How item changes are redefining the jungle in League of Legends
There’s a reason we refer to the lion as the King of the Jungle, and it’s his gold efficiency when it comes to item purchases.
Lots of jungle players think about the same thing when speccing their League of Legends champions - but others focus simply on the final builds they’re working towards. It’s the latter group Riot are hoping to cater to with a new round of jungle enchantments-in-testing.
Star Wars Battlefront will be EA's "major" shooter of next year, out by Christmas 2015
Thank goodness for the insatiable inquisitiveness of shareholders. It’s them we have to thank for any news at all on DICE’s reboot of Star Wars Battlefront. EA see the competitive Lucas shooter as their big FPS of next year - but it’s been pushed back from a tentative summer release spot to Christmas 2015.
EA are plotting a new Need for Speed release for 2016
Nobody disputed the quality of Need for Speed Rivals when it arrived late last year, but there was a sense the series had quietly run out of road. First, Criterion shrunk down to 17 staff to work on a YouTube-inspired extreme sports experiment. And then Ghost Games, the studio most of Criterion had decamped to, was hit by layoffs.
Last we heard, the new Need for Speed was in a state of flux - but EA have just now started talking about it again.
Humble Bundle have made more than 100 linux ports
The latest Humble Indie Bundle sees the likes of Twisted Shadow Planet, Risk of Rain, and Tower of Guns making their debut on Linux. This isn’t solely down to the games developers, it’s with the help of Humble’s in-house Linux porter and a couple of contractors that this can happen.
Since Humble started its bid to take over the bundle world they’ve managed to port more than 100 games over to the open source operating system.
Eve Online to make space for "boldest changes in years" in Phoebe update on November 4
CCP have been meaning to shake up the entrenched player territories of nullsec in Eve Online for some time now. The transport changes wrought by next week’s Phoebe expansion might look innocuous enough - but they’ll finally force old alliances to redraw their battlelines.
Hands on with Dirty Bomb
Dirty Bomb is an objective-based multiplayer shooter from developers Splash Damage, the folks who've been making invariably excellent objective-based multiplayer shooters for the last thousand or so years. It's a team-focused first person shooter in which you work together using guns to achieve things, while another bunch of players works together using their guns to stop you.
The free to play shooter was revealed ages ago before slinking back into an epoch-long closed beta slumber. Now that it's finally re-emerging from its developmental chrysalis, all moist with a nutritious outer sheen and ready to play, I've been allowed to have a go. And it's really quite good.
Farming Simulator 15 trailer will make city dwellers sad their lives aren’t as delightful
I know farming isn’t as easy, colourful, or charming as Farming Simulator 15’s trailer makes it out to be but it’s so damn picturesque that I want to get on a bus to the nearest field.
Seriously, you need to see this thing, it might make you reevaluate your current choice of abode.
Inside Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition and the future of D&D RPGs
There’s a proud triumvirate of RPGs that inspired Obsidian and 74 thousand fans to make Pillars of Eternity happen: Baldur’s Gate, Planescape Torment and Icewind Dale.
Icewind Dale is the lesser known of the three - but it’s also the only one to benefit from both the concise wit of Chris Avellone, and full use of the refined tactical combat engine BioWare are still now working to better in Dragon Age: Inquisition.
Ask a fan what distinguished Icewind Dale from its ‘90s peers, though, and they’ll tell you about the cold. The frost that seemed to bite through CRT monitor glass and bring the danger and adventure of the Sword Coast’s northern wastes rushing in.
Bedlam Kickstarter ends in success. Bring on the vomiting mutants and cyborgs
Skyshine Games’ just wrapped up its Kickstarter campaign, netting itself $166,540 to develop their roguelike RPG, Bedlam.
Reading through the details on their Kickstarter page, Bedlam sounds a little like the mechanics of Final Fantasy wrapped up in the clothes of Judge Dredd.
It sounds grokking excellent.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive kicks off the Electronic Sports World Cup
Today is the first day of this year’s Electronic Sports World Cup in Paris, with players duking it out in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Shootmania and Trackmania 2, FIFA 15 and Just Dance.
Matches will be taking place all day, from now until Sunday, November 2nd. You can watch the Livestream from the main stage below, which is all about Counter-Strike: Global Offensive at the moment.
Carbine starts free server transfers in WildStar to help out PvP realms
A couple of weeks ago, Carbine gathered every WildStar player up and plonked them into new megaservers, split into a PvE and PvP server in each of the game’s two regions, Europe and North America.
But rumbles of discontent have been coming out of the PvP servers, with players concerned about how quiet they were. To tackle this, Carbine’s opened the doors to free transfers between PvP and PvE servers within a region.
Watch a ship skim a sun in the Elite: Dangerous beta 3 trailer
Elite: Dangerous’ beta 3 update went live last night, cramming in more fixes, tweaks and new features than an impatient person could count.
For those of you yet to launch into space and who haven’t trawled through the cosmically large patch notes, Frontier has put together a trailer with the highlights.
World of Speed developer Slightly Mad Studios is trying to do F2P without being "evil"
Project CARS developer Slightly Mad Studios are ambitiously working on two car games at the moment, the second one being World of Speed, an MMO racer. And it’s free-to-play.
“We’re doing nice free-to-play instead of evil free to play,” lead producer Pete Morrish promises. “Free-to-play kind of gets a bad rap in the industry and rightly so because a lot of free to play games are nothing more than highly optimised systems that are made to optimise the removal of money from your wallet into the developers’ wallets. It’s quite cynical, nothing more than a slash and burn as far as I’m concerned.”
Beginner's guide to X-Wing and TIE Fighter: joystick issues, controls, and picking a version
Now that I’ve had a day with the new TIE Fighter and X-Wing re-releases on GOG, there are a few issues that I’ve encountered and a few things I’ve learned about the editions available on GOG.
Most importantly, I had an odd and frustrating joystick issue that took me a few minutes to solve.
Modding support sneaks into Endless Legend's Halloween mini add-on
You can usually expect a bit of seasonal silliness when games get Halloween updates: new skins, spooky questlines, a spot of Halloween loot in lieu of sweets. Endless Legend has most of that, but also a bit more. The science fiction-fantasy 4X game has opened the door to modders.
50-100 million Oculus Rifts will need to be sold for it to be a "meaningful thing as a computing platform"
Facebook has over a billion users. Even babies, unable to communicate with the world besides leaking, have Facebook pages. So it’s probably with good reason that Mark Zuckerberg thinks in big numbers, numbers like 50-100 million. That’s the number of Oculus Rift units that will need to be sold for the device to be a "meaningful" platform, which the Facebook head honcho dropped in an earnings call.
Not quite a billion then, but gosh that’s still a very large number.
Scream Fortress has turned Team Fortress 2 into a urine-soaked carnival
Have you had your fill of Scream Fortresses past? If you’re not too fat on candy and old game modes, you might want to jump back into Team Fortress 2 now that Scream Fortress 6 is underway.
It’s a carnival of death, dismemberment and silliness, as Merasmus takes over, sowing chaos with spells, curses and bumper cars.
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