Woooh! Good news!  I completely agree, Scoobes. :)

The PC Gaming Master race, continues to march forwards! :P

Second statement from CA on Rome II's release (11 Sep 2013)

    Hi everyone,

    We’ve just put up a hotfix that significantly improves campaign map frame-rate on a variety of hardware combinations that were getting frame rates less than 15 fps. It took us until Monday to get a case of this happening in the studio, but it was a very simple fix, so we’ve decided to put it out as a single issue patch. This bug was introduced very late in the process, but we absolutely should have found and fixed it before release.

    This release has obviously not gone as planned for some people, and I want to apologise to everyone out there who had issues with the game, whether they were hardware issues or disappointment in the performance of game features. We obviously don’t plan to release a game with any bugs, performance and AI issues. How this has happened is something we’re beginning to post mortem in detail now.

    Fortunately, the same tech that gave us the rope to work on the game right up to release lets us keep working on it after it’s out, and the flaws in the game are mostly just bugs, not structural defects. We can and will get the game to where we wanted it to be for everyone.

    The top priority is stability and performance – both frame rates in battle and campaign, and end of turn times and loading times. Then gameplay spoilers – AI flaws and exploits, balancing tweaks and the level of challenge on higher difficulties. Then minor bugs, lesser features that really didn’t pan out, UI improvements, and longer term adjustments to features and systems that could be better. Because there are a lot of us working in parallel there will be a mixture of different priority fixes in each patch. Much of this work would be part of the usual planned improvements we would make to our games post-launch anyway, but we are aware that they have now taken on extra significance and importance.

    We have a major improvement to end of turn times in the pipeline, along with around 100 fixes in the next patch. We have another 100 or so fixes already being tested for the patch after that. At this point the limiting factor on getting issues fixed in patches is not our ability to fix issues, it’s our ability to test them and guarantee that we don’t repeat past mistakes by putting a patch out that breaks something new. We’ll also be putting each patch up as a beta you can opt in to before releasing it. It’s our aim to continue patching more or less weekly until all the bugs are dealt with.

    Then we can start the kind of dialogue we always want to be having with the community – which new features you like, which you don’t like, which deleted features from previous games you really miss and so on. That’s a good conversation to be having, and since it’s our intention not to fall in to the trap of just re-skinning the previous game each time, it’s one that hopefully you’ll be having for years to come.

    Lastly, I’m hoping we can fundamentally treat our releases differently in the future. Long open betas are the way things are going, and while that model hasn’t been compatible with the way Total War has been built to date, that could be the way forward.

    Mike Simpson
    Creative Director
    Creative Assembly

http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/89314-Second-statement-from-CA-on-Rome-II-s-release-%2811-Sep-2013%29

steam share,wow

come on guys surely with just a couple of people from here as steam freinds i could probably game free for the rest of my life

Essentially what it's doing is what people were doing anyways except now, you don't have to share PW. So you can share it with a few more people you don't trust as much.

I've always shared my account with my brother.

i only have 35 games on my steam account,you lot probably have all of them anyway,it would have to be a one way deal :)

how would it work anyway,there must be limits of things for sharing

Valve and the IGF team up again to bring 2014′s finalists to Steam

The Independent Games Festival has renewed its deal with Valve to give shortlisted finalists of the 2014 IGF Awards an automagical Golden Ticket onto Steam. All main competition finalists will be offered a distribution deal, whether they’re nominated in the individual Excellence categories, the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, or the Nuovo Award. “Nuovo” being IGF speak for “kinda weird”.

Thanks to the IGF 2013 deal, Steam became home to games like Kentucky Route Zero, Starseed Pilgrim, Bientot l’Ete, Gone Home, MirrorMoon EP, and – winner of the Grand Prize, Nuovo and Narrative awards – Cart Life. It’s arguable that many of the games would have eventually secured distribution without the guaranteed offer, but the partnership remains a pretty convenient shortcut for indies.

It’s going to be especially interesting this year to see how the nomination list compares to Steam’s own Greenlight approval list. Valve’s wisdom-of-the-crowds voting system is supposed to make it easier for quality indie games to get onto the storefront, but its success at doing so is debatable. At the very least, the Steam/IGF deal gives acclaimed projects a second chance, even if they didn’t capture the attention of Greenlight’s core voter base.

The 16th IGF will run from the 17-21st March, 2014. The finalists will be announced January.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/09/12/valve-and-the-igf-team-up-again-to-bring-2014s-finalists-to-steam/

Gone Home has sold over 50,000 copies so far

Gone Home developer The Fullbright Company has announced that its Steam release has generated more than 50,000 sales since it launched on August 15.

The game is currently selling for £14.99/$19.99 on Steam and £20 over on the official site.

It casts you as a person who has just returned from a year abroad. You enter your family home and expect your loved ones to greet you with open arms, except they’ve all disappeared. It’s very mysterious and a novel concept to boot.

Fullbright co-founder Steve Gaynor issued a statement on the sales figures over on the Gone Home site which read, “We’re now almost a month out since launching on August 15, and we hope people will find it encouraging to know that, along with the positive critical response we are continually grateful for and humbled by, we are also doing alright as far as sales numbers go!”

http://www.vg247.com/2013/09/12/gone-home-has-sold-over-50000-copies-so-far/

Razer Hydra successor the STEM System launches on Kickstarter, hits funding goal in mere hours

Sixense, the team behind the Razer Hydra’s core technology have launched their new motion controller on Kickstarter: The STEM System. The STEM system consists of a base station and up to five wireless STEMs, which track motion and can be clipped to your body (head, hands, legs) or inserted into the back System’s wireless controllers. The base with just two controllers will set you back $200 while the pack with a STEM for head tracking will cost another $50.

Each STEM based supports up to five of the sensors, which mean you can either track all four limbs and the head or the head, both legs and arms via the two wireless controllers. The wireless packs don’t use line of sight to track at all, so you can play games through walls or keep the sensors in your pockets if you don’t like wearing wristbands. Sixense estimate the range of the STEM as about 16 feet from the Base unit.

In the pitch, Sixense also advertise the fact that utilising the Sixense MotionCreator, you can use the Sixense with any game by emulating more traditional inputs, which presumably won’t work as well but does probably mean it’ll be fairly widely supported.

Developers such as Denny Unger, the President of Cloudhead Games seem pretty excited by the STEM:”Previously simple interactions like climbing a ladder suddenly become an intense and virtual experience”. As do users evidently, with the project receiving more than 150% of its $250,000 funding target within its first 24 hours.

Sixense are estimating that the STEM will start shipping to Kickstarter backers in July 2014.

http://www.vg247.com/2013/09/13/razer-hydra-successor-the-stem-system-launches-on-kickstarter-hits-funding-goal-in-mere-hours/

King of Fighters 13 now available through Steam

King of Fighters 13 is now available worldwide through Steam. The game includes an improved Netcode for online versus matches, 36 characters and other nice nuggets. You can download it here for $29.99 A video for the game is below.

http://www.vg247.com/2013/09/13/king-of-fighters-13-now-available-through-steam/

The digital effect - Total War: Rome II was last week's real No.1

Total War: Rome II would have been the UK’s real No.1 last week, if we counted digital sales, MCV can reveal.

The strategy game was No.2 in the UK retail charts with over 32,000 units sold, narrowly missing out on the No.1 spot by just 200 copies.

Yet if you factor in UK digital sales of 73,000, and the game would not only have comfortably been top of the charts, but it would have been one of the biggest single format launches of the year, with 105,00 games sold.

This is further evidence of the growing importance of including digital data in the weekly charts.

Despite the popularity of Total War as a digital download, Sega’s digital VP John Clark insists retail has nothing to fear.

He told MCV that the launch sales of Rome II at retail were 4,000 higher than they were for the original title.

