A
lengthy reddit post from Sony Online Entertainment's Adam Clegg offers a
personal apology for accidentally misinforming gamers about gun-purchases in
H1Z1, their early access zombie game (thanks
IncGamers). The game's airdrop component
has drawn fire for being exactly the sort of pay-to-win scenario he said would
not exist, leading to SOE
offering refunds to
early access purchasers.
Amid his apologies, he explains: "When I said you can't buy any guns or ammo, I
completely disregarded the possibility of airdrops and meant that you can't buy
a gun or ammo and have it go into your starting loadout, or your loadout
immediately like you were buying a gun from the gun store." He also talks about
how they plan on tuning airdrops to make them less disagreeable to
players:
The dev team loves airdrops, and in testing, every time we used
one, they were highly contested where the person who actually called in the
airdrop had to earn it through a gladiator style brawl. They usually weren't the
one that ended up with the airdrop but no matter what, the person who called it
in was satisfied with the event that they got to make happen. That event is the
magic we are trying to capture with everyone. The last thing we want is it to be
a boring item that someone can sneak around and quietly get to find gear without
it being contested. In our opinion that is basically cheating and nobody should
be able to do that.
Whether you agree with us or not, that is how we want airdrops to work. We are
going to be tuning them throughout early access until we can get them to work
that way, here are the first pass initial changes.
1) Make the plane move slowly (53% of current) This increases the ability for
other players to react to the plane coming in.
2) Make the drop fall more slowly (80% of current) This increases the ability
for other players to react to the plane coming in.
3) Less accurate maximum drop radius (was 250m now 700m, so with these settings
it would drop up to 700m from the calling player)
4) New minimum distance of 250m for airdrops to appear from a player. This is a
little less than ½ the player density of 700m distance with 120 players on a
server. Therefore more players are likely to be near the airdrop when deployed.
5) Increase the minimum number of required players to 120 (a little higher after
more discussion about player density being important to keeping airdrops
contested)
Excalibur Publishing announces
European Ship Simulator will set sail on
February 20th, saying this is the official release date for the retail and
digital editions of the transportation game for both Windows and OS X.
This page
is where the game can be preordered, and it offers relevant system
specifications, which are pretty modest, but do adhere to what seems to be the
new standard of requiring a 64-bit OS and 4GB of RAM.
This trailer shows off
around eight minutes of gameplay, cranking along at 60 frames-per-second, and
for those who can't wait a month for the full release, the game is available via
Steam early access.
Here's more:
This brand new ship simming must-have brings six of Europe’s
busiest ports together as you captain a wide variety of vessels between Calais,
Dover, Rostock, Rotterdam, Hamburg and Gibraltar. Sail a passenger ferry,
tugboat, bulk carrier, fishing boat, large ocean cruiser, LNG tanker, cargo
container or speed boat on a multitude of varying missions.
With a realistic ocean and highly detailed ports, it’s difficult to tell where
reality ends and European Ship Simulator begins.
European Ship Simulator breathes new life into the ship sailing genre with its
exciting plans for expansions and downloadable content such as new ports, ships
and missions
Features:
- Mission Editor Create missions triggering
changes in wind speed, weather effects and objectives
- Mission Mode Play through individual
challenges and improve your time and score to earn rewards
- Ships Includes a fishing boat, container
ship, tanker and ocean cruiser
- Ports Calais, Dover, Rostock, Rotterdam,
Hamburg and Gibraltar
- Weather A variety of ever-changing weather
conditions from bright, sunny days to dark, stormy nights with lightning and
sound effects
- Physics – fight against realistic water
physics to maintain control of the vessel
We're almost a month into winter, the weather forecasts around here all include
the word "arctic," and there are no NFL games today. I think this is the world's
way of telling me I'm supposed to be making
some
chili today. Yes, I think this is something that needs to happen.
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