Total War: Warhammer's upcoming free Update 2 is bringing in new maps, magic, heroes and balance changes
- By Ash
- in News
Pretty much every conversation about Total War: Warhammer these days is centered around the upcoming Call of the Beastmen DLC and how it appears to be overpriced, but its well worth mentioning that there is also a substantial free update coming this week.
The creatively named Update 2 is set to arrive this Thursday with four new maps to wage war on, two new heroes, an entirely new magic school "Lore of Beasts" reserved solely for the Beastmen and the Empire, as well as a couple of other little features and balance changes. If you're looking for detailed information I would suggest you head to the official wiki, but for now here's an overview of what to expect:
Team Fortress 2's recent update has significantly improved Casual Matchmaking
- By Ash
- in News
If you haven't played Team Fortress 2 the past few weeks you should consider yourself extremely lucky since the Meet your Match update brought in not just the Competitive Mode, but a whole slew of bugs and poorly thought out design choices as well. Casual Matchmaking, the bread and butter for the wast majority of TF2's playerbase, was unfortunately hit by the majority of these issues as it got forcibly transformed into a completely serious, almost competitive mode with long queue times, punishments for leaving in the middle of a match, and worst of all, no autobalance.
As you can imagine, the community was less than pleased, but thankfully Valve have broken their vow of silence and have recently corrected the majority of these issues and brought back random, chaotic fun into Team Fortress 2, a game where the primary objective is to acquire the most outlandishly stupid hat. You can read the full change log over at the TF2 blog, but here's the short version:
McCree currently holds nearly a 100% pick rate in Overwatch's competitive scene
- By Ash
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Blizzard has always been a bit shaky when it comes to balance, as any Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Hearthstone or World of Warcraft player will attest, but even with that considered its still baffling to see how the current McCree went through the Public Test Realms unscathed. To put things into perspective, players thought that McCree was so strong he'd completely overshadow Soldier 76 as the king of ranged damage, but what ended up happening is that McCree completely overshadowed everyone.
Nowhere has this been more apparent than during the recent GosuGamers weekend tournament (both EU and NA versions) given that the almighty McLeftClick has scored a nearly 100% pick rate among the various teams. Most hilarious of all, the 1.24% times he hasn't been picked resulted in the team getting obliterated soon afterwards. You can find the full list of pick rates over at do7RiV's Reddit thread, but I'm afraid to say that it doesn't paint a pretty picture. The question is, how can this be fixed?
Battleborn has recently added three competitive maps and a brand new sneaky hero is coming soon
- By Ash
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While its unfortunate given that Battleborn is by no means a bad game, there is no denying that it has fallen quite heavily behind when it comes to playerbase, at least on PC where such numbers can be observed. Thankfully, it does appear that Gearbox is still not giving up on Battleborn as they have recently added three new competitive maps, and soon a brand new hero as well.
The second of the post-launch heroes is going to be a sneaky aquatic assassin that likes to call himself Pendles. He hails from the same water-world as Alani, the previously released hero, and while she mostly focuses on supporting her team Pendles is a much more proactive character given that he can sneak behind enemy lines and use either poison or big ol' knives to simply dispatch any high priority targets. If you enjoy preying on the weak and hate seeing other people have fun, you'll be happy to hear that Pendles will be entering Early Access tomorrow, with an official release set for August 4.
Humble Bundle has detailed their methods for fighting online fraud
- By Ash
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Online fraud has been a thing for as long as the Internet has existed, and due to the massive world-wide appeal of gaming it shouldn't surprise you to hear that the issue has spread here as well. Just last month the indie publisher TinyBuild has claimed that G2A, an online key reseller, sold $450k worth of keys without them seeing a single cent from any of the sales.
The way this is usually done is by having a third party buy or otherwise acquire a database of stolen credit cards, use those credit cards to purchase massive amounts of popular game keys, and then resell them on various online markets such as G2A for half the price, or even less. To put it simply, its a race to sell as many keys as possible before anyone becomes even remotely aware of any potential shadiness.
Its not an easy problem to solve, but according to Humble Bundle's latest blog post they seem to have eliminated the majority of the offenders. If online security is something you're interested in, I fully recommend you give it a read as its all fairly simple stuff that comes together to form a complex system that appears to do its job rather well.
System Shock Remastered's RPG elements have been revealed
- By Ash
- in News
[Update]: After nearly seven years in development, the System Shock Remake will finally be launching in March 2023!
The original System Shock was an excellent game that brought about a revolution in the RPG genre, but as I've come to realize last year when I tried to replay it, the RPG mechanics aren't actually that well balanced. The biggest issue is the relative power level of the various weapons and cyber-upgrades as some of them are nearly mandatory, while the others are mostly pointless, leading to long stretches of gameplay with basically no improvements to your character.
Thankfully, it does appear that Nightdive Studios are aware of these issues with the original since they have recently posted a Kickstarter update on how exactly they aim to make the RPG mechanics compelling in the upcoming System Shock remaster. Here's what they had to say:
The Reaper's Due, an upcoming DLC for Crusader Kings 2, brings with it the black plague
- By Ash
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Crusader Kings 2 has always been a bit of a niche experience, a strategy game designed for those that wish to delve deep into the politics behind a kingdom, but the upcoming DLC is really starting to stretch how niche CK2 can truly become.
The Reaper's Due, as you might expect given its ominous title, brings with it one of the deadliest phenomena the world has ever seen - the black plague! Here's the rather... bizarre trailer to get you in the right mood, as well as a brief overview of what to expect with The Reaper's Due: