest arms race of all time has nothing to do with superpowers and nuclear weapons, or even anything man-made. It is instead a natural process that has played out around the world over literally millions of years. Sometimes with actual arms. Literal arms. You know, the things that stick out of your shoulders that were once flippers. Continue reading →
You can pet cats in Assassin’s Creed: Origins. There is no button to “pet cat.” Just crouch next to one and your Bayek will automatically reach out and give the feline a good rubbing. Good kitty! You cannot, however, pet dogs in the game. Crouch all you want next to a canine and Bayek will just sit there hunched over, ready for assassinating, while Fido runs off. Bad doggy!
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is facing an uphill fight in China thanks to a negative recommendation from a leading censorship advisory group. The China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association, working in conjunction with the official Chinese government’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television issued a statement on Battlegrounds that accuses the game of being too violent and “deviates from the values of socialism” according to a translation from Bloomberg. It is an early sign that the game will not likely get an official license for sale in China.
“This basically spells the death sentence for PUBG in China,” said Benjamin Wu, an analyst at Shanghai-based consultancy Pacific Epoch.
The SAPPRFT previously recommended that lone survivor multiplayer games not be allowed in China and discourages local development of such games. Honour of Kings, a Korean multiplayer survival game published by Tencent, is the most popular game in the genre in China. It slipped into the country before the SAPPRFT ruling and remains on sale with little to no competition in the country.
