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

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).

Most films, anime, and books I like are really serious and brutal, or really serious and foreign, or really serious and arthouse, and you get the picture: They’re really serious. I went to see the third Hangover movie last night and only laughed when I myself did a squeaky fart and the row of perfumed media professionals behind me chittered excitedly trying to work out if it had been what they knew in their hearts that it was. Subsequently, most games I like are also really serious.

It’s one of the reasons I enjoy shooters so much. There’s a po-faced sincerity to them that I can really grind on even though sometimes it’s so po-faced it is actually funny. That’s kind of the point: Humour in the face of incredible adversity – oft accidental or incidental – is a VIP. It is the only kind of laughter I will allow into the gamecave during kill time. The Duke Nukems have to wait outside, they’re trying too hard. Please bear witness to this personal highlight:

Now whether that is amusing or not is fairly subjective, I suppose, but it is the candid way in which Jensen articulates the way this woman’s beloved daughter has perished that has made me laugh for one, maybe two weeks. I wake up laughing about it. I know right, you don’t want this life. It is so insensitive and inappropriate it’s glorious.

It might well be the exact kind of thing that happens in that exact situation, were a weary detective answering the queries of a forlorn mother in reality. I absolutely would not laugh at that. No way in hell. I wouldn’t even feel the impulse. That’s horrible, I’m not a 100% monster unless you fail to deliver unto me the Seven Kingdoms that are rightfully mine, dear sister, and wake the drago-

But I’ve realised that these instances in my serious gaming time have shone somewhat of a light over just how ridiculous it can be to be alive. Free from the actuality of bad things going down, there is mirth there that would never be uncovered otherwise. The tragic comedies of Shakesy wished they had have been video games, for their hopeless mission is one now accomplished – tripped over, even – by video games every hour on the hour.

Were it that some might accuse me of cresting a fine lens too close to the sun that lights to entertain and little else, I would opine they have taught me something about myself and the art of coping.

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.

The voice shouts orders again. He’s saying to wait 10 seconds for the smoke, then banzai the flag. We’d been pushing up on the objectives for five minutes now, and getting slaughtered by well placed US troops. I was so shaken by incoming artillery that my teeth felt loose in my jaw. I trust that voice — he’s what we call a ‘team player’ and can hopefully rescue success from the maelstrom of our failure so far in this bloody round.

Moments before, I had cautiously stepped around dense foliage to see if there were any pickings on our enemy’s right-flank. Just as I did, a running US trooper crested a nearby rock formation. We both snapped up, knowing the fight wasn’t entirely fair — I could take a single shot from my Arisaka and then had to manually bolt, whereas even with the worst opposing class he’d have an M1 Garand that could pump out multiple shots in quick succession. Just as I started to aim, one of my teammates landed an indirect kill with the new knee-mortar, a ground-plantable grenade launcher, and the hostile trooper’s body was flung into the air on a great gout of blood while his neatly separated limbs framed the scene behind him.

We hear the far-away rumble of artillery fire and then smoke canisters start to smack the tops of the enemy fortifications. As the clouds spread, the voice yells for everyone to banzai. I hold F and then sprint into the cloud along with most of my team, my character unleashing ‘Tenno Heika Banzai’ (‘Long live the Emperor’) from deep within. Just ahead of me is one of our officers, screaming his own madness and brandishing a katana. I think the bullet takes him in the gut because his character suddenly stumbles and then, pantomiming a hundred World War 2 movies, he slowly drops to his knees with his arms lifted at the elbow. Then he falls forward, dead.

It’s nearly impossible to see anything in the smoke cloud, but I keep running until the brown shapes ahead of me resolve into enemy combatants and I end my banzai charge with a sweep of my rifle’s bayonet and insta-kill the poor sap in front of me. The man to his right has hit ‘X’ to hug the wall in front, an emplacement position that gives him an aiming bonus when he pops out — but one that costs him his peripheral view. My bullet is guided by the Emperor and his head pops open to reveal a red mist. I feel a moment of joy followed by a moment of intense heat as the US flamethrower-wielding soldier hoses down the front line. My countrymen and I perish in a beautifully Hollywood-esque gout of liquid fire.

