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David Brevik, co-founder of Blizzard North and one of the leading forces behind Diablo 1 and Diablo 2, released a rather unique piece of gaming history, the original pitch for Diablo 1.
While that would be interesting enough on its own, given how influential Diablo has become to the ARPG genre, what caught my eye is the team's plan to sell "small additional purchases to revitalize their existing game", or what we these days call microtransactions. Here's the full quote:
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In a recent SXSW Gaming Expo panel Telltale shared a few more nuggets of information on their upcoming M rated Batman series which is set to arrive in summer.
Perhaps the most exciting note in the entire announcement is that the Batman series is being made by the same team that did The Wolf Among Us and Tales from the Borderlands, Telltale's finest games. Here's the official summary from the panel:
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Firewatch is a narrative driven adventure game, or walking simulator as some would say, and despite the genre receiving undue amounts of criticism from the gaming community I am glad that so many were willing to look past that in order to experience the touching, and very human story Firewatch wanted to tell.
According to Panic, the publisher behind Firewatch, around 500,000 people donned the fire lookout shorts and set out in to the wilderness, an impressive number even for some AAA studios, let alone an indie one. Here's a few more tidbits of info from the announcement, and what exactly the team is working on right now:
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Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a medieval open-world RPG that aims to be as realistic and faithful to the era as possible, especially when it comes to the combat.
Its currently in an early beta state and some things are obviously unfinished, but as you can see in the hour-long gameplay showcase below, its development is chugging along nicely. Here's the video and a few of the things I noticed while watching it:
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In an update that seems like its straight out of Star Trek, Valve have announced that you can now use Steam to play a 2D game on a giant screen within your VR headset.
The Desktop Game Theater feature is currently in beta, but even so it should work on the majority of games out there, provided they support Steam Broadcast. Here's the short changelog from this update:
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Paragon is an upcoming MOBA from Epic Games that features some beautiful landscapes, nifty character design, and gameplay that's a mixture of elements from its three biggest competitors: Dota 2, LoL and SMITE.
It has just launched in Early Access (not the Steam kind), and along with that announcement came the PC system requirements which you can find below:
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The Custom Game Pass is an in-game purchasable item that grants you additional content and features in select Dota 2 custom games. If you want the long version head over here, but in short its a nifty way of supporting Dota 2 map makers without alienating the playerbase or making the custom games annoying to play.
One of the reasons I was rather optimistic about the whole system, despite the paid Skyrim mods fiasco, is because Valve stated that they would be carefully selecting which games are allowed to participate in the program.
As a proof of concept, Valve started the entire Custom Game Pass system with a single game - Roshpit Champions. However, a mere day later it was found out that Roshpit Champions uses few "borrowed assets" which brought the entirety of Valve's curation efforts in to question, and once again refueled the same complaints that were leveled against Skyrim's paid mods. Here's what happened, and how I propose we solve the issue once and for all:
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For those of you that don't know anything about him, Julian Gollop was the designer and one of the main driving forces behind the original XCOM series whose gameplay holds up even to this date, despite some clunkiness.
After finishing up work on his latest title, the turn-based RPG Chaos Reborn, Gollop has set his sights on making a brand new game - Phoenix Point.
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Despite not being a fan of the story direction Blizzard took with Starcraft 2 I've still spent far more time than I'm willing to admit playing and replaying the campaigns, simply because they've managed to absolutely nail the gameplay, variety and level of challenge.
If you're in the same camp as I am you'll be delighted to hear that the first part of the brand new 'Nova Covert Ops' DLC campaign is coming on March 30th. Here's the trailer and a bit of information on what to expect:
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This isn't the first time Creative Assembly has attempted to make a free-to-play version of Total War, that honor belongs to the somewhat mediocre Total War Battles: Shogun.
However, while Shogun was a massive departure from the classic Total War formula the upcoming Total War Battles: Kingdom looks to be a proper spin-off. Here's the trailer and a bit of information on what to expect from Kingdom: