Bethesda and Sabre Interactive has released a brief tease about future content coming to Quake Champions. Future patches will that bring forward a classic Quake enemy – the baddies of Quake II, The Strogg – as a playable champion. Also introduced in this latest patch is a brand new map called Awoken – this ruinous labyrinth is sure to be home to many bloodbaths when it is finally released.
Here is the official description of the upcoming champion the Strogg and its drone companion, Peeker:
Half metal, half decaying flesh, and 100% ready to rage, the primary enemy of Quake II and Quake 4 is back as Strogg fights to be freed from the Dreamlands and reestablish contact with his ruthless warlord, Makron.
Players will also be able to take control and fight as Strogg’s drone sidekick, Peeker, who can fly around the battlefield, shoot at enemies and deal damage with its explosive self-destruct attack. Enemy kills are turned into a nutritional paste called Stroyent that provides 25HP, but players need to act fast – other Strogg players can steal your Stroyent!
New Weapon: The Plasma Cannon
Quake III’s face melting Plasma Cannon will finally find its way into Quake Champions in a future update. For many Q3A Veterans the lack of a proper Plasma Canon has made the available arsenal feel a bit bare.
Here’s the official description:
A blast from the past, the Plasma Gun from Quake III Arena finds its new home in Quake Champions! This high-powered cannon melts unwitting foes with bursts of pure energy and is sure to shake things up when it joins the Quake Champions arsenal later this month!
Last month’s March Update also brought a number of new modes and enhancements to Quake Champions, which unfortunately I did not have time to write about at the time of release. That patch saw the implementation of the much requested insta-gib mode where players are killed in a single hit as well as a brand new 2 Vs. 2 Ranked Mode.
Here’s the official description from those two features from last month’s patch:
NEW GAMEPLAY – Everyone, meet Instagib – The fast-moving, gib-tastic classic will finally make its way to Quake Champions, introducing a fun, fast and casual game where every shot is a one-hit kill. Players will start each match with the only weapons available – the Rail Gun and the Gauntlet – and there will not be weapon, health, armor, or power-up pickups. Champions will still be able to use active and passive abilities, and cool-down hourglasses will spawn on the map.
NEW RANKS – Introducing 2v2 TDM Ranked Mode – In addition to the head-to-head intensity of Duel mode, players will be able to grab a buddy and face off against teams from around the world in deadly 2v2 showdowns. Finding the right Champion and ability combinations will make the difference in the fight for the top spot on the leaderboard.
The world of free to play games can be daunting with the amount of sheer choice available and if you’re not careful you might end up choosing a game that is more advertisement for the in-game cash shop than a proper video game.
Thousands of Steam users – almost 8,000 concurrently at the moment of the writing of this article – have decided to download and try out this previously under the radar free to play shooter. On a weekend where Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is free to play for everyone, what could this imported and 3-year-old FPS from Korea offer players that Activision isn’t?
Black Squad’s gameplay feels like a throwback to the shooters of the 90s- eschewing recent staples like vertical movement, wall-running or peaking behind cover. In their place are the identical hit boxes for every player, fast movement / res-pawn time and a limited selection of weapons. As quickly as players die in TDM they respawn and are thrown back into the fray. Combine all of this with some trappings from Counter Strike: the previously mentioned role based selection of weapons, running animations featuring a knife and a loud announcer and you’ve got a recipe for a nostalgic throwback of a game that doesn’t really care for the current trends in the genre.
In terms of modes, there is the standard Free for All and Team Death Match (where I spent the majority of my three hours with the game last night). Also offered are two objective modes where special abilities can be used based upon the amount of experience you’ve accrued throughout the match. These range from the mundane: placing down a sentry turret or ammo packs for your team-mates; to the spectacular: calling in a devastating airstrike that rains hellfire from above. XP rewards aren’t nearly as flashy or differentiated as the Kill Streaks in Call of Duty but in a game like this, they don’t really have to be.
