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2 CommentsNight in the Woods delayed to February
Night in the Woods, the gorgeous adventure game from Infinite Fall, has been pushed back to “somewhere in the first part of February,” the studio announced today.
That represents a delay of a few weeks from the previously given release date — Infinite Fall said in late October that it planned to launch Night in the Woods on Jan. 10, 2017.
“Some last minute things have come up suddenly over the past few days and we have to push back the [Night in the Woods] release by a few weeks,” said Infinite Fall in a Kickstarter update. “It’s all normal stuff, nothing is on fire, and it’s all to do with the fact that we’re a tiny team making a big game and doing a multi-platform launch is a whole *waves hands around* thing.”
It’s rough timing for Infinite Fall: Last week, the studio released the f...
Cover Story
Issue
24
November 4, 2016
Blizzard’s prodigal son returns
How one of Blizzard’s co-founders left the company, why he decided to come back and what it means for the future.
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0 CommentsLeague of Legends’ maker inks rich broadcast contract, with an eye on premium content
Riot Games will rake in $50 million a year — at minimum — under an arrangement with Major League Baseball's online streaming operation to monetize and commercialize League of Legends competitions.
The deal between Riot and BAMTech, which is a subsidiary of MLB Advanced Media, runs through 2023. MLBAM handles MLB.tv, the online streaming network showing the leagues' games throughout the season. Clients such as Disney, HBO, the WWE and the PGA Tour also use BAMTech for their premium content offerings.
In an interview with Yahoo! Sports, Riot representatives said the deal will not change or end the current supply of free League of Legends content found on Twitch, YouTube and other streaming platforms. However, with a $50 million minimum guarantee per year, it's obvious some kind of premium...
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3 CommentsNight in the Woods has knife fights and creepy platforming
Indie adventure game Night in the Woods has received its official trailer, and it’s here to prove that there’s more to this stylish game than meets the eye.
Night in the Woods is the story of Mae, a cat who returns home from college to her beleaguered rust-belt town. We’ve spent time with this game’s E3 demo, which was lavish in presentation and dense with dialogue. But from the looks of this trailer, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It shows off the game’s many other characters, and also teases a few more mini-games including what appears to be a knife fight.
Night in the Woods won’t be available until its launch date, Jan. 10, 2017, when it will be out on itch.io, Linux, Mac and Windows PC via Valve’s Steam platform, and PlayStation 4. But there’s a few ways you can experience it...
Video
1 CommentMessing up some space dragons in EarthNight
In a world where dragons took over Earth, one girl and one man in space must punch them in the eyes.
So I gather from EarthNight, a roguelike runner where you launch yourself from dragon to dragon, running down their winding spines before poking them aggressively. The goal is to eventually reach Earth’s surface to end this dragon plague once and for all. Each dragon is procedurally generated, and contains multitudes of monsters, platforms, and collectibles.
According to the developers, each dragon has 125 potential layouts. You’ll see a few different kinds of dragons in this video. You’ll also notice that the game is challenging as heck. Even when we had what we thought was a good run — well, you’ll see. In this gameplay video, captured at PlayStation Experience, we conquer a few...
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5 CommentsTelltale’s Walking Dead returns a great video game hero to the spotlight
Telltale Games' adaptation of The Walking Dead returns Dec. 20 titled not as "Season 3," but A New Frontier. A two-part episode will be available at launch, reintroducing players to Clementine, and pairing her with a new protagonist, Javier.
Clementine is one of the all-time great slow-burn video game heroes, emerging from the frightened grade-schooler for whom you put your life on the line in Season One, through an expedited adolescence where she accepts very hard lessons about people in Season Two. Now, as a teenager, she's acting first, and no longer being acted upon by this cruel world. Zombie stories are best when people realize the will to live and fight for it, and that is the truth of Clementine’s character.
Javier is her companion and another playable character, the first time...
News
14 CommentsDota 2’s big update goes live tomorrow. Here’s what’s in it.
Monkey King, a brand new Dota 2 character teased back in August, headlines a comprehensive update arriving tomorrow for Valve's free-to-play MOBA. Changes to Dota 2's game interface, gameplay, and a talent tree for heroes, also are forthcoming.
The talent tree is probably the broadest-reaching gameplay update in Dota 2 version 7.00. With it, players can select talents for their heroes at levels 10, 15, 20 and 25 to equip them with new augmentations to their powers and abilities. As it is a skill tree, each skill taken opens a new branch, and once taken, other branches are no longer available to the hero.
This example, for Wraith King, explains what Dota 2 is getting at. Much more is available at the Dota 2 site.
