There's no gameplay in this new teaser for Bethesda's upcoming massively multiplayer online role-playing game, but at least it sounds cool.
The Elder Scrolls Online will be out next year for PC and Mac. Hopefully it's not as generic as leaked details make it seem.
I was going to headline this article "You've Seen the Avengers, Now Play With Their Balls", but decided to be the better man, at least for a few seconds. Funny, I would have thought the Hulk's would be bigger.
Coming soon to Pinball FX 2 on the Xbox 360 and Zen Pinball 2 for the PlayStation 3 and Vita, the official Avengers movie table joins the World War Hulk table as part of the upcoming four-table Avengers Chronicles set.
Capturing the spirit of the movie (which I don't get to see until Saturday, so no spoilers please), the table assembles Earth's mightiest on the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, where they'll do battle with the forces of pinball that threaten the planet.
The coolest part of this new table would have to be the Avengers balls. There's one for each hero: Hulk, Iron Man, Hawkeye, Captain America, Thor and even Black Window, who doesn't even... okay, sorry.
A small percentage of League of Legends players have been using an exploit that lets them cast powerful spells one right after another. The exploit let players add more points to the game's Mastery system that would normally be allowed. But LoL developer Riot Games says such tactics are "bull****" and made moves to fix the loophole that made the cheat possible as soon as they heard about it.
Games with ultra-competitive communities are always going to be filled with people who try to find an edge over their opponents. That's okay. What isn't cool is when that edge crosses the line and breaks the balance. In some games, hacks, cheats and exploits go unnoticed and unpatched. Not with League of Legends, though.
In a post on the League of Legends forum, community manager Andrew Beeglesaid the following about the exploit:
That's bull****, and we're not going to allow it. That's bull****, and we're not going to allow it.
We take this seriously. Nothing is more important to us than the sanctity of our game, competitive or otherwise. As soon as we discovered the issue, we immediately dropped everything to find both immediate and permanent fixes. I'm happy to report that the immediate fix has been implemented, and we'll be restarting all regions this evening to add some redundancy which will prevent similar exploits in the future. As we continue to investigate and further analyze data, our primary commitment is identifying players affected and doing everything within our power to make it right.
Is this the end of people trying to ruin your experience? No. But we're committed to stopping this kind of behavior in its tracks, and are discussing ways to increase our monitoring and development as part of that commitment. We have comprehensive logs and data that allow us to see precisely who did what, and also who was negatively affected by this malicious behavior. We've identified all of the players that have been using this exploit, and we're going to be taking firm action against their accounts.
Mastery Exploit Fixed: Players Banned
[League of Legends, via Reddit]
Early this morning a delivery person showed up at my door with shocking news: HITLER BEGINS WAR ON RUSSIA. Either that was the world's most delinquent paper boy, or THQ really wants us to get excited about Company of Heroes 2.
Not only did THQ send me a FedEx wake-up call at 7AM, they also got me to translate Russian. The card accompanying this poster-sized piece of World War II nostalgia reads "Briefings begin May 7", indicating we're just three days away from the big reveal of the sequel to one of the greatest real-time strategy games of all time.
Well, aside from what's already been revealed via magazine scans.
I just wish THQ hadn't gone the newspaper route (*rimshot*) with this initial tease. It's not that I don't appreciate the significance of June 22, 1941. It's not that I hate history. It's the fact that the obsessive compulsive collector in me now feels I need to collect the entire set of 1941 cover sheets from The New York Times.
Note to insane PR people: That was not a request.
Victoria "Scruffy Rebel" Schmidt is a cosplayer who, most of the time, devotes her time to dressing up as characters from the Star Wars universe. And she does a damn fine job of it.
X-Wing pilots, prequel jedi, "set to stun" Leia, Han Solo's kids, she covers all three eras of the Star Wars universe (before, during and after the movies).
Am I the only one who thinks it's weird seeing "Ewok Village" Leia's feet?
These shots were taken between 2006-2011. If you want to see more, check out Victoria's Facebook page, which also features some Tron, Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica.
The recently-released Sniper Elite V2 is, for want of a more in-depth review, a pretty lacklustre third-person stealth/action game punctuated by moments of extreme excitement.
Those are the times you actually get to do some proper sniping. And, as you can see in this video (be sure to click the "HD" button first to see it as nature intended), they're also some of the most excruciatingly uncomfortable killings you've ever seen in a game so otherwise serious in tone.
