Crysis 2 map making tools arriving tomorrow, DX11 video released
Alongside the release of a series of advanced DirectX 11 graphical features yesterday, EA also announced that “PC gamers can design their own maps and create their own epic battleground with the Map Editor Pack which can be downloaded at http://mycrysis.com for no cost starting Wednesday.”
Crytek have also put out a new video showing some of the new DirectX 11 features in action, just in case you didn’t know what Custom Shape Based Bokeh DOF looks like (it’s sort of blurry). For the full list of new graphical features added by the update, check out the 1.9 patch notes.
PC Gamer UK Podcast 58 – Hitman: Absolution, Bioshock Infinite and Team Fortress 2
Tim, Rich, Craig and Tom Francis amass for episode 58 of the PC Gamer UK Podcast. Topics include Hitman Absolution, Bioshock Infinite and Valve’s recent Team Fortress 2 announcement. Of course, we answer a stack of your Twitter questions too.
Download the MP3, subscribe, or find our older podcasts here. Thanks for listening, and don’t forget to let us know what you think in the comments.
Orcs Must Die! trailer shows steam traps and airborne Orcs
If you have a friend, relative or pet who is an Orc, avert your eyes from the video above. Steam traps are latest death contraption to be revealed for Orc-slaughter sim, Orcs must die. Warm gusts of steam waft the trap’s victim upwards into a secondary trap, or a hard ceiling-shaped object.
Orcs Must Die is a tower defense game in which you must stop armies of Orcs from leaving the tower or fortress they’re spawning in. To do this you must make use of a variety of traps, towers and personal weapons like fire bracers and electric crossbows to hold back the green tide and protect the clueless villagers outside. The game’s due out this summer. Find out more on the Orcs Must Die site.
Call of Duty: Black Ops best selling game ever in UK
According to ChartTrack, this month saw Call of Duty: Black Ops become the UK’s best selling game of all time, beating its closest rival, Modern Warfare 2, by around 20 thousand copies.
Since its launch last November, 3,722,411 copies of the game have been sold in the UK. CVG report that Activision recently confirmed that Black Ops was already the best selling game ever across North America and Europe in a recent earnings call, with 33% more unique players than Modern Warfare 2.
Civilization V patch improves AI and adds hotseat multiplayer
Civilization V has received an enormous patch designed to improve enemy AI and rebalance the game to make higher difficulty levels more challenging. The new patch also adds a multiplayer hotseat mode, compatible with all Civ V maps. While email multiplayer hasn’t been implemented yet, the update allows players to save between turns to make it easier to swap saves by email manually.
The comedy fix award for this set of patch notes goes to the entry that claims to have “made backstab routine more transparent” for more in-your-face AI betrayal. Despots will also be pleased to know that “liberty and Autocracy are no longer mutually exclusive.” You’ll find the full patch notes below, as listed on Steam.
AOC releases USB powered screens
High end gaming PCs aren’t the power hungry kilowatt killers that they used to be, but I still feel guilty every time I fit a 250W TDP graphics card to a new machine. Guilt of the kind that only someone who was taught by nuns can feel. Hence a more than passing interest in AOC’s latest screens. They’re so low power, they can be run off a USB port.
According the specs, the AOC e2251Fwu, which is being launched today, can hold its own with the best too. Highlights of the 22 inch screen include a 1000:1 contrast ratio, 5ms response rate and a 200cd/m2 nit rating for brightness. AOC is billing its low power usage as perfect for a large photo frame, but if it really is that efficient then it’s far more interesting for multi monitor set-ups that won’t burn your flesh off or send your electricity bill spiralling.
Portal 2 mapping contest winners announced
One month ago we mentioned the start of the Thinkingwithportals.com Portal 2 mapping contest, a Valve-endorsed competition to find the best new community made maps for Portal 2. After 140 hours of judging, the 13 judges have decided on the winners.
First prize was taken by Patent Pending by ebola. Second place was won by, Infinifling by MrTwoVideoCards, and Edifice by Omnicoder took a close third place.
The winners were announced on the Portal 2 site, along with instructions on how to download and play the maps. You’ll find more runners-up maps listed on thinkingwithportals.com. The fan-made test chambers should tide us over nicely until Valve release their first chunk of Portal 2 DLC, which is set to add new test chambers, leaderboards and challenge modes to the game later this summer.
Guild Wars 2 trailers show underwater combat, dungeons detailed
ArenaNet have dropped more info on how dungeons will work in Guild Wars 2. The world of Tyria will contain eight instanced group missions, made gradually available from level 35 onwards. Each dungeon has a story mode and an exploration mode. Once dungeon’s story has been completed, groups will be able to pick their choice of three advanced explorable versions of that dungeon. Each version will come with different challenges, including new boss fights and enemies.
The dungeons are completely optional, but come with their own background and storylines and are packed full of loot. The trailer above sets up the catacombs, inhabited by the ghosts of a dead army, cursed by their jerk of a king to defend the city until the end of time. VG247 have eight minutes of footage of a team battling their way through the catacombs. It also gives us a glimpse of the underwater combat ArenaNet recently revealed. You’ll find the video embedded below.
Shift 2 Unleashed Legends and Speedhunters DLC to be released free on PC
The Legends and Speedhunters DLC packs for Need for Speed: Shift 2 Unleashed will be released for free on PC this week on EA’s new digital download service, Origin. Between them the packs add more than twenty new cars, five new tracks and new racing modes, including drag racing.
The two packs were released in April and May this year on the Xbox 360 as paid-for packs. As of June 30, this Thursday, they’ll be free to all PC gamers. Head over to the Need for Speed site for guides on how to grab the new packs through Origin.
And in other PC gaming news…
We’re free, Lulsec are gone, and we can now hopefully play our games without fear of having to change our passwords again. What will we be playing? Probably Team Fortress 2, after all we need to educate all the new players with our snazzy guides (and also use them to score cheap kills).
Other news, which for once doesn’t involve hacking, is below.
PC Gamer US Podcast #277: Free’d
To free, or not to free? Does a game by any other price play as sweet? On this week’s podcast (a few days late, due to crows), we break down the significance of Team Fortress 2 being a $0 game, and decide which class “won” the Über Update. Also talked: Arma 2: Free, L.A. Noire’s arrival on PC this Fall, and Evan sings the praises of his favorite community-made L4D2 content, Questionable Ethics and Let’s Build A Rocket.
Tribes: Ascend will be free to play, first gameplay footage
Revealing the first in-game footage of Tribes: Ascend, developer Hi-Rez Studios has also announced that the multiplayer shooter will be free to play. IGN has the gameplay teaser. Global Agenda, Hi-Rez’s massively-multiplayer shooter, re-released on Steam earlier this month as a free-to-play game.
I got to touch Tribes two weeks ago when I traveled to Hi-Rez–look for a preview in our next issue, and impressions on my time with Tribes on this Thursday’s podcast.
US Supreme Court strikes down game law – you still shouldn’t let your kids play Bulletstorm
In a complete lack of surprise, the United States Supreme Court has upheld the lower court’s decision that California’s attempt to ban the sale of violent games to minors is unconstitutional. The vote was seven to two, with Justices Thomas and Breyer dissenting. You can read the full, massive PDF of the ruling here, but here’s the gist of it:
“Like the protected books, plays, and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world). That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.”
“…The State wishes to create a wholly new category of content-based regulation that is permissible only for speech directed at children. That is unprecedented and mistaken. This country has no tradition of specially restricting children’s access to depictions of violence.”
“California’s claim that ’interactive’ video games present special problems, in that the player participates in the violent action on screen and determines its outcome, is unpersuasive.”
So +1 to freedom of speech! It’s a good day for gamers – not because it’s a good idea to expose children to games in which human entrails are playthings, but because (among other things) if each state had been allowed to create its own criteria for what’s violent and what’s not, it’d make selling such games nearly impossible.
Crysis 2 DirectX 11 patch released
Three months after the release of Crysis 2, Crytek has finally released a trio of patches, totaling 2.32GB, to enable its promised DX11 features. According to our calculations, that’s at least two more DirectXes than it had at launch. It’ll definitely look prettier now (not that it was ever even close to ugly to begin with), but will that be enough to bring you back to play the game again, or has its moment in the spotlight already passed?
Edit: EA follows up by announcing that the map editor will be available for download from mycrysis.com this Wednesday.
World of Tanks creator: after Warplanes “we will do Battleships”
We recently got the chance to catch up with Wargaming.net’s CEO, Victor Kislyi about the monster success of World of Tanks, and what comes next: World of Warplanes, and possible further continuations of the series. Kislyi revealed that Wargaming.net are already thinking about where to go after World of Warplanes, suggesting that battleships are the obvious next direction.
When asked why Wargaming.net decided to do Warplanes as their next game, Kislyi said it was down to the number of requests on the World of Tanks forums, and added that “when players talk about what they want us to do for the next game, of course they say battleships because there is a lot of Navy Field players playing our game that don’t seem to believe in Navy Field 2.”
