NASL bids farewell to Starcraft 2, Blizzard, and the WCS

The North American Star League have announced they’re parting ways with Blizzard and will no longer support competitive Starcraft 2 and the World Championship Series.

“Alas, fate has scouted our fast expand, and our time broadcasting StarCraft has come to an end,” the team write. “To all of our partners, sponsors, friends, and especially our fans, thank you.”

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Vertiginous Golf lands in the leather of Early Access

Are you that person who loudly complains at parties that your taste in games isn’t catered for? Do you shout that all you want is a dystopian, steampunk mini golf game and the big publishers won’t let your dream see the light of day? Month after month do you read the previews and news of studio closures in ‘Dystopian Minigolf Companion’ and think “Why is it my love that is so fated to never see life on the screen?”. If so you need to be quiet: you’re ruining perfectly good parties with your niche-driven whining.

Besides, Vertiginous Golf is available to play on Steam Early Access so your wish has been granted.

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Loadout’s feature roadmap tells of parties, bots and new modes aplenty

If, like Tim, you’ve fallen in love with Edge of Reality’s comic shooter, Loadout, then you’ll be glad to know the game’s getting nothing but better with it’s slew of planned updates. Reality have published a roadmap of upcoming features, all of which expand on multitude of weapons and maps available - who’d have thought a game with a gun called the Nutpunch Project could get any more enticing.

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Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy adventure game gets remastered release

It’s 30 years Infocom released the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy adventure game. One of the most brutally difficult, hilariously callous puzzle games you will likely play. Take too long finding the light switch in the first room and you will find the world demolished around you by the Vogon destructor fleet. Don’t eat the nuts after hitching a ride on the Vogon ship and you will die of protein loss. It's a hard game.

To mark its anniversary the BBC have released a remastered version of the game. It’s in fancy HD now.

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Lego The Hobbit trailer introduces you to the ragtaggle crew you’ll control

The Lego games continue to be the finest thing to come from Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit (that compliment carries varying degrees of weight depending on your opinion of the films). The latest trailer introduces the different characters you’ll be controlling, in particular the group of dwarfs that accompany Bilbo in his quest into Smaug’s lair.

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FFXIV: A Realm Reborn patch 2.2 screenshots surface from the depths

A new primal stirs in the lands of Eorzea. The Sahagin, a beast tribe of the Indigo Deep have finally succeeded in summoning their ruthless god, Leviathan. Patch 2.2 for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn will put players head on with this new threat in an all new main story quest. Also in is a new system for altering the appearance of gear using “glamour” magicks.

We’ve fished up some screenshots of the upcoming patch, featuring many of the main story characters and the dreaded Leviathan himself.

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Just Cause 2 Multiplayer – Upcoming Version Will Add Earthquakes & Amphibious Cars

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Unreal Engine 4 – Impressive Video Shows Off An Entire Honda Jet Rendered In Real-Time

March 9, 2014 John Papadopoulos 0 Comments

Company 4T has released an amazing video, showing off a Honda Jet that was rendered in real-time by Unreal Engine 4. This tech demo showcases an amazing level of detail, really high-res textures, great reflections and refractions, as well as GI effects. What’s also impressive is that the entire scene is dynamic and dynamically lit. According to the company, each cabin light can be toggled and adjusted and anything that can move does (arm rests extend, knobs turn, tray tables extend and even the sink in the lavatory works). Make sure to watch the video at 1080p as it’s really, really impressive. Enjoy! Continue reading →

So... I was just wasting a bit of time looking at different forums when I saw over at [H]ardForum that someone had done something: a surround setup with 3 4K monitors in portrait mode!

WOW.

The thread is recent, 2 days old, and besides a lot of negative comments for going with portrait mode and the bezels (understandable) he has posted a few screenshots with good fps! (but of course he runs a 3-way SLI

Here's the thread: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1809835

And here the pics at native resolution from

F1 with all settings maxed out (No AA) @ 6480x3840, 100 fps : here

Assassin's Creed IV, almost 60 fps : here

And Borderlands 2, a little over 40 fps : here

So, what do you think? Because I'm speachless.

I wish I had that kind of cash...

Personally I hate the giant bezels breaking up the gameplay. Ill just wait till one of the big curved 4k displays becone cheaper and buy one of those.

One Way Heroics is a pretty neat game. You should all go and buy it, it's real cheap.

Way to Singularity flies you into a blackhole

Block holes, the gravity well left behind by a dead star, draw into them everything from dust particles, to light, to milkshake. Under immense force a black hole will crush those particles down into super dense molecules. Picture the densest, darkest brownie you’ve ever eaten - the kind with big chocolate chunks in it - that’s nothing like a black hole but it’s hardly wasted time to think about a chocolate brownie.

Way to Singularity puts you in the pilots of a ship aiming right for the centre of such an entity (a black hole, not a brownie), and it’s great fun. It’s free, too.

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Elder Scrolls Online to be lovingly cluttered with more items

When we sat down to play Elder Scrolls Online, Nick, Jeremy, and I all separately came to the conclusion that there wasn’t enough stuff. We didn’t care what it was - plates, butter knives, blank bits of paper - we wanted more of it. This is an MMO based on games like Morrowind and Skyrim, after all, the kings of game worlds filled with detritus.

Zenimax Online Studio have answered. In the near future we’ll see the world populated by things. There are a great many other changes coming, too.

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20,000 Leagues Above the Sky takes piracy to the islands floating over the seven seas

Floating islands, steampunk airships, pirates. 20,000 Leagues Above the Sky has tapped straight into the Davy Jones’ Locker that is my heart. Taking nods from Baldur’s Gate, Firefly, and Studio Ghibli, the game has you fly between different floating skyports, picking up odd jobs and brigands, all the while learning about the strange world you inhabit.

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Colour me excited: Perlinoid is a puzzle game based on palette

This won’t be a game for the colourblind. Perlinoid’s a game about blending and separating colours to advance through alien environments. We’ve only a short video of in-game footage to work from but in 30 seconds we get a pretty good idea of the puzzles and scope this mechanic has.

Watch it and prepare to have your brain scratched.

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Proven Lands sets its sandbox world in the golden age of sci fi

Let me just quote the developer here to see if you’re interested - separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak - “Starting with a backdrop of endless, procedurally generated terrain, Proven Lands combines 3D, science fiction, survival, sandbox, roguelike and RPG elements with an AI-driven meta game - like a game master - and on top of all that: modding!”

Still here? Good, because Proven Lands looks freakin’ awesome.

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Age of Empires II: The Forgotten discovers a whole new free campaign: El Dorado

Microsoft are continuing to support the recent HD rerelease of Age of Empires II by giving a free campaign to all owners of the The Forgotten expansion. El Dorado tells the story of Francisco Orellana and Gonzalo Pizarro in their search for the lost city of gold. It’s made up of four new missions and a load of historical backstory for interested players.

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THIEF – New Patch Comes With Performance Improvements & Crash Fixes

I wholeheartedly agree. I hate bezels.

But, if you don't want to wait that much, you could go for the 34" 21:9 LG monitor with 3,440 x 1,440 res.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3195513

Standby for Titanfall: PC players can now pre-load via Origin

If you’re going to succeed in the rubble-troubled streets of Angel City, you’re going to need to improve your timing. You’ll want to engage your camo at such a time that you can dart from one window to another unseen. You’ll have to reload your rockets before that fellow Titan rounds the corner, not afterwards.

The improvement program starts here. Pre-load your copy of Titanfall before it unlocks on Origin later this week, and that’s 50GB you won’t have to install while everybody else is hopping off roofs and stabbing strangers with data knives.

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Warcraft movie star Dominic Cooper talks the "terrifying" task of appeasing Blizzard fans

Hollywood type and Best History Boy Dominic Cooper is fresh off the Need for Speed flick, which early accounts suggest has worked out rather nicely. Need for Speed, though, doesn’t have lore. It doesn’t have a decade of continuous fiction behind it, nor a playerbase with long-held ideas about the way its world looks and its characters talk.

That’s why Cooper’s pooing himself a bit about the upcoming Warcraft movie.

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Tales from the Borderlands to feature not just one unreliable narrator, but two

Update: Added full SXSW panel video on Tales from the Borderlands.

Unreliable narrators are a uniquely compelling prospect in vidyagames, where tricksy designers can force players to occupy whitewashed worlds and live through altered events dreamed up by storytellers with ulterior motives.

It’s remained a chiefly literary concept, however - until bullshitters helped elevate Dragon Age II beyond its repeating level design, and render Call of Juarez: Gunslinger an unlikely candidate for best shooter of last year.

The same trick will power the future of a post-Walking Dead Telltale - whose Gearbox tie-in Tales from the Borderlands will feature two playable liars.

