HITMAN™

It feels like only yesterday we were loitering around sunny Sapienza, waiting for the right moment to cap some bloke. The life of a professional killer is a busy one, though, and now Hitman's Agent 47 finds himself in Marrakesh, a bustling and colourful Moroccan city.

That episode rolls out today, by the way, and sees Agent 47 scheming to pop an investment banker and an army general. It promises to be a lot less chilled out than Italy: there's quite a bit of nervous activity on the streets, and you'll be navigating bustling lanes rather than sprawling seaside resorts.

Here's the video:

Broken Age

Every once in awhile a Humble Bundle comes along that's just too good to ignore. Today's launch of the Humble Narrative Bundle, featuring Her Story, Broken Age, 80 Days, and Shadowrun: Hong Kong, definitely feels like one of those times.

We begin, as always, at the pay what you want level (minimum $1 for Steam keys) for the Bafta award-winning Her Story, the cyberpunk adventure Read Only Memories, and Cibele, James' Personal Pick for 2015. Beating the average price, which is currently sitting at under $3.50, will add Broken Age, Inkle's outstanding adventure 80 Days, and the first two parts of Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, also by Inkle and also very good. Finally, for $10 or more, you'll get the Shadowrun: Hong Kong Extended Edition on top of everything else.

The bundle also includes a ten percent coupon for new Humble Monthly subscribers, and charitable donations will go to support Worldreader, a global nonprofit bringing digital books children and their families, empowering them to read, think, and grow in order to improve their lives and their world. Or you can opt to support an entirely different cause if that's your thing.

The Humble Narrative Bundle is live now and runs until June 14.

Kerbal Space Program

After more than five years on the job, Kerbal Space Program Lead Developer Felipe Falanghe is moving on. In a farewell message posted on the KSP subreddit, Falanghe praised and thanked the development team and KSP supporters, but said, I desperately need to have something new, to create more than one game in my life.

KSP has become far more than the game I imagined half a decade ago. When we first set out to take on this project, I could not have expected anything even remotely close to what it ended up becoming, he wrote. To say KSP surpassed my every expectation would be, at best, a colossal understatement.

Kerbal Space Program is now conceptually complete, Falanghe explained, but its development is not. A long-term plan for the future is in place, with enough ideas to keep us all going for years, and he emphasized that his departure won't have an impact on any of it.

I need to make one thing perfectly clear: development on KSP will continue as always. No features, upgrades, bugfixes or anything of the sort are being discontinued because of my leaving, he wrote. This I say with absolute confidence, because I have complete trust in every member of the KSP team, and I know they are fully capable of handling anything that comes their way.

Falanghe, who showed us his rig in 2014, gave no indication of what he'll get up to next, although clearly he's not looking to get out of the game-making business. So while it's sad to see him leave, the prospect of Kerbal Space Program carrying on as usual, while the guy who came up with it goes off to do something new, does have a real appeal to it. And in case there was any question as to exactly how people feel about Falanghe and his game, another redditor created a word cloud of all the comments in the thread up to that point. It's pretty great.

PC Gamer

Photo credit: Riot Games

It s hot outside. Sweat drips down my brow as I write this sentence, and I have a nice frosty jug of water nearby. When I was a kid, the most exciting thing about summer was getting time off school. Now that I m old and graduated, I looking forward to the LCS Summer Split. There ll be more games (NA has transitioned to a Best of 3 format, while EU is temporarily using the Best of 2 format with ties) some very exciting rosters (NRG for pure fan appeal and style, while Immortals, CLG, C9, and TSM all have some incredible talent lined up) and of course this is the split that leads to Worlds. Here are some of the most exciting storylines that fans should be keeping an eye on.

Liquid, Dardoch, and a new jungler?

Dardoch was the rookie of the split, the star of Liquid s roster during a spring in which it seemed everything was doomed. World champion or not, it s tough to imagine Liquid s situation turning out as well as it did at the beginning of spring. They were down three veterans, and replaced them with three rookies. Matt turned out to be an incredible Bard, and Lourlo a perfectly serviceable top, but the real success story was Dardoch. Dardoch, he of the Ghostblade Lee Sin and the NRG stomp, he of the native NA talent and occasional trash talk Dardoch was seen as one of the strongest parts of not just Liquid s roster, but North American native talent in general.

