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Archived News:
Steam News announces the
promised free weekend is now
underway for Tom Clancy's
Rainbow Six Siege. The game is also on sale for those who enjoy their
sample. Here's word on the game: ABOUT THIS GAME
Master the art of destruction and gadgetry in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege.
Face intense close quarters combat, high lethality, tactical decision making,
team play and explosive action within every moment. Experience a new era of
fierce firefights and expert strategy born from the rich legacy of past Tom
Clancy's Rainbow Six games.
CLOSE QUARTERS COMBAT
Engage in a brand-new style of assault using an unrivaled level of destruction
and gadgetry.
On defense, coordinate with your team to transform your environments into
strongholds. Trap, fortify and create defensive systems to prevent being
breached by the enemy.
On attack, lead your team through narrow corridors, barricaded doorways and
reinforced walls. Combine tactical maps, observation drones, rappelling and more
to plan, attack and defuse every situation.
TOOLS OF DESTRUCTION
Choose from dozens of highly trained, Special Forces operators from around the
world. Deploy the latest technology to track enemy movement. Shatter walls to
open new lines of fire. Breach ceilings and floors to create new access points.
Employ every weapon and gadget from your deadly arsenal to locate, manipulate
and destroy your enemies and the environment around them.
ALWAYS EVOLVING
Experience new strategies and tactics as Rainbow Six Siege evolves over time.
Change the rules of Siege with every update that includes new operators,
weapons, gadgets and maps. Evolve alongside the ever-changing landscape with
your friends and become the most experienced and dangerous operators out there.
HIGHLY COMPETITIVE
Compete against others from around the world in ranked match play. Grab your
best squad and join the competitive community in weekly tournaments or watch the
best professional teams battle it out in the Rainbow Six Siege Pro
League.
Valve announces a Steam
Lunar New Year Sale is now underway, offering discounts on thousands of
games to celebrate the year of the dog. They
also announce changes to how Steam Wishlists operate they've rolled out
today. They describe the following as the key pieces they've added so far:
- Steam has long shown the discount and price for
items on your Wishlist, but there hasn’t been a way of sorting or filtering
based on discounts. This can be frustrating when trying to find items during
a large Steam sale or to finding purchases at particular prices. Now you can
filter items shown on your Wishlist by levels of discount like 50% off or
75% off. You can also filter by various tiers of price, or filter to only
see items you can buy with your current Steam Wallet balance.
- We’ve also heard a lot of requests for the ability
to filter your Wishlist by tags or genres to help find games when you’re in
the mood for a strategy game or an RPG. So now Steam displays the top-ranked
tags for each item on your Wishlist. Clicking any of those tags will filter
your Wishlist to just other titles with that same tag applied. This makes it
easy to find the best co-op games on your Wishlist, or quickly find a
discounted horror game.
- Many players have reported that they find a
promising game currently in Early Access that they want to keep track of,
but aren’t interested in buying until the game has transitioned to full
release. Now your Wishlist will reflect if a game is currently in Early
Access, and we’ve added a filter option to hide those games until they have
transitioned from Early Access to full release.
- Players frequently add unreleased games to their
Wishlist, which is a helpful way to express interest in an upcoming release
and be notified when the game releases. But between now and that title’s
release, it isn’t always helpful to see those unreleased selections when
you’re shopping for something to play now. So we added the release date to
each Wishlist item along with a filter option to hide unreleased games until
they become available.
Saber Interactive announces they're partnering with publisher Wired
Productions to release Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn this spring. They celebrate the
news with a
new
trailer celebrating how much the original game sucked and how the new game
doesn't. This comes with details about the game's release for Windows and
consoles, including special offers for owners of NBA Playgrounds on Nintendo
Switch and the game's Indigogo backers: Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn is an
intense, action-packed beat ‘em up which sees players take on the role of the
unstoppable Shaquille O’Neal as he fights his way through the hordes of hell and
Hollywood. Master devastating combos, battle outlandish celebrity bosses and
take on all comers with an array of weapons, including katanas, shuriken and
baseball bats. Channel Shaq’s alter egos, Big Daddy O and Big Diesel, in epic
battles in the successor to the worst game ever on a mission to restore Shaq’s
legacy.
“We know diehard fans have been waiting eagerly to experience the hard-hitting
action of this new take on Shaq Fu, and we’re excited to team up with Wired
Productions to get the game physically into the hands of players this spring,”
said Saber CEO Matt Karch.
Leo Zullo, Managing Director at Wired Productions, commented, “Shaq Fu has an
incredible legacy in the history of video games, and we’re delighted to be part
of the team shooting to earn Shaq his place in the future of video games.”
Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn will arrive globally at physical and digital retail
this spring for the PlayStation®4 system, Xbox One, Windows PC and Nintendo
Switch. This game is a co-production of Saber and Big Deez Productions and
published in partnership with Wired Productions.
Anyone who purchased NBA Playgrounds on Nintendo Switch prior to June 10, 2017,
will receive a free copy of Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn upon release. Saber will
share more specifics regarding timing and delivery of rewards for the game’s
Indiegogo backers directly via the game’s Indiegogo page.
Continue here to read the full story.
The Beamblog announces the release of a version 8159 patch for
Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition and the launch of the promised Steam
beta for headstart customers. Here's word on the patch, testing, and how to get
a Steam key: The next step towards the launch of Neverwinter Nights:
Enhanced Edition is a beta on Steam. Over the next few weeks, we’d love to hear
feedback from Steam = players on Friend Lists, Steam Workshop, stability, and
about any translation errors.
To get access to the Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition Steam beta, pre-order
NWN:EE on Beamdog.com. Find out more about
how to get your Steam key here.
Community participation in the Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition Head Start
program has been amazing! Your submitted bugs, feature discussions in the
Beamdog forums, and participation with the input and roadmap Trello boards has
really helped light the way. Keep on letting us know what features and fixes you
want to see!
Rolling Stone reports more scrutiny falling on the use of loot boxes in
videogames, as U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) sent a letter to the
Entertainment Software Ratings Board on the topic on the same day she raised it
during a Senate committee meeting. The letter touches on the question of whether
loot box sales represent a form of gambling, and asks the ESRB to direct some
extra scrutiny toward this topic, suggesting that "at minimum" the rating system
should identify a game's use of loot boxes. During a hearing of the Senate
Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, Senator Hassan solicited
reassurances from four Federal Trade Commission nominees that they feel gambling
concerns make this an issue that bears investigation by the FTC, depending on
the ESRB's response to the Senator's letter.
This video shows the questions at the committee hearing, and Rolling Stone
also has the letter of response from ESRB president Patricia Vance, saying, "As
the industry evolves, so does our rating system, and we will continue to make
enhancements to ensure parents continue to be well-informed." Here is a portion
of the original letter Senator Hassan sent to the ESRB: The prevalence of
in-game micro-transactions, often referred to as ‘loot boxes,’ raises several
concerns surrounding the use of psychological principles and enticing mechanics
that closely mirror those often found in casinos and games of chance. The
potential for harm is real. Recently the World Health Organization classified
“gaming disorder” as a unique condition in its recent draft revision of the 11th
International Classification of Diseases. While there is robust debate over
whether loot boxes should be considered gambling, the fact that they are both
expensive habits and use similar psychological principles suggest loot boxes
should be treated with extra scrutiny. At minimum, the rating system should
denote when loot boxes are utilized in physical copies of electronic games.
To that end, I respectfully urge the ESRB to review the completeness of the
board’s ratings process and policies as they relate to loot boxes, and to take
into account the potential harm these types of micro-transactions may have on
children. I also urge the board to examine whether the design and marketing
approach to loot boxes in games geared toward children is being conducted in an
ethical and transparent way that adequately protects the developing minds of
young children from predatory practices.
Further, I urge the ESRB to consider working with the relevant stakeholders –
including parents – to collect and publish data on how developers are using loot
boxes, how widespread their use is, and how much money players spend on them.
Finally, I ask that you develop best practices for developers, such as ethical
design, tools for parents to disable these mechanisms, or making them less
essential to core gameplay.
Sea of Thieves Website
announces a weekend Sea of Thieves Scale Test will get underway
tomorrow. This will be available to all who had access to the recent closed beta
test as well as all Xbox Insiders. They warn that this may be a disrupted
experience, since dealing with issues is one of the things they are testing:
Scale Testing
Since the Closed Beta, our services team have been assessing their plans for
launch to ensure the game stands up to the amount of interest we’re expecting to
see. As a result of the Closed Beta, we are planning on running a couple of
Scale Tests between now and launch, with the first of these beginning on Friday,
February 16th at 10am GMT (2am PST) and ending on Sunday, February 18th at 10am
GMT (2am PST).
The goal of this is to test a lot of the work we’ve done since the Closed Beta,
and to try and hit a higher concurrent players number than we’ve ever seen
before.
What to Expect
With this added scale we expect – and plan – to see issues, that we can learn
from and address. Not only are we looking to hit scale, we will also
purposefully be stressing our services by throttling performance at certain
times, testing the game in different data centers around the world, and
simulating deliberate outages.
