New Unreal Tournament will let Epic "succeed by doing the right thing for the community"
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The new Unreal Tournament is being developed in a fashion that would’ve seemed completely absurd in 2007, when its last iteration was released. The culmination of years of crowdfunding and community interaction, this nebulous new game will be designed in consultation with its future playerbase, and eventually released for free. Not free-to-play, but free, with all revenue sourced from a mod marketplace.
Epic say they like the model because it’s “fundamentally generous”.
“It allows us to succeed by doing the right thing for the community, and it keeps all of us, at Epic and in the community, on the same page with what we are trying to accomplish,” said senior programmer Steve Polge.
Oculus VR hoover up another id veteran for their game dev team
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John Carmack may have been Oculus’ most high-profile poaching from id, but he was only the first. Rage design director Matt Hooper followed within a week, and now Doom and Quake alumnus Kenneth Scott has joined the studio as art director.
Counter-like: Call of Duty: Ghosts' new Reinforce mode doesn't do respawns
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Call of Duty: Ghosts’ Reinforce isn’t so much a new mode as all of the existing ones stuck together - the factory-fused amalgam of sweets that turns up at the bottom of the packet.
Teams can win matches by killing all of their opponents, capturing three flags, or taking over two objective points - and then sprint for the dropship. Just joking on that last point - but it does rather feel like Infinity Ward have mishmashed their best work into a trashily compelling frag salad.
Nvidia nab the "greatest PC games of all time" for the Shield: Half-Life 2 and Portal
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Handheld PCs are going to happen, everyone. Whether they’ll be connected by vapour trails to our Steam Machines or to GPUs installed in our eye sockets remains to be seen, but Nvidia are still the only manufacturers with convincing tech already on the market.
The Nvidia Shield is also now the only handheld console with Valve games on it.
Diablo 3 patch 2.0.5 brings new class changes and a cure for Tyrael's hunger pains
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Your chance to Did you know that tomorrow is the two year anniversary of Diablo III? You might have forgotten your card and flowers, but Blizzard haven’t forgotten theirs. Patch 2.0.5 brings forth numerous rebalances to every class - leaving very few skills and runes untouched - for the better. The game will also be much more rewarding with a buff to bounties, rifts and the blood shard vendor Kadala.
But that’s not all because starting tomorrow there will be a community buff to commemorate Diablo III’s second birthday with increased xp and legendary find for all.find Legendary items is increased, including a guaranteed drop during your first hour of play.
Self-explanatory: "real-time chess" FPS Superhot demands to be Kickstarted
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Time moves only when you do. That was the high concept behind Superhot, the webgame we all got very excited about 245 days ago. Never before had bullet time been applied with such creative flair as in this modest shooter - which somehow turned the FPS into a simultaneous turn-based affair a little like Frozen Synapse.
“We’re onto something,” says creative director Piotr Iwanicki. “We can’t just leave it as a half-baked prototype. We need to make a full game out of it.”
If a tree Titanfalls in the forest: watch woodland parkour courtesy of tomorrow's Expedition DLC
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Swampland, Runoff and Wargames don’t sound like places you’d particularly like to share a postcode with, but they’ll do nicely as the three focal points of Titanfall’s first map pack since its release in March.
The first in particular promises to challenge pilots’ parkour skills like never before.
Shards is an MMO where players run the world, developed by Ultima and Elder Scrolls vets, and looking for cash on Kickstarter
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You see some pretty ambitious games on Kickstarter, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything as out there as Shards. A MMO that plans to ditch everything we’ve come to know from the genre bible, indie developer Citadel Studios intends to make Shards the “first-ever player-run MMO”.
To do this, Citadel are banishing levels, classes, and grind quests from their blueprints, and instead doing all they can to provide a world for natural, emergent player stories.
No One Lives Forever’s cutting room floor revealed
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No matter how beloved the game, if you start to run your fingers across its surface you’ll soon start to feel the lumps, bumps, cracks, and imperfections that come with tight deadlines, over-worked design teams, and coding nightmares. The dawn of the new millenium was full of games with great ideas but fractured execution, and Monolith’s No One Lives Forever is living proof of the period.
A brave, camp spy comedy FPS, No One Lives Forever’s brilliance was occasionally let down by naff stealth elements, and full of loose threads like mechanics that led nowhere, and redundant weapons. Some of the unknown reasons behind these oddities have now been revealed in an interview with the game’s lead designer Craig Hubbard.
Devolver Digital games being sold illegitimately online
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PC publisher Devolver Digital has taken to Twitter to warn people that its games are being illegitimately sold by online vendor G2A.com. Devolver also warns that all games purchased from G2A will be cancelled and rendered unusable.
The tweet came earlier this afternoon, and warned that keys purchased from G2A were not guaranteed and unsupported.
The Sims 4 character creator lets you pinch and trim every little detail
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The biggest appeal of The Sims has always been, for me at least, recreation. I’ve recreated my houses, my family, my housemates, and almost every other residence and its occupants that have been part of my life.
Whilst I’ve always been satisfied with The Sims’ cartoony renders, The Sims 4 is about to introduce a new element of detail with the series’ most elaborate character creator yet. And despite being able to customise absolutely everything on your sim, it seems to be the most simple tool Maxis has ever made.
Writer / Developer Jim Rossignol on Sir, You Are Being Hunted, and letting go of perfection
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When I finally met Jim Rossignol at GDC to talk about Sir, You Are Being Hunted, I mentioned how difficult it had been to find him inside a crowded Starbucks. The only picture I had of him was his Twitter profile picture... which is a shot of Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner. Rossignol, it turns out, does not look very much like Britain’s coolest secret agent and inmate.
Rossignol laughed, but he was off to the races as he explained what The Prisoner meant to him, and why it has endured as a seminal work of British television. In both of his careers as a game journalist and developer, Rossignol has been trying to protect and promote the same values that created some of the UK’s most memorable characters and cultish success stories.
It’s not easy. In both television and games, the trend is toward glossier, less personal works. “The formula’s been sweetened and it’s less weird. That smooths out some of the bumps to consumption, but it’s smoothed out some of the influence,” Rossignol said. “Because it’s the stuff that’s really weird that kind of pushes people off into a new direction.”
Rossignol was pushed in a new direction by odd TV and odd games for most of his adult life. Now he’s tried to return the favor.
Minimum opens its gates to Early Access ticket holders
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Minimum, the five-vs-five craft-a-weapon FPSMOBA that’s lead a troubled life, has made its appearance on Steam Early Access. If you missed last week’s beta testing period and are desperate to engage in its blocky fun, then this is your opportunity, should your pockets run deep enough.
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