Bad Company 2: Vietnam confirmed, trailer
The digital-only expansion pack for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is real, and there’s a quick teaser video after the jump. This confirms our earlier story that a translated French press release seemed to leak the expansion’s existence and theme. The release was primarily about a new EA rewards scheme called Gun Club, which has also now been announced. Nice job, rumour! Here’s the trailer.
Medal of Honour beta starts on June 21
At their E3 press conference in Los Angeles, EA have announced that the multiplayer beta for the new Medal of Honour game will be launched on June 21st, or even earlier for their hardest of hardcore fans. Which is a week today. Here’s a good reason to get excited: the multiplayer is being made by DICE, and from we saw, it’s a cross between Bad Company 2 and Modern Warfare 2.
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit is coming to PC
EA have just launched the latest Need for Speed game, it’s Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, and it’s being developed by Burnout creators Criterion. In the demo shown at the EA E3 press conference, a Koenigsegg was chased by police driving Buggati Verons through a vast redwood forest. It was pretty, exciting and fast. But it’s the new online features that offer the most intricate innovation.
Star Wars: The Old Republic gets spaceship houses
The Old Republic has one upped World of Warcraft – it’s getting player housing. That’s the first message that came out of developer Bioware’s presentation at the E3 press conference in Los Angeles. Each player will get a space-ship – different ships for Republic and Empire characters. The Sith ship looked like a tricked out TIE Fighter, while the Republic ship looked like an early version of the old Corellian Corvettes. EA will be showing The Old Republic’s first player versus player battlegrounds – set on Alderaan – on the show floor tomorrow. It will be our first stop. There’s a new pre-rendered trailer online now – and it’s below the break.
Bethesda’s Hunted: The Demon’s Forge E3 trailer
The first in-game footage of Brian Fargo’s co-op fantasy combat game has been seen by my eyes and embedded in this post. Fargo, who founded Interplay, sees it as a return to the old-school dungeon crawlers. My eyes, who founded this trailer, see it as a pretty frenetic hack-and-slash with some nice monsters and a few hints at interesting co-op moves. See what yours think.
Is Fable 3 Xbox exclusive?
According to Peter Molyneux at Microsoft’s Xbox E3 conference, his company’s third Fable game is “exclusive to Xbox 360.”
But that’s not a definite recipe for panic, friends. Microsoft have confirmed in a press release dated May 21 that the PC would be receiving its own version of Molyneux’s action-RPG, albeit a touch later than the console outing. If that official announcement is to be believed, we’ll be getting a PC version of Fable 3 around Christmas of this year.
EA announce Bad Company 2: Vietnam
EDIT: THIS IS CONFIRMED. MORE SOON.
A Battlefield: Bad Company 2 expansion may be on the way. According to a translated press release at NoFrag, today EA are to announce a cross-game reward scheme that would give items and beta access to players of Dead Space 2, Medal of Honor, Bad Company 2, and “a brand new digital expansion pack for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 taking place in Vietnam”. It would reward players for owning one game by giving them new weapons in another, or early access to the Medal of Honor beta. The translated (and possibly garbled) press release states “By using their profile as a profile of existing EA Member of the Gun Club, players will access content that could give them an edge in combat.”
Lending some credibility to the story, the Gun Club site the supposed release links does exist as part of ea.com, but currently requires a username and password to access. We’ll be at the EA press conference today, and bring you more, and more pertinent details.
Pre-order Elemental, play the beta now
Tom once wrote a book about Galactic Civilizations, Stardock’s brilliant turn based space-bunny bothering strategy game. So, you can kind of understand if we’ve got a softspot for them. Stardock now have a beta ongoing for their next game – the fantasy empire building and strategy of Elemental: War of Magic. You can play the game right now if you pre-order. There’s a movie to show you what you’re getting below the break.
Via RPS.
Fallout: New Vegas trailer
Obsidian, the crack team of sequelologists who’ve been making Fallout 3′s followup, Fallout: New Vegas, have just released a trailer. It contains the mandatory quota of explosions and shooty bang, showing some new weapons (including a very explodey detonator thingy towards the end), and it’s heavy with Fallout’s characteristic juxtaposition of being melted by a robot in a nuclear dystopia while toe tapping to care-free ’40s crooners.
Taking Liberties: a Deus Ex story
What, exactly, is so great about Deus Ex? It didn’t sell amazingly well, and plenty of gamers played it and just didn’t see the point. Why all the reverence? Why is this talked about like it’s the Mona Lisa of game design?
My exact answer changes each time I write about this, but like any Deus Ex fan, I always end up using the first level as an example. Liberty Island – tiny by island standards, but huge for an open-air game level. It showcased everything that was unique and exciting about the game’s open-ended approach to missions, demand for tactical planning, and constant surprises. So I played through that level one more time, the way I like to play, and used everything that happened as a demonstration of why I love this game like nothing else.
Crysis 2 is in 3D: will you get the goggles?
Crysis 2 is to be capable of being played in 3D, in both the single player story and competitive multiplayer according to a story in USA Today. Cervat Yerli, the Crytek CEO, said “the success of 3-D movies like Avatar and the introduction of 3-D TVs from the hardware manufacturers tells us that this is the next big movement in entertainment, much like HD was years ago.” But are you going to fork out for the inevitable 3D goggles?
APB designer: expansions might have zombies
APB lead designer EJ Moreland has dropped the zomb-bomb – Realtime Worlds have considered a massively-multiplayer zombie game based on the technology of APB. Speaking to PC Gamer, “APB,” says EJ, is a “giant construction kit. We know we can do this cool urban combat, but what else can we do with it?”
New Deus Ex designer criticises Invisible War
The lead designer of Deus Ex: Human Revolution has criticised the second game in the series, saying that its opening was unengaging, and that the setting was ‘too futuristic.’
Blizzard cut ‘Path of the Titans’, guild talents from Catacylsm
Remember those lovely guild talent trees – the fun perks that guild leaders could choose when they levelled up? Or the Paths of the Titans, the progression and character customisation system that was meant to apply to players beyond World of Warcraft’s level cap? Well they’re gone. Kaput. No more.
StarCraft 2 to get built-in replay uploads
Chris Sigurty, lead producer on StarCraft II, has told PC Gamer that the game will eventually include the ability to upload and download replays of matches to Blizzard’s Battle.net service.
