Tekken 7 adds Bob and Master Raven to roster

The Evolution Fighting Championships 2016—the World Cup/Super Bowl of the beat ‘em up spectrum—took place in Las Vegas this weekend.

The Evolution Fighting Championships 2016—the World Cup/Super Bowl of the beat ‘em up spectrum—took place in Las Vegas this weekend. The event served up some typically fast and furious competition, and Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada used the tourney to reveal two new Tekken 7 combatants: Bob and Master Raven.

The trailer above introduces freestyle Karate enthusiast Bob, who might recognise from Tekken 6, Bloodline Retribution, Tekken Tag Tournament 2, and Street Fighter X Tekken; however Master Raven is new, and may be somehow tied to the existing and ever-mysterious Raven.

“The original Raven made his debut in Tekken 5 with origins that are still murky today,” says publisher Bandai Namco. “Now Master Raven enters the fight in Tekken 7, executing her ninjutsu fighting skills with exceptional power and precision. Master Raven has no problem tearing her opponents apart in The King of Iron Fist Tournament.”

And here’s Master Raven demonstrating said techniques:

Tekken 7 is expected to arrivein early 2017. In the meantime, why not check out 11 minutes in-game footagefrom this year's E3?

Ubisoft: "We want travel to not become a chore" in Far Cry 3

Motoring around Far Cry 2's picturesque African landscapes delivered the brutality of a nation ripping itself apart through civil war to your windshield, but it also brought frustrating moments of downtime when repairing broken engines.

Motoring around Far Cry 2's picturesque African landscapes delivered the brutality of a nation ripping itself apart through civil war to your windshield, but it also brought frustrating moments of downtime when repairing broken engines. Ubisoft's third go-around with the open-world FPS includes driving improvements as a measure against the slim possibility that puttering around the Rook Islands while high on psychedelics becomes a boring affair. As Lead Designer Jamie Keen tells Official PlayStation Magazine UK: "You can just launch your vehicle at 70 MPH off a cliff. It might not end very well -- but you can do that stuff."

"If you want to just travel across coastal roads for hours on end, by all means, knock yourself out," Keen added. "We also have fast travel points that let you move quickly around the world. You never feel like anything is too far way, but it's there and it's the choice that you are making. This idea of player choice is very important to us, that you are the one that's deciding the pace and what you engage with."

While exploration definitely retains its importance in Far Cry 3, Keen doesn't want vehicular transportation impeding the allure of curiously poking into the brush, saying, "We want you, when you are wandering around the world, to just get lost out there and go off and explore, have a look around it and just satisfy your curiosity, but know that at any moment, things can just switch and you are suddenly on the receiving end of tigers or an enemy patrol or something like that." Our hands-on previewdelves deeper into crossing bullets against sharpened fangs after driving around the twisted wilderness.

Insomniac announces Edge of Nowhere for Oculus Rift

Ratchet & Clank and Sunset Overdrive developer Insomniac Games has announced its next game: Edge of Nowhere, exclusively for the Oculus Rift.

Ratchet & Clank and Sunset Overdrive developer Insomniac Games has announced its next game: Edge of Nowhere, exclusively for the Oculus Rift. Insomniac CEO Ted Price took the stage at Oculus' press conferencetoday to announce the third-person action adventure.

"Travel to the frigid reaches of the Antarctic in search of a missing expedition," said Price. "As you venture deep into the unknown, you will encounter a surreal world which will test you. It will twist you. And eventually it may break you. You're surrouned on all sides by the unexpected, and nothing is as it seems."

Edge of Nowhere has been designed for VR from the beginning, according to Price. "It's been educational, it's been challenging, but it's also brought that thrill of exploring a new frontier," he said. Despite previously being skeptical of VR, Price says he's now a "believer."

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt video offers 35 minutes of methodical witching

CD Projekt RED has released a video filled with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt footage.

CD Projekt RED has released a video filled with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt footage. The last time this happened, it lasted for six minutes. This time, it's a full thirty-five. Maybe you want to potentially spoil a whole half-hour of an upcoming RPG; maybe you don't. I'm not here to judge. I'm just here to place down this embed and slowly back away.

Oh, if it helps your decision any: at least some of this footage was previously shown as part of an E3 press demo, and another chunk is from that aforementioned 6-minute Gamescom video.

Finally, if you want to consume even more details about the game, check out Sam's featureon how it's being made.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is due out next February.

Blood Bowl 2 release date announced with new trailer

It's had something of a delayed start, but Focus Home International has now announced that Blood Bowl 2 will kick off on September 22.

Blood Bowl

Originally due out this month, the sequel to the electronic adaptation of Games Workshop's American-Football-but-with-orcs-and-violence-'em-up was delayed so that developer Cyanide could shine up its helmets and boots. Or, "to ensure that players would enjoy the most polished foundations for the next generation Blood Bowl experience as possible," as the press release puts it.

A new trailer has been released that further details the sequel's planned campaign mode.

"As a thank you for your support and patience," continues the press release, "players will receive an extra Blood Bowl 2 race (including its own AI, design, skills, and their Star Players): the Lizardmen or the Wood Elves during pre-order campaign on consoles and PC."

E3 2011: Far Cry 3 preview

FarCry 2 did a lot of bold, weird things.

farcry3 thumb

FarCry 2 did a lot of bold, weird things. It moved the setting from the tropical island of the first game to the African savannah. It introduced "buddies", friendly NPCs who acted as save points and whose survival or death shaped your personal story. It gave the main character malaria, and forced you to travel the world to find medicine.

It's early days for FarCry 3 - there's a lot the presentation I saw didn't show, and a lot the producer I interviewed wouldn't say - but it seems to be walking back from that weirdness, keeping what worked, and re-establishing the things that made the original FarCry feel like such a wonderful holiday.

The presentation opens with the player in a dense jungle, stood alongside a crashed, rusted fighter plane. It's old, and isn't how you got here. You're Jason Brody - your girlfriend is gone, your friends are gone, and you're "off the edge of the map," says Dan Hay, the game's producer

Peering over a nearby ledge, we get our first look at the island laid out before us. There's a small camp not far from here, beyond which spreads blue ocean, blue sky, and more green, jungle-covered mountains. It's beautiful - the primary colours of FarCry 1 made with today's technology and running on a beast of a PC sat under the screen.

In the village below, people are being lined up on their knees by armed men. Brody takes photos for the brief moment before he gets knocked unconscious with the butt of a rifle, and we wake up to this guy staring at us:

This is Vaas. "Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?" he says. "Doing the exact same thing over and over again, expecting shit to change. That is crazy." He rambles, he's nuts, but he speaks at a reasonable pace. That's an improvement over FarCry 2's hurried acting.

So far, so scripted. It's a few minutes later, when the fighting starts, that it begins to look more like FarCry. There's a jungle, there are patrolling guards and, from the looks of it, there's more than one way to approach the situation. On the far side of the camp in front of us, there's a military helicopter. It's the best way out of here, if the player can reach it.

In the video, the player approaches quietly, using a machete found in a corpse's back. He pounces on an enemy below from a small ledge, and moving between shacks, uses the knife again to stab one guy in the neck and then hurl it into the face of another sitting close by. These are special takedown moves.

The bodies can then be looted for money and guns afterwards - and, we're told, the guns don't decay any more.

"We wanted to make sure we were giving the player the ability to turn on the action when they want to turn on the action," says Hay. "Making sure that the AI isn't always hammering you with bullets." FarCry 2's enemies were so bloodthirsty, they'd smash their cars into trees, leap out and begin firing the second you appeared on the horizon.

The player turns on the action, using an AK-47 to take down three guys in the middle distance, before sprinting and diving into a river. It's beautiful under here. "We wanted to give you that same feeling you had in FarCry 1 the first time you jumped in the water. 'Oh my god, I can't believe how good it looks'". I can believe how good it looks, but it looks very good.

Emerging on the other side, the player pops some explosive barrels foolishly positioned on a wooden bridge, and sprints for the helicopter. It switches back to a scripted scene, thankfully without breaking first-person, and Jason threatens the pilot with a pistol: take off, now. It's 15 seconds before he's shot back down, back face to face again with Vaas.

"Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?" he says. And scene.