With the gameplay being provided for free there has to be some form of monetization. Black Squad comes with the requisite cash shop and multiple forms of currency (one earned through completing matches, another purchased with real dollars and yet a third “medal” currency awarded for weekly challenges). Despite the onslaught of currencies available Black Squad doesn’t feel pay to win. Each gun has a number of different stats that are tweaked depending on what other options the gun offers – silencer, scope, laser sight etc. – but it all feels balanced enough. This isn’t a game where someone can put down $20 on the table and buy a super powered sniper rifle and one shot everyone. The minor difference in stats & armor don’t appear to give paying players any sizeable advantage; instead, the developers hope to earn cash through limited edition skins and weapon models sold through loot crates. It is great to see them prioritizing balance & fun factor for all players versus taking the easy route of offering a $99.99 USD Golden Gun that could kill anyone.
Who knows if the sizeable community that has formed around Black Squad will stick around for the long term. Steam fads have a tendency to come and go with the whims of the players- who is still playing The Culling? The thousands of people who flocked to the revamped Battleborn have all but left, leaving that game with similar to numbers to before the Free to Play transition. Then again, some thought (myself included) that Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds was going to be a flash in the pan next to H1Z1: King of the Kill and PUBG has had considerable staying power – enough so that it has spawned imitators like Last Man Standing.
The latest champion revealed for Bethesda / id Software’s Free-to-play FPS Quake Champions is Anarki – a hover board skating, transhumanism punk who appears to embrace the 90s surfer attitude alongside old school FPS action.
Anarki’s active ability is health injection which allows him to gain a temporary health boost, which would be great to use right after taking a rocket to the fact. His passive, Hoverboard Air Control appears to allow him to traverse small distances on his hover board at an increased speed. Other tactics that might be useful when playing Anarki include rocket jumps, which are featured prominently in this brief one minute introduction trailer.
Hoverboards, surfer slang and rocket jumps – it doesn’t quite get much more 90s FPS – unless you’re offered a Jolt Cola, of course.
Quake Champions will be entering a “rather lengthy” closed beta period soon before being released presumably later this summer for free. Players can sign up for the beta at the game’s official website.
It is no secret that Bungie & Activision are hard at work on a sequel to 2014’s Destiny, the loot-based shooter that launched 3 additional content heavy expansions that when combined with the base game have kept guardians busy for years. A set of new leaks, one comprised of promotional materials from an Italian retailer, and another from a shop listed from a German retailer point to Destiny 2 coming to Windows PC for the first time.
Originally appearing on the Italian website Leganetwork.it, the now removed poster showcases three helmet humanoid guardians – each brandishing a different type of weapon. Featured prominently on the poster in that familiar Destiny typeface is “Destiny 2 – September 8th“, adding further credence to speculation that the Destiny sequel will launch in the early Fall.
Via PCGamer here is a look at the Italian Destiny 2 Poster:
Yesterday according to this Reddit post on r/PCGamingDestiny 2 briefly appeared on GameStop Germany’s public facing website listed for Windows PC. The listing has since been taken down and clicking the provided GameStop.de will simply redirect you to the store’s homepage. The thread is still an interesting read, not for new information on the unannounced sequel, but rather to see just how polarizing a game like Destiny can be. Some in the thread enjoyed the original despite its’ lack of story content, some see the potential of an MMOFPS but feel Destiny 1.0’s approach got it all wrong and others deridde the genre hybrid all together.
None of this information is exactly new as industry veteran reporter Jason Schreier reported almost six months ago that Destiny 2 would indeed appear on PC. In his initial report, he stated that Bungie had decided that they wanted to shift the games’ multi-platform strategy to include PC in the full sequel even if that meant leaving behind all of the characters & content created for the first title.
In part his report said:
“Earlier this year, I’d also heard from a person familiar with Bungie’s plans that Destiny 2, which is currently slated for a late 2017 release, will be on PC…. Bungie’s leadership wants Destiny 2 to feel like a proper sequel, even if that means leaving old planets, characters, and activities behind. “
At the end of the day while we don’t have a lot of concrete details on the Destiny sequel these latest retail promotional material & listing leaks could point to an imminent reveal. Huge publishers do have a habit of sending promotional materials to specialty stores like GameStop ahead of product reveals, but these reveals are usually only days or at most a week separated from the shipment of said posters & promotional items. Remember how badly Ubisoft got burned a couple of years back when they shipped Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag posters early?
Half-Life might as well be a mythical unicorn that poops rainbows and that could even the oldest video cards into a GTX 1080 by the simply being loaded. One journalist from Games Informer attempted to track down the elusive 10 year old piece of vaporware as revealed at the end of the most recent Game Informer video podcast.
Interestingly enough according to his sources Half-Life 3 never really made it out of the prototype stage, with no more than a handful of developers working on each prototype. One of these prototype used Real Time Strategy mechanics, could Gordon Freeman have commanded entire armies of Ant Lions at some point? Another idea that Valve reportedly experimented with was adventure game mechanics that used real life actors. Could this have been some sort of advanced performance capture technology?
Sadly Andrew Reiner didn’t really offer up any more concrete information save for this truncated soundbite regarding what he knows about the previous state of Halfe-Life 3:
“I was actually chasing a story on Half-Life 3 … I talked to one developer who told me it was a hot mess. There were so many proto-types with four or five people working on them that went no where. Two of the ideas was an RTS game that would have changed the script. Another would have been a version with live actors, like NightTrap… I reached out to 10 – 15 people who worked for the company and they just didn’t want to talk about it all.”
To watch the Game Informer crew chat about Half-Life 2: Epsode 3 head-on over to the 5:45 mark of the embedded video below. Perhaps in some alternate universe the Combine have successfully enslaved humanity simply because Half-Life 3 is a reality.
Considering it sounds like Bungie was hoping to have Destiny 2 out by now and Rise of Iron wasn’t originally in the cards, you’d be hard pressed to know it. In this expansion you venture into the plaguelands, a patrol area that overlaps some of the sections of classic Earth patrol with a new snowy theme. Along with the change in the weather comes signs of a vicious battle as well as strands of red vines called Siva, a nanite weapon that is growing out of control.
By this point with Rise of Iron being the fourth Destiny expansion, you pretty much know what you’re in for, but for gamers who haven’t taken the plunge there is quite a bit of content now. The first two expansions gave players quite a bit of running around to do through shorter stories in previous areas. Meanwhile The Taken King was quite a massive third expansion which added a large new play area, an alien ship to explore over Saturn.
Many of these expansions, including Rise of Iron, included strikes and raids. Strikes are missions you complete with a team of three which leads up to a boss battle and tends to have good rewards. Raids can include up to six players and include both puzzles and battles to keep everyone busy. So what really keeps people playing Destiny? We’ve all heard the complaints that it’s a grind and not much content is really added story wise in each expansion.
The experience itself is great! My friend and I finally buckled down and accepted that we’d have to place an awkward personal ad of sorts to find ourselves a group to play with. The raids don’t matchmake for you, nor does some other in game content. So we went online and begged random strangers to come to our rescue so we could run some of the earlier raids we’d missed. In less than twenty four hours we had a group.
It’s really spending time with these guys and running content to get new gear that keeps us playing. We socialize, have a good time, and enjoy the solid gameplay. It’s not exactly the same but in a way Destiny even brings back memories of StarSiege Tribes. You have these amazing double jumps instead of a jetpack and lots of great fire fights. The whole experience is fun and that’s what keeps us coming back and trying to get new gear and goodies to drop from replaying raids or other multiplayer sections.
Really I’m hoping the sequel will grab the MMO style of Destiny and expand it deeply. What I’d really like to see is constant character improvement. Typically when you go back into older areas in Destiny, your character gets scaled down a bit. You’ll still be a beast, but you can’t expect to one shot any old foes. If Borderlands and Destiny had a baby that kept the rewards and leveling coming, it would be a completely addictive experience. More so than what Destiny already is.
All that aside, the fact remains that what we do have is fun. If you’ve enjoyed Destiny in the past and have people to play with, you’re going to enjoy going through this latest batch of content. Story content does need to be detailed out more and I still dislike that collecting gear unlocks cards to read online. I want everything in my game itself. Give me a reason to visit the Speaker, the leader of the Guardians you play as. Let me filter through a list of his unlocked knowledge and read the text of those cards in game. Or better yet, when the card is about an exotic weapon, let me use my Ghost robot friend to scan the weapon and learn that data from them in my own inventory.
So what do you get in this pack? As mentioned above the plaguelands are an overlapping section outside the wall of the Cosmodrome on Earth. You can wander back into familiar areas and see what they’re like all battle scarred and Siva covered, but the new content holds up as well. From a destroyed shipyard with a massive tanker that seems split in two like the wall of a collapsed apartment building baring it’s rooms to the outside world, to more factory like complexes to wander through while having fire fights with upgraded Fallen warriors. The new enemy type are called Splicers which are basically cybernetically enhanced Fallen. They come with a new Shank as well, a flying robot enemy, which is electrically charged to explode when it gets too close. This comes as a disadvantage to them however since they can be destroyed to take out nearby regular Shanks as well.
The main story mission is fun as well, even though it’s sadly only two hours long. There is still more content on top of that though. Like quests to find new guns which do include spoken dialogue and story bits along the way, so saying the story really ends after two hours isn’t entirely true. Plus there is the strike, the new raid, and patrolling that new plagueland area. There’s also a new social area in the cold mountains where you’ll find the temple of the Iron Lords.
In short, it’s more Destiny. Somehow Rise of Iron jumps that hurdle of feeling like the same old thing and creates a familiar nostalgia that becomes an enjoyable experience. Fighting familiar enemies isn’t a rehash anymore, it’s your part of the war against the darkness. Exploring old content with new visuals isn’t a slog through reused assets, it’s a fun experience with new collectibles to find. If you’re still playing Destiny, you’re getting more of what you enjoy already. You’ve got your friends online to enjoy it with, and you want to take an evening off and go find more gear with those people.
Plus who knows what new events will be waiting for us! Will Sparrow League Racing make a return? What will the new Iron Banner be like when that relaunches? So is Rise of Iron worth the admission price? Well I’ve already spent more time on it than I probably should have, so I think that speaks to it’s value right there. It’s more of what you enjoy with new stuff to discover.
These last two weeks Boss Key productions have released two new trailers for their upcoming first person shooter headed by Cliff Blizinsky, Law Breakers. Each of the one minute videos feature about a minute of one of the developers talking about so far two of the games classes. First the Enforcer, then the Vanguard. Ill let the videos speak for them selves, but they look pretty awesome so far. Be sure to sign up for the alpha for a chance to get in on the action!
I saw this game at PAX East and really had fun with it. I was playing the enforcer and even though I wasnt able to capture any of my gameplay I did feel like the game was mostly done and ready to go. These videos feature what seems to me to be a much higher level of polish. Textures are smoother, there are more details, so I assume boss key have been hard at work on the game since I saw it over a month ago. Brokenjoysticks will be doing a full demo play through of this game at E3 so be sure to keep your eyes open for those first impressions.
In case you have been busy, or just forgot, last night was the global launch of Blizzards first FPS Overwatch. With the launch came the answer to the long left in the air question of “but how will Blizzard make any money if its not free to play with microtransactions?” We finally know how much each of those sweet, sweet loot boxes is going to cost if you want to skip the grinding and just get right to the games rarest items.
