Wurm Online Offline: Puts Out Bounty To Catch DDoSsers

By John Walker on February 20th, 2014 at 2:00 pm.

Wurm Online, the long running MMO famously co-created by Notch, is currently Wurm Offline. Some scumbag DDoSpots took the site offline this week, and it’s not yet back up. In response the developers, Code Club AB, have offered a €10,000 reward for “tips leading to a conviction.”

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Galactic Princess, Ultimate General, 48 More Greenlit

By Nathan Grayson on February 20th, 2014 at 3:00 pm.

The infernal Greenlight machine rolls on, devastating the environment and breaking hearts without missing a beat. It doesn’t care what gets in its way. It knows only one pursuit: middling-to-popular indie games. Its main fuel source? People. Well, their votes, anyway. And also some arcane fusion of press reviews, crowdfunding successes, sales on other platforms, angel dust, kitten tears, and a signed copy of The Who’s greatest hits album. But hey, I can’t fault the system’s invisible, probably mutant hand for selecting the likes of Galactic Princess, Ultimate General: Gettysburg, Hover: Revolt of Gamer, and Woolfe: The Red Hood Diaries. The full 50-strong batch is below.

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Glitchspace Looks Way Smarter Than Me

By John Walker on February 20th, 2014 at 4:00 pm.

First-person puzzling is a genre there can never be enough of, and Space Budgie’s Glitchspace is adding itself to the gang. Immediately visually reminiscent of InMomentum, this isn’t so much about speed, but more – well – reprogramming the platforms to allow you to achieve your goals. It’s best that you watch the video.

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Impressions: Drunken Robot Pornography

So... Steam's new TAG system seems to work fine, don't you think?

Yep, it works perfectly gine .

Friendly fire: Valve launch Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's third community map initiative - Operation Phoenix

The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive community have spent the past few weeks - well, they’ve spent it shooting, haven’t they. But in between trigger squeezes, they’ve voted on the best maps from the last two Operations - limited-period initiatives in which players have been able to pay a small fee to play community-made maps on low-ping Valve servers.

They’ve pieced together eight favourites - now playable on official servers for the next few months of Operation Phoenix.

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Open goal: Football Manager 2014 breaks UK high street PC charts records

I have a distinct memory of watching Top of the Pops every Friday of 1999 and becoming slowly distraught that Cliff Richard’s stranglehold on the no. 1 spot with some interminable Christmas ballad had begun to creep too far into Spring - which is odd, because I can’t find any record of it now.

Here’s a certifiable fact, though: Football Manager 2014 has been at the top sales rung in the UK for 16 weeks on the trot - a new record for the most consecutive no. 1s in PC chart history.

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Hammerfell: here's Elder Scrolls Online's crafting system explained by its makers

I spent my Elder Scrolls Online beta time tip-toeing my way around the slopes of Daggerfall, avoiding combat where I could - and occasionally very loudly thwacking the iron ore out of the odd rock jutting up from the greenery. 

Crafting has always been one of a compelling set of reasons to meander around Tamriel - one quest in Morrowind was notorious for sending players on an hours-long walk for a nice flower - but it’s become maybe more alluring (and certainly more complicated) in ESO. 

Items can be tinkered with and taken apart for their traits, and some bonuses are exclusive to well-hidden areas on the map. Creative director Paul Sage, lead gameplay designer Nick Konkle and lead user experience designer Chris Strasz elaborate on all that in the video below.

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Why Respawn cut complex mech controls from Titanfall; "The cutting room floor is three feet deep"

For a multiplayer FPS that threatens to add so much new to the genre, Titanfall is an extremely lean game. No single player; no cooperative horde modes; no distractions.

Much of what Respawn developed along the way has been thrown from the rooftops of Angel City and trampled by bipedal machines - including a much more complicated mech control system that sounded more Brothers in Arms than binary.

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Thief play and UI options designed to accommodate "very wide" set of expectations

Where Thief 2: The Metal Age was cold, brilliant and unyielding as iron, nu-Thief is malleable like lead. It can be whoever you want it to be. It can be Dishonored, or Deadly Shadows - just head to its modification options and have a play with the dials.

Eidos Montreal have imbued Thief with their design values and aesthetic, but beyond that they’re happy for you to tweak the details.

“As we progressed we started getting feedback with community managers, collaborating all the information from support and playtesting, [and] it became apparent that expectations were very wide,” explains lead level designer Daniel Windfeld.

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Still no beards: Warlords of Draenor's new female dwarf model revealed

The female dwarf has forever been a challenge for fantasy creators leaning on Tolkien, because he didn’t really do them. Some, like Terry Pratchett, have made them comically indistinguishable from their male counterparts, beards and all. In the interests of unbounded character creation, Blizzard took the other route for World of Warcraft - resulting in the stocky, strong ladies we’ve had in the game since 2004.

Lately, though, they’ve begun to look outmoded - and not for their lack of beards. The WoW dev team have redesigned them for upcoming expansion Warlords of Draenor - and they now look like this.

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Square Enix Collective's pilot phase ends on Monday; vote for your favourite pitch

Square Enix Collective’s pilot phase - where you can vote for (or against) one of three game pitches - ends this coming Monday. So if you haven’t already voted, now’s your chance. 

World War Machine, Moon Hunters and Game of Glens are the titles available for your consideration. New submissions will open in March, with any developer able to pitch a project. Pitches that pass the submission criteria will be posted on the Collective in batches every Monday from then on. 

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Dragon Age: Inquisition snaps show off Varric and Cassandra's new looks

Dragon Age: Inquisition seems to be coming along rather nicely, but I’m someone who actually thoroughly enjoyed Dragon Age II despite its major missteps, so take that for what it’s worth.

Lead writer David Gaider has some pictures to show you. They aren’t of a holiday in Benidorm. He’s showing off the character models for Varric, sexiest of all dwarf men, and Cassandra, Varric's interrogator in Dragon Age II and one of the “Seekers of Truth”. Sounds like a tough gig. 

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Elite: Dangerous developer gets £3.75 million to work on two titles from an internal game jam

Frontier Developments, the studio behind Elite: Dangerous, has netted itself a healthy chunk of change, £3.75 million, for the development of two new projects. 

Both games - neither of which Frontier is ready to reveal - were the products of an internal game jam the company puts on every now and then called “Game of the week”. 

I’ve got a jar of jam at the back of my kitchen cupboard and I’ve been waiting for it to turn into a game for years. It’s progressing nicely, as it’s already evolved into a hideous, mouldy concoction.

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Garry's Mod sales reach $30 million, which Rust has already beaten

Garry Newman was celebrating today, as Garry’s Mod - which was first released for Half-Life 2 in 2004 before launching as a standalone in 2006 - sales have now reached a whopping $30 million. 

As impressive as this milestone is, Newman revealed that Facepunch has still made more money from Rust, even though it has only been available since December and is still in alpha. 

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Nosgoth is free-to-play not pay-to-win says community manager

Square Enix community manager George Kelion attempted to assuage any fears that upcoming free-to-play multiplayer arena game, Nosgoth, would be pay-to-win in a recent blog post.

“So, Nosgoth is a free-to-play game - but it's not pay-to-win,” said Kelion. “We made the decision to go to free-to-play to break down barriers and let as many players into the game as possible.” He goes on to explain how currency will work in Nosgoth, as well as how purchased items will affect the game. 

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Tardisfall: Titanfall's regeneration system uncovered

Are you ready for some more Titanfall leaks? We’ve had a few already, most courtesy of NeoGAF's RazorUK, and he’s at it again. This time he’s discovered information about Titanfall’s prestige system, where pilots can regenerate, making them sharper and more deadly. 

But will you be able to become Peter Capaldi? One can only hope.

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Keen Arrow: Towerfall Lands March 11

By Adam Smith on February 21st, 2014 at 5:00 pm.

The gleeful multiplayer exploits of Towerfall have long been the best (and perhaps) only reason to own the US Marine Corps sponsored Oorah! console. When we heard that a PC version was coming, with oodles of new features, I refused to be excited. I expected the newly colonised Towerfall: Ascension to show its face at shady conventions and to be passed around on sleek USB sticks at exclusive awards shows like Nidhogg before it. As the trailer below admirably demonstrates, Towerfall looks absolutely brilliant – a slapstick Spelunky deathmatch. The good news is that you won’t have to be in with the in crowd to play it. It’s out on March 11th. You will need friends though because multiplayer is local only, with no online support.

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The Only Winning Move: Wargame: Red Dragon Trailer

By Graham Smith on February 21st, 2014 at 8:00 pm.

I showed the last Wargame: Red Dragon trailer to a friend who is knowledgeable about games. As it drew to a close they turned to me and asked, “What kind of game is this?” It’s a large-scale real-time strategy game with a dynamic campaign map, multiplayer, hundreds of modernish military units, and taut tactical combat, but I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not that you can’t immediately tell from the trailers that it’s not, for example, a first-person shooter. I do know it means it looks visually impressive. I do know it means you should watch the latest trailer, twice.

Once to appreciate how it looks, and a second time to double check how the voice-over pronounces the world “stealth”.
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Next Car Game Update Adds American Sedan car, Figure 8 track, Cinematic Camera + More

Wurm Online back online following DDOS attack. €10,000 bounty still up for grabs

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Do you picture yourself as a bounty hunter? Leaping from tree to tree in subtropical Africa, knife between your teeth as you pursue a Bounty as it attempts to flee through the undergrowth? Almost unable to contain your desire to feed on its soft, chocolate skin and coconut filled body?

What do you mean it’s not that sort of bounty? Oh, right. A bounty. Wurm Online’s creators have put a  €10,000 bounty out on information that leads to the conviction of the person who brought down their game with a DDOS attack.

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Prison break game The Escapists finds publisher in Team17

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Breaking out of prison is no mean feat. There’s all that tunnel digging business, wall hopping shenanigans, dog doping trouble, and, then, after all that, you have to do it in such stark orange jumpsuits. The Escapists puts that struggle centre stage.

You’ll have to find moments in the tight prison schedule to orchestrate your escape without the guards knowledge, it won’t be easy but it looks like it’ll be a blast.

Oddly it’s being published by the team that gave us Worms. (Tee hee.)

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Warface Tower Raid video shows elevators are more fun with heavy machine guns

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As objectives go, stop a man from reaching the top of the building in his elevator is less than exciting. At least, that’s the case on paper. WarFace’s latest trailer proves it can be very very exciting if, as well as elevators, there are heavy machine guns, helicopters, mechs, and explosions.

WarFace continues to deliver on its ridiculous name with ridiculously fun levels.

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GOG to use regional pricing for bigger releases

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There were a number of things GOG strived for when it launched. DRM-free gaming was a big one, as was adding extra value to games by bundling releases with soundtracks and other niceties. But there was also global pricing.

The cost of a game often fluctuates between regions, in some cases significantly. An example would be the $80 Japanese release for Tomb Raider. GOG wanted to avoid that, selling a game for a single price the world over.

That won’t be the case for bigger releases, though.

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Risen 3: Titan Lords Revealed, First Screenshots Leaked

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THIEF will NOT Launch with Mantle Support, Coming on March via a Patch

February 23, 2014 John Papadopoulos 3 Comments

THIEF will be the second game that will support AMD’s new API, Mantle. And while Nixxes Software and Square Enix claimed that the game would support Mantle from the get-go, EIDOS Montreal’s ‘Valerie Bourdeau’ revealed that this won’t be the case after all. Continue reading →

 

 

 

Twitch Plays With Your Head: Daylight’s Streaming Screams

By Nathan Grayson on February 22nd, 2014 at 3:00 pm.

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Daylight, despite its balmy, flower-scented hug of a name, is meant to be scary. Wicked scary. If you have pants, they will be scared off your person. Your pants will leave you to die. It’s a fascinating experiment, too, because many of the game’s levels and scares are procedurally generated, hopefully leading to high replayability in a genre that typically goes cold after you’ve figured out where all the boogiemen live. But that, apparently, is only the beginning. Developer Zombie Studios has introduced a new wrinkle: the ability for Twitch users to enter commands into chat ala Twitch Plays Pokemon and produce spine-chilling, flesh-rattling effects. Like kitties meowing! Seriously. Details and release info below.

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Broken Age Act II Already Funded, Claims Double Fine

By Nathan Grayson on February 22nd, 2014 at 1:00 pm.

