Yea I decided I'm posting non specific multiplatform stuff here because I can
Diablo III: Reaper of Souls revealed
Blizzard have just unveiled the first expansion pack for Diablo III - as hinted at last week, it’s titled Reaper of Souls. What’s unexpected is how much they’re adding to the game, including a new character class, The Crusader, raising the level cap to 70, a new story act, two new game modes and a redesigned loot system.
Eve: Valkyrie is incredible. Let’s just get this out of the way first.
It’s a space shooter: a three versus three deathmatch currently played exclusively via a 3D VR headset like the Oculus Rift. It’s played with a pad. You use the left stick to rotate and direct your craft. The bumper buttons traverse, and the triggers fire your weapons. There’s also a neat mechanic: you use your head motion to lock onto an enemy fighter, as if the HUD is bolted to your forehead.
The sense of speed, the sense of space: this is what I dreamed games would feel like. And it exists.
No one would have believed in the last days of 2010 that by the time 2K Marin’s reimagined XCOM hit Steam libraries, we’d all be looking forward to another helping of Sectoids from the Civ guys instead.
Yet here we are: an honest-to-god Enemy Unknown expansion has appeared as an ominous blip on our radars. The new tools and terrors it offers are all about making your men and women more than they are; more than they could possibly have been before the invasion, for better or, well, not better.
New Soldier Abilities: Research a new alien technology to advance the capabilities of operatives:
Gene Mods: Construct the Genetics Lab to physically enhance operatives’ abilities, including augmentations to the chest, brain, eyes, skin and legs.
MECs: Build the Cybernetics Lab to enable the construction of the new Mechanized Exoskeletal Cybersuit, or MEC. The new MEC Trooper class has specialized abilities and each suit can be upgraded with new weapons including the flamethrower, grenade launcher and more.
New Weapons and Equipment: Give operatives an extra tactical edge with new projects from the engineering team in the Foundry;
New Enemy Threats: Adopt new tactics to counter the threats from a host of new enemies, including the Mechtoid;
New Strategic Resource: A valuable new alien resource, known as Meld, has been discovered. Secure it on the battlefield and use it carefully back at base to unlock new research and upgrades;
New Tactical Challenges and Maps: Face new tactical challenges, on nearly 50% more maps;
New Multiplayer Maps, Units and Abilities: Create custom squad from a wider array of options and dominate opponents in intense, one-on-one, turn-based matches.
Total War: Rome 2 pre-sales six times that of Total War: Shogun 2
Total War: Rome 2 is has broken records by being the most pre-ordered title in the series’ history, SEGA has announced. There’s also an unboxing video – of sorts – for the Collector’s Edition below as well.
According to the publisher, pre-sales are six times that of Total War: Shogun 2 in 2011.
“Our expectations for Total War: Rome 2 are extremely high,” said SEGA product manager Sam Sadeghi. “It is already our fastest pre-ordered Total War game of all time.”
To support the game’s launch, SEGA will be rolling out a large marketing campaign which will see the strategy title from The Creative Assembly featured in ads on Discover History and Quest.
Endless Space dev behind fantasy 4X Endless Legend
Amplitude Studios is working on a new 4X in the vein of its quiet PC hit Endless Space, but with a grand fantasy twist.
New title Endless Legend ditches the sci-fi theme for fantasy, as you’ll see in the screens below – a move Amplitude CEO Mathieu Girard said has long been an ambition of the indie team’s.
“Creating a fantasy 4X game was a dream for all of us at Amplitude. The success of Endless Space and the support of our community have allowed to make this dream come true,” he said.
“With respect toward great games released before us, we intend to set a new benchmark in creating a rich, immersive, thrilling, and accessible 4X strategy game in a new fantasy setting.”
Set long after an apocalyptic event, Endless Legend starts players with just one settlement and has them branch out, discovering other civilisations. Here’s the official low-down:
Key features:
Explore legendary lands with one of the eight civilizations available both in single and multiplayer, as you adventure through seasons, striving to discover the secrets of Auriga.
Expand beyond the unknown and send your heroes in every corner of the world to find mysterious artifacts to equip your troops, and assimilate powerful minor factions which will help you overwhelm your opponents.
Exploit every opportunity by researching new technologies and magical powers while collecting Dust, luxuries and strategic resources tradable on the marketplace.
Exterminate fools who defy you with a genuine combat system where terrain and your unit abilities are key to take the advantage over the enemy armies.
Endless Legend is expected in northern spring 2014, for Mac and PC.
AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series Video Cards Will Support DirectX 11.2 After Driver Update
Windows 8.1 Preview introduced DirectX 11.2, which brings a host of new features to improve performance in your games and graphics apps. The standout feature appears to be Direct3D tiled resources, which allows developers to easily use both GPU and system memory (RAM) to store textures. Microsoft has confirmed that DirectX 11.2 will be exclusive to Windows 8.1 and the Xbox One. AMD Radeon HD 7990 Video cards based on AMD’s Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, the Radeon HD 7000 series and the OEM-rebadged HD 8000 series, aren’t currently compatible with DirectX 11.2. A number of sites reported last week that they will never be compatible, but AMD says that is not the case. The issued the following statement today that says they will introduce a driver update that will enable DirectX 11.2 support on AMD Radeon HD 7000 series video cards!
“The Radeon™ HD 7000 series hardware architecture is fully DirectX 11.2-capable when used with a driver that enables this feature. AMD is planning to enable DirectX 11.2 with a driver update in the Windows® 8.1 launch timeframe in October, when DirectX® 11.2 ships. Today, AMD is the only GPU manufacturer to offer fully-compatible DirectX 11.1 support, and the only manufacturer to support Tiled Resources Tier-2 within a shipping product stack.” - AMD PR
DayZ: only networking left before alpha, no release dates
There’s just one more feature to implement before DayZ goes into alpha, creator Dean Hall has said.
Hall told Polygon only networking remains before the game hits alpha release.
Nevertheless, he won’t give a release date, and said the development team no longer even talks about them.
“I’ve made a heck of a lot of mistakes giving out release dates. We don’t have any release dates internally anymore,” he said.
Although Hall gave his original release dates in good faith, later assessment of the DayZ standalone release project revealed much more work to be done than he initially expected.
“We realised we needed to redo everything and that didn’t go over very well. In December we had nothing to show for it, nothing. It was very, very awful. Our worst fears were realised,” he said.
Want to see how DayZ’s getting along? Hall gave us a good look at it at gamescom.
King Art Games has set a beta and release window for its crowdfunded strategy effort, Battle Worlds: Kronos. Joystiq reports the beta launch in mid-November, with an open beta to kick off a few weeks in advance. It’s coming to Linux, Mac and PC, with a mobile launch expected in 2014, and has not yet been priced, although King Art is aiming for under $30, and plans to offer free DLC after launch.
Tropico developer’s next game is Diablo-esque Victor Vran
Tropico and Omerta developer Haemimont is turning its attention to dungeon crawling for its next project.
The new project is called Victor Vran, presumably the name of the dude in the hat. Haemimont CEO Gabriel Dobrev told Joystiq the ARPG is expected in early 2014. Platforms were not announced, but presumably PC at the very least, given Haemimont’s history.
Victor Vran isn’t a straight ttake on the Diablo genre; it includes platform elements such as wall jumping.
Victor can use scythes, guns and “lightning guns”, among other weapons. Although all players will be cast as Victor, multiplayer is possible thanks to character reskins.
Dobrev said Victor Vran is a “pet project” of Haemimont’s which it has ben working on independently around the Tropico series for two years.
Star Citizen’s first playable module out next week for backers
Star Citizen backers will be able to try out the first playable module next week, Chris Roberts has told Eurogamer.
The module includes a hangar which can be moved about with an avatar, and you can even drive a space buggy in it. A dogfighting module is planned for release by the end of the year and a planetside module is due for release in March 2014.
“I’m actually not taking money from investors now,” he said. “The budget for what we’re delivering is about $20 million, and we’re almost there – we’ll probably be there before the end of the year.
“The nice thing about not taking the investor’s money is, as much as they’re nice investors, they want a return at some point. If this thing’s a big success, they’ll say, ‘EA and Activision want this for about $100 million and that gives me a certain return on my investment’ – but that may not be the best thing for the game. I like the idea that the game gets 100 per cent community funded because all they care about is getting a great game, and all I care about is making a great game.”
The CryEngine 3 powered PC titles hasn’t been ruled out for next-gen consoles in the future, according to Roberts, as PS4 and Xbox One “are just high-end PCs with custom operating systems.”
However, if the game were to land on living room boxes, console manufactures would have to be on board with the game’s free content updates which react to “what the players are doing… If the platform holders wanted to do that, then great.”
Klei has added Steam Workshop support to its wilderness survival sim Don’t Starve. This will make it easier for players to find and install mods directly through Steam.
