Resident Evil: Revelations 2 to uncloak its secrets episodically from February 18
To those of us not versed in the lore of Resident Evil, Barry Burton sounds like a TV entertainer under investigation by Operation Yewtree. But for players with first-hand memories of a ‘90s mansion with a snarling front door, he is the original BSAA investigator - now returned after the Racoon City incident to star in Revelations 2.
Or star across Revelations 2. The new Resident Evil will be episodic, released in weekly increments from the middle of February.
Game of Thrones: Iron From Ice launch trailer features more Snow than snow
Oh, crikey. I don’t know if you’ve seen our Fraser’s Game of Thrones: Iron From Ice review, but it’s not all winter sunshine and war of the roses. Apparently, Telltale have been overly cautious about laying the foundations for a new series and wound up with something much less compelling than Tales from the Borderlands.
Better have a look at the launch trailer, and decide for yourself whether you think Telltale will manage to scale The Wall and land more satisfying blows in future episodes.
Trine 2 trailer highlights the best community maps
Trine 2’s almost three years old but that’s not diminished the popularity of Frozenbyte’s co-op platformer. If anything, it’s grown.
Back in September, Frozenbyte released mapmaking tools for the community and in two months they’ve come up with some cracking creations.
Frozenbyte’s released a trailer showing off the best of them.
Heroes of the Storm stimpacks let you buy experience boosts
Soon after Heroes of the Storm’s next technical alpha patch you’ll be able to buy stimpacks from the game store. The stims double your experience gain and more than double the amount of gold you accrue in matches.
The making of Watch_Dogs: money, manpower and Ubi Montreal
Pick any two Ubisoft earnings calls from the past couple of years - they’re all public record - and you’ll notice a familiar refrain emerge. Every three months, the publisher’s investors would call on Yves Guillemot to slash Watch_Dogs’ R&D costs. And every three months, the mild-mannered but steely CEO would politely refuse.
Those R&D figures represented the cost of doing something new at the bonkers scale Ubisoft routinely work at. Between 2009 and 2014, Watch_Dogs wasn’t just about NPC manipulation - it was a hardcore numbers game.
Try 98 motion capture sessions with 64 cameras - at a rate of two working days a month for five years. Or two new consoles with 150-200 MB of memory - more than enough to dislodge the last generation’s cap on animations, and bring in ballooning team sizes and spiralling budgets to match.
And in the face of it all, Ubisoft Montreal. A Canadian studio with a headcount of over 3000 and the audacity to make the maths work.
Hearthstone players rally together to get Blizzard's attention on shop and arena bug
Bugs can be a frustrating issue in any game, and the community of Blizzard’s simplistic yet fun collectable card game, Hearthstone, know all too well. After a bug has locked unlucky players out of being able to use the in-game shop and arena mode, the community plan to band together in an effort to raise awareness to Blizzard to fix the issue.
With the help Hearthstone’s most popular streamers, the mighty goal is to send over one million tweets with the “#FixOurShop” hashtag, tonight.
Evolve trailer shows big men with big guns fighting bigger monsters
For a strictly multiplayer co-op shooter I didn’t figure Evolve to tell much of a story. The latest trailer aims to prove me wrong, there are people talking about how doomed the world is, there’s epic music with gravitas, and asses are mentioned (the Hollywood seal of approval).
Steam is looking twitchy: the broadcasting beta starts today
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Valve continues its march towards making Steam as social as possible today, while probably hoping to take a chunk or two out of Twitch. If you jump into a game on Steam, you’ll be able to start broadcasting your in-game shenanigans, with commentary, of course.
You can check it out now, but you’ll need to opt into the Steam beta client first.
The doctor is in: Alien: Isolation's Trauma DLC launches today
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So you’ve survived Sevastopl, and perhaps you’ve even survived the Nostromo as well, but you’re the slick, but Creative Assembly isn’t quite finished scaring the hair off your noggin. A new bit of Alien: Isolation DLC launches today, Trauma, putting you in the shoes of a new character, wandering around in three new survivor mode maps set before the main game.
London is calling in Assassin's Creed Victory
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After the boundless freedom of the high seas, the rough and tumble life of a pirate, and the sounds of my ship mates as they sang their shanties, I couldn’t spend more than a few hours with Assassin’s Creed Unity. Black Flag whisked me away on a proper adventure, one that Ubisoft’s Parisian outing failed to improve upon.
Has the lukewarm reception to Unity lead to Ubisoft Montreal heading back to sea? Nope. Kotaku has spilled the beans on the next Assassin’s Creed game, thanks to a video leak, and we’re back in another capital city, this time London. Development duties have been passed to Ubisoft Quebec, so we'll get to see how another studio handles the core series. It's time for a fresh start. At least they’ll be able to reuse all of this English voice actors from Unity.
Hearthstone: Goblins vs Gnomes will fill the game with over 120 new cards next week
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Hearthstone’s upcoming expansion, Goblins vs Gnomes, is less than a week away, Blizzard has announced. The diminutive residents of Azeroth will get their time in the spotlight on December 8th in America, Oceania and South East Asia, and the 9th for the rest of the world, where they’ll be transformed into a multitude of cards.
The expansion adds over 120 new cards, from gnomish contraptions to the demon lord Mal’Ganis. Our Nick’s shown off the new cards, so check the list out.
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