I honestly don’t know why we won that round, or how any round is even scored. Tripwire Interactive’s latest release Red Orchestra 2: Rising Storm demands a lot more of the player than most multiplayer FPS titles, and that includes learning the scoring system — although as expected in a game like this, playing the objective is a good start. If you played RO2‘s first release, 2012′s Heroes of Stalingrad, then you’re fairly well prepared for what Rising Storm brings — but it’s the panache with which it does so that makes this a far superior release.

I’ve fought long and hard in this Pacific theatre of war, and died in many locations. Without exception, this new arena offers far better fighting locations than the last outing. They’re still laid out in shockingly straight lines, but whether it’s the abundance of naturally placed cover or just that it doesn’t look like what gamers are used to from WW2 shooters, the environments here are the best that Tripwire have ever put together. I’ve seen close quarter city-fighting, repelled GI’s at Iwo Jima, and even took part in a night-raid at Guadalcanal and in each ‘map’ it’s the natural layout that makes it feel less like a game (although a quick look at the rectangular map can change that perception slightly).

There are a handful of things to be aware of. Rising Storm is built on Unreal — and not the good Unreal, either. Player and environmental textures can be a bit bland, and despite Tripwire’s excellent handling of particle effects and a keen eye for colour, this doesn’t look like up to the standards of a modern shooter. The good news, of course, is that as a result just about any rig will run it. Movement can be a little stilted with a few of the extra keyboard commands not something that most players will be used to, and even with remapping I’d often find myself accidentally sticking to cover at the worst possible times, or trying to find the right spot to jump over what should be a shallow wall. These movement limitations are minimal and given the slow pace of the game not something that will pop up regularly.

Also, while I’m a big fan of the unlock system, I’m concerned that I’ve already been unable to access any of my new toys, and that my stats aren’t recording properly… and this is exactly what happened with the last title. There are multiple weapon unlocks, as well as add-ons you can mix with existing weapons and what I’ve heard of them sounds great — if only I could have used them during this beta period. Stats aren’t the be-all and end-all of gaming, but if you’re going to put them into your game you should make sure they work and given this is essentially DLC, it’s very concerning that this is still a problem.

The coolest change to the RO2 formula is what the developers are calling ‘asymmetric warfare’. The US clearly have the edge in the weaponry department, so to offset this, the warriors of the Rising Sun have been given a lot of fun toys that really balance things out. Firstly, banzai-charges actually affect suppression; reducing it for the attacking infantry and increasing it on the US troops. Then there’s the already mentioned knee-mortars and katanas, the ability to set your grenades as booby-traps and — my personal favourite — by pulling the pin on a grenade and running into opposing soldiers your glorious suicide does not cost team points but it will cost enemy troops god knows what to their peace of mind.

And when you consider that any purchase of Rising Storm also gives access to all of the content from Heroes of Stalingrad and that it will all come with Steam Workshop integration means… wait, sorry, you didn’t know that bit? That’s right, buying Rising Storm gives you every map from the original release and you’ll be able to play on servers with user-made maps. It looks like Tripwire have put a lot of thought into this latest expansion and how to avoid the empty server wasteland that followed just a few months after HoS.

You can banzai over to Steam, where if you already own Heroes of Stalingrad you’ll receive a discount on Rising Storm — or if you don’t, it’s just $20 for one hell of a good shooter.

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

Microsoft revealed the existence of the Xbox One overnight, unveiling their new “all-in-one entertainment system” in a performance that seemed to continue the company’s trend of focusing on TV, Skype and music over actual video games.

Unlike Sony, Microsoft actually did show what their console looks like, and you can see it here. Underneath the hood it’s all a bit vague, but Microsoft are promising an 8-core x86 processor (meaning all next-gen consoles are now on par with the PC — good news for console ports), 8GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive (which is not replaceable or user-servicable, but you will be able to use external storage as a primary drive through USB 3.0).

Multiple power states will help it conserve power, as it’s designed to boot instantly on voice command. It will also feature a Blu-ray player and HDMI passthrough — so that you never have to use any other device again. It is not backwards-compatible with existing Xbox 360 titles.

The Xbox One will ship with something called “Xbox One Live TV”, which will enable you to control your cable, telco or satellite set-top box through your Xbox. This will, of course, only be available in the US at launch.