Let's be clear here. A seven-minute presentation of a linear, partly scripted combat bubble isn't the best way to show an open world game. What we saw looked like a first-person shooter - and not just without the boldness of the last game, but without so much of the core of what makes FarCry special.

What we did get were some promising words from Hay; mainly, that exploration will be a big part of the experience. "You're walking along, you're on a mission - maybe you're in a truck, bombing along pretty quick. There's always something just off the edge of the map - 'what is that?' You stop, you get out, you explore. Exploration is key to us."

In the demo, there were little glimpses of things: the downed plane at the start, statue heads buried in the grass, ancient temples spotted through the trees.

There's also more to the game than just Vaas - he's not the big bad, but just one enemy leader. The buddies, too, will return, albeit in changed form. Tim has an interview with the narrative designer later this week which should reveal more.

The biggest question mark, though, is the respawning enemies that made so much of the last game a slog. The question seemed to flummox Hay slightly, which is worrying.

For now, though, I'll give the game the benefit of the doubt. For all the interesting things that made me like FarCry 2, I wouldn't mind another summer holiday in a better, monster-free FarCry 1.

Science-Fiction Weekly – God Of War's Star Wars Roots, A New Theory About Rey's Parents

If someone asked you where the inspiration for the newly announced God of War game comes from, most of you would probably say The Last of Us .

. The connection between Kratosand his son echoes that of Joelteaching Elliehow to survive in a harsh world. Odds are developer Sony Santa Monica is drawing heavily from The Last of Us, but Cory Barlog, the game's creative director, says that the inspiration for a more humanized version of Kratos comes from a canceled Star Wars television show.

In an interview with Venture Beat, Barlog, who worked at LucasArts for a brief time before God of War projects, says he was invited to Skywalker Ranch to read the scripts of the show. "It was the most mind-blowing thing I’d ever
experienced. I cared about the Emperor," he said. "They made the Emperora
sympathetic figure who was wronged by this f--king heartless woman.
She’s this hardcore gangster, and she just totally destroyed him as a
person. I almost cried while reading this.”

A television show that focused on the Emperor? My initial reaction was "that would be awesome," but after much thought, I'm glad George Lucas and his team at Lucasfilm didn't move forward with the project. Some characters are better left in the shadows. We don't need to know everything about every major character. Sheev Palpatine(yes, that's his real name) is one of them. The funny thing, through Barlog's inspiration, I suppose we'll learn a little bit more about the Emperor as we see Kratos' new life unfold.

In other Star Wars television news, if you didn't watch Star Wars Rebels as it aired, the second season hits Blu-Ray and DVD on August 30. Along with all 22 episodes, these discs include a number of bonus features, including a video feature called "From Apprentice to Adversary," in which executive producer Dave Filoni dissects season two's big finale.

In a less serious part of the Star Wars universe, Lego Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures kicked off its first season on Disney XD and video-on-demand services yesterday, and I absolutely adored it. Disney is airing a new episode every day up until June 23.

Before I dive into a new theory about Rey's parents, let's leap to another universe to talk about Star Trek. One of the most unexpected surprises at this year's E3 was Red Storm and Ubisoft's Star Trek: Bridge Crew, a virtual reality game that places you on the bridge of the U.S.S. Aegis (NX-1787) with three other players. This is a cooperative experience that demands teamwork, as each player has a specified role on the ship. I was an engineer in my playthrough, tasked with routing power, activating the warp coils, and teleporting people onto the vessel. The only things I had to do were listen to the Captain, who is controlled by another player, and interact with just a handful of buttons on the terminal in front of me. It sounds simple, and it is, but once the action starts, and the Captainbarks out commands to other players in helm and tactical, the experience turns surprisingly intense. Every second matters on the Aegis. Andy McNamara (who was piloting our ship as a helm officer) and I managed to keep the Aegis intact and transport every civilian aboard successfully. Ubisoft said it was one of the cleanest playthroughs they've seen, even after I asked the Captainif I could transport Andy to a nearby asteroid. He said I couldn't, but thought it was a great idea and would bring it back to the development team.

And now it's time to flash the SPOILER alert. If you haven't seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens yet (who are you?), turn back now. Additionally, if you don't want to know anything about Star Wars: Episode VIII, stop reading.

The next rumor to surface is supposedly from a script leak. I wouldn't put too much stock into it, as we see fake leads like this all of the time, but this one opens up a different line of thinking than I think most people have had when trying to figure out who Rey's parents are. The safe bet I hear the most (one that I believe to be true) is Luke Skywalkeris Rey's father. Given just how powerful with the Force Reyappears to be, I suspect her mother is an equally powerful Jedi. I'd love it to be Mara Jade, but I doubt Disney opens up the Expanded Universe that much with the new canon in place.

I've also heard that people think Rey may be a descendant of Obi-Wan Kenobi, perhaps his granddaughter. I like this idea too, but I don't think Obi-Wan (or his family) will be a part of this trilogy. A few people out there also think Rey is the daughter of Han and Leia. If you're not laughing at this idea, you should be. It's absurd. No chance this happens. I'd put money on Jar Jar Binks being the dad over Han Solo.

The newest rumorsuggests that Rey may be related to the first of the Jedi. That's why she commandsthe Force so easily. The supposed leaked script says that the Force was contained in a single tree and was eventually freed and spread throughout the universe by a brother and sister. The boy was consumed by the tree's dark energy. The girl came from the light. Rey could be the reincarnated version of that girl. "The One" that the Jedi have been looking for.

The idea is a little silly, and the writing in the scriptisn't great, but I do like the idea of Rey potentially having old Jedi blood coursing through her veins. It makes me think Snoke could be from a similar era. Theorize away, people. Let me know who you think Rey's parents are in the comments below. I still stand with Lukebeing daddy, but I do like the old blood angle too.

See you again in seven days!

Blood Bowl 2 video plays pigskin with the greenskins

The new engine is the big reason to follow Blood Bowl 2, the underlying rules developed by Games Workshop in 1995 are still perfectly capable of producing farce on the football field.

The new engine is the big reason to follow Blood Bowl 2, the underlying rules developed by Games Workshop in 1995 are still perfectly capable of producing farce on the football field. Developer Cyanide says its striving for a "fresher" look that improves "clarity and comprehension of the action on the field". They've also put a lot of work into animating Blood Bowl's bumbling players, as you can see in the latest trailer, starring the humans, who aren't especially good at anything, but pass basic IQ requirements that Orks sometimes struggle with.

The game's due out in Spring, and a shiny new websitehas launched with extra details, including news of a story-driven campaign following the resurgence of the Reikland Reavers. If it's anything like the last game, the real fun will be in creating leagues with friends, which tend to create ridiculous but surprisingly intense rivalries.

Far Cry 3 lead dev: consoles lack the "grandeur" of PCs

Jamie Keen, lead developer on Far Cry 3 has been speaking exclusively to PC gamer about the evolution of the series since Far Cry 2 and the difficulties of developing for multiple platforms.

Far Cry 3 grandeur

I saw Jamie play through the same demo we saw running at E3. It seems that, despite the on-screen controller-prompts, the demo was running on a meaty PC. We guessed that from the framerate and anti aliasing too, but thought it was worth mentioning.

According to Jamie, scalability doesn't necessarily mean compromise: "The consoles simply don't have the same kind of grandeur that PCs can have. Especially a top end PC. This is an E3 demo so we're going to have everything really really, really dialled up. But it's going to be scalable. And that's the good thing – we are starting off with something that's scaleable to begin with.

"Right now we're just trying to show this stuff – we want to show the range and put our best foot forward. But then that's just the nature of development. The specs of a console are different to the specs of the top end PC, so it's not that we're able to avoid," continued the developer.

"We really listen to what the community is after. There's a hit list of things that we need to get right this time. Not that anything we did was really bad last time, it's just that there's going to be develop to make sure that we deliver the experience."

Story, and the player's interaction with the world are high on the developer's priority list: "I think the other thing is narrative. The narrative within Far Cry 2 was a great, but it was slightly at arms length. But what we really want to do with Far Cry 3 is we want to make sure that you feel this really human scale thing. Something you make your own way through, that you can really interact with... we want to take you on a voyage of discovery."

For more on Far Cry 3, read our E3 preview.

