American media conglomerate Turner Broadcasting and talent agency WME/IMG plans to show 20 live Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [official site] events on US television next year as part of a league series after brokering a successful deal with Valve.
Livestreaming has lead to a few interesting changes in how people play games together. Some games let Twitch viewers trigger in-game problems and shocks for the player to deal with, we play Dark Souls by committee, and, of course, some use it for cheating and griefing – whether that’s watching an opponent’s livestream in an RTS to see their side, trying to jump into matchmaking at the same time, or seeing where they are in the wide world of Chernarus to track and murder them.
Rust [official site] can have a problem with the latter, with viewers griefing streamers by joining their server and hunting them down, but this week added anonymising options to tackle that. I’m sure we’ll see more games follow suit.
VR almost certainly needs a killer app if it’s to spread beyond monied game-fans. Facebook have probably got something up their sleeves for that there Oculus Rift, but as for the Vive, I do wonder if Garry Newman’s talk of a VR-focused follow-up to his monster-selling Garry’s Mod [official site] could be the mega-toy it needs.
“This game’s murdering sucks” is a common complaint amongst murdergame enthusiast, but what does that even mean? Virtual murder is a system of many tiny parts, covering animations, timings, kinaesthetics, damage, balance, effects, sounds, and, you know, murder – basic murdering. Sometimes a few small changes can make all the difference.
Rust [official site] developers Facepunch have taken a look at complaints of “how badly the gunplay sucks” in their open-world survival murdersim, and come up with a few changes – big and small – that might help fix that.
Female character models are now available in Rust [official site] (but only for server admins during the testing phase).
When the models do go fully live it won’t be as a “pick your avatar” option. Instead you’ll have a male or female avatar permanently assigned to your Steam ID. It’s the same deal with how race (or at least skin tone) is assigned in the game. Penis size also works that way but apparently that was serendipitous – the result of how skeletons are constructed for animation and the fact that one of these “bones” is the penis.
Only in Rust s [official site] dark wasteland would you ignore the obvious practical and safety issues of wearing a lit candle on your head. Which, I suppose, is what makes Rust’s dark wasteland so appealing. Stand up straight; the last thing you want is hot wax dripping down your face.
This exercise in masochistic torture is just one of the many new additions to Rust, as detailed in the latest Devblog. These weekly blogs give each member of the development team an opportunity to show off what they ve made this week and plan their week ahead. It s like being right in the studio for their Friday meetings, but with presumably less beer.
Running an arcade was a brief childhood dream of mine, mostly because I wanted free play on multiplayer tank battle FPS Tokyo Wars. Then I got a new PC and Quake and, well, here we are.
Rust and Garry’s Mod makers Facepunch Studios announced last year that they were working on a multiplayer virtual arcade that’d let folks lark about in player-design arcades full of player-made games. They’ve been quiet about it for a few months, so I’d assumed they’d gently smothered the prototype with a digipillow. No, a new dev blog post shows it’s still coming along nicely. I don’t see a Tokyo Wars em up, but they do have virtual physical games like pool running now.
As someone who’s entire career is about staring silently and slack-jawed at lists of patch updates, I have nothing but love for Garry Newman. He’s the kind of guy who’ll write an update that says: “I’ve been spending a good wedge of my time looking at performance, figuring out why the game sometimes runs like shit.” What prose! What truth!
Then he’ll go on to post pictures of guys playing electric guitar with their wangs hanging loose.
Things like this are central to Rust [official site], a game that has inspired its own developers to introduce guitars into the game so you can finally impress fellow players with your instrumental cover version of Smoke on the Water.
I’ve been fascinated by the rebuilding of Rust [official site], and DayZ too, and how different their developments are the second time around. The initial free versions of both open-world survive ‘em ups were scrappy things, quickly growing and tossing features onto foundations that, it turned out, weren’t quite able to support them. Starting over from scratch, both have moved more cautiously through Early Access, and I’ve enjoyed seeing how they grow at this slower pace.
Rust is about to enter a bit of a growth spurt, now stable enough to start boshing in more features.
As of last month, developers Facepunch (headed by Garry Newman of Garry s Mod fame) declared that what was previously known as Experimental Mode is now the definitive version of Rust. It now launches by default on Steam, with an option to play on the old Legacy servers instead if you re not ready for change. Unfortunately, I don t think the game s quite ready itself.