Assassin's Creed Unity system specs are as steep as Notre Dame
It’s going to be a cruel Christmas. Over in the console kingdom, developers have tired of pulling along owners of older machines, content to let customers slide backwards down the hill on their sleds if they won’t buy a new box. And in the PC province, system requirements have taken a sudden and uncomfortable lurch upwards, like so much rum butter in your oesophagus.
To Shadow of Mordor and The Evil Within add Assassin’s Creed Unity, which is calling for the head of your ageing graphics card to be separated from its body.
Warframe Archwing update turns you into a rocket-powered space ninja
Warframe gave us space ninjas in 2013, a sizeable technological advance on 17th century Japan, and now they’ve gone and got jetpacks in the upcoming Archwing update. Which, by my maths, makes them about 18,027 times better.
Yes, Archwing’s going to let you fly around in deep space, dispensing ninja justice to robots and evil spaceships-alike. And for free.
Dota 2 players outnumbered all 99 other games on Steam's most-played list put together today
Press releases eventually slide out of inboxes; promo deals come and go. But Steam’s stat page is forever - a slowly-shifting stone tablet of absolute truths.
Dota 2 has sat undisturbed at its topmost peak for many months now, but this morning the MOBA claimed another quiet victory. If you’d totted up the total player numbers for every other Steam game on the top 100 most-played list, they still wouldn’t have matched Dota’s concurrent roster of heroes.
Risk of Rain patch 1.2 adds killer chef and Aliens-inspired Loader
If Gordon Ramsey’s to be believed, chefs are angry people. They swear, shout, and hit things when they don’t get their way. Chefs haven’t always been this way so it’s a fair assumption that over time they’re getting worse.
Skip to the future-set side-scrolling roguelike Risk of Rain and Chef makes a lot more sense. He's one of the two new characters added in the 1.2 update. A killer robot cook, Chef throws cleavers, blasts flames from his chest oven, and lets you tear your enemies limb from limb.
Risk of Rain’s 1.2 update’s been a long time coming but when you see what’s in it you won’t be disappointed.
Stockholm Syndrome: Why Scandinavia loves DreamHack
If there were any worry that DreamHack would lose some of its unique allure in its move from the Swedish provinces to the capital, that doubt dissolved like the snow in Jönköping about a minute and a half after I lost my hotel keycard at the Stockholm Globe Arena.
I spent the 10 floor lift journey down to the lobby working up the grovel in my voice, but needn’t have bothered.
“Are you at DreamHack?” asked the young blonde Swede at the desk, eyes brightening as his hands registered my new card. “I’m kind of a nerdy guy myself. What do you play?”
This is what DreamHack do: inclusive, wide-eyed events. Their feet are in PC gaming, and their heads filled with ideas for bettering eSports, the Scandinavian games industry, and themselves.
3D Realms rises from the grave with a 32-game anthology
Despite its legacy, developer 3D Realms has been known more for lawsuits than games over the last few years, and earlier this year, its remains were acquired by Rise of the Triad (the remake) developer Interceptor. This all happened while Gearbox was suing both companies for announcing a Duke Nukem game.
Today, the veteran developer is back, reformed by Interceptor and some of the original team. First thing on the docket for the newly resurrected company is the release of a massive anthology of old 3D Realms games, from Duke Nukem 3D to Commander Keen.
Guild Wars 2: Tyria prepares for war with the return of the Living World Season 2
“The road to war is paved by points of no return” - those words from ArenaNet’s blog post couldn’t be more true, as Guild Wars 2 players prepare to bring the fight to the latest threat against Tyria: the mighty elder dragon Mordremoth, who was awoken by Scarlet at the end of Season 1. On November the 4th, the second half of the Living World Season 2 kicks off with a preemptive strike against Mordremoth’s forces.
We sat down with lead designer, Isaiah Cartwright, to talk about the update. Find out why you’re not going to want to miss the “unforgettable end” that will likely change Tyria forever.
Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty will come to PC "as soon as possible", and a beta is being considered
Abe’s Oddysee remake, New ‘n’ Tasty, launched on PS4 way back in July, but the PC version has been in hiding, though it did make an appearance earlier in the month in a fully playable state.
So it’s on its way and will launch on Steam “as soon as possible,” says developer Oddworld Inhabitants. There’s no specific release date yet, however.
Take a free weekend break in Arma 3
Bohemia Interactive’s Make Arma Not War competition, which tasks modders with creating Arma mods for a chance to win up to €200,000, comes to a close at the end of this week, on the 26th.
To make the end of the competition a wee bit special, Arma 3 will be completely free for the weekend, so you can check out some mods yourself, or simply pretend to be in the army on some lovely Greek islands.
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