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Once upon a time in Prior Age 2013, you might remember that Tim Schafer garnered some Internet scorn by confessing that Broken Age had broken Double Fine’s bank. This despite a Kickstarter so successful that it kickstarted the notion of using Kickstarter for games (Kickstarter). But then Schafer and co, those clever jesters, they hatched a scheme: break the game into two parts (WORDPLAY) and then use the first to fund the second. So, did it work? It’s a multilayered question, a  nigh-ineffable series of concepts, a seemingly simple binary that explodes into mind-boggling complexity, and the answer is yes.

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Bad GOG. :(
Australians/New Zealanders will get shafted for sure.

Star Citizen sets procedural generation as next goal. Passes $39m in funding

Our style guide has a whole section devoted to Star Citizen. For the past year every article we’ve written has needed to start in the same way “Star Citizen’s now has more money than [insert large, fiscally abundant country :: Note: make sure it is larger than previous country referenced].” It has to stop. Star Citizen’s clearly out of control. It will never stop sucking in money. It will be referred to in the future by economic historians as the event that tore assunder our world of separate nation states as all governments became indebted to the Star Citizen machine.

On a separate note, Star Citizen’s next stretch goal is to add procedural generation.

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The strange case of Gearbox’s suit against 3D Realms and Interceptor

The tale of Duke Nukem seems to go on forever, doesn’t it? Gearbox are suing 3D Realms, the game’s original developer, and a studio called Interceptor for violating the IP Gearbox bought in 2010. What’s stranger is that, according to Gearbox, since 2010 3D Realms have been telling companies that they never sold the IP and that they’re free to develop Duke Nukem games.

This is all going to take a little unpacking but it’s a fascinating story.

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Grim Fandango no longer controls like a tank thanks to this new point and click mod

It might be sixteen years old but that’s not stopped one modder from tweaking Grim Fandango. The clever so and so has replaced Grim’s awkward tank-like movement system with a more traditional point and click control system.

It works a treat.

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Sir, You are Being Hunted gains final hunter, the Landowner

Sir, You Are Being Hunted’s cast is complete; the latest update brought with it the Landowner. A portly fellow with an elephant gun. He may not be quick on his feet but once you fall into his sights you’re likely not long for this world.

It marks the team’s entrance into the last leg of development.

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Flying Wild Hog Talks Shadow Warrior 64bit & CPU Optimizations, Mantle, Mod Tools, Future Plans

Blizzard rumoured to be modelling Heroes of the Storm's free-to-play on LoL

Go to the cupboard, grab the salt, and empty a semicircle of the white stuff onto the desk in front of you. Now let your hands rest gently atop the grains, and pinch down, hard. Taiwanese whispers suggest that Blizzard’s planned payment model for their new MOBA, Heroes of the Storm, will be more League of Legends than Dota 2.

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Oculus to temporarily stop taking Rift developer kit orders

Oculus VR, the presumably omniscient types behind the Rift, will suspend sales of the goggles’ developer kit in the near future. Somewhat alarmingly, third-party manufacturers have stopped making bits of it. According to the company’s community manager, though, that’s a “good problem to have”.

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Diablo III was going to have branching storylines - but multiplayer made it "impossible"

Suddenly, it makes sense. Why, in the early days of Diablo III, did Blizzard hire Leonard Boyarsky - one of the originators of the Fallout series, and later lead developer on Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines - to head up story on a linear action RPG?

Here’s why: an early version of Diablo III had a branching narrative, and a sliding moral scale that opened up new player choices. But it was not to be.

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Rocket man down: Dean Hall to leave Bohemia and DayZ behind in 2015; "I am a grenade"

Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall will have left Bohemia and the game that made his name behind by the end of this year. He’ll move back home to New Zealand to start a new multiplayer studio, and DayZ will continue on in the capable hands of the team he’s built at Bohemia.

“I am a grenade,” he explained, unhelpfully.

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Double Fine have sold enough Broken Age Part 1s to finish Part 2

Last year, Double Fine announced they’d overscoped their eight-times-funded Kickstarter adventure game and would be funding its second half with the sales of its first. More profound than the split of the game itself was the sudden and cataclysmic rift in its audience - while backers who’d been watching the dev team’s progress month-by-month seemed to take the news in their stride, broader public goodwill turned instantly to goodwon’t.

Whatever your stance, Double Fine’s financial statements say that it’s worked.

Said Tim Schafer: “We've made enough that we can make the second half of the game for sure.”

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Hands on with Wolfenstein: The New Order

Here are the first four notes I took while playing the opening stages of Wolfenstein: The New Order.