Every Xbox One will ship with an improved version of the Kinect, which Microsoft are now touting as essential to the Xbox experience — in fact, it won’t work without a Kinect attached. In a delightful bit of Kinect-related hilarity, users trying to watch the Xbox One reveal on their current Xboxes found that the demonstration voice commands coming from the live stream were picked up by their current Kinect, causing the stream to continually pause and drop out. Take a read, it’s beautiful.

According to Microsoft’s hardware program manager John Link, the Kinect is “always listening”, but user privacy will be “a top priority” for the team and the device will only be looking for specific activation commands when not in use.

Why might you want to worry about being listened in on? Well, because…

You’ll need to connect to the internet once a day

My current Xbox console sits in the living room unconnected to the internet — which isn’t something you’ll be able to do with the Xbox One, according to Microsoft vice president Phil Harrison. Asked by Kotaku whether they would have to connect regularly to play a single-player game, Harrison responded with “I believe it’s (every) 24 hours”.

This is further explained at the official FAQ, which states the Xbox One: “does not have to be always connected, but does require a connection to the Internet. We’re designing Xbox One to be your all-in-one entertainment system that is connected to the cloud and always ready. We are also designing it so you can play games and watch Blu-ray movies and live TV if you lose your connection.”

So what does the Xbox One need with a constant internet connection?

It’s because you need to activate each game

When you buy an Xbox One game you’ll be given a one-use only activation code, which locks that game to your Xbox LIVE account over the internet. Any user on that console can play it for free, but if you want to take your disc to your friend’s house, you’ll have to pay a fee — and not just a one-time activation fee, but the full price of the game. Again.

“The bits that are on that disc, you can give it to your friend and they can install it on an Xbox One,” claimed Phil Harrison again. “They would then have to purchase the right to play that game through Xbox Live.”

When asked by Kotaku whether they would pay the same price as a user who purchased it new in stores, Harrison said: “Let’s assume it’s a new game, so the answer is yes, it will be the same price.”

However, Harrison also explained that Microsoft had created a solution to allow players to sell their used games to other players online. He declined to discuss the specifics of this solution.

But how about the games?

Microsoft spent the majority of the presentation discussing how you could watch the NFL through your Kinect, but don’t worry — the Xbox One will also play games. The only games so far announced for it (beyond the major AAA releases such as Assassin’s Creed 4 and Battlefield 4) were Call of Duty: Ghosts, Forza 5, and something called Quantum Break by the team behind Alan Wake and Max Payne.

If all this has you excited you can (of course) slap down a pre-order for the Xbox One over at places like EB Games for the completely fictional price of $899. No actual Australian RRP has been confirmed (and, in fact, no international features were confirmed at all, such as what Australians would get instead of the NFL).

You can find out more at Microsoft’s official site.

Sony’s stock rose 9% after the Xbox One announcement (but it’s probably not related).

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

I’ll just come out and say it: I hate DLC.

Once upon a time, developers and publishers would laud an upcoming game on its merits alone, highlighting the work done on a compelling story or new gameplay mechanic. We’d buy into the hype after a couple of screenshots, an interview or even a video if we were lucky. But now we’re lucky to hear an announcement or see a trailer that doesn’t mention the bundle of pre-order extras or day one DLC that’s available. Extra guns? $5. Extra missions? $10. Feel like recruiting that master assassin into your ranks? Well, that’s $7, or part of the package if you sign up for the MasterEliteUltraPass that guarantees you all* of the extras for one low, low price of half the initial game’s cost, again.

I don’t tend to buy into some of the hyperbolic statements made by a lot of (mostly YouTube) commentators… but I can honestly state that I think DLC is right up there with DRM as one of the true scourges of our gaming pastime.

Before the days of season passes and costume packs, teaser trailers for new maps and controversial horse armour, developers actually felt the need to justify extra content. It was the early nineties, and expansion packs were introduced in order to bridge the gap between sequels. In most cases, expansions weren’t even considered until after the original development period had completed; developers would gauge reactions to the game, take feedback as to what content players wanted more of, and decided whether they could complement the existing title with an additional update. Arguably, Blizzard were behind most of the memorable, well crafted expansion packs, that enabled them to keep initial teams running on their IP (many of which are still there today, as opposed to many studios that let teams go after each game), and continue the stories of the title’s canon without creating an entirely new experience.

