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Archived News:
Iceberg Interactive announces the official launch of Into the Stars for
Windows on Steam, saying
they have added new missions and other content to mark the space simulation's
emergence from early access, and there are now localized versions for a number
of different languages. Here's a
launch trailer, and
here's word: Into the Stars is an open-world space survival simulation
that utilizes Unreal Engine 4 to immerse players in a massive star system as
they take on the role of Captain and navigate deep space in search of a new home
for humanity. With each journey, players will outfit their ships, hand pick
their crew and set off on a voyage where they must scavenge resources, shelter
civilians and outrun a hostile alien force in order to survive.
“Into the Stars has used the Early Access process to the fullest, leveraging
community feedback and numerous updates to fine tune the gameplay experience”,
says Ben Jones, development director at Fugitive Games. “With a massive, vibrant
universe to explore, Into The Stars provides players with hours of
discoverability. Each time someone plays, their strategy skills will be tested
by facing incredible obstacles and unique situations from the surface of foreign
planets to the hulls of derelict ships.”
Continue here to read the full story.
A
reddit AMA with Mike O'Brien has word from the ArenaNet boss that Guild
Wars 2 game director Colin Johanson is leaving the company, saying this is
on good terms, and they remain good friends (thanks Marvin T. Martian). Mike
says he will be stepping in as game director for Guild Wars 2 for now, and that
while he is excited about returning to such a role, one of his goals is to
eventually hire someone to replace him to guide the MMORPG sequel. He also takes
the opportunity to lay out plans for the game's future: We recently
started PvP season two and we’re about to launch the next raid wing. After that
we’re packaging up and preparing our next big quarterly update for April. The
April update is about reducing grind, clearing away some tedium, getting quickly
to the fun, and improving rewards. We’ve always said that Guild Wars should be
about having fun rather than preparing to have fun, and this will be a
back-to-our-roots kind of update. After the April update, we’ll start live
beta-tests of improvements to WvW. Our goal is to be very incremental and
visible with the changes we’re making there, so that players are involved every
step of the way. Further on, we’ll launch the next raid wing in May or June,
then Living World and the next quarterly update.
You’ve seen in past years that we went through times when the whole company
worked on one thing. In 2013, the year we shipped 21 Living World updates,
pretty much the whole company was working on Living World. In 2015, we were all
working on the expansion. Going forward we’re putting ourselves in a more
sustainable mode where live and expansion don’t compete with each other.
We have about 120 devs working on the live game, 70 devs on Expac2, and 30 devs
on core teams that support both. Within these groups we have cross-discipline
teams with focused missions. For example on Live we have the PvP team, the WvW
team, the Fractals team, the Raids team, the Living World team, the Legendaries
team, and a couple others. The teams are charged with carrying a feature from
inception and design through completion. When they finish, we typically package
work from multiple teams into a single release, then we hand it off to release
teams for final voice integration, localization, QA, and release
management.
There's a new
post-release update on CapCom Unity following up further on the launch of
Street Fighter V. They
recently promised to
do something to punish those who rage quit during matches in the fighting game,
and now they explain their plans. Word is they are going to concentrate on only
blatant abuses of their trust, as this excerpt explains: To be clear, we
are only targeting the worst offenders in our system, so if you have had a few
instances of being disconnected during a match, you have nothing to worry about.
The players who fit the criteria of what we would call a “Rage Quitter”
typically have an 80-90% disconnect rate and their accounts sit far outside of
the norm as compared to the majority of other players.
The Penalty
Starting last week, we penalized roughly 30 players in our system by docking
their League Points. Players who log into their account and see that their LP
and Rank has dropped significantly can consider this a warning. We will be
continuing to monitor these accounts in the coming weeks and will take further
action if needed.
Moving forward, we will be making a sweep each week based on accounts in our
system that have abnormally high disconnect rates (particularly at the end of
the match) and will reset their League Points.
While we don’t have an exact ETA on a permanent solution, we will let everyone
know as soon as it is in place.
Digital Extremes announce the launch of a new Sands of Inaros update for the
Windows edition of Warframe, saying this is the first of many major updates
coming to the free-to-play action game this year.
This page has details on the update
along with a new trailer
showing it off. Here's word: Today marks the first of many major updates
planned in 2016 for Digital Extremes' Free-to-Play hit, Warframe®. Sands of
Inaros reaches PC players today with a brand-new mummy-themed Warframe, a new
quest, updates to Reactor Sabotage Missions, and more. The update continues
Digital Extremes' dedicated effort to redefine the Free-to-Play experience in a
AAA way through constant interaction with their players, better known as Tenno,
for feedback that results in regular new content additions and sometimes major
gameplay overhauls that keep the game fresh and exciting to new and seasoned
players.