Players will now have easy access to language translation packs, new character skins, custom creatures, and world generation mods, as well as a host of other mods created by the community.
Alongside the Steam Workshop update, Klei has added a new level to Don’t Starve called The Ruins. It comprises five different areas filled with new items and creatures. These include an Ancient Guardian and the Dangling Depth Dweller spider, which sounds absolutely terrifying. There is also a new Morgue screen that keeps a tally of how many times you perish. Just so you know how terrible you are at the game at all times.
@DirextX 11.2: If a graphics card can run it with only a driver update, it's fairly obvious that Win7 (and maybe Vista) could also use it with a software update. But of course MSoft thinks we'll ditch Win7 and move to Win8 just because of that.
Please excuse my bad English.
Currently gaming on a PC with an i5-4670k@stock (for now), 16Gb RAM 1600 MHz and a GTX 1070
Steam / Live / NNID : jonxiquet Add me if you want, but I'm a single player gamer.
Total War: Rome 2 post-release free and paid content plans announced
Total War: Rome 2 players will be the recipients of post-release content in both free and paid formats, The Creative Assembly has announced.
Alongside paid-for DLC, regular free content and feature updates will be included: the first of these, the Greek States Culture Pack and Pontus faction will release at launch alongside the game.
“As with Shogun 2, we will continually improve the game’s compatibility, optimization and integral features such as AI and gameplay balancing post-release, and plan to add to that with new control schemes and additional free formats on other operating systems,” said lead designer James Russell.
“We are also very proud of how Shogun 2 is our most moddable Total War to date with over 500 user-made mods on Steam Workshop alone. We hope to support ROME 2 in a similar fashion. Rome 2 will be the biggest game we’ve ever released, in terms of scope, gameplay features and sheer weight of content, but even then we’re just scratching the surface of the Roman period – an era so rich in diversity that it’s easy to foresee releasing relevant content for years after ROME 2has shipped.”
In addition to free content, players can expect to see Culture Packs that add more playable factions and unique units, Feature Packs that add gameplay or wide-ranging aesthetic changes, and Campaign Packs that add entirely new story-based campaign expansions.
By October, players will be able to add the Seleucid Empire Factions to the playable roster for free and the Nomadic Tribes Culture Pack featuring the Royal Scythians, Roxolani and Massagetae as DLC.
Total War: ROME 2 will be released on the September 3 and the Greek States Culture Pack is free when pre-ordering from participating retailers.
Standing alone is hard. Believe me, I know. As a newborn infant, it took me years before I was able to master the art without any parental assistance. Even now – as a young adult who lives inside of a house and can cook without burning it all down (some of the time) – I still occasionally go sailing end-over-end as though tripped by some malevolent practical joke ghost. That in mind, I can totally understand why DayZ’s standalone version keeps slipping. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. And so, due to online infrastructure issues, Dean “Rocket” Hall’s expanded multiplayer survival sandbox is once again without a release date.
Once upon a time, the standalone was supposed to have already flipped the switch on open alpha by now, but no such luck. So then, what’s the holdup this time? According to Hall, just one thing. One very, very crucial thing. See, online games don’t really work without the online part. Hall explained to Joystiq:
“The awkward thing is the only thing we’re waiting on is the core network architecture. That’s the kind of thing only a few people can work on. It’s very specialized. It’s like, you can’t throw more pilots at a plane. You put a thousand pilots in a plane it’s not going to fly any faster.”
And once that’s ready at some indeterminate date? “Bam, it’s go time,” said Hall.
In the meantime, he noted that the extra lengthy wait might not be such a bad thing. He wants a small, dedicated community of hardcore survivalists – not a mindless mass of transient ne’er-do-wells. The plan is to attract a solid base first, then expand out into the zombo-fad-obsessed hordes.
And hey, speed is all well and good, but if the result is a sticky, half-chewed mess, then why even bother?
“The worst thing we could do would be to release too early. Flat out, that’s the stupidest thing we could do. [The alpha launch] is going to be riddled with bugs, but the one thing I don’t want it to be riddled with is terrible multiplayer, it’s a multiplayer game.”
ishiki said: I have a dragon Age 2 code... the game is bleh imo. But I got it in a bundle back with Origins Ultimate (Cheaper than individually buying DLC).
I'll give that to someone.
I'll take it , I never touched that abomination but if it's free lol...
@TheVoxelman on twitter
, I never touched that abomination but if it's free lol...