StarCraft’s Brood War expansion pack is still, hands down, not only one of the best updates to a game in recent memory, but a fantastic game on its own. Unlike the long, meandering tale of development delays that is StarCraft 2, Brood War came out less than a year after its predecessor. It included not only an enormous campaign mode, featuring all 3 races, but arguably featured a fundamentally more interesting story than the original alongside a stack of new cutscenes. It also added seven new units that fundamentally changed how multiplayer functioned and drastically increased AI difficulty and intelligence. It went on to be one of the best selling expansion packs in history, sitting at 96% on GameRankings and still sold in retail boxes for almost a decade after its release.

The killer? It cost half the price of the title it was upgrading, was DRM free and included a “spawn” mode for people to test multiplayer out before they bought it.

This still stands out, in my mind, as the pinnacle of what a development studio should do when they want to extend the life, world and canon of their titles. The thought that went into Brood War showed that Blizzard truly wanted to create an experience that allowed players to continue deeper into StarCraft and discover more complex situations and difficulty. It also made them a bucket of money from what was effectively a pretty cheap investment – almost all of the assets were taken from the original, outside the work done on the new areas and units. Unfortunately for modern gamers, much of this ethos — that is, crafting an experience that complements the game without overwhelming the wallets and expectations of their customer base — is well and truly dead in 2013.

EA created a behemoth at the turn of the century with The Sims, and they quickly released that in a virtual world that emulated our own, they could charge anyone for pretty much anything. How about a pack that introduced shopping malls? Halloween? Pets? University? Dating? The possibilities were endless. It worked, too — many of the expansions for The Sims sat at the top of sales charts for weeks, surpassing many AAA releases. By the time the sequel arrived, pre-order benefits had arrived on the scene, and The Sims was ripe for it. By the time the 3rd iteration had rolled around, it was basically stripped down to the bone – but EA and Maxis were ready to offer an absolutely ridiculous eighteen expansion and “stuff” packs. The “stuff: packs, most importantly, did not effect gameplay at all, consisting largely of crap to fill your house or dress your Sims. In addition, there was also a store available for people to buy almost anything else they could think of — all for cold hard cash of course.

Other publishers saw the success of The Sims franchise, but not in terms of its innovative gameplay or mechanics, but in its manner of vomiting money like a drunk after a lamb kebab. Before long, everyone was on the DLC drug, offering everything from overpowered weapons to the infamous equestrian protection we’re all so fond of. But there were titles that didn’t have things like weapons that could easily be sold. How could games like RPGs get in on the play? Simple — offer in-game cash as an option in the store, or how about 1,000 extra costumes for characters? Introduction screens for games now didn’t just invite you to start a new game, they practically begged you to get into the store and buy something, anything. Cardboard inserts offered an extra map or some other useless trinket to get you hooked, hopefully leading to an extra $10 or $20 purchase.

The problem here wasn’t that these extras were being offered per se, but more that they were of such poor quality. Most of these extra weapons or armour packs didn’t give you much of an advantage, and in most cases tended to be outclassed quite early on by a standard item. Multiplayer benefits began to skew communities, creating two or more tiers of “haves” and “have nots”, arbitrarily reducing the player base well and truly before the game had been out three months — plus you could tell many of the maps were rushed as well. Then there were the extra missions. Then there is the Civilization 5 route, where a host of existing features are ripped out and sold to us piece by piece later on, with the reason being that “so much had changed, we didn’t think players could handle it”. Uh-huh.

Mass Effect is, in this writers’ humble opinion, one of the best game trilogies of the past decade — but the DLC content was, with a few exceptions, completely forgettable. First, there was the controversy of important story arcs being locked, day one, behind a paywall. Then, extra squad members. But after we decided to take the plunge anyway, because hey, it’s Mass Effect, what we were left with was a sour taste on our tongues after dropping an extra $40 to unlock (most) of the extra missions, weapons and squadmates. So, publishers, why aren’t we just provided with this content with the (not so insignificant cost) of the original game?

Because, well, we’ve already demonstrated that we’re more than happy to pay for it. For all of the complaints about day one DLC, we’re all desperate for more of the same that we buy everything on offer, rolling the dice, in the hope that what we get complements the existing experience. But, it doesn’t. Everything feels tacked on, overpriced and lazy. Not only that, but it feels like that much of this content could have been easily integrated into the original title, creating a more cohesive link, rather than dropped abruptly onto the end.

