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Borderlands 2 blog discusses the evolution of loot drops, addresses fan complaints

Borderlands 2 creative director Paul Hellquist has penned a new blog that addresses fan criticism of the way loot works in the Gearbox shooter, and explains quite explicitly how the mechanic works.

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MechWarrior Online: Community Warfare expansion rolling out over next six months, details here

MechWarrior Online’s Community Warfare expansion will roll out over the next six months, and will implement big changes to the way several core areas of the game work. Get the details here.

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Spore designer offers post-mortem on project, team was essentially making five games at once

Spore designer Soren Johnson has reflected on the game’s five-year anniversary over on his blog. The post discusses what went wrong with the game, and how its lofty ambitions perhaps grew too vast for the team. It’s an interesting reflection on the polarising strategy game.

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Star Citizen’s Chris Roberts to speak at GDC Next 2013

Star Citizen creator Chris Roberts will deliver a talk at GDC Next 2013 in November. His game has raised over $20 million in crowd-funding. Drinks are on him.

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Battlefield 4 beta roll-out times confirmed, get them here

Battlefield 4′s beta goes live today and your friendly neighbourhood VG247 will be there playing all this week. Well, just me, like a lonely sad-sack. Anyway, the beta launch times have been confirmed. Get them here.

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War of the Vikings alpha out now on Steam Early Access

War of the Vikings publisher Paradox Interactive has released the game’s alpha build on Steam Early Access.

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Assassin’s Creed 4 asks players to rate missions, feedback will help future games

Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag houses a ‘Rate This Mission’ feature that will help collate opinion and form content in future games, Ubisoft Montreal has confirmed.

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@TheVoxelman on twitter

Check out my hype threads: Cyberpunk, and The Witcher 3!

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https://jira.valvesoftware.com/secur...erBrowser.jspa
(Hit it while you can)

Open he the drop down box at "in group" and scroll to Half-Life 3 :)
There is also a Half-Life 3 core group.




We had the user picker site some time ago which outed L4D3 but back then there was only the HL3 group but not the HL3-core group. There were only 42 assigned back then - now it's 46.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=688711

 

What Does It Meaaaaan: Half-Life 3 Trademarked

By Nathan Grayson on October 1st, 2013 at 10:00 pm.

As if there were any doubt, it looks like Half-Life 3 is officially some kind of a thing. Enough so, at least, that Valve feels the need to make sure everyone knows who it belongs to. And hey, who wouldn’t want Gordon Freeman leading the charge on liberating the living room from the nefarious Combine force that is proprietary, closed console-dom? Also, I did have the fortune of speaking to a Valve source recently who dropped some pretty big hints about Source 2, Left 4 Dead 3, and Half-Life 3. So that’s worth noting as well. But even then, nothing’s even close to confirmed. Here’s what we definitely do know.

Read the rest of this entry »

 

Frictional Games releases first teaser for its next title

Frictional Games has released the first teaser for its latest game SOMA, and the video below is live action affair that looks set in the future.

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Warface will enter a “Sneak Peek” phase tomorrow

Crytek have announced its free-to-play shooter Warface will enter a “Sneak Peek” phase tomorrow.

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Batman: Arkham Origins introduces you to Barbara Gordon through new screenshots

Batman: Arkham Origins has some new screenshots available below introducing you to Barbara Gordon, also known as Batgirl. Check her out below along with stills of the caped one in action. The game is out worldwide on October 25 for PC, PS3, Wii U and Xbox 360.

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Need for Speed: Rivals video shows progression and pursuit tech upgrades

A new Need for Speed: Rivals video is posted below showing enforcement objectives you’ll be given in your Assignments as a Cop and moments you’ll see on your Speedlist as a Racer.
Basically it shows progression and pursuit tech upgrades. Game’s out on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 November 19 in North America and November 22 in the UK, and is a next-gen launch title.

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Zeboyd Games’ Cosmic Star Heroine launches on Kickstarter

Zeboyd Games, as promised, has launched a Kickstarter for Cosmic Star Heroine. The sci-fi RPG is currently slated for a December 2014 release on Mac, PC, PS4, and Vita.

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Neverwinter tech upgrade will combine the game’s three shards into a single server

Neverwinter’s three shards, or for the initiated – servers – will be merged into a single world, Cryptic Studios has announced. The firm said it has been a goal of the developers since beta to “allow all players in Neverwinter to play together on one shard.” In the very near future, the planned server upgrade will bring all players together in a single, unified shard. Information regarding the specific time and date will be coming soon. For more info about the technical details, check out the updated Extended FAQ

Sega confirms lay-offs due to ongoing restructure

Following on from announcements last year, Sega of America has reduced its workforce with an unspecified number of lay-offs.

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@TheVoxelman on twitter

Check out my hype threads: Cyberpunk, and The Witcher 3!

 

 

Mighty Tactical Shooter is a turn-based shmup

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The shoot-’em-up comes with an inbuilt defense mechanism against haughty dismissal that other twitch-based genres lack. Shooter, shmooter. Racer, shmacer. Shmup, um. You see? Can’t be done.

Mighty Tactical Shooter doesn’t need even that fallback, however, because it’s successfully recast the business of sidelong pew-pewing as a boe-nah-fie-dee intellectual pursuit.

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Total War: Rome II patch 3 improves the business of conquest in 140 small ways

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Our Fraser counted the ways he loved Rome II in his review, and on balance decided that they outweighed the ways he didn’t. And you know what? There are bound to be a few more things he likes in the 140 or so technical optimisations, balance tweaks and usability updates that reached the game today. Week by week, Creative Assembly’s latest is slowly becoming the game it ought to be.

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One year of Steam Greenlight: the story so far

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Just over a year ago, Valve set out to solve a problem. Deluged with new game submissions from a growing independent game development community, with lots of games that were impossible to pigeonhole, Valve’s traditional Steam approvals process wasn’t meeting the challenge.

Valve’s solution was innovative and community-oriented. They’d let Steam users decide what to publish on the Steam platform, making the selection process more democratic for an increasingly democratic development scene.

Greenlight has been trouble ever since, perhaps the most notably mixed result in Valve’s history. During its first year, Greenlight’s harshest critics were many of the same people it was meant to help. Its own creators seemed, at times, to be on the verge of renouncing it altogether.

To celebrate Greenlight’s first year, and perhaps to wipe its slate clean, Valve recently approved one hundred Greenlight games. It was a goodwill gesture that ameliorated Greenlight’s sluggish, at times grudging rate of approvals.

But is it enough? The mass-approval of Greenlight candidates may have solved problems for some of Greenlight’s most vocal critics, including some of the people who had suffered the most from Valve’s caprices. But it did not come attached to any clear reforms, and for indies who are still looking to bring their games to PC gaming’s biggest marketing platform, Greenlight may still be a crippling roadblock.

With Valve poised to vastly expand their role in gaming via SteamOS, it’s worth looking at how Valve have administered Greenlight throughout its young life. What did Greenlight do right and wrong in its first year, and what does it need to do to improve its standing in the future? This week, we’re examining Greenlight’s record, and examining whether it deserves another year’s worth of “Yes” votes.

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Space Engineers’ video knows what its audience wants: big spaceships smashing into one another

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Sure, a subsection of Space Engineers’ players will be interested in the effects of gravitational pull on large objects in deep space and the accurate representation of meteorites when distant from large planetary bodies but the majority are all about smashing spaceships into things and watching the debris fly.

Keen Software’s trailer speaks to that majority.

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Terraria 1.2 update released and, girl, it’s a big one

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Just to give you an idea of how big this Terraria update is there are over 1,000 new items, 100 new enemies, 4 new bosses, and 15 new pets.

Oh, and 4 new types of wood.

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@TheVoxelman on twitter

Check out my hype threads: Cyberpunk, and The Witcher 3!

https://twitter.com/HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN

Wow!

Rising PC version looking good, even the shadow looks beautiful.

 

Damn troll, they said this would be out "soon" like 3 months ago. And you forgot to show me what you were having for lunch.



@TheVoxelman on twitter

Check out my hype threads: Cyberpunk, and The Witcher 3!

Race the Sun Greenlit along with 31 others. Spells joy for struggling developers.

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Race the Sun’s been Greenlit. The endless runner has been struggling to make sales without a space in the Steam Store. The developers believed that without Steam customers their studio would go under.

With this approval FlippFly can get their game onto the store and getting sales that should hopefully keep them afloat.

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nice

 

Tom Clancy: author and Red Storm Entertainment co-founder passes away at age 66

Author and co-founder of game development studio Red Storm Entertainment, Tom Clancy, passed away today in a Baltimore hospital at age 66.

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Deus Ex in the works for PC, next-gen – Human Revolution: Director’s Cut releasing this month

A Deus Ex title has been announced by Eidos Montreal as being in the works for PC and next-gen systems. The firm has dubbed its ongoing projects in the franchise the “Deus Ex: Universe” as it’s “an ongoing, expanding and connected game world built across a generation of core games.”

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Double Fine says period after Brutal Legend 2 cancellation was company’s “dark ages”

Double Fine’s lead programmer Oliver Franzke has compared the time after Brutal Legend 2 was cancelled by EA as the “dark ages” for the studio, due to the uncertainty surrounding what would happen to the company after having invested heavily in developing the sequel.

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Football Manager 2013 Steam Workshop functionality allows for custom league trades

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Sports Interactive have done “a load of work” in smartening up their Football Manager data editor for Steam Workshop this year. Its tools will be both easier to use and more extensive than in previous iterations.

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Battlefield 4 PC beta scuppered by freezes and crashes for some

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A select group of Battlefield 3 Premium buyers, Medal of Honor: Warfighter survivors and Battlefield 4 pre-orderers have become the first few to see the Battlefield 4 client crash upon joining a game, and to exclusively witness the error message ‘BF4 Beta has stopped working’.

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Warcraft movie dated for a Christmas in the not too distant future

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Blizzard and Legendary Pictures’ long-in-gestation Warcraft adaptation will arrive in cinemas on December 18, 2015 - just in time to compete for ticket stubs with Tom Hanks’ take on Dan Brown’s Inferno.

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@TheVoxelman on twitter

Check out my hype threads: Cyberpunk, and The Witcher 3!

Around the Network

M & B 2 will be bananas. Hopefully they'll make a Napoleonic Wars expansion for it. I have a feeling my PC won't like it though, and I don't have the money to get a new one atm.

Saw yesterday that Terraria had been updated. Might give it another go.



EverQuest Next and Landmark to share same combat and emergent AI system

EverQuest Next Landmark director Dave Georgeson has said the combat system in the game will contain the same mechanics as EverQuest Next. Speaking in an interview with Forbes, Georgeson said both will also share the emergent AI system built into EQ Next, only it may not be used in the same manner in Landmark. “EverQuest Next is more of a focused narrative with story arcs and rallying calls, [and] emergent AI pushing things around,” he said. “Landmark is very much an exploration in creativity and making things that are cool to show off to other players.”

Combat won’t be available in Landmark at launch but till be released soon afterward. EverQuest Next and the free-to-play Landmark have not been dated. Thanks, Massively.

Maxis’s Lucy Bradshaw named EA senior vice president

A new SEC filing has confirmed some details of EA’s recent executive reshuffle, and outed Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw’s new title. As reported by GameInformer, Bradshaw is now one of EA’s senior vice presidents. There has been no update on the new roles of other EA bosses.

Need for Speed: Rivals screens show off progression and pursuit tech

Did you see that Need for Speed: Rivals progression and pursuit tech video feature earlier? And did you think to yourself “gosh, moving images are all very well, but what I really want to look at is the same thing, but still?” Well, EA and I sure have a treat for you through the break.

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Blizzcon Virtual Ticket goodies include Hearthstone minion

Blizzard has outlined what in-game goodies come with the purchase of BlizzCon virtual tickets.

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Interview: Hinterland On Going Indie, Avoiding Zombies

By Mitch Bowman on October 2nd, 2013 at 5:00 pm.

There’s a lot that can be said for the life of a successful triple-A developer. Job security, financial stability, and having your name in the credits of a game that sells millions of copies are all nice to have. So why would someone in the enviable position of being one of those big-name developers decide to quit their job and make an indie game with a few friends instead?

It turns out there’s quite a few reasons, actually. Mitch Bowman spoke to three gentlemen from Hinterland Games, a new indie studio put together by a handful of long-time industry veterans, to find out what they are, and how they’re affecting the development of The Long Dark.

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Defense Grid 2 eyes-on: it will consume you

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It’s five years old but Defense Grid remains the best tower defense game on PC. A sequel could have been more of the same and I’d have been delighted. Instead, Hidden Path have improved every facet of the original game, added a multiplayer mode that will tear friendships apart, and built a modding store so we’ll never run short of Defense Grid levels again.

To top it off, you can make money from the game, too. Real money that you can spend on things like socks, butter, and books about tower construction.

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Assassin’s Creed 4 lead explains reason for PC version’s release delay

Assassin’s Creed 4 on PC will release three weeks after the console versions, and according to Ubisoft, the reason PC titles sometimes tend to release later, is due to which system the “master version” was created on.

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Watch Dogs – PC System Requirements Revealed – 64-Bit Only, Quad-Cores Minimum Requirement

Ubisoft has just released the PC system requirements for Watch Dogs. Ironically, that’s something we wanted to ask the French company in our upcoming interview but… oh well, we were kind of late I guess. What’s interesting here is that Watch Dogs will be a 64-bit only title, and that – according to its list – will support 8-cores CPUs. Not only that, but dual-cores are not even supported. Watch Dogs is built with a new engine called Disrupt, and we are really curious to see how it will perform on modern-day PC systems. Hit the continue button to read the PC specs for this upcoming sandbox title. Continue reading

Maybe getting a i5-4670 wasn't the best investment lol, will be interesting to see benchmarks on this one.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag – PC Requirements Also Revealed – Only Supports 64-bit OSs

Assassin’s Creed fans, this is for you. Alongside the PC requirements for Watch Dogs, Ubisoft has also revealed the PC requirements for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. According to the game’s official UPLAY page, PC gamers will at least need a quad-core and a 64-bit system. Now I don’t know if this is the latest “next-gen” list that Ubisoft invented, but the specs look somehow similar to those of Watch Dogs (despite the fact that they use different game engines… and the fact that an 8-core is not recommended). Overall, it will be interesting to put this game to the test. You can view the complete specs list below. Continue reading

 

Good bye 32-Bit games, you won't be missed.



@TheVoxelman on twitter

Check out my hype threads: Cyberpunk, and The Witcher 3!

There is an interesting interview on AMD's Mantle over at http://www.hardware.fr/focus/89/amd-mantle-interview-raja-koduri.html

jump the link for full interview but some interesting bits.

So the new consoles were the catalyst for Mantle to be launched on Windows ?

RK -
I wouldn't say that because this is driven more by the game developers than us, so the game developers are ready for major kind of tests, working on new engines, new stuff and they really want to take the PC as a first class citizen. They don't want to forget it as they're architecting their engines for new consoles. They really want to make sure that PC performance moves forward. It's a better timing from a game engine stand point than AMD stand point.

If the game engines [developers] were ready to say "hey we'll put dedicated effort", if Johan came to us and say "I have time I will do the work now" and half dozen other people like Johan also put their hands up, I'm sure other companies and AMD would have say yes years ago to do that thing but they were busy with the last generation consoles, PC and other stuff. Now they're ready.

During the presentation of Mantle you said it was developed with several AAA developers in the gaming industry. In addition to DICE, when can we expect the first announcements ? Around the developer summit (APU13) ?

RK -
I think you may see more around developer summit. Mantle for us is a very developer driven effort, when they are ready they'll say it. Johan was ready he said it. It is not like we came up with Mantle then we kind of want to push it, it is not AMD's CUDA.

 

 

Can you see a game developer providing Mantle as the only PC renderer, getting rid of DirectX renderer ?

RK -
I can't see that happening. If you look at it practically, that doesn't make sense for any game developer. In fact no single API today makes sense for any game developer. Today if you look at a game engine, they have DirectX, they have OpenGL, more OpenGL ES to get to those other platforms, they have the low level consoles APIs whatever they are. So they at least have 4 paths these days at a minimum that a game engine supports if the game engine needs to be taken seriously. So I don't think it will be a single API world, because it is not a single API world today.

Still we could imagine that a developer could use Mantle-like API on game consoles and would not want to develop a DirectX renderer for the PC market only…

RK -
There is a PC market with Mantle but there is a PC market without Mantle…so…

Do you expect your competitors to respond with a Mantle-like approach ?

RK -
I can't really comment but my gentle view is I think we all eventually are trying to do what is the right thing for the gamers and the game developers. If Mantle is solving a problem that the game developers have and if our competitors are compelled to solve the same problem, they have to do something about it.

Let's say half the games are using Mantle and the other half are using Nvidia's Mantle ? It could fragment the PC market.

RK -
It could but in our view that's the responsibility of the game developers to ensure that their users, that could be on Nvidia, or AMD or consoles or whatever, all are getting a good experience.

The other key thing about Mantle is that today a significant amount of the game titles are based on [middleware] engines, the top 4 or 5 engines are covering a huge percentage of the market. If these engines are taking care of the platform differences, hardware differences, Nvidia, AMD, Sony, Microsoft, the actual game developer is covered from that issue.

That's actually the difference between now and ten years ago. Ten years ago, fifteen years ago the engines didn't have as much market share as today. That's why a combination of the engines being where they are and this new console transition and GCN architecture just felt for us like the right time to do something like this. All the issues you bring up are real issues but now the responsibility of managing that is with the game engine, it's not with us, and frankly it's not with the game developers either. It is with the game engine, think of the game engine as this OS and hardware abstraction layer that is proving the service.

A game engine like Frostbite being able to deliver more performance, more draw calls, more things… their view is that it's a competitor edge for the game engine. The view that it's a competitor edge for AMD is a side effect. It's really about the competitor edge for the game engine that it can do more on this hardware.

 

There were reports yesterday about Mantle being an open standard ???

Chris Hook, Head of PR -
Mantle is an industry standard.

So Mantle is not an open standard ? Let's say some IHVs [Independent Hardware Vendors] want to write a Mantle backend/driver, what would be the requirements for them ?

RK -
Mantle is in a very early stage, it's the first disclosure about it we've done, we have the first proof point using that, that is going to ship into some products. We are open to many possibilities with Mantle. We are open to being open; we are open to being standard. How it evolves if our competitor approaches us and says "we want to be compatible with Mantle" ? ... That's a conversation we are not going to shut down.

Chris Hook, Head of PR - There aren't many companies of course... Because of GCN they don't have Mantle capable hardware today…

RK - But Johan said it clearly in his video that he's hoping that Mantle becomes a standard adopted by other companies which means, because game developers were involved in the design, there was feedback loop, … that it is not designed in such a way that it can only work on our architecture. It's a thin abstraction, it's low level. Still it kind of amazingly provides all the performance, all what can be allowed on our architecture.

Is Mantle already influencing future GPU designs ? Could it bring more freedom for you to add extra features ?

RK -
What's happening, the next DirectX, advances in OpenGL, advances in OpenCL, it's the same initiative that we have. We take all of this into consideration. I wouldn't say that we are just looking at Mantle and say "oh I can go off and do something crazy", definitely not thinking along this direction. But it does bring an ability for us to expose if we come off with an hardware innovation and we couldn't get it into a standard API for whatever reason, because of the cycle or something… It does provide a path mechanism for us to make it available to the developers, which is always a nice thing for a hardware company to be able to do.

Could we imagine that in a couple of years, a future architecture won't be able to run the first Mantle games ? Or did you design Mantle to be forward compatible ? There's always this kind of tradeoff with a lower level access…

RK -
Those are all great questions but… Frankly we'll see how it goes. At the end of the day forward compatibility and backward compatibility are important aspects but if they're getting in the way of solving a problem at a given point of time, if they're getting in the way of exposing something that the new hardware is capable of that makes the game be hundred times more realistic, we have to be practical about it and that’s how we move things forward. We move technology forward and at some point of time we have to say "out with the old compatibility", and move forward. If not you get stuck.



@TheVoxelman on twitter

Check out my hype threads: Cyberpunk, and The Witcher 3!

Audiosurf 2 now available through Steam Early Access

As promised in August, Audiosurf, formerly known as Audiosurf Air, is now available in beta form.

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Second Life developer offers Desura distribution to IndieCade finalists

Second Life developer Linden Lab has teamed up with LA festival IndieCade to offer a special publication and distribution deal. All eligible finalists – nominees and winners alike – will be offered publication through Desura. The prize is only available to Linux, mac and PC games, unfortunately, but those who manage it won’t have to pay any listing fees and will be promoted to the Desura partner program, scoring free promotion. IndieCade 2013 runs October 5 through 6 in Los Angeles.

Have A Look At The Not On Steam Sale

By Craig Pearson on October 2nd, 2013 at 8:00 pm.


Steam is so big that making some noise that you’re not on there is actually a half-decent way to get your game noticed. That’s the theory* of the Not On Steam Sale, at any rate. A group of indie developers with games not on Valve’s gaming monolith, who’ve had to deal with people saying “I’ll buy it on Steam”, are having a sale. 40+ indies will be cutting prices by 25% or more for the next seven days, including Inescapable, Sky Nations, and Tower of Guns.
Read the rest of this entry »

 

MLG announce plans for another North American Dota 2 league

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Major League Gaming are pushing a another season of its North American Dota 2 league following the success of this past seaston adn the upcoming Fall Invitational. The game will also feature in their 2014 Pro Circuit, and there will we weekly games broadcast through their streaming channels.

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The digital publishing partnership behind Call of Juarez: Gunslinger

Can a big publisher and a developer work together, fruitfully, on a digital publishing deal? Ubisoft's Majdi Kraiem explains how the relationship with Techland on Call of Juarez: Gunslinger went down.


@TheVoxelman on twitter

Check out my hype threads: Cyberpunk, and The Witcher 3!

So many news to comment. Let's see

+Race theSun greenlit. Some of the credit goes to you, zarx. After you posted that interview a few days ago, I voted for them. I wish them luck. And sales.

+Battlefield 4 Beta with problems. Well, it's a Beta after all. What were they expecting?

+Ubi games being 64-bit only. It was only a matter of time, and with consoles having 8 GB, it was obvious that devs would want to work with more than the 4 GB that Windows 32-bit offers. DICE announced the same some time ago. With that said, AC4 listing the HD5850 as a recommended card is surprising, I would have assumed they would demmand something better newer.



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.