Mojang may be known for the romping great success of Minecraft but it's determined to not be defined by the dig 'em up. The developer's winding up to reveal Scrolls to the world at large, announcing yesterday that the virtual collectible card game will enter paid "open beta" next Monday, June 3.
As someone reading this on the Internet, you know that people on the Internet are often awful. Doubly so if they're playing a video game. To help weed out horrors, Valve is playing with a community self-policing scheme for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. It sounds similar to the Tribunal in Riot's League of Legends, presenting players with "cases" of others who've been reported and asking them to make judgements.
Excitement at the announcement of Shelter in April turned into delight when I started watching the first gameplay trailer this morning, then into horror when it showed the uncaring and terrifying nature of nature. Pid developer Might and Delight's story of a mother badger protecting her kits is looking pretty lovely all right, and bound to break my heart.
14.5 million players with 67.1 million characters have killed 3.3 trillion monsters in Diablo 3, Blizzard has revealed in a whopping great infographic released as part of the action-RPG's first birthday festivities. Yet only 33% of characters have even beaten Normal difficulty, which is arguably the point where it starts to get interesting, and a measly 6% cleared Inferno. If you like numbers, big numbers, and lots of them, it's a fascinating look.
Team Fortress 2 has gotten a new, community-created update. The "Robotic Boogaloo" is the first update entirely made by the community, and it features a plethora of new hats for your metal minions.
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is a jolly fascinating place but too expensive to visit and far too terrifying to tour virtually in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. Thankfully, some kindly modders are treating us to a slightly friendlier whistlestop tour of Pripyat with Dniepr, a Left 4 Dead 2 custom campaign released today after three years of development.
With six days left on its crowdfunding campaign, retro "reset" Jagged Alliance: Flashback has only raised 65% of its goal. Oh, how tense! To tempt, tease and excite potential backers, developer Full Control has released a downloadable "diorama" with a rotatable in-engine peek at the art style it's bringing to the turn-based tactics 'em up.
League of Legends traffics a lot of players on a daily basis--12 million at last count. That player count means it's bound to have some bad behavior, but it also gives developer Riot Games plenty of room for testing. It began a series of player behavior initiatives last year, and has detailed the results.
Valve started the prize pool for its big Dota 2 tournament The International 3 with a very respectable $1.6 million. But to make teams Dote like they've never Doted before, Valve's kicking in 25% of sales from its $10 collector's chart-ish-sort-of-thing The Compendium. It's selling like nobody's business so the pool has now passed a cool $2 million, and Valve has added more "stretch goal" bonuses for Compendium owners.
Telltale's The Walking Dead received a lot of critical praise for its narrative and gut-wrenching choices, but some fans lamented that multiple playthroughs exposed how little impact they made on the story. Its next comic-turned-game A Wolf Among Us aims to solve that concern by having entire chunks of game that are only available if you make a particular choice.
Happy birthday, Diablo III! You're one year old today. My, how you've grown! You do have the odd little accident now and then, and you're still not quite ready for fighting, but gosh, haven't you come a long way. And now, very kindly, you're offering bonus XP and Magic Find to everyone who celebrates with you, and $20 off for newcomers. You are a good little action-RPG, aren't you?
Having played Among the Sleep, I can confidently say I'll never choose to be a baby. It is awful. Scary things happen and I don't know why and I can't even reach door handles. I will play one in a video game, though. As the end of its crowdfunding campaign nears, developer Krillbite has released a demo from an early alpha build of the first-person scarer to lure in more backers.
Given that Kent Hudson has designed on games including Thief: Deadly Shadows, BioShock 2, and Deus Ex: Invisible War, it's perhaps little surprise that his first own game is a first-person, stealth-ish, story-exploring sort of thing. However, being indie means that he's free to make The Novelist about a ghost tinkering with the life of a writer who's struggling with his work and family, which sounds delightful.
The core gang behind the much-beloved The Incredible Machine have reunited to make a new Rube Goldberg machine 'em up, named Contraption Maker. Like TIM, you'll put trampolines, hamster-powered motors, see-saws, alligators, and other odds and ends together unlikely devices to solve puzzles in unexpected and delightfully complicated ways.
"Now that I have succumbed to Mojang and they have my money (I am a believer now finally) I want ..."
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