2 Loot Boxes: $1.99/£1.59
5 Loot Boxes: $4.99/£3.99
11 Loot Boxes: $9.99/£7.99
24 Loot Boxes: $19.99/£15.99
50 Loot Boxes: $39.99/£31.99
What do you think? Personally I think its right in that sweet spot of not too expensive, but also giving you enough that you will come back for more. YouTube is already filling up with people opening 100 crates, or 50 crates, and just like CS:GO boxes, as long as Blizzard keeps releasing skins, or other new content, this monetization strategy could keep the game profitable for years to come. The game has hundreds of unlockables, from voice lines, to sprays, to skins, and it would take a non paying player hundreds of games to unlock all of them, if you just cant wait, it seems like 40USD (the same as the base price of the game) will get you pretty deep in to the games unlocks.
Over the past few weeks we’ve heard lots of complaints about the new DOOM, of course based on multiplayer. Fans have felt let down that it didn’t seem like DOOM. News got worse when it turned out review copies wouldn’t be released until launch day. What we didn’t expect was the campaign to look like a huge SMASH HIT!
The recent launch trailer was a nice touch and gave rise to gamer curiosity. What were we missing here? There was suddenly all this story and much more content than had really been released. We’d seen some PR, but nothing that really indicated the full scope of what the new DOOM would be. That little trailer gave a look at such an intriguing new campaign.
I mean, good on Bethesda for keeping things under wraps to launch such a huge surprise like this! Even I wanted some of the monsters to more resemble their classic game counterparts but after seeing footage of the new release, I’m really feeling the new DOOM!
Lichdom: Battlemage is a fantasy first person shooter, developed by indie developers Xaviant. It came out in the summer of 2014 for PC, with ports for Xbox One and Playstation 4 recently. The game offers players a chance to play as a battlemage, a being capable of casting and crafting powerful magical spells in the heat of combat. Lichdom introduces you to a beautiful world powered by CryEngine3 that will leave you awestruck at the amazing scenery and spell effects. There’s also a very deep spell crafting system, based off of 8 elemental sigils (fire, ice, necromancy, etc) which can be combined together to create new types of magic. The game promises thousands of unique spells, each unique and distinct. So does Lichdom live up to its lofty goals?
Xaviant is an indie developer that started in 2014. I do feel that Lichdom is an impressive piece of art considering it’s their first game. They’re currently working on a new game called The Culling which is a Hunger Games style battle royale tournament and it looks very promising. Their games use CryEngine3 which has been used in the Farcry series of games. Lichdom is a very pretty game and in my opinion, the graphics really carry it. It’s worth checking out just based on the beautiful environments.
The story starts off with the protagonist experiencing a horrific run-in with a cult leader. Depending on whether you choose to be a boy or a girl, this individual proceeds to either kill your wife or kidnap your sister. After that, you find yourself waking in the presence of a mysterious old man who tells you that you are the dragon, a hero destined to save the world using powerful magic. Apparently, your destiny is to fix the wrongdoings of this same powerful cult, who, years ago, literally shattered the moon. Driven by revenge, you set out, fighting hordes upon hordes of evil cultists and demons to find the leader and put an end to their destruction. You will make your way through abandoned catacombs, scorching deserts, and eerie swamps, all the while collecting magical totems to make a variety of spells you will need to win this war.
I thought the magic in Lichdom sounded really cool when I heard that there were thousands of potential spells that you could craft. But for a good portion of the game I found the crafting system very complicated to use. They show you a short “video” consisting of 3 slides, and then just throw you into the spellcrafting system, which can be very confusing to new players. Luckily, there is an auto-magic crafting system that makes things a lot easier. There’s also a somewhat helpful guide on their steam community page. Lichdom’s magic can be fun, but be prepared to invest a lot of time in learning how it works.
Some of the spells really made me want to experiment. For example, I enjoyed playing with necromancy, a spell set that lets you turn fallen enemies into undead companions to fight for you. However, I always felt like I was going to ruin the specific effect my spell currently had if I upgraded it in any way. Further I learned that the extensive variety of spells I was promised were really just small stat tweaks to a number of base spells. I don’t think increasing the damage of a spell counts as an entirely new spell if the effect remains the same, but that’s what this game would like you to believe.
In battle, you can use three elemental sigils at a time. Each of these can can be used in three different ways – a projectile, a defensive blast that works with your shield, and an AoE that you can cast at a distance. You can also equip a magic shield that grants you different abilities depending on what the shield’s type is. Building a perfect blend of these sigils is tedious and requires lots of experimentation. Some spells combo well with others for cool effects. For example, when you kill an enemy marked with both corruption and necromancy, not only will you get a zombie to fight for you, but additionally a bunch of creepy bugs will fly out of them, attacking the closest enemy and causing lots of damage. Later on in the game you also gain access to combination magic, called synergies. These are the heaviest hitting spells in the game. They range from summoning a fire golem, to sending out a supernova in the middle of some unsuspecting cultists.
Usually I’m the type of gamer that likes a long campaign with lots of story. Lichdom: Battlemage certainly has that, but I felt that the game really drags on too long. While playing, I was constantly asking myself, “Ok, is it going to be over soon?” and then it threw more at me. Unfortunately this game was so long that I almost gave up, but the little bit of story here and there was still interesting enough that I had to know how it ended. There’s not a lot of dialogue or story while playing through the levels and what little there is always ends with “Well, whatever, we’ll ask questions later – let’s just get this over with.” It also doesn’t help that every stage was incredibly linear and repetitive. If the environments for each stage weren’t so different from each other, I would have mistaken each stage for the one before.
You mostly fight the same handful of enemies throughout the game, with a few bigger monsters later on. However, these enemies do scale with you as you progress, which can be both challenging and fun. At the end of each level you face a magical boss. I found this to be the only real challenge in the game. When you beat a boss in Lichdom, you feel like you actually accomplished something. The bosses make you strategize on how to take them down, whereas most other battles feel like just aimlessly firing projectiles to win. Actually, there’s not any aiming required in this game. You just shoot a projectile and it heads towards whatever enemy is closest in your field of view. There’s a lob projectile that works like a grenade but it’s not even that great. I tried to power through this game but it ended up taking about 20 hours to complete. I was excited for the ending but after I finally beat the last boss, the game just ended with next to nothing explained. I was really disappointed because the game had convinced me that I would get my answers at the end – but when the credits started to roll I felt as if I had wasted my time.
Despite my criticism, Lichdom: Battlemage is not a bad game, especially since it was the developers first attempt. However I found myself bored throughout my playthrough, and that is less than ideal to me. I also felt misled by its promise of thousands of spells and disappointed by where the story ended, but as I mentioned, the graphics are very good and were the one thing that kept me hanging on for more. There was a particularly memorable environment with hot springs in a snowy forest that really showed what Xavient is capable of in terms of atmosphere and graphics. I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone who isn’t a huge fantasy fps/rpg fan, but I’m looking forward to seeing what the developers bring to the table with their next title.
It seems like just yesterday that we reviewed The Division, (actually its today go read our review), but already Ubisoft have announced a massive free update to arrive in the later part of April. The update will include among other things: Trading in the darkzone, the first “raid” or incursion, a host of new hi end gear, and a new set of daily and weekly challenge missions.
lets talk about that incursion first, Called Falcon Lost, It will be level gated to only people with a gear level of 31 or higher. There will be matchmaking, so players who usually run solo will still be able to cover this mission. The whole mission will be a no-respawn zone, meaning that if your team dies, its the end my friend. The missions are designed to challenge the best players in the game, and if they are anything like Destinys raid content, it may be some time before a single team is even able to beat them. Falcon Lost will feature the Last Man Battalion, and will take place in the sewers of the already existing map. I for one am looking forward to dieing hundreds of times trying to complete this mission in search of good loot!
The Raid is by far the thing that most people are looking forward to, but the April 12th update is also going to bring some quality of life changes that are long overdue. Trading will now be permitted among groups, so now when you get that sweet sweet gold in the Dark Zone, if you already have something better you can trade it to your buddy. Daily and weekly challenges are also getting a buff, with more being added. This is a good move for players like me who still find that they are not geared for the challenge mission but can easily sweep through the dailies in 5-10 minutes.