It’s not just Mass Effect either. How about Fallout 3? Dead Island? Borderlands? All of these titles would later deliver”full featured”, story-based DLC that promised to introduce an extra avenue of plot and character development to their stories. The developers don’t lie in this respect – DLC is usually always an afterthought, but there lies the detriment to the final product. If what we’re paying top dollar for, on top of the original purchase price, isn’t as good as the original product, because it wasn’t designed to be part of it, then why are we being offered it in the first place? There are exceptions to the rule of course – most of the GTA DLC has been great, especially The Ballad of Gay Tony, but it still doesn’t escape the overall bastion of poor development decisions.

I don’t buy DLC because I don’t like the direction I see it taking our industry. Most of what I have played or items I have purchased do not feel like worthwhile products, especially when I can usually find a fantastic, all inclusive, indie experience for the same price I’m paying for a substandard add-on. If you hate DLC, then follow my example and just stop buying it. The only way publishers and developers will stop trying to cash in on our enthusiasm is when we stop buying the snake oil every single time.

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.

With the news that Path of Exile were launching a gateway to bring down the lag for players in Australia and New Zealand, we called Grinding Gear Games’ Chris Wilson to get the low-down on where the F2P-ARPG is at, why now is the right time for a low-ping gateway, and their plans for the future.

If you’d like to play Path of Exile, you can download the beta client free from our file library here (quota-free for iiNet group customers).

GON: Chris, you’ve been in open beta for a little while now, since January in fact — can you tell us a little bit about how everything’s progressing?

Chris: So we’re now at 2.46 million registered users. So we had a large surge of people who became interested in the game, and who have joined our community, which has exceeded our expectations. Most of the game’s performance so far has exceeded our expectations, and this has raised some issues with how do we handle all these users, but thankfully the tests we’ve done prior to open beta were very optimistic in terms of user numbers so we were (barely) able to handle the amount of people that flooded our servers. And it did cause a few weeks of instability while we dealt with issues that only manifest when you have more than 50,000 people playing at once. But we we have those under control now.

GON: So what is your peak concurrent player count?

Chris: We’ve hit 70,000 in the first week of release. We’re very pleased with that. There was an awful lot of stuff combining at the same time with the game being very new and a lot of people talking about it which caused us to really strain the servers, but thankfully it’s dropped a bit to a more maintainable rate at the moment.

GON: Have you identified any issues in the beta that you’ll need to address going forward before launch?

Chris: We have found a lot of things based on player feedback and our own analytics that we can improve. There are various systems that we’ve been working on with the players to find better solutions to. For example loot allocation in the game, a lot of players would like it to be a bit more forgiving and less free-for-all, so we’ve been looking into a variety of options which will hopefully launch by the end of the month.

GON: When we last spoke you anticipated the third act being the final before launch. How do you feel about that now?

Chris: We added most of the third act in beta release, missing off about the last third of that act. And we are expecting that we will have that as the major content added at launch. It basically finishes off the story, adds a much more climactic boss encounter, and a lot of new areas. And we’re also working on the fourth act of the game which isn’t going to be ready for launch at the end of this year, but it will come maybe 9-12 months after that.

GON: So you’re still anticipating a launch in October-December?

Chris: Yeah, at the moment we’re targeting very late September or early October.

GON: And 9-12 months after that, the fourth act?

Chris: Yes, although that will depend a lot on support from the players. If they continue being generous with their support then we’ll be able to do it quickly, and if they’re not then I guess it will take longer. We have to use their money to develop it, and the rate of support dictates how many staff we have working on it.

GON: How many staff do you have now? Have you scaled up since beta?

Chris: We’re up to 39 now, including our customer support department, and that’s the department that’s grown the most.

GON: That’s really good! That must make you… the third biggest developer in New Zealand now?

Chris: Something around there. I’m not sure of the exact studio numbers. After we last spoke, everyone came down on me for misquoting the relative sizes of the NZ game development industry. So I’ll check my figures before I actually comment!

GON: Fair enough! So you’ve activated the in-game cash shop?

Chris: Yeah, when open beta started we stopped selling access to it and so it became public, and we allowed people to use the credit that they’d purchased during closed beta and also to purchase new credit that they can use to buy microtransactions. That’s been very popular. We’re constantly adding new ones, trying to get a few in every week, and people have been letting us know what they’re interested in seeing next.

