RANDOM VIDEO GAME NEWS

[Agiel]

Mirage 2000C module for DCS: World coming in December 2015

 

 

[Agiel]

http://www.pcgamer.com/valve-writer-says-half-life-3-will-not-be-a-vr-game/

 

Frankly don't have much of an opinion on VR gaming, but I guess Half-Life 3 can't be a VR game if it never comes out at all.

[HoonDing]

 

mmaybe I'll play unarmed

[Keyrock]

Quite possibly the most expansive and, dare I say, important DLC ever made:

 

 

All joking aside, this stuff better be in the base game of American Truck Simulator when that comes out.  I need a bobblehead in my Peterbilt 597.  Also, I hope they include the ability to flip people off when the honk their horn at you for the authentic American trucking experience.

Edited September 25, 2015 by Keyrock

[Rosbjerg]

I'll never not find those games extremely weird, which is weird 'cause you'd think we as species should rather play that than Murder Simulator 5. Alas.. 

 

You're weird Keyrock. Good weird.

[Hurlshort]

Keyrock's fascinating descriptions convinced me to buy the game.  But then I tried backing up to a loading dock, and I crushed my truck and my spirit.

[Malcador]

https://community.elitedangerous.com/node/300

 

Elite Dangerous Horizons stuff

[ShadySands]

Keyrock's fascinating descriptions convinced me to buy the game.  But then I tried backing up to a loading dock, and I crushed my truck and my spirit.

 

If you want soul crushing big rig action then I suggest you play Big Rig

 

I told my wife that I should have bought Euro Truck Simulator 2 and practiced the drive from Venice to Florence. Soo many tunnels, so few people staying in their lanes.

[Lexx]

I just wish that damn Train Simulator would get as much love as Truck Simulator. They are spitting out bad DLC for 30€ and they never fix bugs. Every year they call the game "Train Simulator Current Year +1" and change the main menu a bit and that's it. Oh yeah, and since the last year change, the game now is a tad more blurry... Annoys the hell out of me.

 

A Train Simulator could be so great- a combination of what is currently there + some Transport Tycoon. Setup rail lines, setup timetables for many trains, transport goods from A to B and make money with it, etc. Why they don't do such a thing is beyond me.

[marelooke]

 

 

 

I don't know who Wildstar was made for, to be honest. it's too similar to WoW in places, where it matters the least, and where it kind of distances itself from WoW it becomes completely unbearable 

 

I feel like it's made for people who think raiding in WoW is too casual now. Problem is, all those people forgot all the other negatives that came with the hardcore raiding there was. About 1% of players saw the original Naxxramas raid in vanilla WoW. These are not the people you build a succesful MMO on, despite those people clearly and falsely taking credit for WoW's success.

 

 

There being things that are always just out of reach is imho a good thing, it certainly is what got me into raiding, I think a big part of the decline of WoW is that it is much too easy to see everything. For this I blame the LFG-system and the raid finder. The first destroyed the sense of community on realms, the second makes it so that everybody can see all the content without any effort. (Blizzard's attempt to fix this with Cataclysm backfired massively due to the LFG system, there not being any notworthy repercussions for abandoning your team as tank/healer if things don't go super-smoothly literally killed it)

 

Sure you can do the "normal" and "heroic" version of the exact same content but it's the still same content dropping the same gear (with another colour palette) meaning it gets boring real fast since most people do the raids on "raid finder" to get the baseline gear, then do the same stuff on "normal" with their guild and after that the *same* raid again on heroic. If that sounds boring then that is because it *is* boring. I miss when there was a natural progression both in raids as well as in the heroic dungeons (eg. Karazahn -> Gruul's/Magtheridon -> SSC -> whatever the Kael'thas raid was called -> CoT: Mount Hyjal -> Black Temple -> Sunwell Plateau) and if a guild started up later during the expansion they'd still have to go through raids in that order, more or less (our guild started "late" in TBC and we made it to just before that nasty boss in the Sunwell that destroyed entire guilds: M'uru), though generally one could skip the last (and hardest) boss of a raid for progression (eg. since we started up late we tiptoed around Lady Vash for a while...).

By the time I quit WoW when a new raid was released you got handed gear at the level of the last raid for basically free (either through heroic 5mans or through badges earned in said 5mans, later they added raid finder to that list), so there is no need anymore to visit any older raid, and nobody does either, only the current content counts.

 

Moreover since it's less necessary to actually *have* a guild people are a lot less willing to put in the effort necessary to be part of a decent guild (eg. show up on time, or at all), which lead to the top 10 raiding guilds on my realm disappearing in short order (some of them had actually been around to raid Naxxramas in vanilla).

 

That 1% of the players still inspired the rest (or I might be special), certainly the situation in vanilla was far from ideal, but the current situation is entirely the other extreme.

 

Sure we all have less time nowadays (I certainly couldn't put in the time I used to even if I wanted to), but handing everything out for free isn't exactly helping the feeling of accomplishment. I still fondly remember beating Sartharion 25 with 3 drakes (Sarth3d 25man) or even the first time we managed to beat Moroes (2nd boss in Karazahn) before I joined a "true" raiding guild. These kinds of moments are what raiders raid for (Moroes certainly gave met the raiding itch) and really I don't even remember any bosses that came after Wrath of the Lich King, which is saying something I guess...

 

But maybe I'm just suffering from this affliction known to EVE players as "bittervet syndrome" and everything is actually great with how things are in WoW nowadays (though I'd argue that the declining subs are a sign that at least *something* is wrong).

 

PS: the fact that Blizzard still doesn't have a decent grasp on character progression doesn't help any, eg. a paladin in vanilla is so different from a paladin in, say, Cataclysm it's not even funny. The same goes for pretty much every class, Paladins are just the most extreme example. These constant "total rethinks" of classes surely don't help player retention.

 

 

Oh, I do agree with most of what you said (though LFR loot is no longer just a color swap, and it's always below the last tiers heroic so it's not part of the gearing process). It's just that raiding is not as big a part of WoW as people think it is. I was reading about this very subject earlier and I found the actual number of people who did Naxrammas and realized I made a giant overstatement. Ion Hazzikostas didn't say it was 1% of the players, he said it was about 3000 players total made it through Naxx. Back when Naxrammas came out, there were about 7 million players. Think about that - out of 7 million people, 3000 people made it through the raid content. That's less than 0.05%. The reason Blizzard keeps LFR because now at least something like 30% of players (still a minority) sees the raid content so they're actually able to justify making new raid content.

 

The weird thing is that such a majority of MMO players never set foot in raids. It's becoming readily apparent that the reason Warlords of Draenor lost so many subscribers despite the raid content being almost universally praised is because it's got nothing else that's good. Normal (to a point), Heroic and Mythic raids are challenging. But everything else (including LFR) has zero difficulty. Leveling is piss easy - I can solo 5-player designed group quests when I'm level appropriate for them. Professions are pointless and easy and filled with cooldowns where you can't actually craft. Last week, I just did /follow someone in LFR and went AFK to see if that would work, and it did. Hell even heroic dungeons are a faceroll, and I did the relevant rep grinds for WoD in three weeks. And I'm not trying to make myself look awesome here, I'm a TERRIBLE WoW player. I still use the keyboard to turn.

 

Mists of Pandaria did a lot to stem the subscriber loss because it had cool mounts that you could get through rep grinds and professions that took a lot of time and gold and because there was quest and story content in the end-game, and there were scenarios to do, and you had reasons to do dungeons. Even the LFR was a little better in MoP, it was still possible to wipe on it occassionally. But the vocal minority has been saying for so long that the only interesting thing in the game is hardcore raiding, and Blizzard believed them. Now the only thing that is any good is the raiding, and people are leaving the game in droves. I have plenty to do because I started over on a new server, but almost everyone else I know that still plays is out of non-raid content so they don't do anything but log on for raids. I keep seeing the WoW fanboy boards like MMO Champion whining about casuals ruining the game, but in truth the reason it lost 4.5 million subscribers since the launch of WoD is because Blizzard focused on them and their obsession with raiding.