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MMO ecognomics: Warlords of Draenor trailer flaunts new character model and animations

Here’s a trailer designed to exclaim three things we already knew: a new Warcraft expansion is happening! It’s called Warlords of Draenor! You’ll suddenly be level 90! 

The main draw for us is a new gnome character model. We’ve already seen the updated female dwarf and modernised female orc - here we get to see how the men are shaping up.

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Planets³ is a hyper-ambitious sandbox RPG that's both Minecraft and MMO

Of all the games to attempt to one-up Minecraft, there are none more literal about it than Planets³. So you like cubes, huh, Notch? Well, what if I told you we have a cube so large it’s an entire planet? And that it and a bunch of other cube planets spin in a square trajectory around a block sun?

Fortunately, the would-be Planets³ dev team have a tentative feature set to back it up.

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Diary of the Dead: Dark Souls Deaths counts your many failures

With Dark Souls 2 looming, due out April 25th, perhaps it's a good time to reflect over your failures in its predecessor; all those untimely deaths at the boney hands of the undead or huge claws of a dragon. 

Fan-made Dark Souls Deaths has you covered. Simply upload your Dark Souls save file to the site, and voila, it will tell you just how absolutely terrible you are. 

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Frozen Endzone Early Access kicks off today

Frozen Endzone, the simultaneous-turn-based robot sport from the future launched on Steam today, through Early Access. 

The strategy game from the makers of Frozen Synapse has been in beta since early December, and the move to Early Access brings with it a big update including a new game mode, editors and a commentary system.

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World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor now available for pre-purchase; could launch in autumn

World of Warcraft’s boost to level 90 trailer wasn’t the only thing to come out of Azeroth today. Warlords of Draenor is now available for pre-purchase. It’ll set you back £34.99/$49.99 for the standard edition and £49.99/$69.99 for the Digital Deluxe edition.

There’s also a tentative release window of autumn this year, while the product details section states that it will release on or before 20/12/2014.

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EA CEO lays out virtual reality plans

EA CEO Andrew Wilson voiced the company’s virtual reality strategy in a panel at SXSW Gaming recently. He explained that a company can’t plan its future around hardware, as it’s too volatile a space, so EA is looking at how players are consuming games right now and how technology such as VR will be used by them in the future.

"When we think about making games today, we think less about the technology or the means of experiencing the game, and we think more about the modality of play," Wilson said. "So, how are you trying to interact with that game?"

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An unofficial way to play PC games with an Xbox One controller may appear as soon as tomorrow

Despite Xbox 360 controller support being pretty common in PC titles over the last years - to the point where it’s recommended in the requirements list of some games - there’s still no official support for Xbox One controllers. Though such support is planned for this year.

Developer Lucas Assis was hunting for unofficial drivers when he discovered that one already existed, but its creator didn’t release it due to “legal issues”. That’s when he decided to make one himself, after a fashion; one he thinks is safe to release. 

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Monochromatic FPS Betrayer launches on March 24th

Betrayer has made me rather scared of many things: trees, monochrome colour palettes, 17th Century Spaniards… okay, so maybe just three things. Blackpowder’s haunting FPS mystery is unsettled the bejesus out of me when I played a preview build last year, and I expect it to do the same when it leaves Early Access in the 24th.

It’s finished, revealed Blackpowder - a studio made up from ex-Monolith folk - last week. “We're grateful for all the feedback and suggestions the community provided during our Early Access. Your involvement resulted in many new features and refinements and helped us make a better, richer game experience.”

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The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II Comes Out On April 17th

I'll post a couple of pics I've found...

Dota 2 makes Perfect World money in China, large-scale launch coming "soon"

The fiscal year ends in a couple of weeks - which right now means it’s about Christmastime for money. Chinese MMO specialists Perfect World announced a $110.7 million drop in profits since last year, and so were rightfully reticent to break out the mulled wine - but still had something to celebrate with their shareholders.

Namely early revenue from Dota 2, which Perfect World are in the tentative stages of introducing to mainland China.

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In The Elder Scrolls Online, crafted gear will be "slightly better" than its found equivalent

Zenimax have gone to great lengths to ensure that The Elder Scrolls Online, like its namesakes, is exploration-driven - and for the most part they’ve succeeded. Skill points are acquired from magic crystals secreted around its maps, and you won’t find many if you stick to the cities.

Sometimes, though, it’ll make sense to chain yourself to the leg of a crafting table. Because the level 10 axe you put together yourself is going to be ever-so-slightly better for cleaving with than the level 10 axe your friend will ride back into town wielding at the end of the day.

Double Fine take a second bob at the apple with Costume Quest 2

Double Fine splitting their company into four teams post-Brutal Legend hasn’t just meant four times as many games - it’s meant four times as many announcements.

In a games news world where the time between discovery and release can be long enough to encompass excitement, backlash and entrenched opinion, that’s been nice: a series of bite-sized chunks of anticipation followed by (more often than not) fulfillment.

Here’s another: the studio’s very first sequel. Costume Quest 2 will see the return of protagonist twins Reynold and Wren - though not lead designer Tasha Harris, who has since returned to a career at Pixar.

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Weekend in Paris: Riot bring Europe "a little love" with League of Legends All-Star 2014

Riot have announced deets for a major happening in the annual League of Legends calendar: the All-Star tournament. The Le Zenith Arena in Paris will inaugurate a new two-pronged format across four days, beginning May 8.

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Why it's time to reinstall Diablo III

Diablo III is insanely fun right now. 

And this horde of orange loot is why. Just look at it. A couple of weeks ago, this bountiful hoard of legendaries from Diablo III would’ve taken the majority of a month to acquire. What was even worse is that only one or two of the items would of been deemed “OK” at best, with the rest finding their way onto the auction house. Now however, they're all really good.

The difference is I acquired all of that in one sitting of the campaign last night. Patch 2.0 - and most notably Loot 2.0 - is responsible, and it’s amazing. 

It’s why you should reinstall Diablo III and get playing again. 

And to think Reaper of Souls isn’t even out yet.

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Pyramid scheme: The Old Republic's PvP Huttball to get a vertical makeover on April 8

One of those things that must have made KOTOR seem such a prime candidate for MMOification - besides its cooldown-based combat system and setting in bloody Star Wars - was its proclivity for minigames. 

In 2003, a player might have interrupted their journey of extraordinary self-discovery to play a few rounds of pazaak and watch the pod-racing, before decamping to the Ebon Hawke for a spot of turret target practice. 

These are precisely the sort of embedded distractions MMO players like to get involved in. In SWTOR, that’s manifested as something called Huttball: “the most brutal game in the galaxy”, funded by its slimiest residents. To date it’s had a single PvP warzone to its name - but BioWare Austin have built a new one in portrait, on the atmospherically poisonous adopted homeworld of the Hutt: Quesh.

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Time to mech a move: Titanfall is out today (and you'll want to let it download overnight)

Microsoft would quite like Titanfall to be the thing the Xbox One has over the PS4, and so they and EA have done everything in their power to make sure you don’t forget about it. But just in case you had: Titanfall’s out today on the PC too, and better there.

If you’re planning on playing it pretty sharpish, a warning: you might want to get started downloading and installing the thing.

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Arma III single player campaign will conclude on March 20 with large-scale "tactical freedom"

Gosh, that’s a relief. Bohemia have been naming their sequential single-player campaigns in such a fashion that when you line the spines up on your digital shelf they’ll constitute a three-word guide to Arma-ing. It’s a relief, then, to discover that what follows ‘Survive’ and ‘Adapt’ isn’t ‘Lie in the grass and wait for the tanks to roll over you’, but ‘Win’.

Win will be the concluding part of Arma III’s ‘The East Wind’ campaign. Out in just over a week, it’ll finish the story of infantryman Ben Kerry and pull together all of the game’s elements for large-scale tactical combat.

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Oculus hire Valve VR man Atman Binstock, name him Chief Architect

You know all those shellshocked second-hand accounts that’ve been emerging from Steam Dev Days in recent weeks? Of imaginary fifty-foot drops and walls covered in serial killer QR codes?

All of that was the doing of Atman Binstock: sounds like a BioShock villain, actually one of the lead engineers and driving forces behind Valve’s internal VR projects. None of his work there will see the commercial light of day, sadly - but he’s just now moved to Oculus, where his knowledge and drive can power the Rift.

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League of Legends' Team Builder is live in North America; lead developer responds to feedback

League of Legends’ Team Builder is in live beta for North American players right now, until tomorrow at 9AM PDT. It allows players to queue for particular positions and roles, selecting specific champions rather than rushing in or bargaining when they hit the champion select screen.

Players have jumped in to fiddle around with it, and Riot has already started to address some of the feedback. 

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Monsters run free: The Witcher 3 delayed until February 2015

Tragedy has struck. The monsters are winning. Dragons are burning down the countryside, ghouls are having loud parties in graveyards and demonic beasties are hassling folk in the street. What we need is a Witcher, but we won’t be getting one until February, 2015.

Can we even survive for that long?

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Van Helsing Jr. has another Incredible Adventure on April 17th

Whether it was my love of wide-brimmed hats or my dream of having a ghost chum that engendered me towards The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, I can’t say for sure, but it really sunk its monstrous claws into me.  

Neocore’s action RPG had more than hats and ghosts, of course. Deep character progression; compelling, varied combat encounters with interesting monsters; the curious juxtaposition of cheeky comedy and grim horror - there’s a lot to recommend it. So its upcoming sequel, due out on April 17th, is worth keeping an eye out for.

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Titanfall had a rocky start, but the worst seems to be over

Titanfall, which released in North America last night, has had a slightly rocky start. PC players started having trouble immediately, with the majority of problems relating to logging into EA’s servers. A patch was issued quickly, seemingly fixing the connection problems. 

The scars from EA’s previous high profile cock-ups, namely SimCity and Battlefield 4, still stung, and some users were quick to declare Titanfall’s launch another massive failure. 

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Cancel your engagements: Hearthstone just launched

Hearthstone, Blizzard’s terrifyingly addictive online game of card battles, just launched. It’s been a bit of a fixture around the digital PCGN office since closed beta, worming its way into our lives and making it rather hard to work. It’s not our fault, I say; we’re just weak. 

If you weren’t fiddling around with it during the beta phase, you can hop on in now pretty easily. Wander over to playhearthstone.com and download it from there, or grab it from the Battle.net client. 

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This weekend's Elder Scrolls Online beta event unveils the Imperial race

The Elder Scrolls Online is gearing up for another beta weekend, kicking off on Friday, March 14th at 5PM GMT, running until Monday, March 17th at 3:59AM GMT. 

This weekend is going to be a bit different from the last couple, however, as ZeniMax is unlocking the Imperial Edition and Explorer Pack for all beta testers. This means you’ll be able to play as those boring old Imperials or any race in any alliance, so your Redguard can start in Skyrim, for instance. 

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Alone With You is an ominous sci-fi dating sim from the creator of Home

Benjamin Rivers’ horror thriller Home and I did not see eye to eye. Experimental and certainly unique, it tasked players with solving a mystery where they ultimately decided the resolution. Unfortunately, this led to all resolutions being vague and unfulfilling, as well as inconsistent with the tense build up. It bled ambition from every pore, however.

Rivers is following up his peculiar horror adventure with a lonely sci-fi outing. Alone With You puts players in the space boots of a stranded astronaut, stuck all by himself on an uninhabited planet following a failed terraforming expedition. Well, he’s not quite by himself. He’s accompanied by an AI partner, somewhat evocative of A Space Odyssey’s HAL.

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Crytek confirms Linux support for the new Cryengine

Crytek has confirmed that the new CryEngine will have full native support, spilling the beans in a teaser of what they’ll be showing off at GDC next week in San Francisco.

Alongside CryEngine working on Linux, the developer and publisher will be showing off the new Warface modes, Tower Raid and Capture.

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Watch Dogs’ Creative Director: PC Version Better Than E3 2012 Build In Many Regards, NG Close To PC

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Ex-Elder Scrolls & Ultima Online Developers Form Citadel Studios, Announce Shards

March 11, 2014 John Papadopoulos 2 Comments

Citadel Studios, a new independent video game development company focusing on multiplayer role-playing games for PC, announced today Shards. According to the press release, for the past six months Citadel has been heads down working on their first project, codenamed “Shards,” and has released a teaser trailer that can be viewed below. Continue reading →

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ArcheBlade Releases On Steam This April

March 11, 2014 John Papadopoulos 3 Comments

CodeBrush Games has announced that its multi-player fighting game ArcheBlade will officially launch this April on Steam. Although CodeBrush Games did not reveal a specific date, the company promised to make another announcement when the date is finally set. Continue reading →

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Unreal Engine-powered Sci-Fi Horror Adventure ‘Caffeine’ Gets A New Teaser Trailer

March 12, 2014 John Papadopoulos 1 Comment

Incandescent Imaging has released a new teaser trailer for its upcoming sci-fi horror adventure title, Caffeine. Caffeine is powered by the Unreal Engine and this new teaser trailer features a snippet of in-game footage. Incandescent Imaging promised to release a demo for Caffeine soon, so stay tuned for more. Until then, enjoy the teaser trailer! Continue reading →