“It’s an incredible number and the biggest, most significant number we’ve seen,” said Clark.

“Based on other stats that we’re looking at it also shows that this isn’t a digital shift – we’re now adding consumers.”

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/the-digital-effect-total-war-rome-ii-was-last-week-s-real-no-1/0120925

100K+ copies in the UK alone paints a good picture for how well it has sold globally dispite it's problems.

Company of Heroes 2 map editor due soon, new maps plotted

Talking in a letter over at the Company of Heroes website, producer Greg Wilson explained that two new maps were on the way: Langreska and Semoskiy. Inspired by some of the most popular battlefields from the first game, the maps feature both summer and winter variants, so if you’re not so keen on the divisive snow mechanics you can remain in the warm and dry. 

Co-op junkies can jump back to 1942 with a new mini-pack for Theatre of War mode, which depicts the mid-point of the war from the German’s perspective. If you’re a Company of Heroes fan who brought a Collector’s Edition of the game - digital or physical - you can pick these missions up for free, as can those who pre-ordered. If you don’t fall into either category, then you can purchase the mini-pack on Steam.   

The team at Relic have also been working on World Builder, the map editing tool for CoH that should be hitting v1.0 very soon. It will be released for free sometime in the near future. 

Wilson emphases that Company of Heroes 2 is still very much in its infancy, and that it has a long life ahead of it. There hasn’t been much noise from the Eastern front since CoH2 launched, but the promise of community-made maps dropping in could be the reinforcements that the game needs.

http://www.pcgamesn.com/companyofheroes/company-heroes-2-map-editor-due-soon-new-maps-plotted

Payday/Left 4 Dead crossover might be in the works again

Talking to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Goldflarb explained how the original concept came together. “The story I heard is that the [original Payday developers and Valve] met at GDC. they hit it off, and they were like “Hey, why don’t we do a crossover?” and I think they was a mutual agreement. And we just sort of did the Mercy Hospital stuff and Valve was super cool about it.”

He’s clearly very happy about No Mercy. Perhaps so happy with it he’d like to give the crossover treatment to his own Payday 2? “I’m sure we will be doing another thing, but I can’t say what that is. Yet.”

Tantilizing. It’s not the definitive “Yes we’re doing it” we’d like to hear, but being sworn to silence suggests that there’s something happening. Another Payday/Left 4 Dead crossover? A crossover with another game completely? Imagine robbing banks with portals….

http://www.pcgamesn.com/paydayleft-4-dead-crossover-might-be-works-again

Child Of Light Devs On Poetry, Female Characters

Ubisoft is making an art game. Or at least, Child of Light is as close to an art game as any major publisher is likely to get for quite some time. It’s being put together by a tiny team (headed up by Far Cry 3‘s directors, of all people, because we are living in Bizarro Land) with incredibly little in the way of bellowing blasts from Ubisoft brass. The result? A gorgeously painterly JRPG Metroidvania with a story that takes the form of a 120-page epic poem. The yarn itself, meanwhile, is a highly metaphorical spin on a young girl’s struggles growing up. I sat down with creative director Patrick Plourde and lead writer Jeffrey Yohalem to discuss poetry, influence from both JRPGs and classic PC adventure games, creating a female character who’s not defined by her search for a “Prince Charming,” choices that cut off large chunks of content, and more.

Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/09/13/child-of-light-devs-on-poetry-female-characters/

Blue Estate Is A Motional Fringe Game

Blue Estate is a “dark comedy shooter” (but aren’t they all, in a way?) based on the comic, and designed to show off the Leap Motion controller. Leap Motion, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is a hand-tracking system, not unlike the good ol’ Kinect. Anyway, what’s interesting about Blue Estate is that you play Tony Luciano, a gangster with a black mop of greasy hair, and that hair occasionally flops in front of your face. Which suggests you must need to brush back your fringe with hand motions in the game? The trailer and other promotional clutter doesn’t make that requirement clear, but surely it MUST be the case. And if not WHY NOT.
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