As it turns out, you can be the best jungler in the world, but if Liquid thinks you re less of a strong personality and more outright insubordinate , they ll put you on the bench. Dardoch still had a lot of room to grow and evolve, and it d be a shame to see a young career to put an early end... but on the other hand, we simply don t know the facts that led to Dardoch s suspension, beyond that they were considered seriously. This is likely just one more step in the evolution of esports, although it s difficult to see how Liquid can replace their rookie of the split without resorting to an import.

The EU top five

In some ways, Europe has been less devastated by roster changes and switch ups than their cousins across the Atlantic. A lot of the trades have been more focused and tactical. The end result is that H2K, Fnatic, Origen, G2, and Vitality could all potentially be representing Europe at Worlds and the competition between all of these teams will be fierce. (Who knows, maybe the rest of the league will be full of surprises as well?) Vitality is one of the relative newcomers to the EU LCS, after they purchased Gambit s spot, but all five of these teams have a lot of history with each other.

The return of the king

Of course, there s one story from the top five teams that I d be remiss not to mention at all the return of Yellowstar, the man who captained Fnatic through their 18-0 regular Summer season in 2015. Even though he achieved an admirable second place finish in North America with TSM, that was a vacation or so the marketing goes and now it s time to go back to work. For better or for worse, vacations and hard work are both two storylines that are going to pervade Europe after the memes that haunted G2 at the Mid-Season Invitational in Shanghai. The truth is, Yellowstar never really did have a vacation. NA never seemed his style, and he was working to the bone the entire time. Now, he returns to Europe to restore his legacy and bring Fnatic, the team that gave him so much, to the finish line as number one. Speaking of Yellowstar s former team...

Photo credit: Riot Games

TSM roars back

It s odd to categorize a second place finish as bad , but TSM had worked so hard to be at the top of North America, and their star studded roster of Svenskeren, Doublelift, Hauntzer, Bjergsen, and Yellowstar seemed so unstoppable, that it was a shock when they made a mere fifth during the regular season. Even their second place finish was odd, considering the fact that they suddenly clicked and suddenly looked like the monster roster that had been promised so early on.

Now, Yellowstar has been replaced with young former Dream Team support Biofrost, and in an even bigger move, Reginald has shipped in one of esports best coaches, Weldon Green... and Green s family. While this is for a five month trial, it shows that TSM is serious about improving every aspect of their team to make it further in the summer and their sights are likely set on Worlds.

NRG and fan appeal

Usually when people discuss teams, it s all in terms of how many wins they re expected to rack up and how many sweet combos they ll score on the Rift. Very few players have marketed themselves purely off the merits of being fan favourites. Even a team like the Immortals, who have five really, genuinely likable guys (Wildturtle, Reignover, Pobelter, Huni, and Adrian) never really seem to lean on the personality aspect of their team too much. Instead, it s the Immortals: the 12 win streak monsters, the unstoppable beasts.*

*oh, and they re all incredibly likeable guys you ll love to cheer for.

NRG s new lineup flips the script and pushes the big smiles and likable attitudes of its roster to the front: Santorin, Quas, and KiWiKiD are all massive signs that NRG are looking to balance the potential to reach number one with a likable crew. Their pastel photoshoots and bow ties just add to the appeal. We ll see whether this is a valid strategy for getting through a split soon enough although personally, I m really happy to see more teams focusing on goals beyond being #1 after all, not everyone can win.

With that being said, all of the above mentioned teams are definitely going to try. It ll be exciting to watch this split play out.

Cities: Skylines

Intrepid Cities: Skylines player inthoughtwelive has recreated downtown Seattle using 49,152 buildings, at which point the building limit put an end to his architectural dreams. I haven't been to Seattle this could be a replica Mombasa for all I know but Google Maps seems to corroborate things.

Starting with a template by Tanis_2589, inthoughtwelive "redid all the highways, and then eyeballed the rest using Google Earth as a reference". Traffic lights had to be forcibly disabled so as to avoid a traffic jam of apocalyptic proportions.

Seattle residents can attempt to spot their house in the full gallery here.

The Witcher® 3: Wild Hunt

Accompanying the release of Blood and Wine The Witcher 3's incredible final expansion is the colossal patch 1.2. CD Projekt Red has tended its game like a loving gardener since it released a year ago, and even though this is the end, that hasn't stopped it fixing longstanding issues and adding free features for good measure.

The addition of enemy level scaling is a big one. It's optional, intended for the players who have outlevelled the native fauna through exuberant side-questing, and can be toggled at any time.

There's good news for card captors too: a new book, A Miraculous Guide to Gwent, lists the missing cards in your collection and offers hints at where to find them.

Most excitingly if you're dull like me the inventory, player, crafting and repair interfaces have been further reworked. Subcategories make inventory sorting easier, while missing reagents can now be bought straight from the crafting screen (assuming you're at a vendor, of course). Even icons have been redone to make oils, cards and decorations recognisable at a glance.

Patch note of the year: "Fixes issue whereby Geralt's clothing was not properly restored after sex scenes."

The extensive notes can be found here.

EVE Online

Few corporations in EVE Online will ever have a reputation like Hard Knocks Inc. More than just a group of elite soldiers, they routinely infiltrate alliances, blow up their most prized assets, and steal everything that isn't bolted down and that's just on a Monday. Their ranks are made of brigands, thieves, scammers, and all the other refuse that slowly filters out of the more upstanding corporations of EVE. But instead of falling into chaos, Hard Knocks have become a weaponized nightmare. If EVE Online is a sandbox, these are the players who like kicking down all the sandcastles. And now they've just finished building the biggest sandcastle the galaxy of New Eden has ever seen.

Last month, EVE Online released its latest update, Citadel, introducing indomitable new structures that pilots could build to better defend their space. Coming in three different sizes, these citadels are capable of dealing extreme damage against even the most coordinated invading fleet. Since Citadel's release, Hard Knocks have made EVE Online history three times. First, they built the first Fortizar-class large citadels. Then they celebrated by blowing up someone else's. And then, two weeks ago, they made history one more time when they announced the arrival of their Keepstar-class extra large citadel the biggest structure in all of EVE Online at this time.

The Keepstar fires its devastating "doomsday" energy beam weapon.

Welcome to Fort Knocks

Meet the Keepstar citadel (above), the first of its kind anywhere in New Eden. This monstrous fortress is 800,000 meters squared and is the only one in existence in EVE that we know of. It's so large that titans, the massive supercapital ships of EVE, can safely dock within its bays. Along its outer hull lies eight slots where anti-capital ship weapons are fitted, waiting to gut anything that gets too close. The crown jewel is a devastating weapon of mass destruction, one of EVE Online's "doomsday" weapons. With just the push of a button, Fort Knocks fires a beam of energy that bounces between ships, obliterating an entire armada in one fell swoop. Fort Knocks isn't just a weapon, it's practically an entire city, and it took Hard Knocks trillions of ISK (EVE's currency) and months of planning to build.

We absolutely don't need one, this is just a penis-waving contest here.

Jerzii Devil

Jerzii Devil is a senior director within Hard Knocks, but he also has a long history of corporate theft under his belt. When I ask him about why Hard Knocks felt like they needed an extra large citadel, he laughs. "We absolutely don't need one, this is just a penis-waving contest here," he says. "We just decided to build one because, why not?"

He tells me that Hard Knocks' road to owning the first Keepstar citadel started all the way back in the spring of 2015 when EVE Online's developer, CCP Games, first announced it would be adding the new structures. Plans began in earnest in November of 2015 through to January of 2016, when more details on citadels were becoming public. With only months until they would be officially launched and available to the citizens of New Eden, the race to be the first was on.

 The road to citadels

"Early on we decided money wouldn't be the issue. We have all these older members, and they're all very rich," Jerzii says. But that didn't stop the alliance from hesitating to drop the 700 billion ISK required to purchase the blueprint needed to manufacture the Keepstar. For reference, EVE Online's largest battle, The Bloodbath of B-R5RB, cost an estimated 11 trillion ISK. For an even better reference, EVE Online's monthly subscription can be sold in-game as an item for 900 million ISK and costs $20 USD. That implies that the estimated value of the Keepstar is around $15,000.

If money wasn't a problem, however, manufacturing sure was. Being some of the biggest badasses in EVE Online had its downsides, like not welcoming pacifistic industrialists that many alliances rely on for income and wealth. For the first time in their history, Hard Knocks either needed to become the pilots that they so mercilessly slaughtered or, as Jerzii tells me, they could just find someone to do it for them. "We had to find a builder," he says. "We had a few possible people who might be able to build it for us, and eventually we got referred to this one guy. It seemed legit at first."

That's when we found out that his plan was to basically dick us over and lead us on while he was building his own citadel.

Jerzii Devil

The arrangement was simple. Hard Knocks would pay this builder to create their Keepstar citadel for them, letting him handle the logistical nightmare of putting together EVE's equivalent of a Death Star while they stuck to what they were good at. It seemed like a good deal until a defector from the builder's group turned coat and had some interesting news for Hard Knocks. "The group he belonged to ended up imploding and we gained a few of their members. That's when we found out that his plan was to basically dick us over and lead us on while he was building his own citadel. That way he could stop us from building ours while he built his first."

Unwilling to trust anyone else, Jerzii and Hard Knocks knew that if they were going to build EVE Online's first Keepstar, they were going to need to do it themselves. They bought the Keepstar blueprint and made plans to start building. In a Reddit post, Hard Knocks member Noobman detailed the extensive effort required to gather the construction materials necessary: "I had 18 builders with 180-200 [construction jobs] needing [blueprint copies] every 3-4 days. I had 4-5 private [blueprint copy] makers producing constantly for me as well."

Hard Knocks was becoming an industrial powerhouse.

People joke about EVE Online being "spreadsheets in space." It's mostly true.

But now they had a new problem: gathering the staggering amount of resources needed to even begin production. "It was about three months until Citadel launched at this point," Jerzii says. "We were never going to fill the kind of demand we had to build a citadel before they launch." He tells me that himself, Noobman, and others placed characters within New Eden's most popular trade hubs, aggressively buying up all the materials they could. Elsewhere, other Hard Knocks pilots had given up their murderous ways to focus on aiding in other efforts, like manufacturing, hauling resources, and other logistical tasks.

Hard Knocks began stockpiling resources and manufacturing on March 16th and by April 19th they had finally built the entirety of the components necessary for their Keepstar. On April 27th, when the Citadel update went live, Hard Knocks ferried hundreds of components and the blueprint to a station in high-security space, and began to assemble the Keepstar. Twenty days later, it was finished. But Hard Knocks now faced an even greater challenge. How the were they going to get the damn thing back home?

Moving day

Hard Knocks' home system is called "Rage." This star system has no strategic or economic value. Its planets are mostly barren, its moons not abundant in valuable resources. It s the kind of place that most wouldn't think twice about revisiting, and Hard Knocks has transformed it into the closest thing EVE Online has to hell a bastion full of murderous thugs armed to the teeth and ready to tear apart any pilot that might stumble in. And even worse, no one even knows how to find Rage. In most cases, Rage finds them.

In EVE Online, each star system is connected by stargates that lead to neighboring systems, forming a vast tangle of pathways players can use to travel the galaxy of New Eden. They are strategic chokepoints, and it's not uncommon for stargates to be the center of EVE's epic battles. But around 4,000 star systems aren't connected by stargates at all. Instead, unstable wormholes stitch them together with the known universe for brief periods of time before collapsing and reopening with a brand new connection. This is where Hard Knocks calls home.

Part of what makes wormhole systems so dangerous is that there's no way of knowing who might be in the system with you.

"Every day it's a new world," Jerzii Devil tells me. He describes life for a normal EVE pilot living in a region of space: "It's the same map, same enemies, same people passing through it can get pretty stagnant." In wormhole space, however, every day new connections are made and broken with any of the thousands of star systems of New Eden. And for one unlucky system, each day they wake up to find Rage on their doorstep. But right now, that unpredictable nature of Rage was a curse.

"At one point we talked about building [the Keepstar] directly in Rage," Jerzii says. "But the directors were like, no way, we're not risking putting that much money in our system." So instead they opted to build the Keepstar in the safety of high-security space where space stations couldn't be destroyed by anyone trying to stop them. Once the Keepstar was in transit, that was a different story. There was little they could do to prevent someone from blowing up one of their freighters if they were determined to do so.