Have you picked up a Raspberry Pi yet? Perhaps you had a fiddle with it and then buried it in a drawer

-- or maybe it's become part of your development set-up. Either way, it's hard to deny that this little-computer-that-could is a huge breakthrough for game development, especially where kids learning to code are concerned. Minecraft: Pi Edition will be completely free to download, and will feature a version of the Pocket Edition with support for multiple programming languages.

Minecraft: Pi Edition advocates do-it-yourself programming

And now there's even more reason for both small and big kids alike to pay attention to the device, as Minecraft studio Mojang announced a special free edition of the ultra-popular indie game for the Raspberry Pi.



"The Raspberry Pi project resonates very strongly with the Mojang spirit," claims Mojang's chief architect Daniel Frisk in a Gamasutra interview. "The emphasis on creativity versus passive consumption, the do-it-yourself spirit and the pricing makes it available for all kinds of exploration and tinkering for curious people of all ages.

"Also [there's] the coolness of having a credit card-sized computer running Minecraft ," he adds.

With the Pi edition of Minecraft , users will be able to access the external world manipulation API, making it possible to alter the game's world with a variety of coding methods.

"[The API] is exposed as a textual protocol on a network port. This makes it very easy to manipulate the game world from any programming language with network support," notes Frisk. "We will have integrations for Python and Java with the release and expect the community to provide several more upon."

minecraft 1.jpg"With the API it's easy to write programs that manipulate the game world," he continues -- examples include "building an epic pyramid worthy of any pharaoh with just a couple of lines," and "writing games that run inside of Minecraft - one of our demos is a remake of the classic Snake ."

"It's also possible to add new game modes," he says. "I'm prototyping a maze game where the goal is to get out first and trigger the floor of the maze to be removed causing the trapped players to fall into lava."

There's another side to the API too. Pulling data from Minecraft will be incredibly easy, and so creating real-life maps of your worlds will be possible - or, as Frisk suggests, you can "print your builds on a 3D printer if you happen to have one of those."

This all sounds very entertaining to be sure, but can Minecraft Pi , and the Raspberry Pi itself for that matter, actually help young people to get into coding, or is it more of a toy to fiddle about with on the cheap?

"Most programmers of the current generation were children during the home computer revolution," Frisk answers. "In those days most computers booted up to a Basic interpreter, so what was a kid to do? Program of course."

"These days most hardware is appliance-based, it's not accessible on any other level than as a consumer. The remaining platforms -- Windows, Mac OS X -- that are widely available are closing fast and heading in the direction of a very controlled experience."

The Raspberry Pi, says Frisk, helps to encourage these young people to tinker and explore with coding, much in the same way that people used to on older home computers, and in turn foster the right mindset for future programmers.

"The reality is that very few things can be thought to you by somebody else, you have to do the learning and have the passion yourself," he adds. "The community surrounding the project is at least as important as the hardware. The positive can-do attitude of people that explore, help each other and learn together is much more powerful than any academic course."

The Witcher 3 will include a Hearthstone-style game-within-a-game called Gwent

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is going to be a very big game, but CD Projekt Red is apparently concerned that hunting monsters, handling politics and trying to unravel the mysteries of the Wild Hunt won't be enough to keep players busy.

is going to be a very big game, but CD Projekt Red is apparently concerned that hunting monsters, handling politics and trying to unravel the mysteries of the Wild Hunt won't be enough to keep players busy. So on top of everything else, it's added a collectible card game featuring four distinct factions battling for supremacy with an array of soldiers, spells and unique heroes. It sounds familiar, but it's not Hearthstone: It's Gwent.

Gwent, according to The Witcher 3 game lore, was invented by Dwarves and "perfected over centuries of tavern table play." It features more than 150 units, spells and hero cards divided among four different factions—the mighty and cunning Nilfgaardian Empire, the brave Northern Realms and their siege weapons, the agile and devious Scoia'tael, and the brutal monsters of No Man's Land.

It certainly sounds more interesting than The Witcher 2's dice poker, but CD Projekt Red may have overplayed its hand by announcing that two Gwent card decks, along with a cloth map of the game world, will be included as physical extrasin the Xbox One collector's edition of the game. Fan reaction against the Microsoft exclusive led CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwiński to quickly issue a statement addressing the controversy.

"I do understand that these extra items might be desirable for Witcher fans playing the game on other platforms. However, as we are not offering any platform or retail exclusive DLCs or any other form of gameplay differentiation, we do have to find other ways to support our partners," he said, as reported by Eurogamer.

"Why are we doing this? We need the support of partners to make our game visible worldwide. This should hopefully translate to better sales, which will in consequence allow us to do what we have been doing for the last 10 years, i.e. reinvest this money to make more great RPGs, while still sticking to our values," he continued. "If you still consider that adding two decks of Gwent cards and a map of the in-game world to the Xbox One CE equals us betraying our values and not fulfilling our promises, well, it does make us sad, but the final call is always yours to make."

The Witcher 3 Collector's Edition for PCis still a very impressive piece of kit, but the lack of the cards and map is a disappointing omission. Maybe they'll ultimately backtrack and make them available to everyone, but if not, will it have any effect on your decision to go with the big box?

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt comes out in February 2015.

Blood Bowl 2 Kickoff Trailer highlights new graphics engine

Blood Bowl actually began life back in the 80s as a tabletop game that blended Games Workshop's Warhammer Fantasy setting with football—American football, for those of you living in more soccer-centric parts of the world.

Blood Bowl 2doesn't actually kick off until next year, but the Blood Bowl 2 Kickoff Trailer is here now, symbolizing "the beginning of the last sprint" in the game's development.

Blood Bowl actually began life back in the 80s as a tabletop game that blended Games Workshop's Warhammer Fantasy setting with football—American football, for those of you living in more soccer-centric parts of the world. There have actually been two videogame adaptations since then, one in 1995, and one in 2009.

This is the sequel to the 2009 edition, and once again teams of Humans, Orcs, Dwarfs, Elves, Skaven, and Beastman will go head-to-head in violent, turn-based contests in which victory can be earned by either scoring points or butchering opposing players. Focus Home Interactive says Blood Bowl 2 is "more ambitious" than its predecessor in every way, and employs a brand new engine providing upgraded graphics, sounds, and animations.

Blood Bowl 2 comes out in the spring of 2015. Find out more at bloodbowl-game.com.

E3 2011: Far Cry 3 announced

Far Cry 2

Ubisoft have just revealed the existence of Far Cry 3 at the Ubisoft press conference. It will be making a return to the jungle environments of the original Far Cry, but will be a huge open world game, similar to Far Cry 2. We'll have more shortly.

The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna DLC is out now

A new expansion has been released for brain-bending philosophy-'em-up The Talos Principle.

Talos

A new expansion has been released for brain-bending philosophy-'em-up The Talos Principle. It's called Road to Gehenna, and it follows Elohim's messenger Uriel as he journeys through four new worlds. It is likely to be just the ticket for anyone looking to dismantle more fans, place more jamming devices and redirect more lasers.

Can you solve the puzzle of how to watch this trailer? I have faith that you can.

The Talos Principle was really good, so I'm glad to see there's more of it now available. It sounds like a sizeable amount of new content, too. That's reflected in the £11/$15 price tag, although you can currently get Road to Gehenna for 10% offuntil July 30.

Is it any good, though? We should have a review up tomorrow—just as soon as Chris's head has stopped hurting.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt trailer offers six minutes of brand new footage

Were you left informed yet faintly unsatisfied by yesterday's Witcher 3 video dev diary ?

? Well then, boom and/or wallop: here's six full minutes of new and unbroken game footage. Join Geralt as he attempts to rid the village of Downwarren of its ancient and awakened evil. It's an occupational hazard in these parts.

What about Gamescom 2014's other trailers? You'll find them all here.

Blood Bowl 2 trailer tramples, elbows, bellows through first match footage

The best thing about Cyanide's first Blood Bowl was the Games Workshop ruleset that supported it.

The best thing about Cyanide's first Blood Bowl was the Games Workshop ruleset that supported it. Clunky UI and some wobbly networking almost spoiled the appeal of violent, high-fantasy Gridiron. The latest Blood Bowl 2 trailer shows the new match engine, which certainly looks the part, but will those important underlying systems be fixed? Ponder that as you watch some big green fellas squashing some little pink fellas in the first moving pictures of a BB2 match.

Not shown, the Black Ork failing a roll and dropping the ball after a few steps of his big angry run. Meanwhile, the blue team is disqualified for fielding four number 16sand player doping allegationscontinue. You can keep track of the latest Blood Bowl over on the official site. Thanks to Evil Avatarfor the heads up.

Battlefield 4 patch fixes crashes, stops players from being shot behind cover

Maybe we should all start buying multiplayer games three months after launch.

Maybe we should all start buying multiplayer games three months after launch. Releasing an online monolith that'll be played by millions is complicated business when there's no way to stress test against those huge numbers, but Battlefield 4's problems extend beyond connection errors and crashes to its shooting systems which, as a shooter, are almost all of its systems.

Fortunately, patch-o-geddon continues. The latest one fixes a bug that could see you shot to death if changing stance into cover. A desync while crouching could leave your phantom hitbox head exposed even when your vision was safely behind scenery. DICE have also "increased the camera height when crouching and moving to more accurately reflect the actual height of your soldier", cranking soldiers up from Tom Cruise to Liam Neeson altitudes. There are also some crash fixes, which are listed below, as lifted from the latest update on Battlelog.

Shot behind cover when changing stance

Sometimes the character stance could get into a multiple frame desync and be part of the problem where you got shot even though your character was actually behind cover. This would mostly affect players doing transitions into crouch and prone as well as moving when crouched. The impact was smaller in a standing stance. This bug fix eliminates this particular desync issue.

We have also increased the camera height when crouching and moving to more accurately reflect the actual height of your soldier in that stance (the first person camera was too low when crouching and moving, resulting in that you had a poor representation of how much of your soldier that was actually out of cover.)

Fixed one of the most frequently occurring client crashes Fixed broken collision on containers with open doors. The bug previously made grenades bounce back even though the doors were open. Fixed a bug in Defuse mode where defenders could win the round by killing all the attackers without disarming the bomb, if the bomb was disarmed in the previous round. Miscellaneous stability fixes further reducing the number of client crashes Fixed side gunner jitter when aiming in attack boats & transport helicopters Fixed some instances of frame rate drops when shooting at large Levolution objects after they have been destroyed (like the radar dish on Rogue Transmission) Fixed broken aiming for passengers on the China Rising dirt bike Fixed a bug where the sound when capturing a flag was not playing correctly Removed a bug that would double save during MP round transition and SP level transition. This fix will reduce the occurrence of corrupted save files.

We'll probably see more of these patches, as DICE have apparently frozen work on all other projectsto get Battlefield 4 into shape. Historically, DICE do tend get their games working well eventually, so there's hope yet, eh.

Croteam releases source code to Serious Sam engine

Croteam has released the source code to its Serious Engine v1.10, and I think those head-carrying dudes from Serious Sam 2 up there should be a little happier about it.

Serious Sam 2

happier about it. As it was the engine used to make the first two Serious Sams, it means they're about to appear in a load more games and mods.

The Serious Sam/Talos Principle developer has put the source code up on GitHub here, and while it's a tad more complicated to set up than Unity or Unreal or what have you, it should be worth it if you have a Serious Sam-like game or mod idea in you, or you just like messing about with game engines. Croteam reckons the Serious Engine is pretty easy to use, anyway.

Serious Editor

"Historically, this version of Serious Engine is very important for Croteam and for me personally," says Croteam’s Vyacheslav Nikitenko, who prepared the engine for this new release. "I created several mods for Serious Sam back in the day, before even starting the work on the source code, and it was a great tool for learning.

"And it’s even better today! Obviously, Serious Engine v1.10 won’t produce top-notch graphics, but the source code is very well commented, easy to modify, and there are lots of user generated mods out there. This version has everything you need to build your own game – or just experiment.

"If you’re looking to get started, just download the files from GitHub and head over to SeriousZone, it has a great community and lots of tutorials."

Thanks, Blue's News!

Talking Counter-Strike with Minh Le

Talking Counter-Strike with Minh Le While at university, Minh Le made game mods in his spare time. One such mod of his, Counter-Strike, would go on to become one of the most popular videogames of all time What were your favourite games when you were growing up? I was really into all sorts of genres. Back then RPGs were a big thing – I really got into Ultima VII and the Wing Commander series. Strike

Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide is free on Steam this weekend

Sit bolt upright in your Warhammer-branded seat, steady your Warhammer-themed coffee mug and get ready to play some more Warhammer video games, because Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide is free on Steam this weekend.

is free on Steam this weekend. Granted, you may be busy playing Total War: Warhammer, or Warhammer: Arcane Magic, but if it's a Warhammer life you lead, Vermintide is among the more satisfying Warhammer tie-ins.

The game is free to play on Steamthis weekend, and if you decide you'd like to keep playing it's currently offered for $17.99 (that's a 40% discount). The Collector's Edition is also cheaper as well, going for $26.99.

"Vermintide is a brilliant twist on the Left 4 Dead formula, and deserves much of the same praise heaped on Valve," Ian wrote in his reviewof the game last year. If Total War: Warhammer is too slow-paced for you, this particular Warhammer game is all about beating enemies to death from a first-person perspective.

Overgrowth preview

At the time of writing, the latest feature indie developers Wolfire have put into Overgrowth is the ability for weapons to slash open wounds in the characters they hit, from which blood spurts and trickles realistically down their clothing.

Overgrowth preview thumb

At the time of writing, the latest feature indie developers Wolfire have put into Overgrowth is the ability for weapons to slash open wounds in the characters they hit, from which blood spurts and trickles realistically down their clothing. But that's OK: they're rabbits.

This is a fighting game about bipedal animals kick-boxing and lacerating each other with knives in huge open levels. The animals aren't really the remarkable thing: the game is interesting for the fluid and physical way they connect with each other in combat. The game blends predetermined animations with physics, so that characters can be knocked about convincingly mid-roundhouse – and recover to do the same to you.

So, er, why are they rabbits again? “The game will have some really disturbing depictions of blood and pain,” says David Rosen, “and I don't know if I could handle doing that with human characters.”

That's not the only reason. As David says: “I suspect that audiences are hungry for novel experiences and settings, and would rather see something new than yet another game about masked ninjas.”

Overgrowth is in the alpha stage of development, and if you preorder it now you'll get the current version. It's still a proof of concept at the moment: a few arenas to choose from with a few opponents each, but no context for the fights except some spectacular scenery. It's hard to get a sense of what kind of game it'll be, so I asked David.

“This isn't final yet, but our plan is to have three categories of missions that you can choose – story, challenge and arena missions. The story missions focus on the characters in the world and how your actions affect them. The challenge levels are all about exploring the game mechanics and demonstrating your proficiency with them. The arena levels follow a professional entertainment fighter through his career, focusing on acquiring new abilities and equipment.”

The levels in the alpha are huge dramatic landscapes with weird stone relics and tall mountains. You can scamper across them with inhuman speed, leap huge distances, and even scramble up ledges and wall-run smoothly. There's a really slick 3D platformer in here somewhere.

Given that they're a small indie team making an ambitious game from scratch, is all this fancy engine stuff necessary?

“I didn't intend to make an engine,” David says. “I just wanted to make the game I had in my head, so I added one necessary component after another... eventually it all combined to form a pretty complex engine, but it's all designed specifically for this game.”

That means the various systems fit together seamlessly. “There's no shift between movement and combat modes,” David tells me. “You can smoothly jump out of a fight to wall-run up a wall at any time, without having to 'tear' yourself away from the combat system.”

That system is pretty simple: there's an 'attack' and a 'block' button, and the rest is all movement. David says it's about putting the complexity elsewhere.

“To attack in Overgrowth, you hold the left mouse to signal your intent, and then trigger the attack by moving within range of an enemy. This brings the focus up from low-level button presses to tactical positioning and awareness, and allows for fast and complex movement.”

Blocking prevents a blow from flooring you, but if it's powerful you'll still see your character reel from the physical force of it. Attacking after a successful block lets you throw your opponent, and duck-attacks sweep their legs from beneath them. The AI loves that one – I've lost a lot of fights where I try a roundhouse and they duck under it and trip me.

