Lord of the Rings Online to receive no new dungeons, server merges off the table
Lord of the Rings Online developer Turbine has confirmed that there are no plans to add any new dungeons to the MMO, and that server merges are being halted by technical hiccups.
Titanfall has been tough to market due to lack of single-player, says Respawn
Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment, has had a rough time of accurately marketing the shooter, given its lack of single-player mode. That’s the claim of producer Drew McCoy, who recently shed some new light on the matter.
Battlefield 4: PC stability patch out today, memory leak addressed
Battlefield 4 developer DICE has confirmed it will release a new PC patch later today, addressing stability and memory leak issues.
Pratchett: “2013 was a pretty good year for female characters,” new interview suggests diversity is improving
Tomb Raider writer Rhianna Pratchett has discussed the state of female protagonists in gaming and the issue of diversity at large among the games industry. 2013 was a good year, the writer agreed, but stressed things are getting better on the whole.
DIRT 4 to be more rally-orientated, Codemasters confirms
DIRT 4 hasn’t been announced yet and for all we know might actually be called ‘Muddy Car Game,’ but one thing is certain, Codemasters is making it more rally-orientated.
Strider: Double Helix reboot and Grin’s canned game are not linked, Capcom shares details
Strider developer Double Helix Games has rebooted Capcom’s classic from scratch, and has not transferred any content or ideas over from Grin’s cancelled project, VG247 has learned.
Obsidian hiring for next-gen game
Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment is currently looking for a UI designer to work on a next-gen game.
Indie gem Nidhogg now available on Steam
Indie arcade darling, Nidhogg, was finally released onto Steam today.
Binding of Isaac creator explains art style change for Rebirth
The Binding of Isaac has some pretty striking imagery, but it seems its creator, Edmund McMillen, was never truly happy with the Flash art style.
Road Redemption gets new footage
DarkSeas Games have released a video showing off how their first game, Road Redemption, will look and play.
DayZ alpha has sold a million copies in four weeks
Wondering why it’s so hard to stay alive in Chernarus? Because there are literally a million people out there trying to kill you over a can of beans.
Waste not want not: Improving Wasteland 2
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With Wasteland 2's beta a month in - a beta that kicked up all manner of nostalgia for me - the hive at inXile has had a lot on its plate, revealed Brian Fargo in an update on Kickstarter, and the work is only going to continue.
8000 suggestions, bugs and comments have been made, 500 new discussion threads have been posted, and 1800 tasks have been generated for the development team, so there's a lot that Fargo and co. want to address, fix and add to Wasteland 2 before it's ready to launch.
Brad McQuaid's fantasy MMO, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, appears on Kickstarter
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Everquest and Vanguard veteran Brad McQuaid's new MMO - which we mentioned last week - has been officially revealed and its Kickstarter campaign is now live. Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, besides having a hilariously generic name, is a high fantasy MMORPG where you do exactly what you'd expect in a fantasy MMO.
The vague list of features is a checklist of typical MMO stuff, which is both a bit unfortunate and pretty predictable, given that McQuaid and his team are veterans of the genre. The hook appears to be that this is a Brad McQuaid game, and after Vanguard that's not much of a hook.
Last major card changes set to hit Hearthstone
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With open beta impending, Blizzard's rolling out what it expects to be the last major set of balance changes in Hearthstone. When it goes live, there won't be many card changes unless they are absolutely necessary. If you haven't been able to get into closed beta, then hopefully you won't have long to wait before you can test your deck building prowess, and maybe even get a chance to knock us down to size in a few games.
First ever footage of Team Meat's Mewgenics shows the miracle of birth
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Cat gifs are the foundation of the internet. When future digital archaeologists dig deep into the past of the internet, all they'll uncover is cat gifts and porn, occasionally combined horrifically. So it only makes sense that the first footage of Team Meat's cat hoarding sim, Mewgenics, is a gif. And not just any gif, it's a gif of a cat squeezing out two smaller cats, which in some circles are called "kittens".
Battlefield 4: China Rising expansion supposed to be levelutionary, wasn't
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Secret game development fact: after the release of Battlefield 4, chief DICE spokesperson Patrick Bach had said made-up portmanteau ‘levelution’ so many times that he had to be retaught the rest of his former vocabulary from scratch.
Strange, then, that DICE neglected to incorporate the feature into the game’s first expansion pack, China Rising. As it turns out, the developers had planned environmental events for all four of its new maps - but none made it to release.
Call of Duty: Ghosts to swallow giant spiders in Onslaught DLC
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Just as the old lady swallowed a spider in an effort to catch a fly, Infinity Ward plan to send hulking arachnids after Call of Duty’s flying PC playerbase.
Ginormous spiders have been considered an effective antidote to creative bankruptcy since the release of Will Smith’s Wild Wild West. Here, they'll occupy a new Extinction map named Nightfall - one of five included in Ghosts’ first DLC pack to date.
Riot address "concerns" about plant mage: "Zyra is not the most well designed of champions"
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League of Legends is no stranger to an unusual backstory: its battlegrounds host both publically-accepted sentient robots and soul-gathering ghouls. But plant mage Zyra’s began after her release in mid-2012, when abusive play patterns led to dramatic nerfs.
“One of the most unfortunate aspects of her being over-tuned on release is that players developed an attachment to her for reasons that were not long-term sustainable,” says associate game designer Bradford 'CertainlyT' Wenban, looking back. “Even in a state of balance, a lot of people will subjectively feel that Zyra is weak.”
Wenban argues that Zyra is balanced, despite community claims to the contrary - but acknowledges that there are issues “deeply baked” into the champion's kit.
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