Even though PlanetSide 2 is an unstoppable free-to-play colossus, for some reason Sony are still charging a subscription fee on the now ten-year-old original game.

All that is set to change however, with Sony’s John Smedley revealing via Twitter that the original game will be moving F2P.

“We did a mass grant of anyone who has ever played PS1 or PS2 with free time in PS1. We weren’t ready to announce it yet because the database grant is still ongoing and won’t be done till tomorrow morning,” he said.

“So please if you didn’t get flagged chill. We are trying to do something cool for everyone, and we were going to tell people when it’s done. But people saw it and others broadcast the info.”

“This also gives us more time to make it F2P. So enjoy starting tomorrow late morning.”

Source: 1,2,3,4,5,6

If you’ve not heard of War for the Overworld then you at least must have heard of Dungeon Keeper — its inspiration, mentor and father figure. Well, War for the Overworld has wrapped up a successful Kickstarter, and is now proudly announcing its entry into the beta testing phase.

Backers of the project on Kickstarter should look out for an email explaining the details soon (if you haven’t already got it). If you didn’t back the project, you can pay $22 to jump in on Steam instantly.

Source: Rock Paper Shotgun

Battlefield 4 has been dated for a European release of November 1st. While this isn’t the official Australian date (we’ll update this story if we hear more), Australian dates are generally identical to those of Europe and the UK.

If you live in the USA of course, you get the game first — it launches there on October 29 so that our American cousins can have three extra days of play time.

There’s no word yet on when any early access or beta periods will be, but you can be sure we’ll let you know (and have our servers up and ready to go).

Source: PC Gamer

EA and Maxis are relentlessly patching SimCity, and they appear to be so excited that each update is considered a major patch — after all 3.0 was only released two weeks ago. I’d probably disagree with their numbering system completely as none of these have really been major patches at all, but hey! It’s your game Maxis, you do your thing.

The patch will include a new region, as well as something called a “Launch Park” to reward “dedicated fans who were early adopters”. There are also a bunch of bug fixes and overall tweaks, including improved response times for fire trucks.

There is, of course, still no mention of an offline mode — so if you were looking for that, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. Check out the full notes below.

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Indie developer and games.on.net community member Sean Edwards has written to us to let us know that the multiplayer update for Lunar Flight is now live.

Lunar Flight, which you can find on Steam, now has two multiplayer modes: mission score and deathmatch. Up to 16 players can take part, and there’s a full integrated server browser and multiplayer leaderboard. Check out the trailer below.

Oculus Rift support is coming next, Sean assures us — so stay tuned.

4A Games and Deep Silver have revealed the details of Metro: Last Light‘s upcoming four DLC packs. The first pack, the Faction Pack, will be out in June and will be single-player content that “expands on the Metro: Last Light universe”. The Chronicles Pack will follow, which is also slated to be single-player content.

Then there’s the Tower Pack, which will provide a “unique solo challenge to Metro veterans”, followed by the Developer Pack, which from the sounds of it is mod tools — it will “give creative players some interesting tools with which to explore the world of Metro”.

These four DLC packs are of course included in the season pass. Season pass holders also get the Abzat, a semi-automatic shotgun with an alternate fire mode that shoots six shells at once.

“Artyom’s story may have been concluded in Metro: Last Light, but there are other characters with stories to tell, some familiar locations that fans of the Metro series wanted to revisit, and some new challenges that 4A wanted to explore,” explained 4A creative director Andrew Prokhorov.

“Since completing the game we have been working on these new stories and hope to release them throughout the summer.”

Ranger Mode, the hardest difficulty level in the game, is not included in the DLC season pass.

Yes, the Steam Database kannot tell a lie — Warner Bros. have konfirmed this morning in a press release that a Komplete Edition of Mortal Kombat will be making its way to PC on July 3.

The Steam version will arrive first, followed by a boxed retail release on August 6. It’s not klear whether or not the retail version will require Steam.

High Voltage Software are handling the port, which will inklude support for both the Mortal Kombat Tournament Edition Fight Stick and regular kontrollers. As this is a Komplete edition, it will inkorporate all of the downloadable kontent, as well as fifteen “Klassic Mortal Kombat Skins” and three “Klassic Fatalities”.

The Komplete Edition was released on konsoles in February 2012.

Source: Press Release

I like to laugh because life is a dynamic experience and it can’t rain all the time. Nor can a man or woman or transgender individual laugh constantly either, because you would edge closer and closer to insanity in the eyes of everyone around you, especially if you were, IDK, at the vet putting the family dog to sleep forever. While I favour giggling over glowering, there are times and places whence a lad such as I need court the grim of drawing breath (please forgive me, I’m reading A Song of Ice and Fire right now and I can’t stop talking like a halberd).

The publisher of Serious Sam 3 and the developer of Hard Reset are teaming up to reboot one of gaming’s most notorious FPS classics: Shadow Warrior, the 1997 game starring “Lo Wang” and being, well… pretty racially insensitive. This one, however, will avoid all of that guff, ditch the multiplayer, and focus on what’s really important: first-person katana combat. Take a look at the (gameplay-free) trailer below.

There’s an interesting interview with Flying Wild Hog about the game over at the PA Report, which you may enjoy.

Activision and Infinity Ward have used the Xbox One reveal event to pull the cover off the new Call of Duty game, Ghosts. It’ll launch as an Xbox One exclusive, which means a delayed PC launch — and this is unfortunate, because one of the biggest selling points of this one is a completely overhauled graphics engine.

One of the biggest features of the new engine is the use of Fast Subdivision, a technique used by places like Pixar to quickly increase the amount of vertices on a model surface in real time. This is supposedly scalable to older console architecture as well, meaning that even the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game should look pretty reasonable.

Ghosts is set in a world damaged by meteor strikes, with the United States (and the world) as we know it apparently considerably changed. Syriana and Traffic writer Stephen Gaghan is behind the script, which should hopefully bode well for a more self-aware and less hoo-rah US-centric storyline. Also, there’s a dog!

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Ubisoft have released a trailer for Splinter Cell: Blacklist‘s co-operative mode, and it shows an impressive evolution beyond the co-op last seen in Conviction. It also promises fourteen maps, four mission types, and 2-player split-screen action (not for me, but nice to have). Fisher’s partner is Isaac Briggs, a CIA operative who you can see being rescued by Sam in this very early trailer.

Murray shouts ‘BANZAI’ at the top of his lungs and hurls himself at the enemy, bringing to you his impressions of Red Orchestra 2′s latest expansion. With asymmetrical warfare and amazing one-sided battles, Rising Storm sounds very impressive.