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Two new heroes announced for Dota 2, one is playable right now

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By Stephany Nunneley,
Saturday, 25 August 2018 15:39 GMT

Two new heroes were announced for Dota 2 during The International, and you can play one right now.

Grimstroke and Mars were announced as new playable characters for Dota 2.

During The International this week, Grimstroke was made available to players as a new, ranged support hero. As you can see in the trailer, he wields a rather dangerous rebinding brush dipped in “profane ink.”

You can look over his character page through the official website and familiarize yourself with his moveset (thanks, Neowin).

Mars will be added as a playable character in late 2018.

A card game based on Dota 2, Artifact, will also be released later this year in November.

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Overwatch’s All Star weekend starts soon, here’s how to watch it

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There’s lots of options if you’re interested

Overwatch‘s professional competitive games are done for the season, but this weekend the Overwatch League (OWL) is hosting its first All-Star weekend, featuring teams made up from some of the best players in the world. The matches begin in about half an hour and can be viewed on Twitch, Major League Gaming, OverwatchLeague.com, or on cable if your package includes DisneyXD or ESPN3. Events will continue on Sunday at 11:00 AM PDT and can be viewed in the same way.

Each event will pit the Atlantic team vs. the Pacific team, and people playing at home can show their support by buying a legendary Tracer or Genji skin by using 200 OWL tokens. These tokens can be purchased (200 tokens cost about $10) or could be earned by watching OWL games via Twitch during the regular season. The skins will be available through the in-game browser until August 27. It’s unclear if watching the All-Star games will enable Twitch OWL token drops, but it can’t hurt to check in.

Saturday’s events include a 1v1 Widowmaker sniping challenge, Lockout Elimination, a Lucioball showdown, and a Mystery Heroes goofabout. There’s also something called a “Talent Takedown,” though I’m not exactly sure what this game mode entails. The Widow challenge should be particularly entertaining, especially since participants like Pine, Carpe and Fleta have demonstrated absolutely inhuman reaction times during regular league play.

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Here’s everything we know about new Dota 2 heroes, Grimstroke and Mars

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Two new heroes have been announced for Dota 2: Grimstroke and Mars.

While there’s not yet much known about the latter other than they’re coming later this year “ready for war”, Grimstroke is playable now courtesy of the latest update.

“Chosen to serve as an arcane guardian of his people, Grimstroke was instead responsible for their eternal corruption,” states the news update on the official Dota 2 website. 

“Trapped in agony as inky revenants, his former kindred cast cruel shadows of what might have been. But the sacrifice infused Grimstroke with great power, and he considers it a price well paid.”

Grimstroke’s abilities include: Stroke of Fate, which paints a path of ink with his brush, damaging and slowing enemies in its wake; Phantom’s Embrace which commands a phantom to latch onto his enemy, damaging and silencing it; Ink Swell which covers Grimstroke or an ally in ink, silencing the target while granting bonus speed and immunity to attacks; and Soulbind, which binds an enemy hero to its nearest allied hero in range, preventing each from moving away from the other. 

For more on all things Grimstroke, including his suitably grim (sorry) backstory, head over to the official character page. 

Gabe Newell has arrived in Dota 2 in the form of a new deadpan voice pack, with lines including: “Please email me at GabeN@valvesoftware.com and let me know about your rampage”.

Survival H1Z1 game Just Survive shuts down in October

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Just Survive, the survival H1Z1 video game, shuts down in October.

In a post on Steam, developer Daybreak said Just Survive goes dark at 7pm UK time on 24th October. All Steam purchases and in-game transactions have been disabled.

“The excitement of the game’s promise was palpable and its loyal community is still full of ideas for its future,” Daybreak said.

“Unfortunately, we are no longer in a position to fulfill its greatness and the current population of the game makes it untenable to maintain.”

Just Survive had an up and down existence. The open-world zombie survival game launched in January 2015 as an early access project titled H1Z1 that was pitched squarely against then Steam golden child DayZ, and while it initially sold well, a raft of technical issues dampened early enthusiasm.

In February 2016, H1Z1 was split into two separate projects: H1Z1: Just Survive and H1Z1: King of the Hill. Later, H1Z1: Just Survive became Just Survive, while H1Z1: King of the Kill became battle royale game H1Z1.

Daybreak has suffered troubles of its own as it struggled to rekindle interest in its games on PC. More recently, though, Daybreak found impressive success with the PlayStation 4 version of H1Z1.

“We truly appreciate everyone’s commitment and your contributions throughout the development process,” Daybreak added.

“Our promise is to do better and learn from every experience along the way.”

Fortnite Week 7 Secret Battle Star: Free Battle Pass Tier Guide (Season 5)

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Fortnite‘s Week 7 challenges on PS4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch, and mobile, bringing the running tally of Season 5 challenges to a whopping 49. As usual, completing these will level your Battle Pass up and unlock Season 5 rewards, but there’s an extra incentive to finish all of the challenges in a given week; doing so will check off a corresponding Road Trip challenge and net you a special loading screen that points to a secret Battle Star hidden around the island.

If you’ve managed to stay on top of all of the challenges to date and clear Week 7’s batch of tasks, you’ll unlock the loading screen pictured below. This one depicts a group of characters standing around in shock as another group–dressed in the Legendary Enforcer outfit you receive for completing seven Road Trip challenges–emerges from a Rift atop the motel sign.

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The clue to the Battle Star’s whereabouts is very subtle this time, but if you peer closely beneath the motel sign, you can see its faint silhouette sitting atop the far end of the brick wall. Head to the motel, which is located to the northwest of Lazy Links, at the start of the match and you’ll find the Battle Star waiting about the brick wall just as on the loading screen. Collect it to level your Battle Pass up by one tier, bringing you another step closer to unlocking the Season 5 rewards.

If you need help locating the Battle Star, you can watch us pick it up in the video above. However, as usual, you will need to meet the aforementioned requirements in order to find it; you won’t be able to simply go to its hiding spot and collect it unless you’ve completed seven weeks of challenges and unlocked the corresponding loading screen.

The latest set of weekly challenges arrived a little later than usual, shortly after Epic rolled out Fortnite’s 5.30 update. Among them is a new kind of multi-step challenge that requires you to go to specific locations, open a treasure chest, and unlock the next step in the process. Another of Week 7’s challenges tasks you with following the treasure map found in Dusty Divot. You can find guides on how to complete all of the missions in our Season 5 challenge roundup.

Star Citizen is free to try this weekend

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Star Citizen is free to try from now until Monday.

Star Citizen’s “Gamescom Free Fly” weekend gives you the chance to try out four vehicles—the Avenger Titan, Cutless Black, Dragonfly Black, and Protector—in both the “dogfighting stage Arena Commander, and first-person shooter Star Marine” modes. 

“To begin your adventure, you would normally pledge for one of our starter packages, which gets you a user-friendly ship and game access,” states the website. “For a limited time, we’re giving prospective Citizens the chance to explore the universe and test out a handful of ships and ground vehicles for free.”

To play, head on over to the Star Citizen website and sign up, using the promotional code GETINTOTHEVERSE. 

Criticism of Cloud Imperium Games intensified earlier this month when the developer opted to remove the cap on in-game currency that players can accumulate in Star Citizen. 

While the amount you can purchase in a single day is limited to 25,000 United Earth Credits (UEC), the limit on the number UEC you could store—150,000 UEC—was removed. 

Co-founder Chris Roberts responded by saying that removing the cap did not make Star Citizen pay-to-win because there is no “specific win state” and “you win by having fun, and fun is different things to different people”.

Thanks, Eurogamer.

What Kind of a Name is Rainbow?

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Rainbow Six turned 20 this week, yet another in a series of impressive milestones for Ubisoft’s special ops series. We could equally well say it’s 20 years since the tactical shooter genre was born, 20 years since ‘realism’ was seriously applied to an FPS, or 20 years since the ‘Tom Clancy’ name began a journey towards becoming one of the most recognisable prefixes in gaming.

Considering where it stands today, it’s impressive to think that the Tom Clancy video-game phenomenon started with just two developers at Red Storm’s North Carolina office, with little experience and no serious architecture underlying the game they were working on. “We just started building stuff, and changing it as we went along” is how Rainbow Six lead designer Brian Upton puts it. For this anniversary I spoke with Upton about the making of Rainbow Six, the unlikely role played by Quake, and just how much input the game had from Tom Clancy himself.

For a video game about shooting all manner of extremists, it’s a little ironic that Rainbow Six was so radical in its own time. You can read more here, but to summarise: it entered an FPS landscape defined by grungy, blood-strewn blasters like Quake 2, Unreal and Shadow Warrior. Rainbow Six was a different breed, forcing you to contend with reloading, one-shot kills, mission planning and squad management. Where its peers had Doom or Quake for their references, Rainbow Six had nothing.

This didn’t bother the young team at Red Storm Entertainment who, according to Upton, were oblivious about the unprecedented task at hand.

“I think our inexperience kind of blinded us to how different Rainbow Six was from other shooters,” Upton says. “We were just making the game we wanted to make, and solving design problems as they cropped up. The real pressure came because we hadn’t anticipated how much work it takes to ship a game. If we’d had more experience, we would have been able to better plan out the production and save ourselves a lot of grief at the end.”

Red Storm Entertainment was co-founded by Tom Clancy, Doug Littlejohns and Steve Reid in May 1996, and work began on Rainbow Six soon after. The game was originally called ‘Black Ops’, expanding from a concept centred around the FBI Hostage Rescue Team. Clancy loved the idea, so much so that (though Upton and Red Storm didn’t yet know this) it would go on to be directly tied into his next novel. In the early going Red Storm even flirted with a more campy 60s-style theme inspired by Austin Powers, but in 1997 started to tie more closely into Clancy’s upcoming novel.

When work began on the game, the development team consisted of Upton and another programmer, though it eventually expanded to five people. With such a small team everyone operated across multiple roles (Upton himself was designer, programmer, lead engineer and VP of engineering) and there was no particular workflow in place. “There was no object database, no standard way to pass messages between objects, no developer tools,” Upton recalls. “Even something as minor as shifting the starting location of an enemy involved running a debug version of the game, moving to where you wanted him to be, pressing a button to display the current coordinates, then manually typing those coordinates into a text file!”

Such lack of development infrastructure wasn’t uncommon back then, and had its perks as well as downsides. There was less bureaucracy, fewer hoops to jump through and, if a developer wanted to throw in a feature on a bit of a whim, they could. That’s how Upton came up with the targeting reticle, which would expand and shrink depending on whether the player was walking, running, crouching or standing still. It was a quiet revolution in shooting mechanics.

When I asked Upton about how the reticle was conceived, I was half-hoping it was based on some wisdom passed down from some of the experts that Clancy arranged to advise on the game. The reality, however, was more grounded, stemming from the relatable woes of playing a shooter against someone younger and insurmountably faster than yourself.

“We played a lot of Quake at the end of the day, and there was one young guy on the team who had amazing twitch reflexes. He could snap around and headshot you in the middle of a jump”, Upton recalls. “It was really annoying because I was in my early 30s and my reflexes were much slower, so I was like ‘I’m going to design a shooting mechanic where Juan can’t headshot me!’ That’s where the reticle came in. Afterwards we justified it because of realism, but the original idea came out of my frustration of getting killed in Quake.”

That was not the only role that Quake played in the development of Rainbow Six. Another reflection of the unprecedented nature of the project was how many familiar shooter elements it was leaving behind: Upton and the team weren’t sure how an FPS without health pickups, jumping or a substantial health bar would work.

With no comparable game to look at Red Storm created — what else? — a Quake mod with the basic rules of Rainbow Six to see whether it would actually be any fun. It passed the test, though Upton stresses that this was more a proof-of-concept than a prototype. “The whole planning interface and AI team system wasn’t prototyped at all. We just started building it,” Upton confirms, which is in-keeping with the rest of Rainbow Six’s freewheeling development.

Other happy accidents of the development process were that lack of a jump button, and visible gun model. “We were a small team on a tight deadline and having a visible gun is a fair amount of work,” Upton says. “It wasn’t just the modelling. If you have a visible gun you also have to have the bullets originate from the barrel and that has implications for how targeting works and how bullets interact with obstacles in the world.”

Meanwhile jumping (that bane of all realism) was being seriously considered for inclusion, even though Upton was secretly hoping it’d miss the cut due to time constraints. What swung this decision could be tangentially accredited to Clancy himself, who hooked Red Storm Entertainment up with technical advisers — actual former counter-terrorism operatives who could provide the kind of fine details that would make Rainbow Six shine (such as getting those tightly-packed postures and animations of the squads just right).

“I remember being thrilled when one of our technical advisers told us they never jumped because it interfered with their ability to maintain a stable firing platform,” Upton tells me. “You can’t effectively return fire if you’re in the air, so they never jumped over an obstacle if there was another way to get where they needed to go. ‘Great! That’s one more animation we don’t need to implement.”

Scrapping these elements afforded more development time to the parts of the game that would ultimately define it, like the level design, camera and AI behaviour; wounded enemies would flee and fetch backup, while spooked ones could execute hostages if you weren’t careful. The open levels were painstakingly handcrafted with little repetition of textures and geometry, giving each one a unique and organic feel. Where levels in other shooters could often blur into one, and this is more difficult to appreciate two decades later of course, Rainbow Six had the feel of a globetrotting spy thriller.

Rainbow Six was unforgiving. Its permadeath campaign meant that your supply of skilled, named operatives could whittle down as the game progressed (unless you repeatedly reloaded a mission to get the perfect run). “It was just the result of us being really bloody-minded about realism,” Upton says candidly. “We had decided that part of the Clancy brand was letting players think they were getting a window into ‘how it really was.’ So what do you do if a character gets killed? Well, dead is dead.”

Rainbow Six did tone down the realism in other areas, but only when it could easily be hidden, such as operative movement speed, which Upton says is “about twice as fast as operatives would move in real life.”

Beyond providing Red Storm with specialists, Clancy didn’t get involved much with the development of Rainbow Six. “He wasn’t a gamer, so he didn’t have any meaningful feedback on how the game played,” Upton says. “He was there at the original brainstorming session where the idea originated, but he didn’t come up with it. I wrote the original draft of the story, not Clancy.”

According to Upton, Clancy in fact used the game’s premise of counter-terrorists vs eco terrorists for the Rainbow Six novel, then went on to build a more elaborate story around it which Red Storm had to adapt to (the game and the novel were timed to release at the same time). When a draft of the final novel arrived late in development, Upton found it wasn’t too dissimilar to the game. “Fortunately he followed our plot pretty closely because at that point the levels were already all built and we couldn’t have accommodated any major changes,” Upton says. “Most of the changes were just in names and mission briefings.”

Another thing that arrived late in development was the name of the novel, and subsequently the game. It seems a distant worry today, but Upton wasn’t convinced at the time. “‘Rainbow?’ For a gritty realistic shooter? And the number on the end was going to make coming up with a title for a sequel tricky! I was overruled though.” In fairness to Upton, the original title of Black Ops would eventually prove itself as very marketable when Call of Duty used it 12 years later.

Upton’s reservations about the replacement title would of course prove unfounded. Rainbow Six launched on 21 August 1998 to critical acclaim and excellent sales, kickstarting a hugely successful series and arguably an entire gaming genre. He did, however, have a point about the title, with the series shying away from numbers barring Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. The latest iteration, Rainbow Six: Siege, sits pretty as one of the world’s most popular online shooters with over 35 million players. Rainbow Six came up with its own rules, its own style, and its own way to play. Say what you will about the name, but it certainly led to gold.

Shadow Hands-On: I Ran Witcher 3 on a Tablet, and I Liked It

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With Nvidia’s recent announcement of its new RTX graphics cards, keeping up with the price of GPUs can burn hole in your pocket. And if you’re not on the PC bandwagon already, the entrance fee will just burn your pants right off.

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However, with Shadow, a cloud gaming service, you can play the most graphically intensive games on the cheapest laptops around. To test this, we used the service on an Asus VivoBook E203NA, an Acer Chromebook Spin 11 and a Samsung Galaxy Tab S4.

First, let’s break down what you actually get with the Shadow service. Currently, the Shadow cloud gaming service costs $34.95 a month and is accessible via Windows, macOS and Android (iOS support is coming soon). The company has a computer dedicated solely to you, and you will basically be streaming the entire thing.

MORE: Highest Resolution Screens

A Shadow machine comes with a 2.1-GHz Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4 processor, 12GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and an “Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 equivalent” GPU (aka, a Quadro P5000). When I benchmarked Rise of the Tomb Raider on Very High at 1080p, that power translated to a smooth 61 frames per second. The internet service from the company’s dark server room registered a 860-Mbps download speed and a 106-Mbps upload speed on Speedtest.net. The company also offers free upgrades to the system “for life.”

Look Ma, No GPU!

The first laptop I tested was the VivoBook, which comes with an Intel Celeron N3350 CPU, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of flash memory. When I booted up Rise of the Tomb Raider, it looked absolutely gorgeous and didn’t suffer from the quality of the stream whatsoever.

Screenshot_20180824-104153_ShadowHowever, the speed of the stream itself was the problem, as I was plagued by constant stuttering and lag while trying to properly aim my bow. It was enough to make the game unplayable. Changing the graphic settings didn’t fix anything, and when I tried to alter the Shadow’s settings to Low Connection Mode, it effectively made everything worse. I could barely track my own movements in game, and I actually heard my footsteps 5 seconds before they happened on screen.

The service worked better when I tested it with The Witcher 3. There was some stuttering, but because all I did was chop people in half with my sword, it wasn’t as bad. I was able to bob and weave through a bunch of demon Nekkers until they eventually murdered me, but they got the best of me due to my lack of skill, not because of the lag.

However, when I pulled out my crossbow, I noticed that the cursor wasn’t stuttering as much as it had in Rise of the Tomb Raider. This improvement allowed me to hit some small trees in the distance. Despite the joy I found in this smooth connection, everything suddenly came to a slow crawl like before.

MORE: Best and Worst Laptop Gaming Brands

From there, I decided to do the ultimate test: Ethernet. That brought my computer from 65 MBps to 120 MBps. Even though the cap on the stream is 50 MBps, I think the stableness of the Ethernet is what completely transformed Rise of the Tomb Raider and The Witcher 3. There was the occasional stutter, but it wasn’t a deal breaker, especially while I aimed.

The Crashbook

Next up was the Acer Chromebook 11, which packed an Intel Celeron N3350 CPU, 4GB of RAM and 32GB of flash memory. The Shadow app literally crashed every time I tried to start Rise of the Tomb Raider and The Witcher 3. It did manage to stream the computer’s desktop, but it was incredibly blurry. Keep in mind that this is a Chromebook running an Android app, a pairing that continues to be finicky even now.

No Touchpad, No Problem

The best part of testing Shadow was running it on the Samsung Galaxy Tab S4, which has a Snapdragon 835 CPU and 4GB of RAM. It felt so good to see Witcher 3 run silky smooth on that vivid display, and it ran even better on Wi-Fi with the S4 than with the Vivobook. Nothing was sweeter than galloping toward a Drowner-ridden river and destroying their way of life. Rise of the Tomb Raider also ran better on Wi-Fi on the S4 than on the Vivobook, allowing me to accurately snipe some intimidating concrete walls in the tomb I was exploring.

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Doing all this on a tablet wasn’t that bad either, as the desktop registered Samsung’s pen perfectly, and connecting my Xbox One controller via Bluetooth was easy. There were a few issues though; I couldn’t put the app in fullscreen while in DeX mode, and trying to switch tabs with a hot key actually switched tabs on the Galaxy itself as opposed to the computer I was streaming.

Additional Notes

There are a lot of things I like about Shadow, but there are a few improvements I’d like to see implemented as well. It’d be nice if two people could access the stream at once, which would allow for local co-op games. I encountered another issue when I tried to scale apps; the mouse didn’t adjust accordingly, so it was way off course when I attempted to click anything. When you use your physical audio slider, it will affect both the computer you’re using and the one that you’re streaming. However, since the service is new, these are things I hope get addressed sooner rather than later.

Bottom Line

Paying $35 a month for Shadow may seem like a steep price, especially for a service that still needs to work out a few kinks. But when you do have that sweet-spot connection, it’s very impressive to see gorgeous games run on a sub-$300 laptop.

A service like this is revolutionary in what it can bring to people who can’t afford a premium PC, and I am genuinely surprised that it works as well as it does right out of the gate. Of course, there are connection issues, but as long as the service improves with time, it will better accommodate poorer internet connections and thus create a better experience for all.

 Credit: Laptop Mag

Palmer Luckey believes he’ll have a cure for VR motion sickness by the end of the year

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Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey has announced he will have a solution for virtually reality locomotion sickness available via open-source later this year.

When pressed to elaborate on the original claim, Luckey clarified (Reddit, via Resetera) that the solution would include “hardware and software” and that he aimed “to open-source the design later this year”. 

He added that he was “not aware of anyone else working on this branch of the problem”.

And that’s not all. In the same series of tweets posted earlier this week, Luckey also predicted that within the next five years, not only would there be a “universal solution for vestibulo-oculular mismatch in virtual reality”, but also “superhuman sensory perception/reaction for a handful of people”, “predictive analytics indistinguishable from time travel in some cases”, “VTOL air taxis”, and “0 to 60 in 0.8 seconds”.

When a Twitterer responded that VTOL air taxis already existed in the form of helicopters, Luckey replied: “I have a few helicopters. They are not sufficient.”

The 6 Coolest Things We Saw at Gamescom 2018

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Held annually in Cologne, Germany, Gamescom is Europe’s most important gaming show and, if measured by attendees and space, the world’s biggest gaming event.

A whopping 500,000 fans, exhibitors and insiders attended this year’s show, all to see the latest and greatest games and hardware from the likes of Nvidia, Microsoft and Sony.

Credit: Pe3k/Shutterstock

This year, I had the pleasure of attending the event, trying some games and (occasionally) mingling with the crowds to check out the surprises awaiting in the booths.

Here are some of the coolest things that stuck out:

Nvidia’s RTX 20 GPUs

Nvidia’s new RTX 20 series GPUs aren’t cheap, starting at the $599 for the RTX 2070 and going all the way up to the $1,199 RTX 2080 Ti. But this steep price is justified by additional hardware that allows the GPU to do real ray tracing, a method for accurately calculating the behavior of light rays in an environment, which allows for realistic lighting simulation.

Credit: Nvidia

One thing is for sure: Real ray tracing in a video game is impressive. This is a big step in the history of computer graphics. Real-time ray tracing in computer games has been a pipe dream for a long time, and to see it implemented in actual commercial hardware is exciting.

Now, given my focus on the more affordable side of hardware, what really worries me is how this will affect the hypothetical RTX 2050 and RT 2030. Will the lowest-end entry in the new series also have dedicated hardware for ray tracing? Would that even make sense in a low-end GPU? 

And more important, will the general price hike affect the whole line? Would the future low-end entry in the series be $160 instead of the $80 for the GT 1030? Will the idea of a sub-$100 GPU be abandoned altogether?

Only time will tell, but I am concerned about how this will affect people building budget gaming PCs when they’re limited to new components. But if money’s not an issue, the RTX series seems to have the potential to take high-end PC gaming to a whole new level.

MORE: Here’s Every RTX 2080 Optimized Game (So Far)

Fallout 76

Although there was still no playable demo of the upcoming multiplayer Fallout experience, attendees could line up to see a new presentation of the game compiled of trailers, interviews and Vault-Tec instructional cartoons.

One of the mechanics explained in the trailer is how the player-versus-player (PvP) and the player-versus-environment (PvE) are balanced, and I find the implementation to be pure genius.

Credit: Bethesda

If a player suddenly attacks another player in Fallout 76, the attack does minimal damage until the attacked player retaliates. At that point, PvP is initiated, and full damage is done by both parties. The player who survives the encounter gets a reward in caps based on the level difference between both players. 

If the attacked player decides to ignore the attack, minimal manage is maintained. However, this damage can accumulate until the attacked player dies. However, since PvP was never initiated, this is considered “murder.”

Players who commit murder get no reward and become wanted criminals with a bounty on their heads, which, if the criminals are killed, is paid directly from their caps. Furthermore, the rest of the players on the map are notified of the murderer’s location. 

This provides a dynamic social penalty for players killing defenseless players and transforms every murder into a miniature event for all players. Players who prefer the PvE (like I do) do not have to engage in PvP on most encounters. High-level players can choose to live as criminals for a serious spike in difficulty, and PvP-focused players can compete for bounties against real human players.

If all of this is properly connected with the deep lore and ambience that characterize games developed by Bethesda Softworks, it should result in a game well worth trying out.

Starlink: Battle for Atlas

Although I love Starlink’s central idea of building a ship model and having the in-game starship match whatever I built (with its corresponding stats), I am not sure if it justifies the extra cost of a bunch of game-specific plastic accessories. Because toys-to-life games can occasionally feel more like a marketing strategy, I was worried that the game would not be able stand on its own, without the plastic accessories.

But thankfully, I had an opportunity to try a short demo of the game, and there seems to be plenty more to it.

Starlink: Battle for Atlas

After I built a toy ship, the game threw me in space with several planets close by, and I was instructed to fly to the nearby planet, where I quickly arrived with no loading screens in sight. Then, I was tasked with destroying an enemy machine and fighting a crab-like giant boss.

The ship is equipped with two weapons (which you can pick while building a ship) and has two main modes of operation: using a close-to-the-ground hovercraft, and regular flying. Switching between them is seamless, and the controls are quick and precise. Five minutes into the demo, I had understood how to maneuver, boost and break to avoid enemy attacks. I also quickly realized that switching between the two modes is the most effective way to adapt to the boss’s patterns.

This surprised me, because Nintendo tried something similar on Star Fox: Zero on the ill-fated Wii U. Arwings could change between flying and using bipedal ground vehicles with the press of a button; but whereas Star Fox’s implementation felt clunky and took hours to get the hang of, Starlink’s system was easy and effective.

It’s no wonder Nintendo took notice of this and offered the use of its classic IP for the Switch version. Starlink feels like the Star Fox sequel that should have been.

The Elder Scrolls: Blades

The announcement of an Elder Scrolls game for mobile got a lukewarm reception during E3, and at Gamescom, the lines to try the demo where consistently the shortest in the Bethesda booth. But allow me to explain why I’m interested in it.

For starters, the visuals of the game are impressive (for a mobile game). The Gamescom demo ran on an iPhone X, and it seemed to utilize the phone’s resources to the fullest, with high-resolution textures, decent animations, and impressive environments and lightning.

Credit: LowSpecGamer

Then, there are the controls. When the game was officially announced, I expected something closer to a Skyrim port with touch controls, but Blades was clearly designed from the ground up for mobile. What I liked the most was how the game adapts to the phone’s orientation. If you play the game in landscape view, you get a layout that should be familiar to most mobile gamers, meant to be played with two hands while holding the phone like a controller.

If you change the phone to portrait orientation, the whole interface shifts to adapt to one-handed controls, without interrupting the game. This means that you could potentially be sitting down, playing this game while you wait for a train, switch to one-handed mode while you board the train and switch back to two-handed mode if you sit down again.

I have not seen any serious mobile games that experiment with dynamic interfaces that adapt to the rotational nature of a phone like that before, and I am interested to see how it feels in actual day-to-day use.

However, the game still has a lot of hurdles to overcome. Will it run well enough on my $200 Xiaomi phone, or will it work well only on expensive flagship devices? The combat and dungeon crawling in the demo were OK, but they lacked variety. Will there be enough to hold players’ attention for more than a few hours?

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

The initial trailer for FromSoftware’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice showcased a game that looked like Dark Souls in feudal Japan. At Gamescom, I had a chance to try a demo of the game, and it is so much more than that.

This is, undoubtedly, a FromSoftware game that runs on some version of the Dark Souls 3 Engine. The ground movement, combat and dodging all make this game feel like Dark Souls. The enemies have clear telegraphed attacks with high damage numbers. You get the idea.

Credit: Activision

However, some aspects of the movement system drastically change the rhythm of the game. This time, there is a proper jump button (not the awkward leaping from Dark Souls) that easily allows climbing into platforms and moving between gaps. Then, there is a grappling hook that seems like it’s ripped straight from the Batman Arkham series. Vantage points and rooftops are marked by a UI element that makes it easy to see which surfaces you can zip to, so it’s a snap to climb to higher ground.

These new movement options work into the game’s stealth system — another addition that would be difficult to justify in a Dark Souls game. A click of the left stick makes your character crouch, allowing you to hide in high grass and take enemies by surprise. Alerted enemies will notify other foes in the area to gang up on you.

The game continues FromSoftware’s tradition of high difficulty; I had a hard time getting through the first group of strong enemies. But the additional movement options gave me dozens of ways to approach every conflict, and I eventually figured out a way to succeed. However, the smallest mistake could eventually lead to an unexpected death.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice shows that FromSoftware is still experimenting with the formula that made the company famous, and adding new mechanics and forms of play that hold a lot of promise.

Given that Dark Souls 3 and Dark Souls: Remastered ran acceptably in a variety of low-end GPUs, I am hoping that Sekiro will continue this trend and provide a good PC experience.

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077‘s basic mechanical concepts — a first-person shooter RPG where you unlock new abilities to gain an edge on your enemies, and a city hub where you gain missions and multiple ways to solve them, with violence or diplomacy — are things I’d seen before. But I’ve never seen them implemented with this level of polish, and I haven’t seen them integrated so perfectly within a Cyberpunk universe.

The abilities vary from combat-oriented powers — like slowing down time, climbing walls and killing enemies silently from above with a jump — to tactical ones, like hacking into implants of disabled enemies to enter their network and locking their link to their guns. My favorite was a holographic display that allowed the protagonist to predict bullet trajectories after bouncing off objects, which easily allowed me to hit enemies behind cover.

Credit: CD Projekt Red

The guns, too, have been thought out clearly to fit the aesthetic and universe. One, in particular, stuck in my memory: a rifle that locks to a target and then directs all bullets to it, correcting for lazy aiming (which gave strong Fifth Element vibes).

The Cyberpunk 2020 universe (the tabletop game that 2070 is based upon) seems to be fully realized for this game. The missing woman from the first mission is enrolled in a health insurance service from a militaristic megacorp, which can be called by jacking into her mental implant. That will prompt a hover car with armed guards to drop onto a terrace and take the patient off while shoving the protagonist away. New implants are added by a back-alley doctor who would happily slice and modify your body for a price. The protagonist lives in a megabuilding that seems to be a universe in itself. The gang confronted at the end of the demo is characterized by extreme bodily modifications, with many of its members looking more android than human.

Night City is run by megacorporations, the streets are ruled by crime, and the buildings are angular, dirty, run down and filled with holographic advertisements. You are trying to find your place in this terrifying mess. I cannot wait to put 80 hours into this game. 

Given that CD Project Red’s attention to detail extends to its PC options (The Witcher 3 had some of the richest, most extensive and most customizable configuration files I have seen in a game), I have no doubt that Cyberpunk 2077 will also scale well in a variety of systems, including low-end ones.

Those are our top highlights from Gamescom 2018. What are yours? Let us know in the comments!

Nearly a decade after it came out, The Last Remnant will be delisted on PC

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Remember The Last Remnant? Square Enix’s role-playing game will soon be discontinued on PC nearly a decade after it came out.

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In Europe, The Last Remnant will be delisted at 5pm UK time on 4th September, which means you have just over a week to grab it from Steam before it’s scrubbed forever. Of course, if you already own the game you will be able to play as normal.

In its note on Steam, Square Enix failed to explain why The Last Remnant was being delisted on PC, but it did thank players.

The Last Remnant was notable for being Square Enix’s first title built with the Unreal Engine. It was designed to appeal to the western market, and launched first on the Xbox 360 in 2008 before later coming out on PC. A PlayStation 3 version was announced but later cancelled.

The Last Remnant was criticised at launch for poor technical performance, with extreme cases of texture pop-in and long loading times. The battle system went down well, though.

Keza Macdonald reviewed The Last Remnant for Eurogamer, awarding it 6/10.

Hearthstone’s New Single-Player Mode Is A Surprisingly Solid Puzzle Game

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Hearthstone has shifted and bent its shape a handful of times over the years. When its first Naxxramas-themed “Adventure” expansion released in 2014, it took the shape of a single-player strategy game. Most recently, with Kobolds and Catacombs and The Witchwood, it took the form of a dungeon-crawling roguelike. And now, with the launch of The Boomsday Project’s Puzzle Lab, Hearthstone is a puzzle game too — and a pretty good one at that.

Framed as a new “Solo Adventure” in the game’s interface, the Puzzle Lab is surprisingly fleshed-out in the way it’s presented. While Hearthstone’s somewhat-static interface doesn’t seem to leave much room for the features you care about in one-off puzzle games, like the ability to quickly restart a level or transition between puzzles you’ve already unlocked, the Puzzle Lab has been carefully designed to feel like its own thing; rather than a variation on the Hearthstone formula, it feels like a full-on puzzle game in and of itself.

The puzzles themselves are similarly thoughtful, and are sorted by their different objectives. Some puzzles are “Lethal” puzzles that challenge you to deal lethal damage to the enemy hero using the cards available to you, while others make you try to “Mirror” the opponent’s board or clear the board of minions entirely. As static, self-contained puzzles, they’re crafted in such a way that you really have to think about what a card is going to do. If you’re completely at a loss, you can experiment with different interactions and see what happens.

Starting off with easy, self-explanatory situations any Hearthstone player has probably seen hundreds of times, The Puzzle Lab quickly escalates in difficulty as it forces you to consider the sequences and positions in which you play your cards. By confronting you with fringe situations you might rarely, if ever, see in the context of an actual game, it tests your ability to think laterally with tools you’re already familiar with. Some puzzles even introduce mechanics that don’t exist as standard Hearthstone cards, providing possibilities that would be extremely overpowered in the context of the standard game itself, but which make the puzzles much more compelling to unravel.

Hearthstone has always had this element to it: situations where you could take a thousand different paths and only one would be truly correct. Seeing it all in front of you this clearly, though, is a reminder of how nuanced Hearthstone can get when you’ve got a limitless turn timer and a complex board state in front of you. There’s no luck involved here — just you, an awkward rat’s nest of cards, and hopefully, enough ingenuity to unlock what’s next.

The only part about the Puzzle Labs that’s somewhat difficult to reckon with is one that should be familiar to any person who’s played a puzzle game in the recent past. Since these puzzles are all specifically authored and static, there’s almost no replay value, especially when compared with a randomised mode like the Monster Hunt or Dungeon Run. Still, with its carefully curated challenges and parade of inventive new mechanics, The Puzzle Lab is an up-close encounter with some of the best interactions Hearthstone has to offer, and one of the game’s most refreshing single-player offerings to date.

World of Warcraft’s story is heading down a weird, wild path

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The Warcraft series has always been a little weird. The core conflict of the game, orcs versus humans, comes about from inciting factors like “portals opened between worlds” and “demons empowering orcs with their blood.”

We’ve been hanging out with Draenei and their crashed spaceship since World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. With all of that in mind, it says a lot that World of Warcraft’s story has gotten unusually bizarre. It isn’t a bad thing, necessarily — there are a lot of times that the odd twists and turns the story is taking work well or are fun… but each time the writers make a decision to head off-road through the wild undergrowth of plot mechanics like time travel, alternate dimensions, cosmic forces and World Souls, you can see the foundation start to tremble, just a little.

World of Warcraft has gotten weird as hell, and there’s no turning back now. All that’s left is to see how this gamble shakes out.

How weird are we talking, exactly?

The Warlords of Draenor expansion gets a lot of heat from the community. There are a lot of factors here: an unsatisfying Garrison system, a missing tier of raid content, a lack of player agency and the entire premise of the expansion. Warlords of Draenor starts off-screen, with heroes from both the Horde and the Alliance coming together to hold a trial for Garrosh Hellscream and his war crimes.

War crimes is an unusual charge for Hellscream, because if that is a thing in the world of Warcraft, the player should probably be up for trial as well. We’ve tortured NPCs to get answers, burned people alive, killed civilians and bombed settlements. If you’re a Death Knight, you’ve also engaged in fun things like torturing people’s souls, necromancy and slaughtering allied red dragons en masse so that you can enjoy a sick mount. (All of these things are no-nos.)

In the end, Hellscream never receives his sentence, because a dragon smuggles him out and takes him back in time to an alternate dimension, where he takes over an RTS-era Horde on the planet of Draenor and uses it to invade Azeroth.

This is probably the turning point for where World of Warcraft got really absurd. Legion reins the premise back in, bringing players back to Azeroth and then sending them on a quest for the Pillars of Creation throughout the Broken Isles. It’s good, clean fun… and then the planet of Argus, the Draenei homeworld, becomes our next tactical target. We team up with the Army of Light, led by two Alliance war heroes who have been locked in space combat for one thousand years, and get on a spaceship to head to Argus with the goal of fighting the planet’s soul.

Cue Battle for Azeroth, where we’re back on our home planet worrying about things like farmers’ crops and local politics.


World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth - Sylvanas Windrunner

Blizzard Entertainment

Wait, what?

The last few expansions have really taken things off the rails, and what’s more, every time things get reined back in, bits of the previous storyline come along for the ride. Alleria Windrunner is still helping the Alliance out, which is great, except she ate the essence of a corrupted Light God and is now irrevocably tainted by the Void. She’s also recruited a small faction of Blood Elves who dabbled in the Void themselves; the Alliance now has Void Elves as an Allied Race. These former Blood Elves have stars falling from their hair, constantly hear the whispers of the void and seem to exclusively travel by ripping holes in time and space.

This is problematic, because players are learning about the existence of things called Void Lords, great cosmic forces that seek nefarious goals. Sargeras, the Fallen Titan, was the previous end boss of Warcraft. Eventually, we discovered that Sargeras had fallen because he had discovered Void Lords; he was so terrified of these beings that he created the Burning Legion to stop them.

There’s also the opposite of Void: the Light. Since the Warcraft RTS games, the Light has been painted as a benevolent force, worshipped as a religion. World of Warcraft is informing us that the Light is actually dangerous in equal measure to the Void, with Warlords of Draenor’s Yrel using the Light as a tool for genocide and conscription.


World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth - Razan in Zandalar dungeon

Blizzard Entertainment

House of cards

To borrow a phrase from Battle for Azeroth’s marketing campaign: It matters. While there will always be a portion of the player base who clicks through quest text until they get their purples, it’s clear Blizzard is working hard on making the Warcraft universe sustainable storywise. None of these changes are a death knell for the game; in fact, the story is the best it’s been for some time. Every time Blizzard makes a story decision, they need to live with that for years. Sometimes, they can’t find a way to make that work.

Take the Vindicaar, the spaceship we took to Argus in Legion. The Alliance is engaged in a war against the Horde, and they have a spaceship capable of making orbital strikes from space in their arsenal. They’re not using it. Why? Well, that wouldn’t be interesting. The Vindicaar goes back on the shelf until we need to invade another planet.

Blizzard needs to take care that its story choices, no matter how wild, stay sustainable. The more we have to shrug off or justify, the harder it is to buy into the World of Warcraft that it’s painstakingly building.

As for the future of World of Warcraft, it seems obvious we’ll be heading back into some pretty out-there territory soon. The Old Gods are stirring, Azshara is bringing the vengeance of N’Zoth to Azeroth, and priests are running around Kul Tiras with squids for faces. We’re carrying the heart of our planet around our neck and feeding it the planet’s lifeblood. It’s not a matter of if something completely wild is going to happen — it’s just a question or whether the game will be able to justify that narrative choice.

Developer Aims To Explore Female Sexuality With A Game That Lets You Bone ISIS To Death

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Super Patriotic Dating Simulator, which began its Kickstarter campaign on Saturday, is your typical romantic story of an elite spy infiltrating, seducing and then killing members of ISIS.

Karlee Esmailli, who wrote and is developing the game, is a first generation Iranian-American who works at Cards Against Humanity and is involved with the Chicago area comedy scene. She sees Super Patriotic Dating Simulator as a game that coalesces her heritage, her politics and her background in comedy.