Monkey King, the new hero, is a melee character who plays in...
News
2 CommentsDota 2’s 7.00 update announcement breaks Dota 2’s official site (Update)
Update: The announcement site is live; go see it for more info. (The main site still seems to be in trouble.)
Dota 2 was supposed to reveal what is in version 7.00 — it’s been 11 years since version 6.00 — at noon today but, 30 minutes later, the site is still crashed, presumably by all the interest.
The update was announced last night at the finals of the Boston Major, in a way overshadowing the very compelling 3-1 championship won by OG over Ad Finem. But right now, we can’t tell you what’s coming in the 7.00 patch. Other than this guy (rimshot)
Both the countdown site and the Dota 2 blog are currently borked. We’ll update when they are unborked.
Update: Well, they got this up, at least.
Valve Corp.
News
1 CommentFacing down copyright claims, Doom roguelike fan game goes open-source (correction)
Rights holder ZeniMax Media slapped DoomRL, a popular fan game based on the classic first-person shooter, with a cease-and-desist order earlier this week, but co-creator Kornel Kisielewicz chose to keep the game available online. To do so, DoomRL — now called DRL — has gone open-source.
ZeniMax Media took issue with DoomRL, as Kisielewicz revealed to fans earlier this week. He shared a letter from the company’s legal team, asking that all references to the Doom property be removed from the fan project.
After weighing whether to ignore or comply with the takedown request, Kisielewicz decided to strip the Doom branding from the game and open it up to other players. The designer told Polygon this week that this was “always the plan” for the free roguelike version of Doom, which has been...
Culture
17 CommentsWhere will the next World of Warcraft expansion take place?
The successful launch of World of Warcraft: Legion earlier this year has revived fan interest in Blizzard’s hit MMO. But with the expansion out for months now, players are beginning to finish up with the content available and are starting to look ahead and wonder: What’s next?
While we likely won’t know what’s coming for sure until well into next year, whenever Blizzard chooses to announce World of Warcraft’s seventh expansion, some passionate fans are already speculating. In the video above, from YouTube user Bellular Gaming, a bunch of possibilities are explored.
The most intriguing expansion concept in the video sees World of Warcraft embracing its heady cosmic lore. In this idea, players would explore the history of the god-like Titans and face off against their evil counterparts,...
News
13 CommentsTelltale’s Walking Dead season 3 premiere will be the first two episodes
The third season of Telltale Games’ acclaimed Walking Dead series of adventure games looks to be as heart-wrenching as ever, as seen in footage the studio debuted tonight at The Game Awards 2016.
The premiere of A New Frontier, the third season, is called “The Ties that Bind.” Clementine, the hero of the first two seasons, will return alongside a second playable protagonist, a new character named Javier.
A New Frontier takes place four years after the zombie plague began. But part of the episode offers a glimpse of the moment of the outbreak, with a devastating death in the family that gets even worse when Javy’s grandfather, well ... you can figure it out for yourself.
Here’s the synopsis from Telltale:
When family is all you have left... how far will you go to protect it? Four years...
News
7 CommentsHearthstone: Mean Streets of Gadgetzan bug fixed, free packs offered (update)
When Blizzard announced its new expansion for Hearthstone, Mean Streets of Gadgetzan, it introduced a brand new mechanic: tri-class cards. As exciting as they are, this new card type was also at the center of a bug that plagued fans excited to unpack cards for the new expansion as soon as possible.
As their name implies, tri-class cards are meant to be used by three specific classes. By making cards unique to three classes, they open up the door to adding unique mechanics to multiple classes, instead of one.
However, as many players rushed to open their new cards today, they realized that they were receiving more tri-class cards than they should. This would be great, if so many of them weren’t duplicates. Blizzard confirmed that they were aware of the bug.
Many fans were quick to show...
News
1 CommentAlmost two-fifths of Steam’s entire library was released in 2016
If it seems like Steam’s list of new releases has been getting more and more cluttered lately, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. More than 4,200 games have been released on Valve’s digital distribution service so far in 2016, according to Steam Spy — a figure that represents a whopping 38 percent of the service’s entire gaming library.
Yesterday, Steam Spy tweeted a pie chart of Steam games organized by their year of release. Today is the first day of December, so the exact number of 2016 titles listed in the chart — 4,207 — doesn’t even include the last month of the year. We just checked Steam’s list of new releases, and as of this writing, 33 games arrived on the service today.
The percentage alone doesn’t tell you a lot, as indie developer Tony Gowland points out. But the actual number...
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