This week brings more expensive pre-orders, Gabe Newell's
crystal ball, Blizzard taking blows over Diablo 3 and more!
On Monday, Dead Space 3 popped up on the Origin Store page. This time around the Sci-Fi zombie shooter
offers single player and co-op play in campaign mode. The game is available for pre-order now for
59.99 for PC (DVD and Download), PS3 and Xbox.
The game is scheduled for release February 2013.
From the Origin
page...
Game features:
• Team up and take
down the terror together: Play the full campaign in online co-op or single
player. Easily drop in and drop out of play.
• Experience a hostile
new environment: Head planet-side to discover underworld cities and accept side
missions. Explore the frozen terrain and search abandoned encampments.
• Embark on a
thrilling expedition to save mankind: Uncover the past, discover the source of
the Necromorph terror and fight to fend off the extinction of the human race.
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Also coming in Feb 2013 is Crysis 3 Hunter edition. The game is available for pre-order now for
59.99 for PC (DVD and Download), PS3 and Xbox
Key Features:
• Seven Wonders of the
Urban Rainforest - New York City has been contained in a giant nanodome and
grown into a unique rainforest with seven distinct environments. Master the
ultimate sandbox and turn it into your own personal hunting ground.
• Assess, Adapt, and
Attack - Crysis’s highly-acclaimed sandbox gameplay is back with more open
levels to let players choose their path and approach. Your upgraded Nanosuit
allows brute force or stealth, always giving you more than one option.
• Expanded Multiplayer
- Experiment with new ways to customize your Nanosuit and brand new game modes.
• The Biggest and Most
Explosive Arsenal in Franchise History - In addition to giving you an arsenal
of human firearms, Crysis 3 lets you scavenge alien weapons and deploy an
all-new signature bow
• The Evolution of
CryENGINE - CryENGINE unleashes the power of the Crytek creative team and
delivers a visually stunning and varied gameplay experience.
The preorder bounses
offer...
OVERKILL PACK
available for PC Digital Download Only: Sorry
Xbox and PS3 fans...
• Overkill Pack -
Includes the base game, all Hunter Edition content and the following early
multiplayer unlocks: the Overkill Pack features early multiplayer access to the
Typhoon assault weapon and skin. Spewing 500 rounds a second, the Typhoon gives
players the ability to go guns blazing to take back the Liberty Dome. Also
included in this pack are the Rapid-Fire Nano-suit module and two exclusive
Overkill themed dog tags.
HUNTER EDITION BONUS
CONTENT:
• Become the Ultimate
Hunter Online- Get early access to the new signature Crysis 3 bow, bow
attachment, and "Hunter" Nanosuit module for use in Crysis 3
Multiplayer.
• Multiplayer Head
Start - Get a bonus XP boost up to Level 5 and gain the ability to unlock
custom loadouts early.
• Look Sharp -
Customize your loadout, plus get a unique bow skin and three exclusive “Hunter”
themed dog tags.
Seems EA has a lot of faith in it's marketing to command $60
pre-orders for two games that are middle of the pack at best. Seems to be a trend here with these two
coming on the heels of the Medal of Honor Warfighte'sr Pre-order...
Also on Monday, Nvidia has released a graphics demo called
"A new Dawn" designed to show off all the advanced hardware features
of the new 6xx cards and featuring the requisite scantily clad forest pixie
named Dawn not seen since the Nvidia FX demo 3 years ago.
The demo touts full DirectX 11 tessellation,
with more than 4 million triangles making up just the vines and forest
bark of
Nvidia's latest graphics exhibition.. The creators went to extra lengths (pun
intended) making sure Dawn's hair is extra pretty with 40,000 carefully rendered strands. I guess that's a lot of triangles for a tree.
Of course there's the obligatory texturing
optimizations, shader this and that, ridiculously
complex quadratic equations and blah blah blah....
See Joystiq's take on it here..
Try it out on your own rig with the download link here..
It'd be fun to see what it does on an ATI card.
In gaming news that will make your heart flutter then stop
dead there's news of....
A new Ultima on the horizon?
A new but not free to play version of Ultima called Ultima
Forever is currently in development in
the alpha stage but will be entering closed Beta soon according to BIOware lead
designer Kate Flack.
Unfortunately this is going to be released on the IPAD first
then on to other platforms. No word on
when or what platforms but I wouldn't be
surprised to see a version on Windows RT tablets at some point. The game is based on Ultima 4 but set 21
years after the original game. Of course
by this point you probably fell asleep immediately after the word...IPAD.
Here's a link to the story if you're still awake...
And now for something completely different as the Pythons
would say...
Except it's not really different other than the lawyers
shaking their legal briefs at Activision Blizzard.
Seems a German consumer watchdog organization,the German body of the Federation of Consumer Organizations (Why
do European agencies have such weird names??)) is threatening a lawsuit if
Activision Blizzard doesn't respond to demands to highlight the need for an
always on Internet connection on Diablo 3's packaging. Blizzard has till today, July 27th to respond.
South Korea has gotten into the act fining
Blizzard $7000 (US) after raiding Blizzard's Seoul offices for what amounts to
non performance of contract due to the zero day server outages that prevented
even single player games of Diablo 3.
Victims of the outages suffered the infamous
Error 37bemoaned in many gaming news outlets.
Since bad news comes in threes the last
little bit of justice concerns only partially addressed exploit that allows
certain character types like the Wizard and Barbarian to play with virtual
invulnerability. This affects the
auction house in the game where ill gotten booty from the exploit can be sold
for in-game gold or real money. At least
they don't have to worry about EBay now.
Blizzard claims to have deployed a hotfix to
address the Invulnerable Wizard exploit to servers worldwide.
So it seems Blizzards unwarranted premium
price, inclusion of World of Warcraft type a la' carte pricing aka
"auction house" and attempt to undercut eBay sales of leveled characters has come back to bite them. It's bad enough that players can gain
artificial bragging rights but now they can fill their wallet too and Blizzard
can't do anything about it.
Remember that episode of South Park when the
kids were playing WoW incessantly to defeat a cheating player that was bullying
everyone in the game. Yeah, that's a
real possibility now.
In mildly interesting Hardware news the next version of Thunderbolt is reported to run at 20GBps, using a new controller
called falcon ridge slated for 2014 release.
At least the upgrade cycle is consistent. Remember how long it took to get USB 3.0?
The Radeon 7990 is delayed till late August. It's powered by 4 6 pin power connectors, 2
7970 GPU's and 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM. It's
said to be using GHz edition GPU's that seem to benefit from binning possibly
allowing the cards to not have to be underclocked like most dual GPU cards have
to be. The release date is said to be
planned around the same time as the upcoming Nvidia midrange 650 and 660Ti
cards.
Now for our foot in the mouth feature....
Gabe newell had some interesting commentary on Windows 8. Apparently the Valve head doesn't believe Windows 8 is going to be a good thing for the PC market in saying,
"I think we’ll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that’s true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality."
"“The big problem that is holding back Linux is games. People don’t realize how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behavior.“We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well. It’s a hedging strategy.
So Linux is held back by gaming? Apparently the hundreds of disparate distributions, lack of standardization and need for constant fiddling for basic functionality has nothing to do with its small market share . Linux is a splintered platform exactly because it's not Windows or MAC. As a predominantly open source platform it's impossible to get everybody in the room to agree on anything.
That's fine for a desktop window manager but it's debilitating to the platform as a whole. Nobody is going to invest in an architecture without a built in user base. That's not going to happen if you try to force a market used to IPAD's to deal with the idiosyncrasies of Linux.
As a former Microsofty, Newell knows this better than anyone else. If the former Microsoft Bob team member wants to expand Steam into realm of Linux he'll have to leave much of the open source crowd out of the loop to succeed. In spite of this Newell claims the need for open platforms.
‘We’ve been a free rider, and we’ve been able to benefit from everything that went into PCs and the Internet, and we have to continue to figure out how there will be open platforms.’”
Hmm, that's odd since last October he predicted Apple was going to be a big influence on game consoles but is also quoted as saying, "I consider Apple to be very closed."
Newell's newfound interest in "Open platforms" may have more to do with using Linux as a closed platform for his own hardware than any act of magnanimity for the Linux community.
http://www.geekwire.com/2011/valves-newell-predicts-shakeup-for-closed-game-consoles/
http://allthingsd.com/20120725/valves-gabe-newell-on-the-future-of-games-wearable-computers-windows-8-and-more/
In this week's windows weekly Paul Thurott claimed Newell's statement was made, "in passing" Yeah and so are Steven Sinofsky's blog posts...
http://twit.tv/show/windows-weekly/271
Finally in the Midagedgamerguys editors corner aka "Rant" we're going to talk
about the "unofficial rules"
of FPS gaming...
We've all experienced it.
No I'm not talking about the cheaters with their aimbots or another rant
about campers either. Hey, I know when
the horse is dead.
No, it's something far more annoying than any of that.
I'm talking about when you see phrases in the chat window
like...
" Don't attack the flags", "I'm just trying
to get my unlock" or "Don't kill anybody at the flag spawn"
I'm sorry but unless we're on an unranked server I can care
less about your personal agenda especially if it's not helping the team.
I'm also not a fan of making up rules on the fly or players
whose only purpose is to screw up the game for everyone else.
I'll bet you've run into a few of these if you've spent any
time playing an FPS. You know the scene,
you spawn at your base and decide it'd be more fun to drive than walk into
battle.
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So after foolishly jumping into the available seat of a
chopper, tank or whatever,
I'm greeted with...
A-hole: "Get out !@%*&, I don't fly with
asshats"
Me: "Just go,
we're wasting time"
time passes...
A-hole" Just
get out"
Me: " We can
go and try to accomplish something or just sit here."
A-hole, I don't go
anywhere with!@%*&
Me: "Look, save the BFF crap for the unranked
servers and go already""
At which point they either accept my viewpoint or unleash
their inner 4 year old.
-----------------------------------
Either way I'm entertained.
Nothing's more fun to watch than a virtual temper tantrum while I give a
blow by blow to the rest of the team usually resulting in a "!votekick"
on the offender once they figure out he's hogging the attack chopper.
Games have rules for a reason, so that everyone gets at
least a chance to participate. If every
server turns into an impromptu private playground nobody is going to have any
fun.
Make no mistake, you are going to run into it if you play
long enough. My advice, don't accept
it. As I've said before nobody has the
right to ruin your experience so long as you're playing by the rules, the real
rules. If the server admin bounces you
for it, don't play on that server and for god sake don't make any donations (some
servers are shameless about the topic) unless you know the admins
personally.
Some of my favorite servers have made me want to punch the
monitor, needless to say I'm not quite ready to make a donation.
It's strange to be a non-conformist when you're just trying
to play by the rules.
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