• Wolfenstein is very good shooting men game
• Aeroplanes crashing forever over and over
• Jumping from one plane to another
• Stabbed a half-robot dog

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Riot apologise for League of Legends disconnections, lag and login queues as arms race against hackers "continues to grow"

Is it possible that the internet is getting worse? Or is it simply that League of Legends continually fails to stop growing, becoming a larger and larger target? Either way, more than half the DDoS attacks Riot Games have ever witnessed against LoL have occurred in the last two months.

Riot record two to four attacks every day against one or more of their server regions - and each one “significantly” stronger than those they were fighting just a few months ago.

It’s a bleak background to an otherwise successful picture - like suddenly noticing a post-apocalyptic landscape behind Van Gogh’s sunflowers. But while the developers acknowledge they sometimes “lose the fight”, they are “not helpless” - and expect things to get better.

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Spring is for sin: Divinity release window pushed back

You might want to set aside some time between marvelling at the blooming of flowers and birth of lambs, this spring, to get in on some turn-based fantasy combat and CRPG goodness, because Divinity: Original Sin is gearing up for a spring launch.

Larian announced the new release window for their isometric romp through Rivellon today. The studio is using this extra time to implement feedback from Early Access players and Kickstarter backers, but really, it’s not very long to wait. 

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Armasaurus: Arma 3 dinosaur mod in development

As I write this, my hands are covered in the blood of the countless goats I’ve just sacrificed. Why, you ask? The reason is two-fold. Everyone knows that you sacrifice either goats or virgins when you really want something, and Jurassic Park taught me that dinosaurs like goats a lot. And I really want dinosaurs in Arma 3. 

Super-serious military sim Arma 2 brought us DayZ, but zombies have been done to death. Arma 3 is bringing us bringing us dinosaurs, which could easily eat a zombie, thanks to a mod from McRuppertle. Point your soon to be terrified eyes in the direction of the T-Rex animation test below.

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The Elder Scrolls Online's beta update is as big as Tamriel

The folks over at ZeniMax Online have been busy since the last Elder Scrolls Online beta event ended, it seems. All that unfiltered feedback has led to a gargantuan list of tweaks, bug fixes and improvements. It’s really, really, really long and includes changes to the levelling pace, more orchestral music across all zones, the implementation of new threats from cheeky Molag Bal and hundreds of other things.

You’ll be able to see the changes for yourself if you jump in-game during the next beta event, which will be announced very soon. 

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Risen becomes a trilogy with Titan Lords

I have a sizable soft spot for Piranha Bytes' creaky, German RPGs. I once convincingly argued that Gothic III was better than Oblivion when I drunkenly overheard people talking about Gothic at a party. Sure, they were discussing architecture, but I left them more knowledgeable about PC RPGs. 

The studio’s other property, Risen, doesn’t engender as much love. I rather enjoyed the first one, for all its flaws, but its sequel, Dark Waters, was a poorly-constructed, endlessly dreary experiment in making pirates pretty damn dull. 

Third time’s a charm, they say (who, I don’t know), so Piranha Bytes is going back to the series with Risen 3: Titan Lords. 

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Double Fine's Amnesia Fortnight Bad Golf pitch being made into a game by fans

Double Fine’s Patrick Hackett really wants Bad Golf to exist. In a previous Amnesia Fortnight, he pitched the idea of a 4-player golf game where you harass your fellow players by running over balls with golf carts, demolishing the fairway and breaking their carts. It sounded great, but failed to get the necessary votes to get turned into a prototype.

In this year’s Amnesia Fortnight, he pitched Bad Golf 2, the sequel to the game that would never be. Once again, his dreams were dashed. Instead, Mnemonic, Steed, Dear Leader and Pendleton Ward’s Little Pink Best Buds made the cut.

The story of Bad Golf could have ended there, were it not for diligent fans who decided that they would make the game a reality. 

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Sol Contingency – Descent remake in UDK – gets a new gameplay trailer

I'm so tempted to troll you with your poll ... must resist >.<

Anyway, it looks like Thief doesn't support Mantle nor TrueAudio yet. They will launch a patch later in March to add them.

Not that some won't be able to enjoy the game because of that, tho.

From the sound of things the game it's self is what is stopping people enjoying it