Overwatch devs have released a behind-the-scenes look at the recent "Honor and Glory" animated short
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During Blizzcon 2017 the Overwatch team unveiled one of their best animated shorts yet - Honor and Glory. Unlike the previous Mei short, Honor and Glory gave us a good look at Reinhardt as a character and what exactly made him into the protector that he is today, as well as a whole bunch of action scenes that really make me think Blizzard should just start up a movie studio one of these days.
If you found the animated short to be as enjoyable as I did, you'll be glad to hear that its Director Ben Dai has now released a brief commentary video going over the various important moments and what it took to create them. Have a look, its quite interesting:
Total War: Rome 2's Empire Divided DLC is bringing 10 new factions and a variety of improvements
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In a bit of a surprising announcement, Creative Assembly has revealed Empire Divided - a brand new DLC for Total War: Rome 2! As you might imagine from the name, its going to be set during the crisis of the 3rd century, and will feature a variety of new factions to toy around with. More interestingly, however, some of the new factions will be labeled as "Heroic", meaning they will come with elaborate victory conditions, famous leaders, and unique event chains.
Besides the factions themselves, the Empire Divided DLC will also bring in a variety of new features and improvements: banditry, plagues, cults, new general skills, new narrative technologies, updated building chains, new units, and naturally, a whole bunch of balance changes. It seems to me like this is an attempt from Creative Assembly to use the lessons learned from Attila and Warhammer to improve Rome 2, and if so, that is something I can certainly get behind given how rough the original launch was.
StarCraft 2's Terran campaign, as well as competitive and co-op multiplayer, are now free-to-play
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If you have even a tiny bit of interest in the RTS genre, you might be glad to hear that StarCraft 2 has now gone free-to-play! You can experience the entire Terran campaign, play as all three races in casual or competitive multiplayer, mess around in the co-op missions with a variety of different characters, and naturally, see what sort of custom maps the community has created in the Arcade.
You can get a brief overview of all these features, as well as a small glimpse of what they look like in-game, via the recently posted developer video. Have a gander:
Ubisoft's Ghost Recon Wildlands now has a free trial that lets you explore everything for 5 in-game hours
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[Update]: Ubisoft has now announced a brand new sequel to Wildlands - Ghost Recon Breakpoint!
Ghost Recon Wildlands is Ubisoft's tactical open-world shooter designed with squad-based play in mind. As such, you can either mess around with a couple of AI companions, or team up with your friends and see just what kind of chaos you can wreak upon the world.
If this sounds like the type of game you'd love to try out, but you don't really feel like buying multiple copies just to do so, you'll be glad to hear that Ubisoft is now offering a free trial. Simply head on over to the official website, pick the platform of your choice, and you'll be able to play for 5 in-game hours either alone or alongside a couple of friends.
Overwatch developers seem to be cracking down on players that only use one hero in Competitive Mode
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[Update]: Blizzard has released another statement on the whole issue.
[Original Story]: If you've given the official subreddit even a single glance today you're no doubt aware that a large amount of 'onetricks', players that only pick one specific hero regardless of circumstances, have received a 24 hour ban. There is currently a lot of misinformation being spread around, but the root cause behind all of the suspensions appears to be a large amount of reports filed by their fellow players.
When one of the banned players asked Blizzard's Customer Service to review their ban, here's the answer they were given back: "If that means that you are picking up a particular character, completely ignoring the rest of the team composition, and the requests from people, that they cannot accommodate you to your play-style, then the reports are justified I'm afraid." In other words, it seems that Blizzard is getting really serious about cleaning up the Competitive Mode, though I don't think banning people willy-nilly is going to accomplish that any time soon.
Blizzard will soon be removing Hearthstone's Death Knight Hero cards from the Arena card pool
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While their addition to Constructed has been met with a great deal of success, Death Knight Hero cards have cause some significant problems for Arena. In a game mode with very limited answers and combos, having to deal with a permanently upgraded Hero Power proved to be nigh impossible, especially when you're faced off against some of the most powerful Death Knight cards like Frost Lich Jaina.
As such, I am very happy to announce that Blizzard will be removing all nine Knights of the Frozen Throne Death Knight Hero cards from the Arena pool this Tuesday, November 14th. Naturally, this won't affect already existing decks, so if you don't feel like fighting a swarm of Death Knights at the high win bracket you might want to wait a week or two for all of the current decks to clear out.
Guild Wars 2 developers have now released an official response to the recent Loot Box controversy
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Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire's very first balance patch arrived a couple of days ago, bringing with it some much needed quality of life changes and tweaks to pretty much all of the classes. While the update itself ended up being favorably received, it was quickly overshadowed by just how ridiculous the new Loot Boxes are. Instead of being able to buy or earn the exact mount skin you want, you have to buy Mount Adoption Licenses for 400 Gems ($5), each one of which gives you a random unique skin. Since there are 30 different mount skins in the box, most of which aren't exactly interesting, I think you can see why the Guild Wars 2 community was in such an uproar over the past few days.
ArenaNet has since then released an official response addressing the whole Loot Box controversy, and while nothing will be changing for this batch of skins you might be glad to hear that they will focus on bundles and individual cosmetics for future releases. Here's the full message: