MTG Arena's Murders at Karlov Manor set is arriving on February 6th alongside surprise guests
- 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!
Instead of having Draft Boosters and Set Boosters, Magic: The Gathering will soon be consolidating both into brand new Play Boosters. These Play Boosters will contain 14 cards, will be fully draftable, and will have a chance to contain some fancy cards from days gone by, including some with unique new artwork.
For MTG Arena in specific, these Play Boosters will be present in Limited formats, while the current 'normal' boosters will continue to be given out as rewards and will remain available for purchase through the in-game store. So if you don't play Limited or care about the older formats like Historic, Timeless or Explorer, chances are you might not even notice anything has changed.
Starship Troopers inspired co-op shooter Helldivers is getting a highly ambitious, third-person sequel
- By Ash
- in Indie Games
[Update #2]: Helldivers 2 will soon be getting the EXO-45 Patriot Exosuits teased all the way back at launch.
[Update]: My 70+ hour review of Helldivers 2 is now out, and I'm delighted to say that the game is phenomenal!
Following in the footsteps of games like Risk of Rain 2, Arrowhead Game Studios have decided to really shake things up for the sequel to their 2015 co-op shooter Helldivers. As such, not only is Helldivers 2 going to be bigger, better and more polished than its predecessor, but it'll also forgo the restricting top-down view in favor of a more personal and higher fidelity third-person one.
When it comes to the actual gameplay, it should come as little surprise to hear that Helldivers 2 will equip you with an assortment of absurdly overpowered weaponry and throw you into the meatgrinder against equally absurd numbers of enemies. Add to that a plethora of toys that all cause copious amounts of friendly fire, a constant stream of chaos and nonsense, as well as overly patriotic, Starship Troopers flavored dialogue, and you've got yourself the building blocks of a (hopefully) highly entertaining co-op game.
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
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- 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.