Ah, that Brazilian Ratings Board — that leaker of all things confidential and upcoming. A listing has now been spotted for something called FarCry HD, leading many to believe that Ubisoft may be working on a HD re-release of the game.

The listing is only for Xbox 360 and PS3 consoles, so it’s unknown whether or not such a remake would be coming to PC. Fingers crossed, however — Far Cry‘s recent successes with number three and Blood Dragon could be inspiring Ubisoft to push the franchise even harder.

Source: VG247

Although war is generally agreed to be “pretty awful” by everybody who has ever been through it, many video games gloss over that fact –especially when there are bad guys that need killing. Well, Company of Heroes 2 is keen to remind you of the horror of war, even if you’re somewhat detached from it when you’re ordering dozens of tiny little soldier-men to their deaths on a whim.

Enjoy! Or, perhaps, don’t. Company of Heroes 2 lands in Australia on June 26.

No real big surprise here for anybody who has been gaming on a Windows PC for more than a few years, but it’s interesting to hear it said aloud: Microsoft’s Matt Booty has confirmed that the company’s strategy is now to focus on Xbox One games and games that connect across Microsoft’s various multiple platforms.

Microsoft announced at the Xbox One reveal event (get the details here) that the console would have 15 exclusive titles in its first year. However, PC gamers are unlikely to see any of those games. Indeed, Booty described Microsoft’s Windows 8 gaming strategy by saying “we have got everything from very, very casual games, like our very much improved and reimagined Solitaire, all the way to graphically complicated games like The Harvest.”

“When I think about more connected experiences across those platforms, it’s things that show up within that family of devices where we’ve got Xbox Live, like Windows Phone and Windows 8,” said Booty.”Not what you might consider a more traditional desktop PC game.”

It’s important to note that this refers only to Microsoft’s first-party strategy — that is, they’re happy to let other developers continue making games for Windows, but they’ll continue to focus their own efforts on consoles and smartphones.

Source: Shacknews

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.

• New: SimCity Launch Park, an exclusive new park just for our dedicated fans who were early adopters.
• New: Region: Edgewater Bay. Seven city sites in one cluster around a beautiful bay with one great work site.
• New: Your current server will now be shown in the options menu.
• New: More detailed rollover information on buildings telling player’s if their Sims received happiness from a park or from shopping. Previous to this fix, this information was generic.
• Re-Enabled Feature: Global Market prices now dynamically change during gameplay.
• Re-Enabled Feature: Leaderboards will be active on EU West 3, Pacific 1 and Pacific 2 at the release. We will enable them on additional servers throughout the day.
• Re-Enabled Feature: Region filters are now enabled on all SimCity servers. Players will be able to search for open games by Map Name, Sandbox Mode, and Abandoned Cities.
• Rain Clouds: Fixed an issue where some cities would not have rain clouds to replenish their water table. If you had a city with this issue, you will start seeing clouds again within a game day.
• Fire: Improved response time of fire trucks to fires. Improved the time it takes for a fire signal to reach a fire station.
• Mission updates: Tuned Metals HQ and Community College missions. These were appearing too early, making them difficult to complete. They now appear later in a city’s development.
• Solar Farm Great Work: Reduced fire risk at the Solar Farm Great work. Local fire engines were spending too much time at the Solar Farm.
• Messaging: Improved pre-requisite messaging for Trade Port, Casinos, Smelting Factory and Oil Refinery. It should be clearer on how to unlock these buildings.
• Graphics: Fix for flickering low wealth buildings on NVIDIA graphics cards.
• Education: Fix for an issue some cities experienced where commuting students did not return from a neighbor’s city. This was causing a problem where students would disappear from a city in some cases.
• Tuning: Sims will lose a small amount of happiness if they don’t have a place to shop. Cities without places to shop will see complaints and feel the effect of unhappy Sims. This will emphasize the importance of commercial zones.

Source: EA Forums (Thanks, Mike)

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

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!

There’s no word unfortunately on a PC version just yet, but it is early days — and the PC hasn’t been Call of Duty‘s target market in a long, long time. But nevertheless, feast your eyes upon the trailer below and the four screens.

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.

To celebrate Diablo III‘s one-year birthday, Blizzard have released an infographic detailing the staggering numbers behind the game.

The image, which you can see below, includes figures such as a total play time of over 2.8 billion hours, spread between 14.5 million unique players, who have collected a total of 648 trillion gold to date.

Take a look below for the full image (click to enlarge).

Source: Battle.net

EA have revealed that Battlefield 4‘s first piece of DLC will be a series of “sprawling” multiplayer maps by the name of ‘China Rising’. The DLC will allow you to “fight for dominance across the vast and majestic Chinese mainland in four massive maps, using all-new vehicles and high-tech military equipment.”

IF you pre-order the game through the official website or through Origin you’ll get China Rising for free, but there’s no word on how much it’ll be otherwise.

This seems like a good time point out our editorial from James explaining why the current practice of DLC needs to stop.

Source: PC Gamer

ArenaNet have sent word that the price of Guild Wars 2 has been permanently dropped by $10 across all editions.

The standard edition now costs $49.99, while the Digital Deluxe edition now costs $69.99. These prices are effective as of today.

The price-drop coincides with the Last Stand at Southsun event, which will kick off on May 28. Get the details here.

Guild Wars 2 has no subscription fee — once you pay for the game, playing is free.

One of the seven new Games Workshop titles in development has been revealed: Armageddon is due out in Q1 of 2014, and it’s a turn-based title in development over at Slitherine Games.