 

EDIT: I got confused on the 1% figure because that was mentioned for another raid, namely Sunwell the final raid of Burning Crusade. It wasn't until Wrath that slightly more than a completely negligable amount of WoW players actually started raiding.

 

EDIT EDIT: I'm sorry about my weird sentence structure in the last few posts, I have the flu and my head's not where it's supposed to be... I recognize some of my sentences are awkward.

 

 

I never felt as if raiding was that hard (though some bosses certainly were, but it's the challenge that makes it fun, as long as people don't lose their temper about wiping), the hard part about raiding is committing to showing up and a good guild leader could even make that seriously flexible (we had 3 raids/week of which you were guaranteed a spot in two, moreover there were no "backups", you either were a raiding member or you were not, since most people gladly raided the full 3 nights members having a real life never interfered with our ability to raid).

 

I played the start of MoP and I don't remember operations, I remember boring questing, lots of extremely tedious daily grinding (with the removal of the cap on dailies) and rather bland raids to top it all off. MoP made me quit WoW for good as I cannot remember a single good thing about the expansion so my desire to go back based on nostalgia has been well and truly buried by that expansion. The extreme streamlining of the "old" content also killed a lot of the fun in questing for me (I was very nearly "Loremaster" before Cataclysm), finding all those mostly forgotten lore quests related to raid unlocks was fun in and of itself and they did away with all that in Cata (though I'm sure the new player experience is much better, but feels they kicked out the good with the bad to me).

 

I think you're mixing up a few expansion since I don't remember Warlords of Draenor, which I assume means it came after Mists.

 

And obviously, a MMO is the sum of its parts, focus on one area to the exclusion of the rest is idiotic. Then again, they homogenized the classes because of PvP, made raids easy so they wouldn't have to provide actual content to the non-raiders at the same time angering the raiders. Basically, Blizzard made a huge mess and each time they try to "fix" it they seem to be making it worse.

 

For the content where you notice the lack of tanks and healers, tanking and healing is typically easier than dps:ing.

 

But it comes with the perception of responsibility which most don't care for I assume.

 

Tanks are a lot more gear dependant, moreover players have zero respect anymore for the job (eg. making sure not to overaggro is a skill lost to time, for non-raids at least) combine those two and the amount of abuse you get if not massively well geared can be pretty impressive. Though that lack of respect goes in all directions (bad tanks dying and bitching at the healers, bad dps dying due to overaggro, etc), how I missed the days before LFG...

 

That said tanking for a good group is extremely rewarding and fun, though DPS-ing is a skill in and of itself, how I miss when being a good mage revolved all around minimizing movement, in the good old days before being able to cast on the move and spam living bomb, /sigh)

Edited September 26, 2015 by marelooke

[Nonek]

Rosbjerg, on 25 Sept 2015 - 7:09 PM, said:

I'll never not find those games extremely weird, which is weird 'cause you'd think we as species should rather play that than Murder Simulator 5. Alas.. 

 

You're weird Keyrock. Good weird.

 

Well Peter Sutcliffe proved that one can play both!

 

Good Lord I must be in a dark mood, that's positively disturbing.

Edited September 26, 2015 by Nonek

[Spider]

 

 

 

Tanks are a lot more gear dependant, moreover players have zero respect anymore for the job (eg. making sure not to overaggro is a skill lost to time, for non-raids at least) combine those two and the amount of abuse you get if not massively well geared can be pretty impressive. Though that lack of respect goes in all directions (bad tanks dying and bitching at the healers, bad dps dying due to overaggro, etc), how I missed the days before LFG...

 

That said tanking for a good group is extremely rewarding and fun, though DPS-ing is a skill in and of itself, how I miss when being a good mage revolved all around minimizing movement, in the good old days before being able to cast on the move and spam living bomb, /sigh)

 

 

Yeah it shows you haven\t played in a while. Tanks are, if anything, the least gear dependant class. And holding aggro is a complete non-issue in Wow these days to the degree that if a tank is attacking a mob at all, it's impossible to take aggro off it. Unless you're also a tank. From all I've seen it was the same in MoP (which is where I started playing WoW), at least the aggro part.