This update drops April the 12th and is free to all players who own the game. Hopefully this will keep us all entertained until we get the first paid subway expansion. its good to see Ubisoft supporting their users with free content before their first major update and I can only hope that it is a trend that continues.
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Homefront wasnt most sucessfull, or most talked about FPS the year it came out, so I personally was surprised when a follow up was announced. Now it seems that sequel will be relying on microtransactions to work. designer Fasahat Salim said in a recent interview with Gamestop that none of them will be for exclusive content, nor will the game become “pay-to-win” as a result: Anything that you can buy, you can also earn by playing the game.
Salim also said there will be no season pass in the same interview. This does not mean it wont have any post-launch content to the contrary its mentioned in the interview that it will exist, just not as a season pass. When pressed about the microtransactions Salim said “It’s absolutely not a pay-to-win system because everything we’re providing in these resistance crates is available for free in the game through normal play all we’re offering is, for those players that don’t necessarily have the time to invest in the game, to unlock those cool things” He went on to say that the game will have additional missions added but in a “drip-feed” system, which i take to mean they will come out every onece and a while, and be free. Perhaps this will be similar to the Halo 5 approach? Either way its a win when ever I see a game not selling a Season pass or map packs.
Look for Homefront: the revolution on May 17, and untill then check out a hands on preview that PC gamer was able to do last month.
Because E-sports is now big business, almost everyone who has a game thats team based seems to be announcing a competitive league. Valve at least are no strangers to a solid comptitive league having previously run The International for DoTA2. So it comes really as no surprise, at least to me, that Valves long running (now) free to play team based co-op shooter Team Fortress 2 is getting a Competitive league.
TF2 is a game famous for its silly hats, unique weapons, and seemingly endless support life. The game went free to play(FTP) in 2011, and since has taken on a new life far beyond what anyone would have imagined. With dozen of patches and events since going free to play, TF2 has been a staple of the FTP community for years. Now it seems that folks who have been begging for a competitive ranked, steam curated mode, have been answered. In a post on reddit /u/vjill points users to a competitive beta inside steams social features.
There were rumors this was happening when in a visit to Valve HQ by community at teamfortress.tv in April of 2014 matchmaking was at least briefly discussed. At the time Valve seemed to be on board, but there was no official word of any pending changes. Now we have the official word, competitive matchmaking is coming to TF2.
Inside the steam group Valve says “[Valve will] be using this group to send out announcements related to the competitive beta as well as seed beta invites for the expansion of the closed beta” This is no doubt exciting for the robust, lively community in TF2, whom despite the game being well past the age of most relevant shooters, still keep its servers populated. Hopefully a ranking system brings in new more competitive blood, and leads to more and better tournaments curated by Valve. Who knows perhaps someday we will see an international TF2 comptition backed by Valve and funded by the players, just like the current International for DOTA2 is.
Battleborn, the new multiplayer shooter from Gearbox just got some new video content. Deande, and Ghalt are featured in new video content released today. Ghalt wields dual shotguns, has a gap closing hook, and can deploy traps. Deande appears to be much more stealth oriented with a melee attack and a cloak that makes her invisible.
There is a lot of footage in the two new trailers, players new to the game will notice that Gearbox’s trademark cell shaded look is also present in the new team based co-op shooter. The RPG style skill system is also shown, appearing to be a strand of DNA like choices which allow the player to “build” different ways. Mostly what I take away from these two trailers is that this is going to be a very combat oriented game, with fast paced shooting bolstered by objective based game play. Very little is currently know about Gearboxes co-op MOBA style shooter, but a beta earlier this year was well received by those who were able to play.
Battleborn will see a full release in May and there was a beta preview late last year, during which players got a very small taste of the new games world and characters. Hit the jump to see the videos and look out for our review of Battleborn when it releases in May.
