Oculus and EA among first members of VR superhero team, The Immersive Technology Alliance
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Who will watch our streets, protecting our loved ones from those that would give us a poor virtual reality experience? Who will define technology standards so we don’t go from one headset to another and throw up everywhere? Who will share low latency technology tips to fledgeling VR companies? Yes, the Green Lantern, but besides him? The Immersive Technology Alliance, that’s who.
Low Battery is about a robot chasing his next fix
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Robots are just like humans - metallic skin, processor filled brain, inability to feel pain - yes, we’re exceedingly similar. The regard in which we best align is our reliance on batteries. As we need them for turning on our lifegiving televisions and powering alarm clocks, they need them to live.
Battery is a game that documents one robot’s constant chase for the next fix.
Mini Metro makes you enjoy designing subways. Seriously
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I’ve spent the last 40 minutes laying down abstract track and watching abstract passengers got on and off at abstract stations. I enjoyed every second of it. Mini Metro is still in alpha and already it’s a marvel.
Your task is simple: you’re the transport director of a quickly expanding city, it’s on you to make sure the populace can get around the metropolis.
It’s a bloody hard job.
Hyper Light Drifter video shows gorgeous environments and massive monsters
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Alex Preston wants “to make an experience that’s visually and atmospherically compelling” while remaining “a hell of a lot of fun to play”. If the new trailer for Hyper Light Drifter is anything to go by, his team over at Heart Machine have certainly got the first part down.
Along with the trailer, Preston’s posted an extensive development blog to explain the different focuses of his team.
Space Engineers survival mode turns the astral void deadly
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The “‘survival mode’ update is the biggest since Space Engineers launched on Early Access,” writes Keen Software House’s Marek Rosa. “Even the multi-player update didn’t bring so many changes.”
Before, in creative mode, you couldn’t be harmed, you couldn’t die. Now your space suit can run out of energy, you can be crushed, exploded, shot - all manner of horrors. It’s not just you that can run down, though, your ships, too, can drift lifeless if you run out of fuel.
After which you’ll die.
Paypal changes policies to support crowdfunding
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“Crowdfunding is fundamentally different from regular ecommerce,” begins Tomer Barel, Paypal’s chief risk officer. “There is a distinction between crowdfunding and ‘preselling’. In crowdfunding, the process involves speculatively supporting a new concept that may, despite the best of intentions, not make it to market. In “preselling” there is an expectation that you will get something tangible for your money…even if it takes months for delivery.”
That’s why, Paypal has traditionally not been supported by crowdfunding platforms. That’s changed.
Riot Games manager talks the "hard realities" of working full-time on League of Legends
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You can measure the buzz surrounding Riot Games by looking at the developers its staff have left behind. Greg Street left Blizzard, where he was the face of WoW. Kristoffer Touborg left CCP, where he was lead designer on Eve Online. The very best people in PC development have dropped everything to work on League of Legends.
But there are downsides - and not just watching your player ranking be overtaken by junglers with more free time. According to product manager Jon Pan, Riot’s is a company culture which demands an ability to compromise, asks for charisma, and gobbles up hours. Lots of them.
Chicago on forever: "doing everything" in Watch Dogs will take close to 100 hours
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A couple of weeks ago, Ubisoft sent me an email reminding me to complete Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Over tens of hours, I’ve filled the oceans with enough driftwood to sink the whole West Indies beneath the waves. I've watched Blackbeard’s facial fuzz grow from bumfluff into that famous chin-tree. But that’s left me just 39% of the way through, according to Abstergo’s metrics.
Expect a similar relationship with Watch Dogs - which has story missions enough to last you 35 to 40 hours, and enough everything else to last you 100.
Fid-back Castro: Tropico 5 beta registration begins
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Tropico is a game in which you want to put your people nice apartments, so you want to get them good jobs at the TV station, and so you send the younger ones to school, but then there’s nobody in the mines and the farms and suddenly you have a sprawling shantytown for the proletariat and you’re exactly the sort of despot you didn’t want to be.
Its last iteration was a better SimCity than SimCity, and the new one’s open for beta sign-up. Better bag a bit o’ beta, then.
Why Hearthstone should never, ever get text chat
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On my first night playing Hearthstone, I watched a mage cast a fireball into her own face. We couldn’t communicate directly, but the message was clear: she knew I’d won, and would rather cook her own eyeballs than allow me the satisfaction and achievement progress of dealing the damage myself.
It was a move at once shrewd and silly, petty and dignified: a spectrum of personality I don’t think either of us could have mustered with the full use of our keyboards. So I want to make sure that’s something Blizzard never gives us.
GOG scraps regional pricing plans due to community feedback
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When GOG announced that it would be introducing regional pricing back in February, my heart sank a little bit. Its fair, flat pricing model was part of its founding tenets along with only offering DRM-free games. The change was only going to affect some games, but it would still mean that customers in Europe and elsewhere would end up paying more for the same game than consumers in the US.
The point of all this was so GOG could offer more DRM-free games; ones where the publisher didn’t accept the platform’s Fair Price plan. But feedback from users has caused GOG to scrap this, Marcin Iwinski and Guillaume Rambourg revealed in a blog post. “We didn’t listen and we let you down. We shouldn't sacrifice one of our core values in an attempt to advance another.”
Putting an end to cheating is a priority for Respawn; Titanfall anti-cheat system to be enabled soon
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Some folk are just a bit crap at shooty games. I get it, trying to get that reticle to hover over an enemy just in time for you to click a button is hard work. So the temptation to use hacks and cheat is too powerful to ignore, for some. Of course, this just ruins the experience for everyone else, and it’s become a problem in Titanfall.
In response to player complaints, Respawn’s Jon Shiring explained that anti-cheat measures exist and will be enabled soon.
Ghost Recon Online becomes Ghost Recon Phantoms; launching April 10th
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Ghost Recon Online was released back in 2012, though it was still considered by Ubisoft to be “in development”. Then, just a couple of months ago, Ubisoft announced that the game would appear on Steam Early Access, which seemed like a bit of a stretch of the term “early access” given that it had been freely available for a year and a half.
That was meant to happen this Spring. But today Ubisoft has announced that the F2P title will actually launch on April 10th, presumably skipping Early Access, and it’s not even going to be called Ghost Recon Online. The new title is Ghost Recon Phantoms.
Galactic Civilizations III: ruling the galaxy one economic tweak at a time
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It really doesn’t matter how powerful your mass drivers are or how many ships you can call into action, you’re never going to conquer a galaxy without a strong economy. The latest Galactic Civilizations III developer update details how galactic rulers can manage their economies, promising that it will be more intuitive than before while still offering the customisation options and hands on experience you’d expect.
Ding dong: Diablo 3's Auction House will be an ex-Auction House by 3AM PST tomorrow
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The Diablo 3 Auction House will be taken out and filled with lead in less than a day. Come 3AM PST, it will cease to exist, consigned to the abyss from whence it came. The event will probably be marked by a celebration in the streets, but mainly because it will coincide with scheduled maintenance for American players, so what else is there to do?
Blizzard has updated the FAQ, explaining exactly how the dismantling of the Auction House will affect players.
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