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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:
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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?
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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.
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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.
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[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:
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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:
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The Dark Souls series is my favorite bunch of games in all of existence and roguelikes are my favorite way of passing the time, so you would think that a combination of the two would result in a game so amazing I would never leave the desk again, but unfortunately Necropolis fell short from such a lofty goal.
Thankfully, there is a bit of hope on the horizon as Harebrained Schemes has promised to release an entire series of free updates in order to address community criticism and turn Necropolis into the game everyone wanted it to be. All of this was detailed in the recently posted announcement, so if you're interested in the full picture I'd recommend you head over there, but for now here's the short version of what to expect in Necropolis' near future:
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Even though it might not seem like it given the show's intentionally crappy art style and crude humor, each episode of South Park has a lot of thought put behind it, especially when it comes to the writing and timing for the various jokes.
Now imagine how complicated things get when you have to retain the show's quality and still somehow make all of it into an entertaining game that can last upwards of 10 hours, longer than an entire season of the show! If your imagination is a bit faulty due to the summer heat, however, here's the most recent South Park: The Fractured But Whole development video with Trey Parker and Matt Stone discussing how the game slowly took shape:
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The 3D Sonic games don't have the best reputation these days given that the majority of them either released unfinished, unpolished, or just downright bland, though there are a couple of exceptions. Sonic: Generations and Colors are two genuinely fun games that have managed to take the 3D premise and concoct some compelling gameplay to go along with it, rather than simply stick to the 2D formula and wonder why it just isn't working.
With that in mind, I'm happy to announce that the team behind both of those games has been assembled once more to create a brand new 3D Sonic game - Project Sonic 2017 (a working title, I'd imagine). While there isn't any gameplay footage just yet, here's the announcement trailer showcasing not just Sonic, but two Sonics:
- By Ash
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The Sonic series has always been a bit of a roller-coaster in terms of quality, but I think everyone can agree that the classic 2D Sonic games are some of the best examples of how fun Sonic can truly be. Unfortunately, at least as far as I'm concerned, the Sonic Team mostly spent the past decade working on 3D iterations of the series and pretty much failing every single time, though I have to give special credit to Generations for being genuinely fun.
With that little introduction out of the way, I hope you can now understand how astounding it is to hear that Sega has teamed up with Christian Whitehead, Headcannon, and PagodaWest Games to create a brand new 2D Sonic game - Sonic Mania! There will be new zones and remixed classic levels, new gameplay mechanics to keep the "gotta go fast" attitude alive despite various platforming challenges, and best of all, all three of the original characters will be playable (Sonic, Tails and Knuckles).
If you're interested in what Sonic Mania looks like, here's the announcement trailer and I would suggest you skip to 55 seconds: