Deus Ex: Human Revolution trailer celebrates launch, questions Jensen’s humanity
The launch trailer for Deus Ex: Human Revolution is here! Which means Deus Ex: Human Revolution is very nearly out, in North America, anyway. Europeans and Australians have a few more painstaking days to wait before it unlocks.
The launch trailer, seen on CVG, is infused with the golden, cyberpunk glow we’ve seen from all of the Human Revolution videos. Watch, and be excited, or if your copy of the game has unlocked already, don’t watch, just play. Read the PC Gamer verdict in our Deus Ex: Human Revolution review.
Shoot Many Robots trailer blasts a few mechs
Shoot Many Robots is not a game about petting puppies. Nor is it a game about serving tea to Japanese diplomats. It is in fact a game in which you launch explosive projectiles at mechanised war-objects to eviscerate or otherwise destroy them. There will be more than one of these mechanoids. There will be many.
Demiurge Studios’ first original project is a sideways blaster with support for four player co-op. You’ll have to fend off an army of chainsaw-wielding chopper bots, shooty tank bots and gargantuan bots whose only purpose is TO CRUSH. Crush them right back, with fire. Find out more on the Shoot Many Robots site. It’s due out next year.
From Dust DRM to be patched out
Ubisoft have decided to remove From Dust’s controversial DRM system that requires players to be online whenever the game is launched.
A post from Ubisoft on their forums, spotted on Eurogamer, says that a patch will arrive in approximately two weeks to remove the start up authentication procedure. They say that the development time is needed to ensure that players’ game saves, currently stored on Ubisoft’s servers, are relocated to users’ hard drives before the servers are switched off.
“Once the patch is ready, players who already have the game will automatically receive the update on their next login and subsequent game sessions will be 100 per cent offline,” reads the forum post.
And in other PC gaming news…
The embargo has lifted, our Deus Ex review is online and you can finally see how much we liked it. How much did Tom Francis like it? He liked it so much, he cybernetically enhanced himself into a bionic killing machine (pictured above). He no longer uses a monitor, but merely plugs his eyes directly into the PC, his hands interface directly with the keyboard, his mind is connected wirelessly to the internet at all times. He has become Francis-bot 2027, and he knows only three commands ‘write’, ‘play Deus Ex’ and ‘kill’.
Check inside for a selection of non-linear, choice driven PC gaming news.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution has in-game advertising
Our of Deus Ex: Human Revolution review is now online – it’s awesome. But there’s one aspect of it that’ll change when the game launches this week (tomorrow in the US, Friday in Europe). Dotted around Human Revolution’s city hubs are large billboards, which currently advertise the game’s developer, Eidos Montreal. When it launches, these will be populated with ads for real-world products.
Eidos say they’ll be filtering them to make sure they make sense for the game world, and these billboards are in bright, commercial, inner-city areas – I didn’t see any where it didn’t make sense for a billboard to be. In a previous build of the game they showed placeholder Coca-Cola and Subway ads, and I have to say I didn’t notice them at all.
I think it’s a dick move to milk more money out of gamers who’ve already paid full price, but I also think a new Deus Ex game, one actually worthy of the name, is too important to boycott.
Diablo 3 game director on lack of offline mode: “the game’s not really being played right if it’s not online”
We met up with Diablo 3 game director, Jay Wilson at Gamescom to discuss Diablo 3′s always-online requirement and some of the issues that PC gamers can face when playing online-only games.
Some players might not have access to a stable internet connection. What should a player do if, say, the internet wiring in his house is flawed?
“Erm… upgrade the wiring in his house?” suggests Wilson. “I mean, in this day and age the notion that there’s this a whole vast majority of players out there that don’t have online connectivity – this doesn’t really fly any more.
“I mean, at our hotel, there’s nine wi-fi networks that I can access. Just from the hotel! And they’re all public – they’re all paid – but they’re pretty cheap, and they’re all publicly available. So the notion that there’s just tons and tons of people out there that aren’t connected – isn’t… I don’t think is really accurate.”
Get £100 off a new MSI laptop
Fancy getting £100 off a top end gaming laptop? MSI is today launching a cashback scheme offering to return up to one hundred of your finest pounds in a cashback scheme if you buy one of its four of its best performing notebooks. It’s available to UK customers only and with the caveat that the laptop must be bought from a UK store.
We wouldn’t normally report on this sort of promotion, except that it extends to the GX660R range which won the most recent laptop round up in PCG 228.
Notch on the Bethesda lawsuit, in court and in Quake 3: “I will fight this for as long as it takes”
Recently, Minecraft creator Notch challenged Bethesda to settle their legal dispute over the name of Mojang’s next game, Scrolls with a game of Quake 3. He’s since spoken to Wired about his chances, with reference in particular to the fact that Bethesda own id, and therefore Quake, and are likely to have some quite good Quake 3 players on staff.
“In retrospect, Quake 3 might have been a poor choice,” says Notch.
Anno 2070 trailer builds cities under the sea
The first screenshots revealed that, for the first time, Anno will be heading into the future. What we didn’t know until Gamescom last week was that you’ll be able to use that future tech to expand your cities beyond the shores of their islands, to the seabed below, where there seem to be lava pits. Rich, tasty, resourceful lava pits. Owen saw the Gamescom demo, and says it looked so pretty it made him fear for his PC. Find out more on the official Anno 2070 site.
Battlefield 3 will have 24 player team deathmatch
Battlefield 3′s team deathmatch mode will be a smaller, vehicle-less affair than the sprawling 64 player Conquest mode that we saw demoed spectacularly at Gamescom last week. DICE confirmed to the BF3 blog that team deathmatch mode will support 24 player, infantry only scraps. It may be less than Conquest mode, but it’s a step above Battlefield: Bad Company 2′s 16 player contests.
Tank fans, fear not. There will be plenty of opportunity to run over cars, enemy soldiers and small animals in single player, and more exciting opportunities to shoot down jets in tanks, divebomb tanks in jets and fly jets into other jets in Battlefield 3′s biggest multiplayer maps. We recently learned that we’ll have to use the Battlelog website to access multiplayer. Battlefield 3 is out on October 25in the US, October 27 in Australia and October 28 in Europe.
Blizzard DOTA “flattened,” rebuilt to be “more user friendly”
Blizzard senior game designer Jonny Ebbert has been talking to Eurogamer about the current state of Blizzard’s version of DOTA. It’s being developed as a StarCraft 2 mod, but has been changed drastically since its showing at last year’s Blizzcon. “We’ve completely flattened it since then,” said Ebbert, “and completely rebooted it because we just thought, there’s more we can question on this.”
Prototype 2 trailer tells story so far, screenshots are Heller violent
Be warned, this Prototype 2 trailer contains major spoilers for Prototype 1. Very major spoilers. In fact, ALL of the spoilers. The entire plot is laid bare, and acts as a set up for the rise of the new similar-but-angrier protagonist, Sergeant James Heller, who is coincidentally the star of a batch of new Prototype 2 screenshots. See his many mutant arms doing terrible things to tanks, helicopters and men in armoured battlesuits below.
Saturday Crapshoot: The Nameless Mod
Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. This week, prepare to enter a world where fandom carries a gun, everyone gets to rock cool trenchcoats, and you’re never alone with a spork.
With the exception of Invisible War, the great shame of Deus Ex’s legacy is that almost nobody’s ever really tried to beat it. Vampire: Bloodlines got the closest, E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy… uh… exists. A few others have taken on board individual ideas, like offering stealthy options, or giving you a sack of gadgets. Nothing however has that same hook of being dropped into a world with a bag of tricks, and invited to make your own way through it. Will Human Revolution finally be the successor we’re all longing for? “Hopefully!” I say, in the shifty tone of one who finished it about two weeks ago, but isn’t allowed to give away any actual details for another week or so. Still, I remember it like it was yesterday.
Unless you follow the mod scene though, it’s likely that you’ve not played one of the best things to come from Deus Ex, and one of the best single-player mods in general. Meet The Nameless Mod, one of the coolest attempts to recreate the original magic, and a fine adventure in its own right. What better way to whet your appetite for the official sequel? Team Fortress 2 weapons? Bah! Prepare to enter Forum City, where conspiracy and intrigue aren’t simply life and death. They’re Serious Business…