[majestic]

Yeah, come Mists of Pandaria Blizzard decided that tanks were not having fun actively trying to hold aggro and moved towards giving tanks a massive bonus to threat generation. First along the lines of +300% and then later much, much more to the point of it being a complete non-factor. The new tanking was supposed to be active damage mitigation with having "lots of buttons to press, because pressing LOTS of buttons is fun!"

 

That approach led to increasingly ridiculous things like Paladin tanks stacking haste.

 

In reality of course simple "fun while tanking" was far from the only motivation for Blizzard, they were desperately trying to fix the damage caused by Cataclysm and failed so utterly that it kind of became hilarious. While I stopped truly actively playing WoW with the Dragonsoul patch of Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria just made sure that I had no regrets leaving.

 

Although I have kind of been tempted to see how the game is now that ghostcrawler can no longer mess it up.

Edited September 27, 2015 by majestic

[Blarghagh]

To be fair, actively holding aggro was less about making an active contribution and more about mitigating other player's idiocy.

[marelooke]

To be fair, actively holding aggro was less about making an active contribution and more about mitigating other player's idiocy.

 

Sure, but in TBC days it was perfectly acceptable to let said idiots die. It was also perfectly acceptable to point and laugh after warning them a few times or just plain boot them from the group if they kept up their asocial and idiotic behaviour since in those days the tank was pretty much always the party leader... Moreover angering tanks in PUGs was a very bad move if one wanted to continue to be able to find PUG groups on that realm...thankfully idiocy among players was fairly limited until LFG was rolled out so I never actually had to blacklist players (and with cross realm LFG blacklisting was pretty pointless anyway).

 

The fun was in setting up the pull (eg. marking the targets, making sure not to pick up patrolling mobs, making sure you have aggro on everything etc), compensating for AOE, keeping the flow of the dungeon going (which wasn't exactly evident as a pally in TBC... insert "table please!" or "OOM!" here) and trying to keep people from overaggroing without breaking the CC yourself... aside form a single alt run in Karazahn I didn't really tank any raids during TBC though. In WotLK tanking had gone from something hard to something trivially easy though. Gaining and keeping aggro was easy, AoE tanking was also trivial and pallies didn't need intelligence anymore and going OOM was also pretty much impossible on top of that a few stats that made gearing a tank hard were removed (anybody remember "crushing blows" and "crit immunity"?)

 

On that note, being a DPS was also harder since gonig bonkers with AOE was generally not appreciated due to CC. It was also imperative to keep your CC target sheeped/banished until the tank called for said target to be killed. CC just made everything harder for everybody, really. It's a shame it became pretty much irrelevant with WotLK (I think Ulduar and Sartharion required some CC when we first we ran them, but 5mans certainly didn't need any).

 

(disclaimer: I levelled a paladin tank in TBC pretty much by living inside instances with PUGs, I was pretty bitter about what they did to the Sunken Temple, I spent so much time in there...)

Edited September 27, 2015 by marelooke

[trulez]

As a tank in WOTLK when ever I wanted to stroke my ego, and just posing around in Dalaran wasn't enough, I would fire up LFG with full raid gear and just watch jaws drop when I mowed down the dungeons. I mean you could literally run through them, DK threat generation was so OP back then, best of times. :D

[Malcador]

Saw this in a GOG mail, looks like it could be interesting or fun. Not much press, at least none I've seen

 

[Keyrock]

^ If nothing else, the soundtrack is great.  It's worth keeping an eye on.

[Shadow_Arms]

well, Wing commander completed 25 years saturday

 

http://www.wcnews.com/news/2015/09/26

[Blarghagh]

As a tank in WOTLK when ever I wanted to stroke my ego, and just posing around in Dalaran wasn't enough, I would fire up LFG with full raid gear and just watch jaws drop when I mowed down the dungeons. I mean you could literally run through them, DK threat generation was so OP back then, best of times. :D

 

Oh man, DKs were overpowered and overpopulous back in Wrath. I'm dreading the same happening to Demon Hunters for a while. I want to roll one, but I'm going to wait until a fairly long time after launch because I have no interest to stand around a raid boss not being able to tell which demon hunter is me.