Some examples of the issues we expect to see are:
- Sessions being interrupted
- An inability to join the game at certain times
during the weekend
- Issues when using shops in-game
Fatshark announces a March 8th release date for Warhammer: Vermintide 2,
offering a sequel to Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide. They announced
this during a livestream on Twitch
that you can still go back and watch, and they also plan another livestream this
afternoon. The Windows melee action game is available for pre-purchase
on
Steam, and this carries two incentives, as preorder customers will receive a
Vermentide 1 DLC pack and access to an exclusive pre-launch beta. "Being
passionate fans of the Warhammer IP, we’ve always wanted to create a Warhammer
sequel that both stayed true to the beautifully dark atmosphere of the world but
also brought new ideas and experiences for players," says Martin Wahlund, CEO of
Fatshark. "It's been years of work but on March 8th we look forward to joining
forces with players everywhere to defend Helmgart from evil." Here's more on the
game: Vermintide 2 is a visually stunning and groundbreaking melee action
game pushing the boundaries of the first person co-op genre. Set within the dark
End Times, during the destruction of the World That Was, the game introduces the
dark, bloody and twisted Chaos as a formidable and unrelenting enemy faction.
Other new features include 15 hero careers, new environments, talent trees and
the proprietary Heroic Deeds System.
A new developer blog for
Stardew Valley has a status report on the upcoming version 1.3 patch for
Chucklefish's farming simulation (thanks
PCGamesN). This update will add multiplayer support, and Eric "ConcernedApe"
Barone explains the process for completing the update, saying he's hopeful it
will enter beta testing in the spring: As you may know, I’ve always
worked solo on Stardew Valley. However, for this multiplayer update I’ve
had the help of Tom Coxon (of Chucklefish). He’s done all the network coding to
turn Stardew Valley into a multiplayer game… truly an impressive feat, and one
that would not be possible without his talent. He deserves a lot of credit for
this — Thank you Tom!
Now, here’s where we’re at:
Work on the new features is done, and we’ve sent all the new text off to be
translated into the different languages. Meanwhile, we are working on bug fixes.
Once we’ve received the translated text and integrated it back into the game,
we’ll begin a serious QA phase involving thorough testing of all new features in
both multiplayer and single player contexts. When that is finished, the update
should be ready for a public beta. I am still shooting for a spring release for
the beta.
When the beta gets closer to launch, I’ll fill you guys in on more specifics as
to how multiplayer will work, as well as a more complete list of the new
features in the update.
I’ll also be sure to let you guys know as soon as we’ve determined a more
concrete timetable for release.
In one of those announcements of announcements everyone loves so much,
a tweet from
Sammie Kang has word from one of the developers of PLAYERUNKNOWN'S
BATTLEGROUNDS realize they've fallen silent lately (thanks
VG247). She says they've been spending early 2018 working on a roadmap for
early 2018 that they will share soon: Our dev team has been working on a
dev roadmap for early 2018 in the past few weeks.
It's about time we update you on what's happening and where things are at. We
will share this roadmap with you soon once we have finalized all the details.
Happy Valentine’s Day, btw.
- Alphacool Eiskoffer Professional Water Cooling Bending Kit on
TechPowerUp.
- AMD Ryzen 3 2200G + Ryzen 5 2400G Linux CPU Performance, 21-Way
Intel-AMD Comparison on
Phoronix.
- AMD Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G CPU on
Legit Reviews.
- AMD Vega 8 Graphics Performance On Linux With The Ryzen 3 2200G
on
Phoronix.
- Aorus K9 Optical Mechanical Keyboard on
Legit Reviews.
- Cooler Master MasterKeys MK750 Keyboard on
Overclocked
Inside. German.
- NZXT H700i Tempered Glass ATX Mid Tower Case on
PC Perspective.
- Raijintek THETIS Window Aluminum Case on
Modders-Inc.
- Samsung SSD 860 EVO SATA Solid State Drive on
Benchmark Reviews.
- Tile Sport Bluetooth Tracker on
ThinkComputers.org.
Today would be my late dad's birthday. If you've noticed my strong affinity for
corny humor, old jokes, and running gags, then you've seen some of my pop
showing through in me. In honor of this set of enviable traits, I will share one
of his favorite cans of corn, a limerick I've since learned was written by Dixon
Lanier Merritt, who was born in the 19th century. So yeah, old jokes:
A wonderful bird is the Pelican.
His beak can hold more than his belly can.
He can hold in his beak
Enough food for a week!
But I'll be darned if I know how the hellican.
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