Blizzard rumoured to be modelling Heroes of the Storm's free-to-play on LoL
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Go to the cupboard, grab the salt, and empty a semicircle of the white stuff onto the desk in front of you. Now let your hands rest gently atop the grains, and pinch down, hard. Taiwanese whispers suggest that Blizzard’s planned payment model for their new MOBA, Heroes of the Storm, will be more League of Legends than Dota 2.
Oculus to temporarily stop taking Rift developer kit orders
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Oculus VR, the presumably omniscient types behind the Rift, will suspend sales of the goggles’ developer kit in the near future. Somewhat alarmingly, third-party manufacturers have stopped making bits of it. According to the company’s community manager, though, that’s a “good problem to have”.
Diablo III was going to have branching storylines - but multiplayer made it "impossible"
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Suddenly, it makes sense. Why, in the early days of Diablo III, did Blizzard hire Leonard Boyarsky - one of the originators of the Fallout series, and later lead developer on Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines - to head up story on a linear action RPG?
Here’s why: an early version of Diablo III had a branching narrative, and a sliding moral scale that opened up new player choices. But it was not to be.
Rocket man down: Dean Hall to leave Bohemia and DayZ behind in 2015; "I am a grenade"
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Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall will have left Bohemia and the game that made his name behind by the end of this year. He’ll move back home to New Zealand to start a new multiplayer studio, and DayZ will continue on in the capable hands of the team he’s built at Bohemia.
“I am a grenade,” he explained, unhelpfully.
Double Fine have sold enough Broken Age Part 1s to finish Part 2
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Last year, Double Fine announced they’d overscoped their eight-times-funded Kickstarter adventure game and would be funding its second half with the sales of its first. More profound than the split of the game itself was the sudden and cataclysmic rift in its audience - while backers who’d been watching the dev team’s progress month-by-month seemed to take the news in their stride, broader public goodwill turned instantly to goodwon’t.
Whatever your stance, Double Fine’s financial statements say that it’s worked.
Said Tim Schafer: “We've made enough that we can make the second half of the game for sure.”
Hands on with Wolfenstein: The New Order
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Here are the first four notes I took while playing the opening stages of Wolfenstein: The New Order.
- Wolfenstein is very good shooting men game
- Aeroplanes crashing forever over and over
- Jumping from one plane to another
- Stabbed a half-robot dog
Riot apologise for League of Legends disconnections, lag and login queues as arms race against hackers "continues to grow"
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Is it possible that the internet is getting worse? Or is it simply that League of Legends continually fails to stop growing, becoming a larger and larger target? Either way, more than half the DDoS attacks Riot Games have ever witnessed against LoL have occurred in the last two months.
Riot record two to four attacks every day against one or more of their server regions - and each one “significantly” stronger than those they were fighting just a few months ago.
It’s a bleak background to an otherwise successful picture - like suddenly noticing a post-apocalyptic landscape behind Van Gogh’s sunflowers. But while the developers acknowledge they sometimes “lose the fight”, they are “not helpless” - and expect things to get better.
Spring is for sin: Divinity release window pushed back
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You might want to set aside some time between marvelling at the blooming of flowers and birth of lambs, this spring, to get in on some turn-based fantasy combat and CRPG goodness, because Divinity: Original Sin is gearing up for a spring launch.
Larian announced the new release window for their isometric romp through Rivellon today. The studio is using this extra time to implement feedback from Early Access players and Kickstarter backers, but really, it’s not very long to wait.
Armasaurus: Arma 3 dinosaur mod in development
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As I write this, my hands are covered in the blood of the countless goats I’ve just sacrificed. Why, you ask? The reason is two-fold. Everyone knows that you sacrifice either goats or virgins when you really want something, and Jurassic Park taught me that dinosaurs like goats a lot. And I really want dinosaurs in Arma 3.
Super-serious military sim Arma 2 brought us DayZ, but zombies have been done to death. Arma 3 is bringing us bringing us dinosaurs, which could easily eat a zombie, thanks to a mod from McRuppertle. Point your soon to be terrified eyes in the direction of the T-Rex animation test below.
The Elder Scrolls Online's beta update is as big as Tamriel
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The folks over at ZeniMax Online have been busy since the last Elder Scrolls Online beta event ended, it seems. All that unfiltered feedback has led to a gargantuan list of tweaks, bug fixes and improvements. It’s really, really, really long and includes changes to the levelling pace, more orchestral music across all zones, the implementation of new threats from cheeky Molag Bal and hundreds of other things.
You’ll be able to see the changes for yourself if you jump in-game during the next beta event, which will be announced very soon.
Risen becomes a trilogy with Titan Lords
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I have a sizable soft spot for Piranha Bytes' creaky, German RPGs. I once convincingly argued that Gothic III was better than Oblivion when I drunkenly overheard people talking about Gothic at a party. Sure, they were discussing architecture, but I left them more knowledgeable about PC RPGs.
The studio’s other property, Risen, doesn’t engender as much love. I rather enjoyed the first one, for all its flaws, but its sequel, Dark Waters, was a poorly-constructed, endlessly dreary experiment in making pirates pretty damn dull.
Third time’s a charm, they say (who, I don’t know), so Piranha Bytes is going back to the series with Risen 3: Titan Lords.
Double Fine's Amnesia Fortnight Bad Golf pitch being made into a game by fans
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Double Fine’s Patrick Hackett really wants Bad Golf to exist. In a previous Amnesia Fortnight, he pitched the idea of a 4-player golf game where you harass your fellow players by running over balls with golf carts, demolishing the fairway and breaking their carts. It sounded great, but failed to get the necessary votes to get turned into a prototype.
In this year’s Amnesia Fortnight, he pitched Bad Golf 2, the sequel to the game that would never be. Once again, his dreams were dashed. Instead, Mnemonic, Steed, Dear Leader and Pendleton Ward’s Little Pink Best Buds made the cut.
The story of Bad Golf could have ended there, were it not for diligent fans who decided that they would make the game a reality.
Sol Contingency – Descent remake in UDK – gets a new gameplay trailer
Back in April 2013, we informed you about a fan-made remake of Descent. Well, today we’ve got a new gameplay trailer to share with you. Maximilian Schulz, Sol Contingency’s team lead, has informed us about this new trailer, featuring gameplay footage from its first internal multiplayer test. It looks great, so make sure to give it a go. According to Max, the game’s first release will be out in late March-April, so stay tuned for more! Continue reading
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