GON: Have you been seeing a lot of people willing to pay out for new stuff?

Chris: It’s been very good, looking at the rates of support from the users and we’ve been finding it helps to run specials so that people can get some of the more premium things at a discount occasionally if they’re patient.

GON: So you’ve just activated the AU/NZ gateway for a week or so now. Can you tell us about how the ping has gone down since then and what feedback you’ve been seeing from affected players?

Chris: Sure. So we added it to the realm toward the end of last week but in a way that the public couldn’t see, but as of yesterday we’ve made it so the public can log in to it, so we’ve got one day of feedback from the public plus one more of testing from ourselves. For people who are used to playing on a 200-250ms connection to America, they say it’s like a different game because they’re playing in Australia with sometimes less than 30 ping. From NZ we get about 50 ping. There are some issues with the server that we’re working on resolving with the host, some initial configuration issues, and we suspect it’s just a matter of replacing that physical machine with one with different hardware. But from a networking point of view as far as we’re concerned it’s working extremely well, and it validates a lot of what we were hoping we would get. It’s a strange case because we’re running the realm internationally through different server hosts.

The thing about Path of Exile is that players can play together regardless of which server they’re playing on, so if you have a friend in Europe you can play with them and trade items, even though their server is located in another continent. So normally we do this because the data centers we use are linked together, they have really good connections, but in the case of the Australian one it’s with a different company so it’s our first case of actually going through ‘the wild internet’ as it were, to connect between them.

GON: So where is your gateway located physically? And what did you have to do to get it set up?

Chris: I have no idea what city in Australia it’s located in. Which in a way shows that this kind of stuff is handled transparently (laughs). In order to set it up, the first challenge was finding a server host that was able to do it. And the difficulty there is the cost of international bandwidth. It’s prohibitively expensive, but we have a good deal on that with this server, and it was just a matter of soliciting a test server to see how well it performs and then once we were happy with that we can order a lot more and scale it up to support a larger Australian population on there.

GON: Do you have a lot of AU/NZ players? Can you give us a rough estimate of how many there are?

Chris: It’s difficult to know exactly, but my estimate is somewhere in the region of about 4%.

GON: So 4% of your 2.4 million?

Chris: Yeah I would say it’s somewhere in the region of about 100,000 game accounts signed up through Australia and New Zealand.

GON: You said that the cost of international bandwidth is prohibitively expensive. Is this something you’re finding worse in Australia than any other country?

Chris: In New Zealand and Australia it’s SUPER expensive compared to the rest of the world. In some cases, one hundred times as expensive. So that is prohibitive. Except now that we have a good deal arranged with the server, it should be sustainable.

GON: Now one of the most common reactions to the gateway news was “But these are NZ devs, why did they take so long to make a gateway for themselves”. Can you explain to our readers the realities of game development and why it took this long to make this decision?

Chris: Well I guess there are a few things in play here, and the first one is that although we’re based in New Zealand, our customers generally aren’t. We’d love to be able to support them, the New Zealanders, especially because we’re based there, but the priority has to be the other 98% of players who we have to make sure come first. Because of that, launching an international realm was the first goal in getting that sorted out. And now we’re in that stage of open beta where we’re not encountering stability issues of the core game, you know, everyone else is playing happily overseas, that’s about the time we can look into supporting other territories. In addition of course New Zealand and Australia are very hard to target because of the cost of bandwidth.

We’ve received quotes in the order of multiple dollars per gigabyte of data, you know, like domestic internet rates or worse in some cases because it’s reliable co-located rates. So we’ve received quotes that… there is no way our company could afford the quantity of bandwidth that would be required to run servers there if it was that bad per gigabyte value. Thankfully you can get better rates if you organise larger bulk deals and tie them into server hosting. So we have eventually been able to get one sorted out but it’s not an exaggeration to say that this is literally the sixteenth or seventeenth server hosting company we’ve spoken to.

GON: How do you feel when you see New Zealanders or Australians complaining about this? It’s obviously very difficult for you to be in this position, since you obviously have to deal with the business realities but also you want to support your home team at the same time?