They're so extreme, so celebrated (that's real-time damage being shown, not a cutscene) that they can, as they did for me, quickly turn comedic. Which probably makes it even worse. Unless that doesn't bother you, in which case, this might well be the game for you.
WARNING: This is pretty graphic stuff. Don't watch if you're at work or there are kids around.
Jet Moto, aka Jet Rider, is a bit of a cult classic from the PlayStation days. It did well enough to get a bunch of sequels, but even then, it's been a long time since we've seen a new game in the series.
Which has upset designer Ian Galvin, enough to drive him to imagine what a new Jet Moto game could/should look like. And Ian's Jet Moto looks great!
Seeking to bring "a more modern twist" to the series (a futuristic entry in the series was canned before release), he's drawn up a number of designs for new vehicles, which you can see below.
Ian Galvin [Coroflot]
DRM, or Digital Rights Management, is the system whereby restrictions are placed upon the use of your content by the people who made or sold you said content.
It affects all mediums, from e-books to movies, but it's especially important/hated in the video game industry for the way it's implemented on certain games, especially those on the PC.
For those angry enough about DRM to want to do something about it, well, today is International Day Against DRM. You can check out the movement's site below for details on local events or ways you can campaign against it online.
International Day Against DRM - May 4, 2012 [Defective by Design, via Boing Boing]
Andrei Cristea is a lead character artist at CCP, the developers behind EVE Online. You know those awesome human face screenshots we showed you the other day? That's the team Andrei is on, with work pioneered by guys like Jeff Miller and Vigfus Omarsson.
But pretty faces and hair aren't all Andrei can do. So today we're looking at his other, very impressive works.
Cristea is a deft hand with 3D models, as this gallery shows. Some of the pieces are professional, others personal, all of them wonderful.
You can see more of Andrei's work at his personal site.
The issue of Game Informer packed with info on the newly-announced Elder Scrolls MMO is already in some people's hands and, well, if you were hoping for a game that was basically Skyrim only with real people, you're in for one hell of a disappointment.
From everything contained in the article, it sounds like "Elder Scrolls Online" is basically "Just Another MMO".
Things start going wrong on the very first page of the story, as ZeniMax Online's Paul Sage says "it needs to be comfortable for people who are coming from a typical massively multiplayer game that has the same control mechanisms, but it also has to appeal to Skyrim players".
A page later? You're playing the game in third-person, and its combat centres around hotbars activating skills. Your attacks have cooldowns. In clear terms, that means no real-time combat. It is literally explained as using "World of Warcraft mechanics".
You can't do something or go some places in the game unless you're appropriately levelled up, just like a regular MMO. ZeniMax is "keeping large areas inaccessible to save them for use as expansion content". Only "some fraction" of the caves and other landmarks in the game are waiting completely unmarked and unexplored. You can't own a house because it's "too hard to implement in an MMO". NPC characters don't run on the same schedules they do in the main games.
Oh dear.
It's not all doom and gloom. Some aspects, like the fact the game has public dungeons (ie, dungeons part of the game world and not separate "instances") and a system where the faction which controls the Imperial City gets to name an Emperor from amongst the playerbase sound kind of cool.
But overall, my heart, it is sinking. Why, exactly, is this game being made if, a few bells and whistles aside, it's just another fantasy MMO, and retains so little of what it is people play Elder Scrolls games for? It even looks like just another fantasy MMO, losing much of the refined elegance of Bethesda's games in exchange for a simpler style that looks little like the past few games in the series.
If I sound overly negative on this game based solely on someone else's preview, well, that's because I am. I don't play conventional MMOs because I find their tropes, especially their combat, to be tiresome and artificial. To hear those bones will be propping up this game is all I need to hear to already be more than a little bummed out.
People always wonder why no MMO has ever beaten World of Warcraft. It's because the people who want to play World of Warcraft...already play World of Warcraft, and don't need to play something built using the same system. This franchise, like Star Wars: Old Republic before it, was a great chance to try something new, something that can capture the imaginations of the hundreds of millions of people who don't play WoW, not the ten million who do. To hear it won't be, as a massive fan of the Elder Scrolls series, is disappointing.
Subscribers to the magazine should be getting their hands on the mag over the next few days. Everyone else, info like this will be added to Game Informer's online hub in the weeks to come.
Elder Scrolls Online [Game Informer]
