If Microsoft were playing the Pyramid Stage of yesterday’s Glastonbury of Games, Blizzard were Radiohead, showing up unannounced to steal the show from a tiny tea-tent. To mark Diablo 3’s first anniversary, the developers last night unveiled an infographic fit to burst with astonishingly large numbers. It transpires that 14.5 million unique players have passed through Sanctuary, and together racked up a total of 2.8 billion hours. That’s an average playtime of just over 193 hours each.
Epic Space Online is a Member Supported MMO Universe that is ever persistent and ever expanding. You play as a pilot among many all trying to live their lives in a small pocket of space.
You have limited resources, and limited ammo, but the universe that you play in has no borders or...
Battlefield 4 will launch on PC on October 29. As with the launch of Battlefield 3, pre-orderers will be granted a free copy of the first DLC pack, which will be China Rising. The DLC promises a "fight for dominance across the vast and majestic Chinese mainland in four massive maps, using all-new vehicles and high-tech military equipment.” Is this date announcement the big reveal we were told to expect, or is something bigger looming just beyond our line of sight? Keep eyes on us, soldier. We'll give you intel as soon as we know.
Residents of Neverwinter might feel like a certain bow-tie wearing Time Lord has been at work, but that’s not the case. MMO beta Neverwinter has been rolled back by a few days to undo the damaged caused by an exploit found in the Auction House and Astral Diamond Exchange.
Earlier this evening/morning a rather big corporation revealed a pretty massive glossy box that plays TV shows and does Skype calls at the same time. Also at this announcement was the reveal of the new Call of Duty trailer, because apparently those games are pretty big with their target audience. It’ll be on PC too though, so that’s pretty cool. Call of Duty Ghosts promises to be a more human experience, with a brand new world, somber music, a loveable doggy, and massive explosions.
Door Kickers is an interesting little title from Romanian indie studio KillHouse Games. The game does indeed allow you to kick in doors (and also blow them up), but that’s just the start. This is a SWAT real-time tactics game that looks like a smart blend of Hotline Miami and Frozen Synapse.
Reboots are seriously vogue right now. They’re happening every day. Only yesterday we reported that 1984 classic Deus Ex Machina was being revived. Now mech arena shooter Heavy Gear is being reassembled with a new game based on the Unreal 4 engine. Stompy Bot Productions are looking for $800,000 to make Heavy Gear Assault.
NCSoft has announced they’re slashing $10 from the price of Guild Wars 2, and this is no special offer. The exceptionally successful MMO will remain at this lower price forever (or at least until the next drop). Effective today, you can pick the game up for £34.99/$49.99.
One of the many nice things about Heart of the Swarm has been how it’s made the Zerg a much more flexible and interesting faction to watch. That really hit home for me yesterday watching the first group of the WCS America round of 16, where Norwegian Zerg Jens “Snute” Aasgaard showed off the variety of play with Heart of the Swarm Zerg, and his own resilience as a player.
You can watch last night’s play over on Twitch: his series against NesTea starts at 9:30, and his series against Alicia (highly recommended) starts at 2:15:30. The MLG-operated WCS America continues tonight (and every night this week save Friday) at 11 PM UK / 6PM Eastern. Tonight, however, the WCS America broadcast is preceded by the first-ever SHOUTcraft America Grand Finals, between Sam “Kane” Morrissette and Ryan “State” Visbeck. It starts at 8 PM UK / 3 PM Eastern and streams via TotalBiscuit’s Twitch channel.
Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
Wargaming.net are all about planting the odd strategic feather or necessary paperweight on one end or the other of the perpetual seesaw that is MMO balancing. And in World of Tanks’ 8.6 update, that means a complete overhall to the game's artillery tier system.
Project Holodeck producer James Iliff and lead developer Alex Silkin are wandering about onstage, completely blind to their audience. Both men sport an Oculus Rift head-mounted display, allowing them to physically look around in their virtual world. Two peripherals sit in each of their hands - that’s the Razer Hydra, providing optical tracking for their position in virtual space. A white orb, that of the Razer Hydra, protrudes from the top of their headsets, giving them the appearance of bobbies on some far-future beat. Both have a laptop strapped to their back, presumably to tie all of their expensive attire together.
