PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds launched its Event Pass progression and reward system last week, in concert with its new Sanhok map. After several days of feedback, developer PUBG Corp has adjusted its workings to better suit players. For now, these changes apply only to test servers.
The changes see the Event Pass' daily XP limit increased from 80 to 120, while the minimum play time that counts towards missions progress has been reduced from five minutes to two minutes. Likewise, the minimum time required to acquire XP has been halved—down from five minutes to two and a half minutes.
"For Duo or Squad games, missions progress is updated when your team wins the game," so reads this Steam Community Update, "or when your whole team is eliminated."
The pre-existing 'Reach top 3 without killing anyone in Solos' mission requirement has also now been changed, allowing players to reach bronze position with two kills or less. Crate percentages have been tweaked, too:
"As we’ve said in the dev notes, the Event Pass was introduced to let players experience a different way to enjoy new PUBG content," says developer PUBG Corp. "Your feedback regarding the Event Pass has been extremely valuable to us, and we’re making some changes based on the feedback received."
Patch notes for PUBG's PC update 1.0 #16 can be perused in full here.
Popular Dark Souls modder and explorer ZullieTheWitch has figured out a way to play the RPG as any of the enemies or NPCs. So yes, that means you can play as a Bonewheel, and it means you can play as a Crystal Golem. But more importantly, it means it's possible to play as a Crystal Lizard (see picture above).
...and by possible, I mean it's possible if you want to fiddle around with the game yourself. This isn't the result of a publicly released mod that you can download, in other words – it's just the result of ZullieTheWitch's code diving.
There's a bunch more to peruse over on Zullie The Witch's Twitter account. The Dark Souls specialist has also thoroughly dissected the recent Remaster for unused equipment and enemies over on YouTube.
We Happy Few was refused classification in Australia last month, meaning it was effectively banned in the country. The game's pill-habit was the source of the trouble: We Happy Few is literally about a society that scarfs truckloads of drugs to maintain happiness (and more importantly, conformity), but Australia's National Classification Code states that games depicting "drug misuse or addiction ... in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults" will be refused classification.
It might seem a bit silly for a country that does actually have an R18+ classification, although its introduction in 2013 doesn't appear to have had much on-the-ground impact for Aussie gamers. But the Classification Board announced today that it will consider an appeal of the RC next month, and extended an invitation to individuals or organizations to "apply for standing as an interested party."
"The closing date to lodge your application for standing as an interested party and any submissions is 29 June 2018," the announcement says. "Please note that the Review Board can only consider submissions about We Happy Few itself and not any other matters relating to computer game classification policy or issues generally."
We Happy Few was refused classification because players are incentivized to take drugs in the game world. "A player who takes Joy can reduce gameplay difficulty, therefore receiving an incentive by progressing through the game quickly. Although there are alternative methods to complete the game, gameplay requires the player to take Joy to progress," the board said in its original ruling.
"In the Board’s opinion, the game’s drug-use mechanism of making game progression less difficult, constituted an incentive or reward for drug-use. Therefore, the game exceeded the R18+ classification because of the drug use related to incentives and rewards."
Hopefully the board will look more deeply into We Happy Few's narrative themes in its re-review, rather than just the basic mechanics of getting high to get by. The Classification Board's re-review is scheduled for July 3.
Nvidia is pushing out another GPU driver release (398.36 WHQL) that is tuned to deliver optimal performance in The Crew 2. The game is due out on Friday, June 29, so you have a few days to let others test drive the new driver to ensure that it works properly.
This is the second time Nvidia has released a GPU driver with performance tweaks for The Crew 2. The last one came in the latter half of May in anticipation for the game's closed beta, and also included optimizations for State of Decay 2.
Nvidia's newest driver package focuses solely on The Crew 2, as it pertains to performance optimizations. However, it also brings with it a handful of bug fixes. They include:
[Pascal GPUs][Gears of War 4][DirectX12]: Blue-screen crash may occur while playing the game.
[Sterescopic 3D][NVIDIA Control Panel]: Switching the 3D display setting On and Off from the Windows display settings page has no effect on the NVIDIA Control Panel stereoscopic 3D settings page.
[G-Sync]: G-Sync may still be active after closing a game, causing the desktop to stutter.
[Surround]: Multiple games crash when launched in Surround mode.
[HDR]: With HDR turned on, non HDR full-screen video playback may cause corruption/flickering in the video.
[Notebook]: Blue-screen crash occurs with Driver_Power_State_Failure error upon bootup.
Black Screen appears when booting Windows after installing the 397.93 display driver.
In related news, Nvidia has partnered with Ubisoft to bundle The Crew 2 (standard edition) with its GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards, as well as select desktops and laptops running on GeForce hardware. Follow this link to see exactly which hardware qualifies, along with a list of participating vendors.
You can download the new driver through GeForce Experience, or grab it here to install manually.
GTA Online's Motor Wars offers triple RP and GTA$ this weekend. For the remainder of the week, it'll grant you double.
Born during last year's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds-inspired battle royale renaissance, Motor Wars' weaponised vehicles, small maps, and busy UI stands it apart from the likes of PUBG and Fortnite. There's no forced stealth, no scavenging and no long distance pilgrimaging. You land with a fully-loaded gun, and your omnipresent minimap is brimming with colour-coded blips that identify vehicles, enemies and weapons throughout.
With that, Motor Wars is one of my favourite Adversary Modes—assuming you have 28 bodies (two to four teams) to pack out the match. With three-times the spoils up for grabs, though, I suspect this weekend, June 29th–July 2nd, could be busier than previous bonus periods.
Elsewhere, this week's GTA Online update offers double GTA$ and RP on Smuggler's Run (with 2x speed on bunker research), Biker Business and Special Cargo Sell Missions. To compliment that, Executive Offices, Special Cargo Warehouses, Vehicle Cargo Warehouses, Biker Clubhouses, and Biker Businesses are all half price.
As I've said umpteen times in the past, I reckon Executive Offices are the best way to earn fast and vast cash in free play—whose cheapest locations now cost just $500,000. Don't trust me? Learn how to make money in GTA Online your own way.
Moreover, Avengers are again 30 percent less their recommended value this week, now $3,351,250. But I've been flirting with picking up the Grotti X80 Proto for some time. With the same discount, that'll set me back $1,890,000.
The history of Dota is the history of ideas being poured into a giant bucket full of wizards. From Aeon of Strife to the wild herds of tower defence games that roamed the plains of the Warcraft III custom map scene, Dota has always been a mongrel thing. In that sense it's appropriate that Steam's former chart-topper should spend the summer paying tribute to the genre that toppled it. Packed in with this year's International Battle Pass is Underhollow, a team-based take on battle royale were teams race to claim a cheese from the denizens of a collapsing underground maze.
Underhollow isn't pure battle royale, however. Its dungeon structure and focus on killing monsters gives it some of the qualities of a MMO raid, and the battles that take place when teams meet are pure MOBA. Think of a Dota teamfight taking place inside a WoW boss chamber on PUBG's map and you're most of the way there.
Its links to the battle pass reward system aside, there's little about Underhollow that couldn't have been done by a determined map maker in Dota 2's community arcade. That said, it's all the better for Valve's resources and craftsmanship—particularly when it comes to the map and monsters monsters, which feature some of Valve's first new art for the game in months.
The monsters are an all-round highlight, actually. Far from being just camps to farm for gold and experience, each room in Underhollow features a randomly-assigned encounter in one of three difficulty tiers, including boss fights. There are MMO-style tank-and-spank fights, 'the floor is lava' encounters, bullet hell wizards, invisible ghosts, and giant Wraith Kings that have to all be slain at the same time to prevent them from respawning.
Figuring out each encounter is the first step, and understanding how to leverage Dota 2's vast pool of heroes to exploit them is the next. Luna's ability to bounce her glaive between lots of different foes is good in most rooms; the fact that she can't switch it off is potentially a nightmare in the room where you have to focus on hitting a big vase rather than any of the trolls standing next to it. Laudably, Valve have made the entire roster of heroes available in Underhollow and been relatively free with how monsters interact with them. They could have stacked bosses up with immunities and forced a particular playstyle, but they haven't and I think the mode is better for it.
It's less balanced as a consequence, however, and while anything can work—this is Dota, after all—there are certain heroes who really love this structure. Axe, for example, thrives in multi-target encounters and is one of the rare heroes who actually becomes more dangerous when a teamfight takes place in a room that's still full of monsters. Zeus' ability to nuke every single hero on the map at the same time is a big force multiplier in Underhollow, where it can sometimes randomly ruin another team's boss battle at the push of a button.