Launching today on PC (and coming soon to consoles), the update introduces
Inaros, a mummy-themed Warframe with classic ancient Egyptian flair. Tenno may
prove themselves worthy of Inaros' strength and unlock this unique Warframe
Blueprint by completing the all-new Sands of Inaros Quest.
Continue here to read the full story.
There's
an op ed on The Guardian written by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney expressing
his opinion that "Microsoft wants to monopolise games development on PC. We must
fight it" (thanks
VG247). The issue he is taking up here is Microsoft's new Universal Windows
Platform (UWP) initiative, and Tim warns: "Microsoft is moving against the
entire PC industry – including consumers (and gamers in particular), software
developers such as Epic Games, publishers like EA and Activision, and
distributors like Valve and Good Old Games" in trying to take control of the
consumer PC ecosystem. He calls for a commitment to opening up the UWP or it
should "die as a result of industry backlash" and says: "We wouldn’t let
Microsoft close down the PC platform overnight without a fight, and therefore we
won’t sit silently by while Microsoft embarks on a series of sneaky manoeuvres
aimed at achieving this over a period of several years." Here's more: The
specific problem here is that Microsoft’s shiny new “Universal Windows Platform”
is locked down, and by default it’s impossible to download UWP apps from the
websites of publishers and developers, to install them, update them, and conduct
commerce in them outside of the Windows Store.
It’s true that if you dig far enough into Microsoft’s settings-burying UI, you
can find a way to install these apps by enabling “side-loading”. But in turning
this off by default, Microsoft is unfairly disadvantaging the competition.
Bigger-picture, this is a feature Microsoft can revoke at any time using Windows
10’s forced-update process.
The Solution
If UWP is to gain the support of major PC game and application developers, it
must be as open a platform as today’s predominant win32 API, which is used by
all major PC games and applications. To the PC ecosystem, opening UWP means the
following:
- That any PC Windows user can download and install
a UWP application from the web, just as we can do now with win32
applications. No new hassle, no insidious warnings about venturing outside
of Microsoft’s walled garden, and no change to Windows’ default settings
required.
- That any company can operate a store for PC
Windows games and apps in UWP format – as Valve, Good Old Games, Epic Games,
EA, and Ubi Soft do today with the win32 format, and that Windows will not
impede or obstruct these apps stores, relegating them to second-class
citizenship.
- That users, developers, and publishers will always
be free to engage in direct commerce with each other, without Microsoft
forcing everyone into its formative in-app commerce monopoly and taking a
30% cut.
Continue here to read the full story.
Techland now offers a new free update for Dying Light: Enhanced Edition
that adds four community-created maps for the zombie game on Windows, OS X, and
Linux along with bug fixes and balance tweaks.
This trailer shows off
the new maps, and here's word: Dying Light: The Following - Enhanced
Edition has just got bigger. The latest content update, which goes live today at
10:00 PST / 19:00 CET, brings four new community maps to all Dying Light players
for free. The four extra maps include:
- Under the City - a choice-based horror story
- Climb Down - arcade-style parkour experience
- The Hunter - survival quest in a horde-infested
forest
- TeeVee - a visual nightmare best experienced in
the dark
Dying Light: The Following – Enhanced Edition | Community Map 4-Pack trailer
can be viewed
here
The four new maps are available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC and are part
of the latest patch. The patch also introduces a number of stability
improvements, bug fixes, and balance tweaks.
Continue here to read the full story.
A
Steam Community announcement announces Spintires has returned to Steam
after
recently
being pulled from sale due to problems that some speculated were deliberate
sabotage due to an internal developer/publisher squabble. Here's
word: First we apologize again for the recent issue causing crashing of
spintires and the delay in resolving this.
We are pleased to say we have now released a fix for the recent crash onto
Steam.
In the next few days we will release a full and frank statement regarding the
cause of the problem and how we plan to avoid this happening again, as well as
details of the next update we have been working on since the start of 2016 which
we plan to start testing next week.
For now follow the instructions below and start to play Spintires again!
Continue here to read the full story.
- be quiet! Dark Rock TF on
Overclockers Club.
- Fractal Design Define S Window Mid-Tower Chassis on
HARDOCP.
- Logitech G502 Proteus Spectrum Gaming Mouse on
TechArp.
- Plantronics RIG 500E Headphones on
Legit Reviews.
- SAPPHIRE Nitro Radeon R9 380X 4GB Video Card on
TweakTown.
- WD Red 6TB HDD RAID 0 Hard Drive on
Play3r.net.
Well March came in like a lamb, and it will likely go out like a lamb, but we
got a little dose of lion weather in the form of some snow this morning. It
wasn't much, but for this mild winter, it's noticeable. I also can't help
noticing it's been over four weeks since Groundhog Day predicted an early
spring. It's like you can't trust rodents anymore, or something.
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