[Malcador]

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2015/09/overwatch-will-have-custom-games-dedicated-servers-and-a-spectator-mode-but-no-private-servers/

 

In an interview with Jeff Kaplan and Geoff Goodman, Overwatch’s principal game designer, the pair confirmed that while Overwatch would remain entirely within the Battle.net ecosystem — no LAN play, in other words — PC fans would not have to endure the misery of player-hosted lobbies, as was the case in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, although players would not be able to hire their own private servers (like you can with Team Fortress 2 or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive).

 

“Overwatch will run completely on Blizzard servers. With that said, and when we do matchmaking it will be in a Blizzard pool, we are looking at regions and IPs and doing the best to minimise any sort of ping issues,” Kaplan explained.

[Malcador]

https://hitman.com/en-us/news/hitman-release-details

 

Today we’re thrilled to share long-awaited details on our release plan for HITMAN. As most of you hopefully know by now, HITMAN will be a live game experience that delivers content over time, supported by live events.

 

HITMAN RELEASE DETAILS

On March 11th 2016, we will release the initial launch content, which contains three locations - Paris, Sapienza and Marrakesh - featuring six campaign missions. For Contracts mode, you’ve got a combined pool of around 800 targets to craft your devious Contracts from, which means we’re expecting fantastic things.

 

Following March, we will release one new sandbox location per month in April, May and June. Each location will come with additional missions, signature kills and more Contracts targets – and of course new disguises, weapons and ways of taking out your target. April takes you to Thailand, May will see you visiting the United States of America and June sends you across the globe to Japan.

 

In addition, the live content will start in March. This consists of our live, time-limited targets, weekly IOI developed Contracts and promoted content built by the very best of you out there. Because, let’s face it, millions of you played and created fantastic Contracts for Absolution and we’re betting you’ll do even better this time around with so many targets and such complex locations.

 

THE INTRO PACK

Since we announced HITMAN at E3, we’ve had a lot of feedback on what we’ve revealed about the release model. Full access to the world of assassination will cost you USD $59.99 (or regional equivalent). For that price, you’ll get everything - all the content we’re planning on releasing, access to all live events and a secured spot in the HITMAN Beta, which will be available on PlayStation 4 and PC only. No additional costs at any time.

 

Today, with the INTRO PACK, we’re also giving you an additional option to jump onboard with just the March content – at a lower price point, of course. The “HITMAN Intro Pack” will also be available on March 11 2016, and will be priced at $34.99 (or regional equivalent). It includes all of the launch content, plus all Live Events and Contracts for the locations released in March 2016. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

Then, if you want to access the rest of HITMAN, you have the option to upgrade your purchase to include all the remaining content (and at the same time get access to all subsequent live events and Contracts across all locations). This will cost you an additional $29.99 (or regional equivalent). The upgrade pack will be available for purchase once the game has launched in March.

 

That’s it! Head on over to the forums or get in touch via Twitter (@hitman) and let us know what you think.

[mkreku]

A fan-made "expansion" for Fallout: New Vegas that looks quite good:

 

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-09-30-new-fallout-new-vegas-mod-looks-as-slick-as-an-official-expansion

 

Link to actual mod (whenever it's released): http://baronvonchateau.tumblr.com/

[majestic]

Gaining and keeping aggro was easy, AoE tanking was also trivial and pallies didn't need intelligence anymore and going OOM was also pretty much impossible on top of that a few stats that made gearing a tank hard were removed (anybody remember "crushing blows" and "crit immunity"?)

 

 

It was Cataclysm that removed both the defense and block stat on items (along with a few other things), not Wrath of the Lich King. Tanks still had to be crit immune and balance their avoidance in Wrath. Endless healer mana-pools and overpowered paladin healers in ridiculous 25 man raid encounters just made it so that tanks geared for the minimum defense necessary and put everything else into their health.

Edited September 30, 2015 by majestic

[Malcador]

https://www.deusex.com/agegate?goto=/news/aypo-cancelled

 

 

Website appears to be borked.