Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I just saw over at VG247 that the Borderlands 2 livestream over at Gamescom has just started. Now. Let’s kick back and watch it together. I’ll go stick the kettle on. Right now they are talking about guns. GUNS!

Update: It’s now over, read on to find a summary of what you missed. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier in the week we revealed that NCSoft will be publishing Carbine’s space MMO, Wildstar, and Alec delivered his impressions on that. Now eight minutes of footage has appeared (below), and holy crap there is a lot in that eight minutes: the player-character starting out getting revived by an NPC, exploring a valley and dodging avalanches, setting up and using bits of equipment, fighting some kind of space yeti, and appearance and destruction of some awesome spacecraft thing. The visual references are clear, and it’s certainly an MMO in the classic sense, but with some surprises. It does look like it might be entertaining.
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Salem – the forthcoming free-to-play crafting MMO from Paradox – has teased us with its first teaser, which you can see below. It’s apparently a taste that’s just getting the essence of the game across, and in that regard looks pretty interesting, especially when you consider the feature list: open PvP combat with perma-death, crafting and building as core mechanics, as well as being free. Now we can add “Being Cute” and “Being Spooky” to that list. I’ve also reposted the video of the developers talking about their idea for the game, so you can refresh your thoughts on it, because I think Salem could be genuinely interesting.
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Well, it IS also exciting if you like the idea of the high-speed chase-me chase-me game of cops and boy-racers spread across the world and shared among millions of players (for free). Need For Speed World recently celebrate a year of whizzing cars wot go fast, and the Gamescom trailer (below) shows off the enfreshened customisation options and the “birthday” Porsche, which I assume everyone received for being around for year. But who cares when all the cars are already so shiny and so soundtracked with electric pop music?

John was a bit unimpressed when he reviewed the game back in the depths of 2010, but perhaps it has changed in the intervening months. Anyone still playing it? Report!
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A few weeks back I had a chance to play Paradox’s fantasy tower defence game (set in the Majesty world, for some reason) which is called Defenders Of Ardania. It was slick and solid! But also hard. The baddies totally thrashed me. I mean I was playing one of the later levels, but anyway. I suspect that it might be fairly popular when it arrives on the 27th of next month, due to the prettiness, and also the general commercial popularity of tower defence games.

Gamescom trailer below!
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Bristol Coventry based indie dev Draknek has got a new game in the pipeline, which he’s pitching as a “Narrative-driven abstract puzzle game”. It’s simple, but efficient and minimalistic use of words, pixels and sounds result in a fairly atmospheric little game. It’s still a work in progress, obviously, but is currently playable here. As part of this time-limited beta testing, why not give him some feedback over twitter too? You’ve got until about 1am UK time tonight to try it.

There’s a trailer, but it contains solutions to all the early puzzles, so I’d suggest just playing it yourself.

According to the official twitter account for Counter Strike: Global Offensive, they’re going to be demoing their new game at PAX next week, and at Eurogamer Expo next month. Not only that, but if you turn up to give it a try, you’ll get given a key for the beta. Sounds like a good chance for us to have an RPS vs Readers showdown to me, although if/when I get killed, I’m going to blame it on lag.

Any of you lot going to PAX and/or Eurogamer Expo?

This story is a little surprising. BF3 Blog have done the legwork on this: first they spotted that Battlefield 3 on the PS3 and 360 is going to have an in-game server browser for multiplayer game-finding. Good for them. However, where this story turns sour is the news that the PC version will not have any in-game server browser, and to find a multiplayer game you have to exit the game or Alt-Tab out of it, and use the “Battlelog” application to launch games. Senior Gameplay Designer Alan Kertz has been assuring everyone that the process is relatively smooth, but why? And, if it has to be in another app, why isn’t there a server browser in Origin’s overlay? Why is there another system to complicate things? Ah, of course, because Battelog wants to be the free equivalent of Activision’s Elite thingum, with all that social and achievement stuff that you play games for.

[Edit - oops, we got that last bit slightly wrong. Those elements of Elite will, in fact, also be free, as will most of its core features. The exact nature of Elite's paid extra bits has yet to be announced, but from the relatively scant information we have so far would appear to be bonus content-based rather than related to social kinda stuff like this.]

Tune in next week for: mouse controls only on the PS3?!

Cheers R-F for flagging this one up in the forums.