Chris: I would love to give the New Zealanders and Australians a place to play, I mean, if they were playing locally, it’d be easier for us to be greedy and to go and do that at the cost of everyone else, but we decided it’d be best to put most of the players first despite that fact it actually inconveniences us. Another thing is: having the game from New Zealand run at 200-250 milliseconds of ping has encouraged us to make sure the game works acceptably at that latency.

There are a lot of games like Vindictus for example, which is an Asian action-MMO, that game limits it so you can’t connect if your latency is over a certain amount, and they did this because they have quite a fast visceral experience but it requires the latency to be low. Whereas in our case we know that some people are connecting from… like we had connections from the middle of Africa. I don’t know how they’re getting internet, but they’re playing our game and it’s important that the game is playable with a lot of ping. We do an awful lot of action-prediction and stuff like that. When you click to attack it starts the animation going straight away even if it’s going to be a full second before the data gets back to you with the result. And while you certainly suffer playing under conditions like that, it still feels relatively immediate to do so.

GON: I guess this must have made you a stronger developer to have to work under these conditions, but did it provide any difficulties in testing? Were you able to really test the game properly?

Chris: We have our internal servers in our office and we also had the servers in the states so to some extent the experience that we were missing was the experience between these two. The ones in the office have less than a millisecond of latency, and the ones in the states maybe 200 ms away. So we were missing the experience of trying it at any less than 200 ms but thankfully, that’s what our giant army of beta testers was for and they gave us plenty of feedback on that.

GON: When you look to the future you’ve got the fourth act coming and before that, the public launch, but what’s the next step for Path of Exile beyond more acts and more content. Do you have plans for maybe a foundry-style mod toolkit, or any sort of player creation tools? Just spitballing — what have you got in the works?

Chris: We’ve looked into the idea of community content and there are definitely some opportunities there. One of the things to note is that because it’s an online game with a secure economy, you can’t let the players literally decide “this is the exact layout of the dungeon and we’ll put the monsters where we want” because they could make it too easy. So there has to be a degree of challenge that’s maintained. We have quite an interesting plan for the future of Path of Exile which involves both continuing forward with the core game, new acts and so on, but also taking advantage of the league system where we can run — think of it as new servers of the game that have a fresh economy and new rulesets.

We’ve been running race events that last between say, one and eight hours, using the system for quite a while now, I mean there’s several running a day now, six today for example. It’s like a fresh start in the game and you get the chance to race other players. It’s unique in action RPGs because it lets you see who’s better at the game rather than who has spent the most time accumulating items. We have some interesting twists on that in the future that we believe will be very addictive, and our goal is that alongside having a strong normal action-RPG we’d like there to be a lot of repeatable content in these interesting events.

GON: Do you have any plans to introduce a real cash economy into these events? Betting on peoples’ performance for example?

Chris: We are very interested in catering towards the more meta e-sports style stuff. With regards to wagering, I mean we’ve discussed wagering from in-game items all the way up to real money and… of course there a lot of legal implications of real-money wagering, and similar kind of abuse issues that can happen with in-game wagering. I mean people will happily throw matches and stuff to get a better sword, if needed. It does have some interesting points but we really value our streaming community and the people who take the events seriously as a pseudo e-sport, and we have better streaming integration coming in the future for example.

GON: I’ve been playing Neverwinter, and a lot of people are using their Foundry tool to create maps that are basically just easy mob grinds and experience farms. Is this the sort of thing you’d have to worry about with player-authoring tools as well?

Chris: Right. One of the things we are planning on selling is the ability for people to customise the parameters of one of these league events, but in a way that can only make it harder. That way you get bragging rights for completing a very difficult event, rather than the ability to just set it to be too easy and make a lot of progress.

GON: Making it too easy does sound pointless, but… I guess if they’re willing to pay you money?

Chris: It should be interesting. Though it really depends. As long as we can keep it safe for the other users. You’ve probably seen with the design of our microtransactions the goal is that people with money can’t get any kind of advantage over other people in terms of actual progress.

GON: And that seems to be working out quite well for you — there’s a lot of MMOs which are struggling with microtransactions because people know it’s pay-to-win, and so they avoid the whole game like the plague.

Chris: Yeah. It’s difficult as a player to commit yourself to playing something where you know that someone can just trump all of your work by spending twenty bucks.

GON: Chris, thanks a lot for your chat and it’s been really good to talk to you!

Chris: Thank you for your time!

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