On May 17th, every pilot was hands on deck for the most important operation in Hard Knocks' history.

The police force that patrols high-security space regions, called CONCORD, is reactionary at best. Like a real police force, their mission is to bring criminals to justice, not prevent the crimes from happening in the first place. In order to keep their Keepstar safe, Hard Knocks was going to have to plan a clever ruse when it came time to move it.

On May 17th, every pilot was hands on deck for the most important operation in Hard Knocks' history. Because the alliance had been somewhat public about their intention of building the Keepstar, they had no guarantees that spies hadn't been carefully watching them for weeks now. Operational security was at its tightest. "We didn't tell our members what they were doing, where they were going, or how they were getting there," Jerzii says. "We had to keep everything close to the chest. Only the directors could see the maps we were using."

The plan was broken down into multiple initiatives that required every pilot to be on their best game. In the system of Paara, where the Keepstar was built, four pilots were chosen to fly freighters. Three would act as decoys to lure off any ambushes while one carried the Keepstar. Between the four freighters, an escort of almost 100 Tornado battlecruisers would accompany each vessel. "If anything comes at [the freighter], it's pretty much over," Jerzii says. "So we decided we didn't want anything to come at it. If we saw anything get near it or anything that even just looks like it might be an issue, we'd just destroy it."

But that was only one half of the operation. Back in Rage, pilots were rolling wormholes like there was no tomorrow. Each wormhole connection in EVE Online degrades slowly over time, but can also be collapsed if enough mass passes through it. Using some hasty math, pilots can fly heavy ships through a wormhole repeatedly forcing it to collapse and automatically generating a new connection to a different part of New Eden. It's a brute force tactic, but if done enough times Hard Knocks stood a good chance at eventually getting a decent connection close to Paara. Meanwhile, another group of pilots were in covert-ops stealth frigates, using scanning probes to map networks of wormhole connections that might lead to a favorable route that way.

Eventually, a winding connection of wormholes was found that would lead the fleet from Paara, in high-sec, to Rage, in wormhole space. When they managed to clear high-security space without incident and enter into infinitely more dangerous wormhole space, Hard Knocks had their first unpleasant encounter.

The Dominix battleship is the ship of choice for "rolling wormholes" due to its impressive bulk.

The final stretch

Wrong Hole, an alliance of tough-as-nails wormhole dwellers like Hard Knocks were connected to the wormhole system they were passing through. If even one of their pilots caught wind of what Hard Knocks might be up to, the entire operation would end in disaster. Even if Wrong Hole didn't manage to destroy the freighter outright, Hard Knocks would never be able to safely set the citadel up in their system without worrying that half of the wormhole alliances were secretly waiting to get their revenge.

"We needed to get that connection gone," Jerzii says. "We had a small group of battleships start rolling the hole while a PVP fleet went to assist them in case they tried anything. We told [Wrong Hole] straight up, we have a huge fleet, just let us roll the hole, and nothing bad will happen. We didn't tell them what was going on or why, we just told them not to mess with us."

In an instant, he was stranded millions of light years from the rest of his fleet in a star system full of embarrassed and angry pilots.

Wrong Hole took the threat seriously and stood down, but as one Hard Knocks pilot went to roll the hole one last time, it collapsed behind him. In an instant, he was stranded millions of light years from the rest of his fleet in a star system full of embarrassed and angry pilots who were just forced to kowtow to a greater threat. He didn't last long.

Once safely inside of Rage, the Keepstar was "anchored," a process that took 24 hours and ended with a 15 minute vulnerability window where the citadel could easily be destroyed by a determined force. While much of the fleet took a break to recharge before the 15 minute timer, a second fleet locked down the hole to make sure no one could get in.

The move operation from Paara to Rage took 12 hours of planning and execution. The next day, the Keepstar came online without issue. Hard Knocks sent a tweet to a CCP developer, who soon after confirmed they were the first to build a Keepstar in EVE Online a two month process requiring thousands of man hours, a trillion ISK, and one very nerve wracking escort mission.

When I ask Jerzii how stressful the whole situation was, he shrugs. "It went too smoothly," he complains. "I was kind of hoping for some hiccup or someone to try something."

Now that Fort Knocks is fully operational, Rage went from being a system most would avoid to one that you'd have to be insane to ever assault. I ask Jerzii why Hard Knocks would ever spend months of their time and a trillion ISK building EVE Online's most defensible structure in a system no one would ever want to visit in the first place. He laughs at me and explains it was never done to make their home more defensible. "Nobody was invading us anyway," he says. "Maybe this will make them try harder. People say we've painted a huge target on our backs, and that's exactly what we want."

HITMAN™

Until the travel industry wises up and makes Agent 47 the official mascot for international holidays/naughty murdering, Square Enix and IO's own trailers will have to do. Once again, they've created a tourist destination that looks absolutely lovely, and ripe for exploration, if you can live with the small caveat that a conspicuous bald man might murder you and steal your clothes at some point during your stay.

The latest trailer for Hitman's Marrakesh-set episode ditches Agent 47 to focus squarely on that environment, implementing a fancy 360-degree camera that we can swivel about to admire it in all its beauty.

Hitman: Episode 3 is out tomorrow you can read all about it here.

Stellaris

This week on the Mod Roundup, we've got a mod that lets you play as the adorable and determined Kerbal race from Kerbal Space Program in Stellaris. There's also a mod that lets you camp anywhere you like in Fallout 4, then turn your campsite into a full working settlement. Finally, a mod for Skyrim changes the prison system to work like it did in Oblivion, makes your pet dog more like Fallout 4's Dogmeat (now it, too, can fetch items), and makes a host of other interesting changes.

Here are the most promising mods we've seen this week.

Kerbal Space Program, for Stellaris

Steam Workshop link

If you're a fan of space games, you probably enjoy both Kerbal Space Program and Stellaris. Now you can smoosh them together with this mod by Knucky333, which imports the Kerbol solar system into the space strategy game. The planet Kerbin and its Mun, and of course its adorably green and brainy residents, are now yours to play with.

Conquest, for Fallout 4

Nexus Mods link

Don't settle for Fallout 4's standard settlements: make your own wherever you want. This mod by Chesko (creator of Skyrim's Frostfall mod) lets you plunk a campsite down wherever you want, and if you enjoy the location, you can turn it into a full-blown settlement. You can build ten new settlements in all, and if you change your mind about some or all of them, you also have to option to dismantle them.

Skydie Reborn, for Skyrim

Nexus Mods link

This Skyrim mod, by Sagittarius22, makes a number of changes. Perhaps most welcome is that your pet dog is now more useful, able to fetch items like Fallout 4's Dogmeat. That's just the beginning though, as the mod also changes Skyrim's prison system to ape Oblivion's (a long prison stay will erode some of your stats), requires you to own crafting tools if you want to create weapons or potions, lets you loot paralyzed NPCs, introduces blood poisoning if you drink too many potions, and tons of other changes you can read about here.

Looking for more mods? Check out our list of the best mods for Kerbal Space Program and the best mods for Skyrim.

DOOM

We recently came up with seven ways that Doom could be more metal. I present you now with an eighth: Doom for Doom, or as the cool kids like to call it, D4D, a mod that brings the weapons of n -Doom into the 1993 original.

It's still very much a work in progress only the pistol and shotgun alt-fires have been implemented at this point but even at this early stage it looks pretty fantastic. Co-creator DBThanatos said on the ZDoom forums that he tried to respect the firing times of Doom 4, but also balance them to Doom, which makes the weapons feel even faster than the normally are.

Beyond the weapons, he said he wants to upgrade the gore not BD [Brutal Doom] levels of gore, but enough to satisfy my needs and may opt for something like dual shotguns in lieu of alt-fires. If there's enough call for it (and right now there seems to be), he may also release a weapons only version that doesn't make any other changes.

A second, slightly newer trailer, demonstrates the D4D pistol and machine gun in greater detail. The mod isn't out yet, but will be soon...ish.

Thanks, VG247.

...

Search news
Archive
2024
May   Apr   Mar   Feb   Jan  
Archives By Year
2024   2023   2022   2021   2020  
2019   2018   2017   2016   2015  
2014   2013   2012   2011   2010  
2009   2008   2007   2006   2005  
2004   2003   2002