The idea for this game came out of Esmailli’s reaction to Trump’s travel ban in February, which has impacted her family in Iran. “That really, that really brought a lot of anger out of me as a writer,” Esmailli said over the phone. “Like I mentioned, I have a background in comedy and when I feel that kind of anger, what it makes me want to do is satirise it, is make fun of it, to find the humour in the ridiculousness of the situation.”

“I don’t think I’m the most well-versed person to quote statistics, but it’s just a matter of public record that the countries that were listed in the travel ban are not countries that are historically associated with terrorist attacks on American soil,” Esmailli went on. “It is a ban that reflects so much of the prejudice of a lot of Americans attitudes towards Middle Eastern people.”

Esmailli said that she feels like ISIS has become a common political talking point for talking about the Middle East, but that much of the discussion about ISIS does not accurately reflect the attitudes of Middle Eastern people.

“ISIS is just so often used in political debate as a boogeyman for all Middle Eastern people,” she said. “It really bothered me that this group that is not representative of Middle Eastern people or my family or Muslim people in general is so often held up as a political example for why all Middle Eastern people are dangerous.”

Combining her anger about the travel ban with a sexy dating sim was a natural choice for her. Esmailli said that without the sexual aspect, the game wouldn’t feel satirical anymore, and would become just a reproduction of ISIS propaganda.

“I didn’t want to reproduce their imagery and continue to give them credibility or space in the conversation that they’d previously taken up,” she said. “So that is where the objectification of the male characters really came into play for me.”

Screenshot: Super Patriotic Dating Simulator (Immigrant Father Studios)

The game includes seven love interests, several of whom are shirtless men with glistening washboard abs. “My intention as an artist is: these guys are so sexy that you know this is a joke,” she said. “It’s a big fuck you to ISIS, that a group that is so strategically focused on intimidation and fear and legitimacy would have their legitimacy taken from them using the same tactics of objectification and dehumanisation.”

That objectification also gave Esmailli a chance to write sex scenes that centre women and women’s experiences during sex, which she said she finds lacking in other dating sims.

“From both my upbringing in Iranian and American cultures, I really was dissatisfied with the sexual education I received about my own body and the portrayal of women’s pleasure in general,” she said. “One of the bones I’ve always had to pick with the dating sims that I’ve personally played is that they never really seemed to represent a depiction of female pleasure.” She said that Super Patriotic Dating Simulator, which will show nudity and does get explicit, strives to show the experience of having sex from a female perspective.

Super Patriotic Dating Simulator is spinning a lot of plates. It’s a satire of ISIS, a parody of dating sim tropes, and also a game that aims to open people’s eyes about the Middle East and be a genuine exploration of women’s sexuality. Esmailli theorises that she’ll be able to get players to engage with the deeper themes after first luring them in with fluff. When asked what her favourite love interest was in the game, she had an answer ready.

“So unlike most dating sims, you can’t really just commit to one character, you have to make enough dents in this organisation that they eventually collapse,” she said. “The kingpin is the Caliph himself. You know, leader of the caliphate, the imam of imams. I wrote him with a lot of love. I tried to make him as good in bed as possible and horrible in every other way that he could possibly be.”

How ‘Anthem’ balances story and shared-world action

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The planet will be structurally similar to Destiny, World of Warcraft and Monster Hunter: World. It can be gorgeous and dynamic, with intelligent wildlife and a variety of enemies. Just don’t expect to blow up half the map, or cause a giant earthquake that is visible until the end credits.

Fort Tarsis, though, will change. That’s because no one else can venture inside your version of the city. You’ll be able to talk to NPCs, discover more of the game’s lore, and see the consequences of the story and choices you’re making. It might seem restrictive, but keeping the narrative heavy-lifting here — in a self-contained, private microcosm — limits the opportunity for unwanted spoilers that might occur while playing missions in the wild with other people.

Your hunting group will always be you and, if you choose, other player-controlled javelins.

If you don’t care for the story, you can simply enter the town, re-equip your javelin and head straight back out again. It will also be possible to maintain group chat while you friends are stocking up or experiencing story beats in their respective versions of Fort Tarsis. “There are certain game conventions that you just [have to] embrace,” Warner said.

The dual structure of Fort Tarsis and the lethal wilderness, which BioWare calls ‘Our World, My Story,’ affects the role of NPCs (non-player characters). In previous BioWare games, like Mass Effect: Andromeda and Dragon Age: Inquisition, you would meet and converse with characters who later became your party members. In Anthem, though, your hunting group will always be you and, if you choose, other player-controlled javelins. That will limit the presence that BioWare-written characters have in the field. Remote ‘Cyphers’ will chat to you throughout each mission, highlighting key objectives, enemy forces and ancient relics, but that’s about it.

The hope, of course, is that organic player moments will fill the void. The first time you perform a combo takedown, for instance, or push through a stronghold with minimal health, should be just as memorable as BioWare’s traditional storytelling.

The critical path story will have a beginning, middle and end. The larger word conflict, though, will be left unresolved. It has to be, so players can continue adventuring and shooting monsters in the wild. Warner sees the world of Anthem as a “stage” to tell fascinating stories well after release. Like Destiny and The Division, it will be continuously updated with new missions, challenges and gear to keep fans interested. “It’s a really exciting prospect,” he said.

Blending single-player storytelling with co-operative, shared-world action is tough. Warner said BioWare has learned from the mistakes of similar games. “We’re always mindful of our craft,” Warner said.” Just looking at how you engage with your community, whether it’s the type of content that you’re releasing, how you manage your community, and the community tools that you release. These are all things that we think about. And I think that there have been some valuable lessons learned for all game developers over the past several years.”

We’ll see if BioWare has pulled it off next February.

Follow all the latest news live from Gamescom here!

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