Set during the second war for Armageddon, players will control the Armageddon Steel Legion of Imperial Guard, as well as the Blood Angels, Ultramarines and Salamanders chapters of Space Marines as they attempt to drive out the ork invasion.

Slitherine are promising a branching campaign with 30 major scenarios, 100 unit types, complex plots which can change during battle, and persistent unit growth enabling you to field veterans who carry over from multiple games.

It will also have “extensive modding options”, and support for Slitherine’s play-by-email system integrated. Count me in.

Source: VG247

Skyforge is an MMO in development by Allods Team, the same people who made the aptly-named Allods Online — and at the recent Russian Game Developer’s Conference, they announced that they’ve brought Obsidian on board to assist in development.

We haven’t heard anything about the game since its announcement in 2012, and even that flew under many people’s radars. The involvement of Obsidian may act to counteract that however, with the high-profile RPG developer known for their successes in storytelling.

“Skyforge is very interesting and promising project, claimed Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart in a statement. “I am glad that Obsidian Entertainment is involved in working on this game.”

“I am confident that the cooperation with the Allods Team will be a great experience for all of us.”

The only known Skyforge trailer was released last year, and can be seen here. It is expected to launch in 2014.

EA’s attempt to join the MOBA scene with new title Dawngate comes at an odd time, with League of Legends currently generating enough concurrent players to populate a small nation, and DotA 2 ripping up the Steam charts. But nevertheless, launch it they will — and here’s what it looks like (courtesy of Machinima).

According to the team, there are territorial control points on each map, including ones that deliver economic boosts to your team by spawning workers to harvest resources. Your towers serve as your bases like normal, but the creatures which guard them can be set loose to roam the map, and the energy flowing down lanes can be redirected. Interesting stuff.

If you’re keen on trying it out, beta testing will begin on Friday May 24. Sign up here.

Zeboyd Games have announced that Episode 3 of Penny Arcade’s On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is free for a short time today, to celebrate the announcement of a release date for Episode 4.

For today only, you can head over to the official site and grab a Steam key for Episode 3 completely free — check that out here.

Episode 4 is now schedule for release on June 7, and is to be the final game in the series — “which everyone here agrees is easily our best game to date,” says Zeboyd. Excellent stuff.

Source: Blue’s News

Warner Bros. have released the full trailer for which they so teasingly teased us last week, and it’s unfortunately not straight gameplay footage but it’s nice and pretty anyway. Here, then, are nearly five minutes of Batman kicking the snot out of various thugs, as well as some iconic enemies.

The press release sent over by Warner Bros. also reveals that Deathstroke will actually be a playable character in Arkham Origins, but only in the challenge modes. If you pre-order the game, you’ll apparently receive exclusive early access to this Deathstroke content.

To update our story from yesterday, it seems that Kevin Conroy will actually not be voicing Batman in Arkham Origins at all. When he spoke at Dallas Comic-Con he was referring to another unannounced Arkham game at Rocksteady — he clarified the position on Twitter, before immediately deleting the tweet (which basically is the same as saying “whoops, I wasn’t supposed to tell you that yet”).

The news that Kevin Conroy would not be voicing Batman in the upcoming Arkham Origins seemed to come out of nowhere, and — though it couldn’t be verified — was still enough to upset many fans. But never fear! Kevin Conroy will be returning in Arkham Origins — although whether or not he’ll be actually voicing Batman remains unconfirmed.

At the recent Dallas Comic-Con, Conroy revealed that “I can talk about it now. We’ve been working for about 9 or 10 months on the next Arkham.”

“We were all signing these contracts that we weren’t allowed to talk about it – you know the studio likes to completely control the roll out of any product, so they don’t like any of us to talk about anything.”

Although this being widely reported as confirmation, Conroy actually stops short of saying “I will be voicing Batman”. It’s hard to imagine what else he’d be doing, but considering this is a prequel, there’s every possibility he may be perhaps providing a voiceover from the perspective of an older Batman, along with a newer actor. Stay tuned!

Source: GameArena

The BBC is reporting that one of the hackers self-identifying as Lulzsec has been slapped with a 32-month jail sentence for their involvement in the hacking attacks against EA, Sony, Nintendo, and others. 32 months is reportedly the longest sentence ever handed out for hacking in the UK.

One additional member received 30 months, while another who acted as the main publicist received 24 months in a young offender institution. An 18-year old member who was sitting his exams at the time received a 20-month suspended sentence and 300 hours of community service.

Unfortunately for these four offenders, that’s not the worst of it — they now face possible extradition to the US for additional charges under the US legal system.

A 24-year old Australian man has also been arrested.

Source: VG247

Epic Games’ co-founded and president Mark Rein has used Twitter to lambast processor-manufacturing giant Intel for holding back PC innovation.

“For years we tried to convince Intel to fix their graphics but their data said they were good enough,” claimed Rein. “PC innovation suffered for it.”

“Intel still owned the lions’ share of the graphics market with integrated,” he continued. “That’s why their data said it was good enough.”

Rein doesn’t provide an idea of when they attempted to convince Intel to fix their graphics, but it’s an interesting perspective nonetheless — although many modern games sadly no longer push the boundaries of PC gaming, with multiplatform releases meaning a lower-end hardware requirement. Who knows what might have been?

Source: Kotaku

The game formerly known as Alien Fear is now Alien Rage, and to celebrate their emotional turnaround they’ve released a teaser trailer showing some of the game below. It’s not clear how much is in-engine and how much is cutscene, but their tried-and-true premise of “you are a badass space marine who must kill thousands of aliens” means you’re probably in for a good time anyway.

Take a look below and let us know what you think.