Many years after being canceled, Vermintide 2's PvP Versus mode is now coming back
- By Ash
- in News
[Update]: Vermintide 2's A Parting of the Waves update is adding a brand new map and shield-bearing enemy.
Back in 2019, Fatshark announced that they're working on a PvP-focused Versus mode for Vermintide 2. Unfortunately, the new game mode ran into some sort of trouble during development as Fatshark quickly stopped talking about it, and eventually seemed to have given up on the idea entirely.
As such, you can imagine my surprise when I decided to fire up Vermintide 2 and was struck with the announcement that Versus is now back! More specifically, it's currently in alpha testing so it'll likely be a while before it's officially out, but the important thing is that it's now once again in active development!
Overwatch 2's Season 9 will bring self-healing to DPS and tank heroes, among other major changes
- By Ash
- in News
[Update]: Overwatch 2's Season 9 has arrived with massive changes to core principles like health and damage.
Once it arrives this February, Overwatch 2's Season 9 will bring with it some drastic changes in order to shake up the rather messy current metagame. The end goal, as you might imagine, is to shift the gameplay from 'heal spam vs damage spam' to more varied and interesting playstyles where all sorts of heroes can shine.
In order to achieve this, Season 9 will be adding a modified, tuned-down version of the Support self-healing passive to both Damage and Tank heroes. This should, in theory, reduce the pressure on Support players as everyone will be able to manage their own health while out of combat. More importantly, it will also give dive heroes a bit of a boost as they'll now be able to constantly harass the enemy without having to glue themselves to a health pack or rely on heroes like Ana to keep them alive.
Dragonflight's Seeds of Renewal update has arrived with NPC teammates, Gilneas reclamation and worldwide Dragonriding
- By Ash
- in News
In order to help tide everyone over until The War Within expansion launches later this year, Blizzard has now released Dragonflight's Update 10.2.5 - Seeds of Renewal. While the patch doesn't bring with it a ton of new content to mess around with, there are quite a few quality-of-life improvements present, as well as some fan-favorite ideas that took quite a few years to finally materialize.
First and foremost, Dragonriding is now available worldwide, which means that travel across the older zones has just been sped up significantly! It's also worth mentioning that the old style of flying has not been removed, so you can just pick whatever option suits you.
MTG Arena has just buffed a whole bunch of Domain and Powerstone focused cards
- By Ash
- in News
[Update]: MTG Arena's Alchemy: Murders at Karlov Manor mini-set is launching on March 5th, and it brings with it a potential teaser for 4-player games!
While it got mostly overshadowed by the Murder at Karlov Manor reveals, MTG Arena's most recent update has brought with it a nifty batch of balance changes. The goal behind the whole update, as you might expect, was to give a bit of a boost to some of the underpowered or underused mechanics.
In this case, that would be Dominaria United's Domain and The Brothers' War's Powerstones - two mechanics that did see some competitive play at first, but just didn't have the raw power needed to contend with the constant influx of new cards. As such, a whole bunch of them have just received a variety of buffs, mostly related to their cost and power, as have a couple of cards that interact with the two mechanics.
Fallout 1 & 2 inspired CRPG set in post-apocalyptic Australia - Broken Roads Preview
- By Ash
- in Previews
Set in the post-apocalyptic version of Western Australia, Broken Roads is a narrative driven CRPG following various groups of people desperately trying to survive in a land that not only contains mutated Australian wildlife, but also one that hasn't seen a single shred of rain in many years! With that in mind, I'm sure it'll come as a massive shock to hear that Broken Roads takes a lot of inspiration from the classic Fallout games, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the number of unique options you have when attempting to resolve some of the major conflicts.
So if you're curious about what exactly Broken Roads does well, as well as where it falls flat on its face, allow me to share with you my thoughts after spending the last week thoroughly exploring its first chapter.
Supergiant Games' Hades 2 will be heading into Early Access in Q2, 2024
- By Ash
- in Indie Games
A fair bit of time has gone by since Hades 2 was first announced, but I'm happy to say that we now have at least a bit more information about it. First and foremost, Hades 2 will be heading into Early Access (both on Steam and the Epic Games Store) in Q2, 2024, though no exact release date has been announced just yet.
Much like its predecessor, the initial version of Hades 2 will come with a sizable amount of content, which will then be expanded through a variety of updates guided by player feedback. These types of updates will bring with them additional characters (likely meaning non-playable ones), new and expanded storylines, deeper interactions, and naturally, more areas to explore and enemies to clobber.
The 2023 Steam Awards winners have been announced, and it's a bit of a mess
- By Ash
- in News
After tallying up all of the votes cast during the most recent winter sale, Valve has now unveiled all of the 2023 Steam Award winners. Much like last year some of the games are truly worthy of their newfound crown, others are a curious yet reasonable choice, while a select few are completely undeserving of the throne and seem to have only gotten there thanks to a collective bout of insanity.
Before I say anything else, allow me to share with you the brief list of categories and their winners: