Activision and Sledgehammer Games have announced details of Call of Duty: WWII’s preorder program. The preorder “multiplayer upgrade” features a token to unlock one weapon of your choice when you start playing, instead of unlocking it eventually in the normal progression scheme. You’ll also get a 2x experience multiplier good for four hours, and a collection of five gear sets that correspond to the Divisions system.
Previous Call of Duty games have been criticized by fans for offering exclusive multiplayer maps, (such as variations of Nuketown) or locking away cooperative zombie campaigns behind preorder bonuses. Some gamers are now criticizing the publisher for not making WWII preorders worthwhile because the incentives aren’t good enough.
Hey, Call of Duty players! Chill out. Activision could make your weapon and player camo skins consumable like Shaders in Destiny 2.
If you’re one of the lucky owners of 2004’s The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth, you may know that there’s a fan-run outfit that stepped in to supply multiplayer capability to the game after publisher Electronic Arts shut down the servers in 2010. That’s all well and good, but the pre-HD textures and models haven’t aged well. Blowing up what looked good in 2004 onto a 2017 monitor is a quick way to reassess the rose-colored glasses you were wearing. Thanks to a couple of dedicated modders, there is now a way to get the game to look as good as Peter Jackson’s green-screen adventures. The HD Edition mod from “RiderOfRohan” and “Mathijs” gives every blocky low-poly model a sharp upgrade. No longer will Aragorn look like he missed second breakfast.
Are you one of the 10 million people playing PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds? Despite still being in early access on Steam, the Battle Royale multiplayer game from independent developer Bluehole is a sales hit. It’s a darling of streamers and YouTube gaming. In fact, Battlegrounds recently surpassed Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2 as the most played games on Steam. It is a growth phenomenon. One can only wonder how much more it will sell when it launches on Xbox One by the end of the year.
If you want to watch Tom Chick and Jason McMaster help others get their chicken dinner, you can check out their play here.
We already knew Taylor Sheridan could write. But what if what he really wanted to do was direct? At the 1:21 mark, the podcast erupts into a highly combustible discussion of exploding people.
Star Wars Empire at War is a complete game once again. The real-time strategy game has been hobbled since 2014 when the online service Gamespy was shuttered effectively ending all multiplayer capability. Thanks to a new update from Petroglyph, multiplayer has been restored via Steamworks! The Gold Pack version of the game on Steam now even includes Workshop support for mods. That’s good news for everyone that wanted to play out those Galactica versus Star Destroyer versus TARDIS fights against other humans.
2K Games is sunsetting Sid Meier’s Pirates! on Apple iOS. Because of 64-bit compatibility issues with the release of iOS 11, 2K Games announced changes to their App Store catalog. While Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution 2 and XCOM: Enemy Within are being temporarily pulled from sale so the developers can update them to 64-bit executables, a handful of games are being taken off the store permanently. While there probably won’t be many tears shed for the loss of the Duke Nukem Forever Soundboard, fans of ballroom dancing and broadsides may be concerned that Pirates! will no longer be purchased, and the game will not be supported going forward.
Early reports are that the retired games are completely inoperable on iOS 11, so updating the system dooms the titles to forever taunt you as useless icons on your screen.
Tom Chick presides over this week’s face-off between Jason McMaster for Conan: Exiles and Nick Diamon for Ark: Survival Evolved. May the best open-world survival crafting/grinding game win! Then a lot of talk about the new War of the Chosen DLC for XCOM 2.
This installment of live-action videogame theater brought to you by Destiny 2 and director Jordan Vogt-Roberts. Destiny 2 launches on September 6th for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The PC version follows on October 24th.
Trip Hawkins is a fan of Strat-O-Matic Baseball. To him, the dice and cards simulation of baseball that’s been published since 1961, is pure genius and he’s been a fan for five decades. As a young man, he was also a fan of football, so he tried the Start-O-Matic version of that but found it wanting. Thinking he could do better, Hawkins borrowed money from his family and created Accu-Stat Football, his take on the formula. It was a financial failure, but the experience taught him that he liked making games and being an entrepreneur. Once personal computing started to take off, Hawkins figured machines could remove some of the barriers between sports fans and gaming, so he spent most of his college education learning as much as he could about the nascent industry. After a stint at Apple, Hawkins would go on to found Electronic Arts in 1982 and helped design John Madden Football in 1988. That’s how we go from throwing dice onto a table to throwing our controllers at our TVs.
Funnily enough, Strat-O-Matic Baseball’s business model still thrives on annual version updates to the game.
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 3 is getting modding tools. The latest patch, which was supposed to go live yesterday but was delayed to today, includes the Attribute Editor and the Tuning Pack that allows users to go nuts with the game’s code. By using the mod tools, players will be able to create new abilities, re-balance units, and create new game modes. User-made mods will be available in the Steam Workshop.
It’s the perfect way to fix a game that a lot of fans believe abandoned what they liked about the previous installment. In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only modding!
We would like to apologize to both Virginias for things Kellywand says on this podcast. At the 1:14 mark, we talk about our favorite transsexual characters. A lot of what our country knows about alternative lifestyles is what it learns from movies. What are they telling us about transsexuals?
Brink, Splash Damage’s 2011 team-based parkour shooter, suddenly became free on Steam over the weekend. That’s totally free to keep in your growing Steam library with a click of a button. But why? Why give away the game with no loot crates or any of the other typical free-to-play monetization schemes in place? According to Bethesda’s Pete Hines, the answer is simple.
“Why not?”
Hard to argue with that. Brink, much-maligned at launch thanks to technical issues, eventually bombed in sales due to poor marketing, multiplayer that was too different from the dominant Call of Duty paradigm at the time, and a number of design decisions that generally fared poorly with the audience. Splash Damage would eventually go on to make Dirty Bomb, taking elements of Brink and trimming the ideas down to a more cohesive whole. Meanwhile, freerunning and high-mobility traversal is all the rage in first person shooters.
From watching The Sandbaggers, I have come to appreciate two things. The first is Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. Matthew Holness and Richard Ayoade’s ode to bad British genre TV from the 70s is hilarious even if you don’t know bad British genre TV from the 70s. What else would it be with Holness, Ayoade, the incomparable Matt Berry, and the even more incomparable Alice Lowe? But now that I’ve seen Sandbaggers, which has the same style, tone, and production values that Darkplace lovingly mocked, I get the joke even better. So this is what it was like to watch TV in the UK!
But then there’s the second thing I’ve come to appreciate. Continue reading →
That’s The Hard Way, a real honest-to-gosh KFC virtual reality game created by W+K Lodge. According to John Minori, the design lead on the project, the studio wanted to create an experience that made the fictional Colonel Sanders “obsessive and borderline menacing.” What better way to do that than ape Andrew Ryan’s kindly instruction?