This runs the risk of turning the hero drafting step into the most important moment of the game, with many of my early matches turning into a game of 'PICK AXE'. As an Axe lifer, it's nice to see him get his moment—especially at the expense of perennial pub menace Pudge, who simply isn't very useful in the confines of the dungeon. But this degree of one-sidedness is only forgivable because Underhollow is a throwaway mode to play over the summer. If it became a bigger part of the game—and there's a case to be made for that happening—then you'd want to see something resembling balance, and that'd probably mean a cut-down hero roster.
Underhollow reliably crashes for a number of players at the beginning of a match, forcing them to reconnect this happens without fail, every single time you play, to at least a couple of people.
The biggest issue, however, is stability. Underhollow reliably crashes for a number of players at the beginning of a match, forcing them to reconnect—this happens without fail, every single time you play, to at least a couple of people. Players working to meet their weekly battle points cap will quickly get used to micromanaging their disconnected teammates while they wait for them to load back into the match. There's not much else to say about this other than 'it's bad' and 'Valve should fix it'.
This unreliable performance, coupled with a drive to farm battle pass points, can make Underhollow feel a little disposable—particularly when you're playing with strangers. It's really easy to throw a game away, and do so quickly, and as a consequence you're always at the mercy of your teammates. If all three of you are on the same page, great. If not, it usually means a few rooms of grinding followed by death to the first team you encounter, a trip back to the main menu, and another roll of the matchmaking dice.
This feeling that Underhollow is ultimately a throwaway experience—compounded by the bugs, the imbalance, and its seasonal nature—are a shame because there's something worth exploring here: a worthy extrapolation of traditional Dota. Were it just a little bit more polished, this might have justified the cost of the Battle Pass by itself.
Bonus Underhollow PSA!
Dota 2 is full of ways to be that guy, from spamming pings to premature GGs. In Underhollow, you can identify that guy really easily: it's the person who picks up all of the loot from a dungeon chest straight away, and then sells it without checking to see if their teammates need anything.
OpenAI, the independent research institute that was co-founded by Elon Musk in 2015, will send its Dota 2 bots to The International 2018. There, the AI team will take on a professional team in a 5v5 match. And it plans to win.
Known as OpenAI Five, the bot team has taught itself the nuts and bolts of Valve's free-to-play MOBA by playing 180 years' worth of games against itself every day. OpenAI says this process requires 256 GPUs and 128,000 CPU cores—and is a scaled up version of the "much-simpler" variant that toppled pro player Danil "Dendi" Ishutin in 1v1 at last year's TI.
"Our team of five neural networks, OpenAI Five, has started to defeat amateur human teams at Dota 2," says OpenAI. "While today we play with restrictions, we aim to beat a team of top professionals at The International in August subject only to a limited set of heroes. We may not succeed: Dota 2 is one of the most popular and complex esports games in the world, with creative and motivated professionals who train year-round to earn part of Dota’s annual $40M prize pool."
This blog post explores the myriad challenges and obstacles the OpenAI team faces while brining OpenAI Five up to speed—not least Dota 2's complex rules. Read the post in full via the link above, and watch the following short which examines some of the learned behaviours the bots have picked up along the way below.
These include teamfighting, value prediction and, rather amusingly, ganking. Here's that:
And here's Dendi's 1v1 defeat to an AI opponent at The International 2017, which kicks off around the 7.30 mark. The pre-match testing segment is worth watching too if you've time—I was particularly tickled by the chap who says "the not being able to kill it part is so annoying" in reference to the AI's skills.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance has rolled out a new Hardcore mode, alongside its latest 1.6 patch. And if you thought survival in 13th century Bohemia was challenging before, trying staying alive minus fast travel, quick saving and compass indicators.
Then try taking on board two permanent negative perks—such is a requirement of the new mode. Ailments cover everything from Nightmares that inflict short-term debuffs, to Tapeworms that heighten your appetite, and Claustrophobia that lowers attacks whenever your helmet visor is closed.
The Somnambulant perk, however, is my favourite. "There is a slight chance you will wake up somewhere else than where you fell asleep," explains this Steam Community update. "Provides quite a challenge when you wake up in an unknown place and can't see your position on the map. Very rarely you can also sleepwalk your place to some secret areas."
Which reminds of a more gruelling slant on Skyrim's A Night to Remember side quest. The full list of negative perks can be read here.
Hardcore mode also prevents Waypoints from being seen unless the player is up close, combat is more realistic—"strikes have a more realistic impact"—traders pay less for goods, and repairing items is more costly. Moreover, in the absence of compass indicators players must determine the time of day against the sun's location in the sky, which sounds pretty neat.
Read more on KC:D's Hardcore survival mode this way, alongside patch notes for update 1.6. There, developer Warhorse Studios says more on the action role-player's incoming From the Ashes DLC is "coming soon".
Update: Since publishing the above, Warhorse has released a brief trailer for its From the Ashes DLC. Here's that:
Valve has disqualified a Dota 2 team from its upcoming The International 2018 for using a programmable gaming mouse. In doing so, Thunder Predator used an "unfair advantage", so says contest organiser FACEIT, during the South America qualifiers, which prevents them progressing to August's $15 million competition.
As reported by Motherboard, Thunder Predator's AtuuN is said to have selected Meepo—a Geomancer, who is billed as "one of the hardest carries in the game to play effectively due to his heavy reliance on micromanagement." Meepo can create clones of himself, and when each clone teleports, they deal damage in the surrounding area. And while this cloning method can be a powerful means of offence, said micromanagement means each clone must be instructed individually.
Under pressure—like, say, during a tournament—this routine isn't easy.
Motherboard links to this YouTube clip of AtuuN effortlessly directing Meepo clones around the map during the third game. This caught the attention of the Dota 2 subreddit, who in turn accused AtuuN of leveraging a software macro—a process that lets players roll complex button combos into fewer/single clicks.
Combat logs (see above) showed that AtuuN teleported Meepo clones at the exact same time. This process would normally take players several seconds—they'd otherwise need to instruct each Meepo individually—but Thunder Predator denied using macros. It did, however, concede that a programmable mouse may be at fault—a Razer Synapse 3.
"The player of our squadron ‘Atún’ has a Razer Synapse mouse, which, like any professional player, has put its own manual configuration to be able to have a better use of Hardware in benefit of its efficient performance in each of the games played with this hero (Meepo)," says Thunder Predator (via Google Translate) on its official Facebook page. "In this way, we highlight the fact that no type of hack has been used."
Thunder Predator suggests it's been hard done by. "That is why through this announcement," the Facebook post continues (again, via Google Translate), "we denounce this accusation, affirming that at no time, our player ‘Atún’ use any type of hack or particular program that facilitated his game mode before the match, yesterday, with the SG team."
Following yesterday's nightclub update reveal, GTA Online has announced its Guest List—an initiative that grants players access to "the best of LS club life along with extracurricular business perks". Simply sign in between now and Monday, July 2 to join the Guest List. Return between July 3-9 and receive GTA$300,000, and an Orange Wireframe Bodysuit, free of charge.
After teasing a star-studded techno summer soundtrack last month, GTA Online confirmed its incoming nightclub-themed update yesterday. Top DJs The Black Madonna, Tale of Us, Solomon and Dixon featured in a teaser trailer, while Rockstar suggested the Los Santos dance club scene is "about to blow open" next month.
"Get on the guest list for access to the best of LS club life along with extracurricular business perks," reads this Rockstar Newswire post. "Log into GTA Online at any point between today and Monday July 2nd and you will be automatically added to the Guest List. Qualifying Guest List players can return to GTA Online later in July to receive new and exclusive rewards for logging in each week."
The post then lists perks like weekly bonus cash windfalls "ranging between GTA$100,000 to GTA$350,000", and discounts on new vehicles such as the MTL Pounder Custom—a so-called "highly customizable asset for your lucrative business deliveries"—and the Ocelot Swinger sports car.
As someone not overly enamoured by GTA Online's racing circuit, the Southern San Andreas Super Sport Series has somewhat passed me by. But as someone who spent several years partying in Ibiza and Glasgow's nightclub circuit, I'm all about seeing Tale of Us et al tearing it up in Los Santos.
According to this post, the nightclub update arrives "thanks to the efforts of one well-known, well-connected and somewhat financially sound impresario." Have another look at the trailer. Is that Gay Tony up there on the mezzanine?