They look absolutely ridiculous. But they're flying an airship.
Visit League of Legends’ EU West shard at its peak on your average day, and you’ll find about 500,000 players at play. It would be the stuff of madness to then shout over the din: “Hey! You lot only think you’re enjoying yourselves. Just you wait until the genre grows up!”
But it’s Dave Cerra’s job to shout over the din. As lead producer on EA MOBA Dawngate, he’s tasked with working out where the most popular eSports genre in PC gaming is going next. He told Machinima: “When I look at where MOBA is it reminds me of where shooters were in the mid-’90s”.
If you’re predisposed to hate Facebook games: high-five. I am totally with you on that. They tend to be, at best, wretched, and at worst, a plague on all who dwell on this fair planet.
However....
And note that I’m being incredibly cautious in recommending this because I’m fairly certain there must be a catch somewhere that I haven’t quite figured out.
It’s quite possible...
Please, please, please don’t bite me if it turns out PopCap have inserted some kind of instant viral cash eating plague within the game that I’ve yet to reach.
That Plants vs Zombies: Adventures is reasonable. It might even be quite good.
Look, don’t ask me how, but I’ve found the script for today’s Xbox reveal. It’s fine if you don’t believe me, all I ask is that you keep an open mind and a firm grip on your corpora cavernosum because by the time we’re done here they’re going to be smeared across your face and chest, such is the ballistic explosivity of the news eggs I’m about to lay. Some of what was rumoured was true, lots of what was rumoured wasn’t, but all of it is exciting as heckins, with ramifications that will undoubtedly transform PC gaming forever. Oh god oh god, here it is.
While PC gaming has never been healthier, PC ownership is in a weird place right now. Shipments to retailers declined at their fastest rate ever in the first three months of this year. And according to market research types DisplayBank, one in ten laptops shipped during the same period had touchscreens.
Every family has a relation with a memory problem - one of the favourite tales in my own is that of the great-aunt or gruncle who attended to the fire with a full bladder and found themselves shovelling coal into the toilet bowl, ho ho - but only in the PCGamesN family of N games are they rewound to a earlier version as a consequence. That’s what’s happened to Dota 2 this morning after its new patch introduced a memory issue for players running the game on 32-bit Windows.
DICE have taken to the rooftops to tell all and sundry that Battlefield 4 will be the subject of a “big announcement” in the very near future. In probably not unrelated news, Microsoft unveil their new plastic PC before the eyes of the world later today.
If you’re both one who braves the unpredictable waves of Macintosh gaming and the proud owner of an early Oculus Rift headset - which, now I write it, doesn’t sound like an entirely unfeasible match - then this one’s for you. It’s started.
Papa John’s are offering eSports fans 50% off if they order using the promo code “PIZZAGG”, and major eSports organizations like Evil Geniuses, Team Liquid, Onemoregame.tv, and ROOT Gaming are all participating in the chain’s eSports initiative. It’s clearly a significant moment for eSports, since Papa John’s is a massive pizza chain and exactly the kind of mainstream brand that many eSports stakeholders want to attract. Over on TeamLiquid, a statement from EG, Liquid, and ROOT suggests, “If you feel like eating a pizza (or two or three or ten) this week, please consider using Papa John’s and help us show them what we can do!”
The reaction from other members of the eSports community, however, has not been quite as universally enthusiastic. What’s interesting is that the objections aren’t about “selling out” or the highly debatable quality of Papa John’s pizza, but about values. It’s a debate that may have ramifications for how eSports culture differs from that of traditional mass-entertainment.
Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
Deus Ex Machina was something of a gaming experiment when it came out in 1984. A ZX Spectrum game, it also shipped with a tape heavy rock soundtrack that you played on a stereo to get the full experience. That full experience also contained narration by Christopher Lee and the voice work of Ian Dury. Mel Croucher and his development studio Automata Source are reimagining the game and looking for funds on Kickstarter. Work has already been underway for a couple of years, and you can see the utterly bizarre results in their video.
