Roshan moves house (ever so slightly) in Dota 2's Rekindling Soul update
“Even the land itself is not above being modified,” boast Valve of the map changes they’ve made to Dota 2 overnight. “It’s moving day for Roshan.”
Roshan hasn’t moved far - but in a manner befitting the creepiest of the creeps, the land around him has shifted to accommodate his new location. Elsewhere, patch 6.82 brings changes to couriers, the way match stats are displayed, and the abilities of Bloodseeker and Phantom Lancer. The Rekindled Soul in question is Shadow Fiend - returning with a “frightful” new look.
Clear the calendar of inferior MMOs: Guild Wars 2 is about to be free for a week
Guild Wars 2 has fewer barriers to entry than any other game on our best MMORPG list, and it’s about to rid itself of the last - its box price. For a week beginning tomorrow you can potter about Tyria, pulling up root vegetables and breaking up necromantic committee meetings, for free.
Behind the scenes with the Alienware Alpha: the first Steambox
You might have heard of the Alienware Alpha. When it was announced a few months back, a cynic might have called it a stopgap machine - something for Dell to produce while they wait for the delayed SteamOS and Steam Controller to come and kickstart the living room PC industry. But as it turns out, it’s far more compelling than that.
What Alienware have made is a Windows machine that never asks you to navigate Windows. Instead, the Alpha represents the marriage of Steam Big Picture Mode to Alienware’s own controller-friendly interface. It’s a living room PC that doesn’t require you to keep a mouse and keyboard under the telly; that takes full advantage of Windows’ swollen Steam catalogue, and ubiquitous developer support for the Xbox 360 controller.
It’ll be out before Christmas, and cost $549 or 499 euro.
“It’s unique,” says Alienware’s Frank Azor. “Very few companies will be able to provide something like this due to the amount of engineering, development and thoughtfulness we’ve had to put in.”
Riot to punish badly-behaved League of Legends players with temporary ranked bans
Riot want to redefine what it means to play competitively in one of the best free PC games available, League of Legends - so that it encompasses not only good laning, but good sportsmanship too. To that end, the studio’s Competitive and Player Behaviour teams have put their heads together to conceive a new punishment for biting the ears off your teammates: temporary bans from ranked mode.
Watch the European Heathstone Finals live from DreamHack Stockholm on Twitch
You’ll be at least passingly familiar with DreamHack - the grand LAN event that twice annually fills the convention building, racket sports centre and ice hockey arena of its Swedish home city of Jönköping.
This Friday will be the first day of a third event - a takeover of Stockholm’s Ericsson Globe designed to position Sweden as the leading eSports nation in Europe. I’ll be there, absorbing the sights and whiplash-fast wi-fi speeds. And the best of it will be streamed on Twitch.
Runescape has been around for over 13 years, and somehow it's still growing
Runescape is over 13 years old, and it should be in its twilight years. At a time when even the World of Warcraft giant is losing subscribers and Blizzard has accepted that it won’t grow again, then surely Runescape should be going through something similar.
It isn’t. Somehow, it’s growing. Even a static playerbase would be impressive for a game of its age, but in July alone, Jagex saw a 20 percent increase in members. That’s a little bonkers.
It does what it says on the tin: Steam's big update is already helping indies get discovered
With the constant stream of new releases, Early Access games and Greenlight guff, it’s hard to get noticed on Steam. But for most developers, getting their game on the platform is key. While the Steam Discovery update is still in its infancy, and we’re all still playing around with it, getting our bearings, it’s already having a positive impact for some developers.
Insurgency, based on the Half-Life mod, has been on Steam for a year, and developer New World Interactive relies on social media and word of mouth to generate interest in the game. According to creative director Andrew Spearin, store page visits have risen significantly, along with sales.
World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor's system requirements are unsurprisingly low
While World of Warcraft gained a lot of bells and whistles since it launched a decade ago, it’s not the most demanding of games. Though it can get a bit dicey with everything on ultra while fighting through a massive raid.
Despite the new character models for all the older races, it looks like Warlords of Draenor is going to be keeping things nice and easy when it comes to system requirements as well. Blizzard's just released the minimum and recommended list and you could probably run it on low with a toaster.
Before, the prehistoric survival sim, joins the Facepunch Studios tribe
It strikes me as unusual that so many survival games are solitary misadventures. It allows for greater focus on simply not dying, I guess; but the stakes are so much higher when more than one person is at risk. Adding more people into the mix offers the potential for exploring how relationships develop under stress, or how people fall into the roles of followers and leaders. And there’s something compelling about seeing loose groups of people coming together to overcome ridiculous odds.
That’s why I’m really rather excited about Before, despite only knowing a tiny bit about it. It’s a prehistoric survival game focusing on a struggling tribe of humans. And there are mammoths! I do love a good wooly mammoth. It almost ran the risk of not being anything more than an interesting concept, but Facepunch Studios, developer of Rust and Garry’s Mod, liked it so much the brought creator Bill Lowe into the fold.
Titanic: Cancelling Titan may have cost Blizzard over $50 million
Blizzard’s cancellation of Titan after seven years of development, a project that had at its peak upwards of 100 team members, was an “excruciating” decision, Mike Morhaime said yesterday. And no small part of that must have been due to the massive investment that the developer made in its now dead MMO.
Analysts told GamesIndustry.biz that the cost of development might have been as high as $50 million, or possibly more. That’s not a drop in the ocean, even for a company that has a game with over 6 million subscribers and some of the best selling titles in the industry.
Gat a load of this - Volition shows off 5 crazy minutes of Saints Row: Gat out of Hell
Volition’s announcement of Saints Row IV standalone DLC instead of a brand new game was initially disappointing, and then overwhelmingly wonderful when it was revealed that it would not only put Johnny Gat in the driver’s seat, but also take him - with Kinzie in tow - to Hell.
And Hell seems like a fun place. The weapons and diversions in Saints Row IV were some of the best in any open world game, but Volition’s clearly been sniffing some properly infernal glue in preparation for Gat out of Hell. So expect to summon demonic imps, fly with burning wings and blow enemies up using a comfortable armchair.
Take a gander at the five minute developer walkthrough.
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