How Divinity: Original Sin put the magic back into spellcasting
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Mana has made magic boring. At some point in the recent history of RPGs, spells became something you spooned out of a generic pool over the course of a battle - powerful ranged attacks you fired off every 30 seconds instead of every three, but otherwise no different to bows and arrows.
Spellcasting deserves better - and it took Divinity: Original Sin to make clear what we’d lost. In Larian’s throwback masterpiece, magic is an ill-advised meeting of ego and academia - an exercise in experimentation as likely to blow your party to oblivion as win your battles.
Vampire open season: Nosgoth open beta weekend begins on August 7th
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Nosgoth, the vampire vs. humans multiplayer romp that’s loosely based on Legacy of Kain has been in closed beta for a while now. While it will be free-to-play, for the time being, you’ve needed to purchase a founders pack to get access.
No more! At least, not for the weekend. For four days, from the 7th to the 10th, it’ll be open season on vampires. It starts at 12:00 BST on the 7th, finishing at 8:00 BST on the following Monday. Wondering what to expect? Take a gander at my Nosgoth hands-on preview.
Expendabros: Broforce and Expendables 3 join forces to fight Mel Gibson in free spin-off
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With the third Expendables flick on it’s way out the door and into cinemas, the novelty is starting to wear thin. Or at least it was, until some ruddy great genius at Lionsgate decided, instead of licensing a terrible game, to approach Broforce developer Free Lives. The result: Expendabros, a free standalone game with 10 stages of explosions and guts.
Getting to fight Mel Gibson is a nice bonus.
Hunt killers and wear ten gallon hats in Westerado: Double Barreled
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There aren’t a great number of Old West games on PC. There’s Gun and Desperados - both good - and, newer, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, but it’s a setting with a dearth of games. But even if it was busier, I reckon Westerado would still stand out. A revenge tale, a hunt for a family’s killer - it’s an old story, but the game’s no cliche. I reviewed it in another time and place, when it was a flash game.
Now it’s poised to hit Steam later this year as Westerado: Double Barreled, expanded and polished.
Wing Commander III: Mark Hamill vs. Space Lions is free on Origin
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Origin might be loathed by a fair few people still, but its On the House program is just great. We’ve gotten Dead Space, Plants vs Zombies, Battlefield 3 and Peggle for free, and now it’s Wing Commander III’s turn.
After he hung up his lightsaber, and between being Gotham’s Clown Prince of Crime, Mark Hamill was a Wing Commander, fightin’ the Kilrathi and being all pensive. The third game in the series that made Chris Roberts a big deal, long before Star Citizen, threw in FMV cutscenes - wonderful, grim and often a bit camp - and a new 3D engine. The engine and FMV haven’t aged spectacularly, but it’s still immensely playable.
XCOM: The Board Game is a cooperative war against aliens led by a possibly evil companion app
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The problem with video games - there is only one - is that you generally can’t swallow them or choke someone with them. That’s why board games exist, and thrive. If you’ve ever thought, while playing XCOM, that it would be even more satisfying if you put your hand into the screen, lift up your soldiers, and eat him, then you will be pleased to know that XCOM: The Board Game is a thing, and it is a thing with tiny pieces.
It’s also cooperative, so you can lead the XCOM Project with a bunch of your chums, each of you taking on the role of one of the department heads, from Commander down to Squad Leader. While it has the traditional trappings of a board game from dice to cards, it also uses a companion app to drive the action forward. You cannot swallow the companion app.
Blizzard previews Warlords of Draenor's Nagrand: home of the Warsong Outriders
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I did love to fly around Nagrand in World of Warcraft’s first expansion, Burning Crusade. And still, when I’m levelling a new alt, I’ll often take them there. And it was nice to hang around in the Outlands, on occasion, and not feel like I was watching the end of days.
With Warlords of Draenor, we get to go back to Nagrand, back when it was home to the Warsong clan, led by Grommash Hellscream. Quite a bit of history there. Senior game designer Eric Maloof and associate game designer Kurt Sparkuhl have spilled the beans on the old new zone in a preview of the area, and it’s looking lovely.
Evolve delayed till 2015 to ensure it's "genre-defining"
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2K were in a call with their investors last night, so we picked up the other phone and tried not to breathe too loudly. What we heard made us shout “muuu-uuuum!” and slam down the receiver: Turtle Rock’s Evolve has been pushed back “a few months”, from the Autumn till February next year.
Born to dye: guild and customisation-focused Elder Scrolls Online Update 3 now live
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The Elder Scrolls Online version of Tamriel is stuffed to the slaughterfish gills with Other People, and so help Zenimax you’re going to interact with them. Update 3 is packed full with the very best in social lubricants that aren’t alcohol: custom guild ranks, colourful clothes and matching bibs.
Codemasters refund players of Colin McRae Rally: not "the game they thought it would be"
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Codemasters launched a port of a mobile game named Colin McRae Rally on PC the other day, and covered its Steam page with references to the PlayStation favourite of the same name. It was practically belching trouble out of its exhaust, and trouble it’s proven to be.
Players have complained that they thought they were buying a different game - and the publishers have promised refunds.
What's next for TUG, the freshly Yogscast-backed survival RPG?
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TUG! It's only a faintly rude sounding name if you're British and puerile, but the open-world survival sandbox RPG is so much more than a local euphemism for masturbation. It's a procedurally generated, Minecraftian exploration and survival game with a deliciously Lionheadian art-style. Less geometrically blocky, more sprawling and natural, with seasons and pets and civilisations to discover.
The Kickstarted project popped into headlines following Yogscast's cancellation of their own player-funded Yogventures game. The YouTubing superpower deigned to placate their empty-handed backers by offering them a copy of TUG, citing it as "in many ways" the survival adventure game they'd always wanted to make with Yogventures.
Where are those Warlords: World of Warcraft subscriptions fall again to 6.8 million
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World of Warcraft remains one of the best PC MMOs around, and Warlords of Draenor its most compelling reason to play in an age. But it looks as if the expansion is hurting Blizzard in the short term. Just as the water recedes before a wave, subscriber numbers have fallen once more ahead of its release.
Curse of Naxxramas campaign brings Hearthstone its "strongest week ever"
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Last week was Hearthstone’s most successful on record - drawing more players and money around the fire than at any other time since launch. That’s thanks to building momentum around Curse of Naxxramas - the game’s multi-part single player campaign.
Activision have noticed a "downturn" in pre-orders - and Call of Duty is "not immune"
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Games publishers would just love it if we’d pre-order some of their games. They’ve made that abundantly clear in the last few years, with a trend toward rewarding people who buy a game before they know it’s any good.
But it’s not really working. Activision told investors they’ve seen an industry-wide decline in pre-order figures.
Play four hours of SimCity for free in an oddly-timed trial
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EA and Maxis have released a demo for the their contemporary city-builder, due out in, er, March 2013.
So it’s a bit late, but there’s now a free trial of SimCity to play around with. You get the run of the reboot’s single player feature-set, and four hours to make your mark on an otherwise unblighted stretch of green land.
The Art of Free to Play: Viktor Antonov on designing Battlecry's beautiful world
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We're told game design has to be unsentimental and iterative. But Viktor Antonov, creative director on Bethesda’s Battlecry and the celebrated artist of behind Half-Life 2's City 17 and Dishonored's Dunwall, disagrees.
“I come from a less experimental philosophy and a commitment to a strong concept,” he said. “If you’re called by a client as an architect and you make a building, you won’t experiment and destroy buildings before it’ll function.
“Battlecry was a one-shot concept. It was very precise and it’s gone into production exactly as it was planned.”
The decline of pre-orders is good for everyone
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Today we are like Heracles, lovely readers. Because we’ve cut off - or at least very badly scratched - one of the hideous heads of the monstrous Hydra. Activision recently told investors that there’s been an industry-wide dip in pre-orders, and this is an excellent thing.
It’s proof that we’re finally starting to realise that pre-orders are completely pointless in the modern industry, and that we’re not so easily manipulated by ham-fisted incentives and ridiculous store-specific tat. The illusion of limited stock has been broken, and absent its source of power, pre-orders are going the way of all monsters: left in the past.
World of Warcraft's 10 year anniversary will be filled with corgis and violence
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Come November, World of Warcraft will be 10 years old. Crikey. I’m suddenly reminded of how fleeting time is, and of my own slow march towards death. Thankfully Blizzard is here to cheer me up, and you, if you’re feeling gloomy.
They’re using throwing nostalgia around like currency, celebrating the game’s past as it moves towards the fifth expansion.
The Stomping Land isn't dead, but players are still out of the loop
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There’s not much stomping being going on in The Stomping Land lately. Indeed, backers and Early Access players had been left wondering if the game had simply been abandoned, as updates and any form of communication suddenly stopped.
It appears that there’s still life in the game yet, and is transitioning to Unreal engine 4. Developer Alex Fundora made a statement to Kotaku, explaining the situation.
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