Fights end fast: one or two good blows can kill you, and even if they don't, you'll be lucky to get back on your feet before the AI kicks you to death. Or stabs you with the spear they picked up. The same goes for them, of course, so the instant you get in range of each other is critical.

I worry that it might be a little too fast right now: Wolfire's own videos of the game feature elegant exchanges of blocked and dodged blows that I've never come close to. But release is a long way off, and by letting preorderers play the game in development, they've got plenty of feedback to work from.

It's a big project: they've been working on it for three years and expect it to take one or two more. But we're talking about it now because it's starting to take shape: the movement is fluid and the combat is fun. There's still no 'game' to it in the broader sense – if you're only interested in how the current build plays, Overgrowth probably isn't worth the $30 preorder yet. But if you want to follow its development into a proper game, now is a good time to get involved.

The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna releases this month

I really liked Croteam's narratively complex puzzle game The Talos Principle , and fortunately for my self-esteem, so did Chris when he played it for our review .

. I was thus very excited about the March announcement of an expansioncalled Road to Gehenna, and today we finally got wind of the release date: July 23.

The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna will unfold over four chapters with "some of the most advanced and challenging puzzles yet." Players will take on the role of Uriel, Elohim's messenger, as he tries to free the souls trapped in the game's strange, mysterious world. The expansion will feature new characters and a new world with its own unique history and philosophy, created by Tom Jubert and Jonas Kyratzes, the writers of the original game.

The Road to Gehenna expansion will be out on July 23. More information will be available on Steam when this linkgoes live—in the meantime, enjoy some screens.

Talos Principle The Road to Gehenna Screen 1

Talos Principle The Road to Gehenna Screen 2

The Talos Principle Road to Gehenna Screen 1

The Talos Principle Road to Gehenna Screen 2

The Talos Principle Road to Gehenna Screen 3

The Talos Principle Road to Gehenna Screen 4

The Talos Principle Road to Gehenna Screen 5

The Talos Principle Road to Gehenna Screen 6

The Talos Principle Road to Gehenna Screen 7

The Talos Principle Road to Gehenna Screen 8

Rise of Twitch: Is watch becoming the new play?

Rise of Twitch: Is watch becoming the new play? By their very nature, videogames are all about the interactivity. It’s what separates them from passive mediums like music and film, because even though the production process between a film and a first-person shooter is vaguely comparable, a game requires some form of input in order to function. That being the case, there’s no reason why a game can’t

Warhammer: Vermintide DLC adds maps, traps, and even more Skaven

Fatshark has once again demonstrated its talent for coming up with snappy-sounding videogame titles with the announcement of a new DLC pack for Warhammer: End Times—Vermintide called Drachenfels.

called Drachenfels. Hey, it's better than Schluesselschloss.

The new expansion will include three new levels set in and around the abandoned Castle Drachenfels, located outside the town of Ubersreik: The Castle itself, an ancient structure “covered in the blood and bones of the past”; Summoner's Peak, where you must destroy the Nurgle portals to halt the flow of Skaven reinforcements; and the Dungeons, which will introduce deadly new traps, along with torches to help you avoid them.

Warhammer: End Times—Vermintide: Drachenfels (say that quickly three times) will be out on May 26. Pricing hasn't been announced, but Scluesselschloss goes for $3/£2, so I wouldn't be surprised to see something close to that mark.

Overgrowth alpha update video shows adaptive AI dumbed down for puny mortal minds

Getting bested by bots always grinds the gears, but it's especially frustrating when the computer's shell of choice is a knife-wielding, anthropomorphic rabbit with a kick powerful enough to send you flying like a dazed potato sack.

Getting bested by bots always grinds the gears, but it's especially frustrating when the computer's shell of choice is a knife-wielding, anthropomorphic rabbit with a kick powerful enough to send you flying like a dazed potato sack. Of course, you'll eventually win by sheer brainpower, but that's why Overgrowth developer Wolfire Games implemented an adaptive learning curve for the AI opponents in its upcoming fur-and-fists fighter.

The latest alpha progress video shows how you'll have to vary your attacks to keep the AI from totally adapting to your flailings, and because computers process information far faster than the squishy pile of glop inside our heads, Wolfire reduced the responsiveness to a level approximating human reaction times. So, the next time you snap your neck after crumpling from a roundhouse kick to the facemuzzle, you'll know it was on the level.

Pre-ordering Overgrowthfor $30 provides access to all alpha releases, so head over to the official website if you feel like punching some rabbits really hard.

The Talos Principle writer talks up "ambitious" expansion

Tom Jubert, one-half of the writing team behind the outstanding first-person puzzle game The Talos Principle , has provided a little bit of insight into what's coming in the Road to Gehenna expansion.

The Talos Principle kitten

expansion. He wasn't interested in repeating what had already been done, he wrote in a recent, so he and writing partner Jonas Kyratzes kicked around some ideas that would "expand on the original world without simply following in its footsteps."

Among the ideas pitched and discarded were setting the expansion in the distant past, when the Elohim system was still in development, or in the distant future, after it's been discovered by other beings; or putting it on a separate server with the same rules but different archive information, resulting in completely different versions of Elohim and Milton, the game's nagging voice of doubt and cynicism.

Jubert didn't offer any hints about what they and Croteam eventually settled on, but said it "provides us huge flexibility in terms of the sort and tone of material we deliver. It gives us a world that fits within the original game's religious and science fiction mythology, but which resolutely has its own identity. Most importantly for me, it lets us explore completely new ideas about how to interact with the game." He also described it as "ambitious," adding that the script is comparable in size to that of The Talos Principle itself.

"We have consciously designed [Road to Gehenna] to be experimental," he wrote. "We wanted to explore new ideas in a safe environment so that when we inevitably come to Talos 2 we will be able to raise our audience's expectations once again."

Jubert said the expansion is now undergoing "final bug-hunting," and will be out in the next month or so.

The Virtual Life: Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto IV, And The Great American Lie

This week I’m talking about Red Dead Redemption
and Grand Theft Auto IV, so spoilers for both of those.

There is perhaps no other developer that’s catalog has represented the complicated struggle for cultural recognition that video games have undergone more visibly than Rockstar Games. In the early aughts, titles like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, State of Emergency, and Manhunt cemented Rockstar as the edgy poster child of interactive entertainment, the developer that could make high-quality, polished experiences that pushed the boundaries of what could be shown on screen.

This is indicative of an era where developers, publishers, and gamers were constantly trying to prove that Games Could Be Things That Adults Could Enjoy Too, Thank You Very Much . What this usually meant was violence became more graphic, innuendo became outright sexual mimicry, and games more or less sought to emulate the look and structure of blockbuster action movies. In this pursuit, Rockstar had remarkable success in chasing the films of Michael Mann and John Singleton to reinforce a very particular version of maturity for video games. Much like a teenager or a child might see cigarettes, gambling, or alcohol not as perks of being an adult but instead the central tenants of adulthood, games of this era, particularly Rockstar games, clung to the idea that edginess was the essence of sophisticated, mature experiences in games.

And then in the latter half of the aughts, something happened: the sea change. More developers embraced a different idea of maturity and what the medium was capable of. Between 2008 and 2010, Rockstar Games released two games that were at once very much in line with sort of open world, do-whatever-the-hell-you-want action titles it had been developing for nearly a decade while also being exceptionally different: Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption. There’s a strong through-line that runs between the two games: both developed on the same engine, both starring men with dark histories, both of them turning a critical eye onto The American Dream.

As an ideological entity, America has always existed at the crossroads of two ideas that are seemingly incompatible with one another:

1. You are who you choose to be and can shape your own destiny. If you work hard and pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you will achieve your dreams.

2. You do not have the ability to be whoever you want to be. Your destiny is shaped completely by a number of socioeconomic factors that are beyond your control. You are at the total mercy of inhuman, interconnected systems capable of annihilating your body and spirit through malice, chance, or negligence.

The truth is that the actual American experience is some combination of these two philosophies, with our choices playing some part in how our lives play out but whatever socioeconomic situation each and every one of us is born with giving us a set amount of opportunity space to use to make the best of those choices. For a number of people this works out; they’re able to pair the right choices with the right opportunities to make a stable life. Some people are born with a nearly infinite amount of opportunities and then spend the rest of their life wasting whatever talent they have on the frivolity afforded to them, while some talented underprivileged people spend their whole lives trying find the right opportunity to make their hard work bear fruit. It’s this imbalance that both Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption target.

GTA IV’s story is centered around a Serbian immigrant coming to Liberty City to start over, another soul trying to run down The American Dream and bottle it for himself. Our protagonist Niko Bellic is probably not a good man by most definitions, having participated in human trafficking and not being above stealing cars and carrying out contract hits, but there’s a tragic quality to his character that makes him more compelling than your run-of-the-mill anti-hero. Namely: Niko seems to earnestly want to get away from his violent past, lamenting the past and hoping for the best, saying “Perhaps here…things will be different.” Niko is sold on America's promise by his cousin Roman, who brags about his riches and his luck with the ladies, but this all turns out to be a lie, with Roman running a failing taxi service and being hounded by loansharks. Niko, unable to let his cousin bear the wrath of these gangsters, finds himself caught up once again in the violence of his past.

While it’s certainly a fair thematic reading that Niko is simply reaping the sins of his past, forever closed out of the promised land for his crimes against humanity, it’s hard to deny the economic forces at play in GTA IV. Niko is exceptional when it comes to killing, stealing, and generally causing mass mayhem. These are skills that are valued by a number of employers in the gray purgatory-esque Liberty City. As players, we can resent Niko for falling back into a life of violence and crime sure, but this is also an immigrant who has come to a place in search of a new life and has found only xenophobia, racism, and that old familiar violence waiting for him. What were the other options, really? Working a low-paying job to scrap together rent every month only to be distrusted and disliked by his employers and whoever he was servicing? His decision to re-enter his life of crime might be lamentable, but the temptation to do so is at least understandable.

The odds were stacked against him from the get-go, and it’s difficult to watch the hope for that new life in the supposed land of opportunity dissipate, especially in the final act of the game, with Niko, foolishly and finally thinking he might achieve some semblance of peace, watching as someone he loves dearly is cut down in a hail of gunfire and later somberly musing as the game closes out: “So this is what the dream feels like? This is the victory we longed for.”

Continue on to page 2 to find out how Red Dead Redemption confronts The American Dream.

Vermintide has sold half a million copies, free update on the way

Warhammer: End Times—Vermintide was one of the happier surprises of 2015.

was one of the happier surprises of 2015. It earned an Editor's Choice award in our review—which I most certainly did not see coming—and gamers clearly liked it, too, to the tune of more than 500,000 copies sold.

“We are really happy with the sales so far. We reached half a million copies much faster than we estimated. As a small studio, this really is an amazing milestone for us. The office is a hive of excitement,” Fatshark CEO Martin Wahlund said. “We are overwhelmed by the positive response from both players and critics alike, and this has given us the extra drive to continue providing exciting and engaging content so that everyone can continue to enjoy the game long into the future.”

Vermintide has so far had two free and one paid DLC release (most recently the sneezy-sounding Schluesselschloss) and the next one is expected to be ready by the beginning of May. Before that, however, the studio said it will push a new, free update that will address a very common complaint: That the game is just too easy.

“Based off the signals we’ve received from the community this seems to be the case,” Wahlund said. “We’ve therefore been hard at work designing a difficulty mode more challenging than anything you’ve ever played before.”

The new Death Wishdifficulty doubles—no, triples! —everything. Skaven, Ratling Gunners, Rat Ogres, Gutter Runners—triple all around! And as you can see from the trailer, that's a whole lotta rats. Now, you might be thinking to yourself that this is just an April Fools prank, and you may well be right. But while it's obviously a lark, I'm not quite fully convinced that it's not real. It seems like it would be simple enough to do, after all, and based on the response in the Steam and YouTube comments, a lot of people actually want to try it.

I've reached out to Fatshark to find out what's really going on here, and I'll let you know what they say. (And just to be sure, I'm going to add it to our 2016 April Fools' roundup, too. Don't miss that, by the way—there's some pretty good stuff this year.)

Alas, Fatshark has confirmed that Death Wish mode is a April Fools gag and nothing more, at least for now. "However, if a lot of people genuinely want this difficulty added to the game, then who knows what future updates might bring," a rep told me. Pity.

Overgrowth: never before has a wolf kicked a rabbit so hard in the face

The lovely chaps at Wolfire are making a game about humanoid animals battering each other.

Overgrowth

The lovely chaps at Wolfire are making a game about humanoid animals battering each other. It's called Overgrowth, and while it's still not totally clear what kind of game it's going to be, the videos they've been posting of their progress are getting more and more exciting.

Despite being a tiny indie studio, they've built an incredibly tactile and convincing physics-driven animation system for combat. In other words, things hit each other really hard, and it doesn't look dumb, wrong or fake. They've just added the ability to assign enemies to teams and make them fight each other, so the latest vid shows some brilliant rabbit v. wolf gang violence.

Elsewhere Overgrowth has elements of free-running platformers and open world games, and there's a comic covering the dog-heavy backstory. Wolfire's development blogis a great read in itself - they did an excellent post on PC game piracy versus lost salesback in May.

You can play around with the Overgrowth alpha if you preorder the game($30). But be aware that it's more of a spawn-things-and-mess-around alpha than an hey-wait-this-is-already-awesome alpha like Minecraft.

The Talos Principle gets Serious Sam voice DLC, and it's free for the first week

I have been assured that this is not in fact an April Fool's joke, and thus I deliver the news that you may now opt to replace the smooth and soothing voice of Elohim, the godlike overseer of The Talos Principle , with the rather rougher tones of Serious Sam .

Serious Sam in The Talos Principle

It will still be Elohim's words and wisdom guiding you through the existential maze that makes up your journey through The Talos Principle, but the new DLC pack means they will delivered by Serious Sam voice actor John J. Dick. The DLC also includes a new Serious Sam player model, for those who'd prefer the game to be a little less serious. (Which is ironic, I know.)

Injecting one of the ultimate embodiments of the thick-headed FPS macho man hero into a game that's essentially a slow-paced meditation on the meaning of life, consciousness, and personhood might seem counterintuitive, but that dichotomy has been one of my favorite things about The Talos Principle from the very beginning. That the studio that gave the world "No Cover. All Man" would conceive of a game like this in the first place is flat-out weird. That it would do such a good jobof it almost beggars belief.

The Serious Sam Voice Pack DLC is free until April 7, after which it will be available for purchase for $3. The Talos Principle itself, along with all other DLC, is on sale on Steamfor half-price (that's $20) over the same duration.

Cyberpunk 2077 "will be a true RPG game," says CD Projekt RED

While still just a hope and a whisper in the minds of genre fans, Cyberpunk 2077 is set to stay true to its RPG roots, according to a new interview with developer CD Projekt RED CEO Marcin Iwinski.

is set to stay true to its RPG roots, according to a new interview with developer CD Projekt RED CEO Marcin Iwinski. He tells IGNthe game's sci-fi setting takes its role-playing cues from the Polish studio's much-celebrated Witcher series.

Now, I'm not sure who on planet Earth would imagine a game based on Mike Pondsmith's original pen-and-paper Cyberpunk RPG without the role-playing, but it's obviously an idea Iwinski feels he has to respond to in this new interview.

"People have been asking me if Cyberpunk 2077 will have multiplayer or if it will be a straight-up shooter, and I tell them to relax, because it will be a true RPG game," Iwinski says. "We are known for storytelling, and big game worlds, and so we're taking all what we've learnt from previous three Witcher games, as well as the open-world aspect, and applying it to Cyberpunk 2077. So yes, it is an all-out RPG game, but we're looking at having a lot of new gameplay elements that I cannot talk about yet. One thing I can say for sure is that it is definitely NOT a multiplayer shooter."

That's not to say Cyberpunk's Night City wouldn't be a great place to stage a multiplayer shooter. But I suspect the team behind The Witcher have different plans, even if we did hear talk last year of Cyberpunk 2077 including some kind of " multiplayer features." Role-playing, a branching narrative, and meaningful character development are burnt into the DNA of the first two Witcher games, and I expect the same from the The Witcher 3: Wild Huntwhen it releases later this year. A cyberpunk game with a similar attention to detail? Sign me up.

Hat tip, CVG.

Vermintide buffed with free Sigmar’s Blessing DLC

I dabbled in the Warhammer: The End Times: Vermintide beta, but being bad at things with strangers on the internet has never been my bag.

I dabbled in the Warhammer: The End Times: Vermintide beta, but being bad at things with strangers on the internet has never been my bag. Ian, however, loved it. Like, 90-score, Editor’s Choice loved it, and apparently 300,000 of you did too, because today developer Fatshark is releasing some free DLC to celebrate.

Warhammer: The End Times: Vermintide: Sigmar’s Blessing is a fairly substantial loot overhaul. New hammers, blunderbusses (blunderbi?) and fiery Bright Wizard staves are among the 40 Veteran pest control weapons patched in, in addition to trinkets that increase the odds of finding loot for a class you care about. That’s tempting me back—slogging through rat hordes to be rewarded with something that wasn’t an impractically massive hammercould get a bit old.

New tools of destruction are accompanied by the Shrine of Solace, which dispenses weapons of a chosen type in exchange for tokens. 'Solace' presumably means something different to the Skaven.

It’s good to know that the community is alive a bustling, and likely more so for the next few days, so get on in there pronto. The whole changelog is yours for the perusing.

The Talos Principle is getting an expansion

Brain-taxing puzzler The Talos Principle is getting an expansion, publisher Devolver has announced.

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Brain-taxing puzzler The Talos Principle is getting an expansion, publisher Devolver has announced. Called the Road to Gehenna, it will cast you as Elohim's messenger, and will send you through a new, previously hidden chunk of the simulation. Fun fact: Gehennahas all manner of religious significance, and could also theoretically contain lasers you can redirect.

A four-episode add-on, Croteam is promising the most advanced and challenging puzzles yet made for the game. It'll also feature new story from the main game's writers, Tom Jubert and Jonas Kyratzes.

"We wanted to revisit the world of The Talos Principle and deliver new characters and a new world with its own history and culture,” said Jubert in a press release. “With Road to Gehenna we have created an all-new narrative which both branches off from and expands the original character’s journey."

The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna is due out this Spring.

Update: BioShock collection announced, remasters free to existing owners

BioShock: The Collection has been officially announced at long last.

BioShock: The Collection has been officially announced at long last. The collection will contain BioShock, BioShock 2 plus Protector Trials and Minerva's Den DLC, and BioShock Infinite plus Clash in the Clouds, Columbia's Finest and Burial at Sea episodes 1 and 2. It'll arrive September 13 (or 16 outside the States) and cost $59.99.

Yes, they have been remastered. That is, everything except BioShock Infinite has been remastered, 2K stating "it already meets current-gen console standards and runs smoothly on high visual settings."

Better still, players who already own BioShock, BioShock 2 or Minerva's Den will be able to upgrade to the respective remastered editions free of charge. Hopefully the Bioshock remaster will uncap its physics framerate, though there is a mod for that.

In terms of new content, there will be a director's commentary video series with input from Ken Levine, a virtual museum of concepts cut from the original BioShock and a number of 'Challenge Rooms' to test yourself outside BioShock's story.

I'm just tickled that the collection has actually been announced. News of it has been leaking like an ill-advised undersea city.

This article has been edited to include the new details listed in this here Steam announcement.

Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide to get free DLC on December 3

Indiana Jones mightn't have been too fond of rats, but around 300,000 of you were content to put up with them in Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide , as that's how many copies the co-op rat-slaughtering game has sold in its first two weeks on sale.

Vermintide Review Screens3

, as that's how many copies the co-op rat-slaughtering game has sold in its first two weeks on sale. You only have to read our glowing reviewfor reasons why that might be the case, and if you're one of the people who bought it, you'll be pleased to hear it's getting some free DLC.

Sigmar's Blessing will be upon you on December 3, a very patch-like piece of downloadable content that adds a number of new features to the game, as explained here.

Basically, it's all about loot. You'll soon be able to decide what kind of loot is dropped during the game, and sacrifice loot at a new altar located at the inn. There's also a new 'red' loot class, while loot in general is getting a few new traits. Loot loot loot.

Vermintide altar

For further DLC, Fatshark is planning to add a 'Private' game mode seemingly without any other players, a 'Realism' mode that disables the HUD, and a Survival mode that pits players against an endless wave of ratty enemies. There's no date for those yet, but from now on Vermintide's DLC will be released on an alternately free, alternately paid basis. So the next bit of DLC, whatever it is, will require cash.

You can now play as RoboCop in The Talos Principle

I can't think of a better fit for a philosophical puzzle game than a murderous Detroit cyborg who shoots first, shoots later, and only stops to think when he's reloading.

Robocop

I can't think of a better fit for a philosophical puzzle game than a murderous Detroit cyborg who shoots first, shoots later, and only stops to think when he's reloading. Croteam neglected to include RoboCop in their well-receivedfirst-person puzzler at the time of its release, but that mistake has now been rectified by a modder named 'Ar2R-devil-PiNKy'. Look at that brilliant, ridiculous image up there.

The Talos Principle's RoboCop mod can be found here, which uses the model from the 2014 mobile RoboCop game that apparently existed. Deprived of his typical killing tools, renowned thinker and MRI hazard Alex Murphy has to rely on every ounce of his pulsating cyborg brain. Let's enjoy some more images of him trying to do just that.

Robocop2

Robocop3

Robocop4

He looks so out of his element. I love it. Thanks, Destructoid!

The Virtual Life: Embracing The Bad Times Through Dark Souls

In this week's The Virtual Life, I'm jabbering on about interactive escapist experiences and Dark Souls.

In this week's The Virtual Life, I'm jabbering on about interactive escapist experiences and Dark Souls. And me, I guess.

I have a coffee shop close to my apartment called Caffeto. To get there, you go down two flights of stairs, walk a block, take a right, another right, walk two more blocks, take a left, and suddenly you've arrived. It’s a nice little place, adorned with paintings of pirate ships and ragged furniture, but the way there is filled with danger, mostly because it gives me time to think about things. Today, as I stepped past shattered and graffitied sidewalk, I found myself thinking about the old life and who I was before I moved to Minnesota in the winter to take this job.

And now, inevitably, my mind turns toward Lordran.

In the old life, my home was a townhouse. I lived with someone else. We had two pets. It was hot outside all year long and I could count on a single hand how many times in my life I’d seen snow that stuck to the ground.

I was a teacher. I was good at my job. I was also, like most teachers I knew, absolutely miserable because our employers couldn’t pay most of us enough to pay our bills, much less buy groceries or insurance. Every weekday I drove the one-hour commute there, taught some bored freshmen how to construct and critique arguments, drove back home, and spent the rest of the night playing games or binge-watching Netflix’s latest show.

Halfway through my second semester of teaching, I popped Dark Souls into the disc drive of my PS3. I had already played through the game before, understood its insistence on making you earn your victories through many, many failures. But I felt drawn to replaying through it for some reason, so I created a new character, and became hollow once more.

Lordran, the setting of Dark Souls, took a different shape this time. It was no longer just a spooky kingdom filled with all sorts of baddies that I had to get before they got me. Instead, it was an absolutely haunting place, a world of the dead and the damned, a realm of silence. I actually took the time to examine my surroundings. The algae green stone bridge guarded by the fiery Hellkite Dragon, the mountains of bloated blue corpses that lay at the bottom of New Londo Ruins. I witnessed a kingdom that had, perhaps in another age been one of great beauty and wonder, fallen so short of its promise and sunken into ruin.

I saw the unhappiness of my life reflected back at me in fragments, being fed to me in bearable installments, and I was engaging with it in a battle doomed to fail because I was confronting that misery without actually confronting it. Instead, simulating confrontation through an interactive assemblage of fantasy archetypes. But that was important for me. It gave me strength to get to the good things that lay just around the bend: creating interactive fiction that people really dug, leaving teaching to write for the likes of Paste and Playboy, and eventually taking a job with Game Informer .

There’s this idea that has inadvertently or otherwise cropped up in criticism, not just games criticism, where escapist experiences aren’t important. They’re fluffy, dumb things that couldn’t possibly have any meaning or value outside of dumb thrills or passing entertainment, like how Michael Bay’s Transformers films are popcorn movies or how Call of Duty's run and gun formula is simple, "dumb" entertainment. There is an art to creating escapist experiences that’s often not observed or given its due respect. And beyond that, even games that you wouldn’t necessarily include in the pantheon of all-time greats can still have a profound effect on our lives. For example, my friend Phil Owen wrote a beautiful, devastating pieceabout how Danganronpa 2helped him say goodbye to his dying father and deal with grief.

Danganronpa 2's subtitle is "Goodbye Despair." Its story is about holding onto hope through dark times. Our hero character is struggling to have faith that he and his friends will be able to persevere and survive through it all, as they fall one by one around him – this was obviously something I could relate to and draw strength from as I, severely depressed as I am on a good day, sat in that chair waiting for my dad to die.

Sometimes, as silly as it sounds, it’s easy to forget the human experience is not a universal one, and that we are all different entities constructed out of our own personal experiences and socio-economic circumstances. Each and every one of us prescribes different amounts of emotional and logical value to objects and experiences we come across in our lives. Someone might have some kind of deep moving emotional attachment to Watch Dogs, a game I truly despise, or Bubsy 3D. Unlikely? Sure. But it’s certainly within the realm of possibility. Besides, who am I, the guy who chose Tales From The Borderlands over The Witcher III: The Wild Hunt for his Game of the Year, to judge anyone on what they find meaning in?

Perhaps in the end it’s as simple as the right game at the right time, and for me in the fall of 2014, that game was Dark Souls because it allowed me to get away from my troubles without really getting away from them. Lordran is, to me, just as much my home as that little townhouse in the heart of Georgia was, filled with memories good and bad, and an essential part of my experience as a person, cracked and broken in more places than the human eye can see, but also housing pockets of light burning well into the neverending night.

What about you, reader? What games have gotten you through the hard times? Tell us about them in the comments section below.

The Talos Principle traps pirates in an elevator

There was a time when those naughty pirates were dealt with via aggressive pursuance - it's not so much like that these days, as games like the Talos Principle show.

Talos Lasers

As complained about on the Steam forums, players using an illegally-obtained version of Talos end up stuck in an elevator until they either break down in tears and turn the game off, or... just turn the game off.

With each elevator leading from the main facility into the game's three hub areas, you have to use them to progress - or backtrack. Meaning being unable to use the elevators both stops you from progressing and retreading old ground.

The discussion may have been deleted now, but you can join in the chuckles over on NeoGafif you're so inclined, as well as seeing a couple of screengrabs.

This isn't Croteam's first foray into trolling the pirates, but it's certainly a good one. If it's as good as Serious Sam's immortal, ever-pursuing scorpion... well, I'll leave that for you to decide.

And while you're deciding, you can legally acquire a copy of the Talos Principle on Steamby exchanging money for the product. Wahey!

The Virtual Life – A Serious Talk About Death In Video Games

The Virtual Life is a column dedicated to exploring the place where our lives and games intersect.

The Virtual Life is a column dedicated to exploring the place where our lives and games intersect. As the medium continues its evolution, we’ll be here to chart that line and talk about life, love, games, and the universe every other week. We like doing things our own way here at GI, so we’re going to kick off the birth of this column by talking about death. Just so you know, this week I’m gabbing about the first season of The Walking Dead and Wolfenstein: The New Order, so spoilers for those if you haven’t played them yet.

My grandfather died a few months back. He was one of the salt of the earth types. Worked as a welder for most of his life until his body wouldn’t let him anymore. He passed while I was a thousand miles away, writing words about why you shouldn’t play a bad Assassin’s Creed spin-off. Like Vonnegut said, I guess: “So it goes.”

Death’s been on my mind a lot since then, mostly the indifference that will settle on my inevitable but hopefully-very-far-into-the-future-demise. It’s scary to think about the end, this idea one day all that remains of you will be dust and any memory of who you were will fade from existence. Perhaps it’s a silly fear in the large scheme of things given that dying is a natural part of life, but the anxiety is there in the back of my mind, snickering and poking at me, no matter how much I try to busy myself with work or passion projects.

Death in games has fascinated me for a long time, mostly because it’s usually treated as more of an inconvenience than anything else — for completely understandable reasons. It would be frustrating, for example, never to be able to boot up Fallout 4 or Call of Duty again once your character got struck down by an enemy’s bullet. It would also be kind of a bummer, albeit interesting, if your character suffered huge amounts of guilt and had a breakdown after a mission where they mowed down a squad of soldiers. The majority of high-budget games where death is a factor in some shape or form are content to make it a non-issue and gamers, including me, are just as often pleased that it’s not that big of a deal. We want our escapist action fantasies that crib hard from summer blockbusters. We want slo-mo headshots on goon after goon. We want to play badass assassin warriors capable of slicing up a dude with a katana and then throwing his buddy through a window with telekinesis (no, really, someone make me this game please).

Sometimes though, it’s refreshing to play a game where the fear of death is tangible. I’m not talking about a series of cutscenes in Mass Effect where characters talk about how the forces of good have to prevent the end of civilization because the fate of humanity is at stake. I mean games that treat death as something other than light slap on the wrist or obvious plot stake, the ones that make you absolutely dread perishing in them.

Roguelikes, like FTL, The Binding of Isaac, and Spelunky make dying more interesting on a mechanical level by turning it into something more than a minor inconvenience: a major one. Losing in those games is devastating in a practical sense because every item or power-up you’ve earned in a run, the stuff you’ve gone to great lengths to secure, is just gone. And you can’t even say you’ve memorized levels since all those games are randomized, so you only keep whatever lessons you learned about the game’s mechanics. It’s invaluable information, of course, but it’s hard to be appreciative of that when every material gain you’ve made has been sucked into a void that sprung out of your failure. While the fear of dying is certainly present in the systems of roguelikes, I find myself drawn even more strongly to games that use death as a way to prey on your emotions. Sure, it’s manipulative, maybe even a teensy bit mean on the part of the developers when characters we’ve come to invest in are suddenly ripped away but it’s also pretty special in a way — a twisted, barbed-wire gift dropkicked straight into our hearts.

I still think about Lee Everett’s death in The Walking Dead all the time. I think about how well-designed and poignant it is. Sure, we get to have the big scene the final two episodes of the first season have been building to: Lee’s drawn-out and tragic goodbye to Clementine. But more than that, we also get to help him part with a final lesson to Clementine before passing, teaching her how to survive one last time in the post-apocalypse. It’s not just clever because it has us essentially guiding another character through the tutorial we played through at the beginning of the season, but also because it lets Lee’s final action be one of love and kindness; it’s an act of defiance in face of cruel existence. This scene offers a powerful combination of pessimism and optimism, implicitly arguing that all we have in the face of an indifferent universe is each other.

Other game deaths reign in my mind as well. I’ve suffered surprising amounts of guilt over the loss of soldiers in the Fire Emblem games because I made a bad choice, feeling the sting of my negligence as one of my favorite characters became a widow. I shouted in dismay when I unwittingly led one of Until Dawn’s best character, someone I had come to care about after hating initially, to her gruesome demise. However, perhaps the most interesting approach to death in a game for me isn’t actually a death scene, but instead a philosophical exchange in Wolfenstein: The New Order about death as a concept between two people with dramatically different beliefs that have been reinforced by war trauma. One sees the tragic aftermath of said war as a call for justice, a need for a righteous crusade against the cruelty of man in the name of the soul, while the other has come to view people as “machines of biology” functioning in a life void of meaning. Uncomfortably, and truthfully, The New Order doesn’t present either view as the right one. Nobody has all the answers no matter how much they want to believe it. We’re all just kind of drifting here, rationalizing it, trying to make the best of our existence in whatever way we can.

None of this is to say that games that approach the subject of death in interesting ways are better than something that gleefully lets you rack up a bodycount with a wide assortment of creatively designed weapons. Instead, like with books and movies that take a nuanced and honest approach to the subject, I find solace in video games that present death as something to be feared. Games are the creations of human beings, after all, and one of the most comforting experiences is to take in a piece of art by someone (or someones) who clearly has the same fears as you and is making some kind expression out of those fears, whether it’s worrying about finding the right person or finding meaning in the time each of us is given in this life. If nothing else, it makes existence just a little less lonely.

What are some games that have handled death in interesting ways? Let us know in the comments below!

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