It’s a big day for Left 4 Dead developer Turtle Rock’s new monster-hunting game Evolve. The 4v1 shooter on Tuesday added a host of new content, including the Behemoth Monster, four new hunters, two free maps, and the Observer Mode.
Watch the video above to see the new content in action.
A full breakdown of all the new content available now for Evolve is below. Note that the two free maps are launching first today on Xbox One, and will come to PC and PlayStation 4 at the end of April.
Fourth playable Monster: Behemoth. Free for everyone who pre-ordered Evolve. Otherwise, players can buy the monster for $15 through the Monster Expansion Pack.
Four new playable Hunters: Included with the $25 Hunting Season Pass or $7.50 each.
Torvald — A Cyborg Assault character with a mortar cannon for an arm
Crow — A Trapper with a pet Batray for tracking Monsters
Slim — A genetically modified combat Medic
Sunny — A Support character equipped with a mini-nuke grenade launcher
Two free maps: The Broken Hill Mine and Broken Hill Foundry. These will launch first on Xbox One before they arrive on PC and PlayStation 4 on April 30.
Players who do not buy Behemoth or the new Hunters are still able to play against or alongside the new characters. Publisher 2K says this will add “depth and replayability for the entire Evolve community without dividing players based on what additional content they own.”
PC gaming company Raptr on Tuesday announced the latest evolution of its platform. The company has released Plays.tv, a new, Instagram-like service that’s described as a “fun, easy way for gamers to capture their most interesting gameplay moments and instantly share them.”
Overall, Plays.tv is all about “celebrating the pro in every gamer,” the company says. Raptr has even formed a partnership with professional eSports squad Team Dignitas for Plays.tv.
Gameplay recording game to Raptr last year, and so far, players have captured more than four million highlight videos from their play sessions. Plays.tv aims to offer a dedicated venue for players to showcase their favorite highlight reels.
Introduced today in beta, the Plays.tv client–which is free and works with any PC game–allows users to capture, edit, and then share their gameplay clips either to the Plays.tv feed (above) or to social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Similar functionality exists on consoles like the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
Raptr promises that the new Plays.tv client won’t be too much of a performance hog, noting that it uses “hardware-accelerated video encoding to ensure minimal impact on performance.” In addition, Plays.tv can capture a user’s webcam to allow for picture-in-picture. The client also supports videos recorded using other programs such as OBS and Nvidia’s Shadowplay.
Below is a quick-hit roundup, courtesy of Raptr, of all the Plays.tv functionality.
Instantly share short highlights from any game (up to the last 20 mins)
Edit and trim clips from full session replays
Follow friends, eSports stars, popular streamers and others
Simultaneously post videos to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social networks
Relive amazing moments with friends and the community
In addition, Raptr today announced that it has raised a new round of funding to the tune of $14 million, some of which will go towards the continued development of Plays.tv. The money comes from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Accel Partners, DAG Ventures, and Tenaya Capital. This latest latest round of financing boosts Raptr’s total venture capital funding to $41 million since the company got off the ground in 2007.
For more on Raptr’s announcements today, check out GameSpot’s interview with CEO Dennis Fong.
GameSpot: What does the $14 million in additional funding allow you to do that you couldn’t before?
Fong: Well, Plays.tv is just in its infancy and we plan to add a lot of cool features to it to make it the best community for capturing and sharing your gaming highlights. We want Plays.tv to be a place where gamers can memorialize and relive their best moments, which means potentially a whole lot of bandwidth and storage costs as serving video can be rather expensive. That’s what we signed up for, though, and we’re very excited about it. 🙂
How did you decide that this “Pro Moment Capture” technology was something you wanted to pursue? Did Raptr users bring it up as a feature they wanted to see?
Raptr users have recorded over four million video clips in the nine months since we added video capture, so that was certainly a huge datapoint for us that our community wanted to record clips of themselves playing. But they also expressed a bit of disappointment in the options we originally provided for sharing that content–Facebook and Twitter aren’t really ideal for sharing your gaming life, and YouTube is so broad and sprawling that users’ highlight vids seemed to just get lost in the avalanche of content on that site.
With that feedback in mind, it’s not so much about the technology of capturing/editing/sharing, but the fact that we wanted a community that was centered around sharing and celebrating those moments that make gaming so awesome. I’ve always saved screenshots and such as I was playing, but I never felt comfortable sharing them on Facebook or Twitter. Now that we’ve made saving video clips as easy as taking a screenshot, we wanted to create a home for all those clips We also recognized that not everyone wanted to use Raptr for this, so we created a Plays.tv client that just does video capture, editing, and sharing.
What are the free vs. paid functionality differences? Are there any?
The entire Plays.tv service is entirely free, including the Plays.tv client which does video capture, editing, and sharing.
How did Team Dignitas get involved with this effort; what does their involvement mean for the product?
We approached Team Dignitas to see if they’d be interested in trying out Plays.tv in beta; they’ve just begun to use the site and client, but so far they’re loving it. We believe that Plays.tv should be a community that involves all kinds of PC gamers, including pros like the Team Dignitas players; we expect their highlight vids will really appeal to the everyday gamers who make up the majority of Plays.tv members. Likewise, pros like Team Dignitas now have a less time-consuming, less “resource-intensive” way of reaching existing fans and attracting new fans, so it’s a win-win. We’re very interested in working with Team Dignitas and other pro teams and players to make Plays.tv as valuable to them as possible!
Bungie’s sci-fi shooter Destiny will be getting a new battleground this week in the form of Inferno Clash. Detailed on the Bungie blog, Inferno Clash will contain a few characteristics that were present in Inferno Control mode but has a heavier emphasis on scoring kills.
These include the removal of the radar on the HUD, placing only one set of heavy ammo crates per match, and simplified scoring. For the latter, Bungie has removed “as many scoring events as possible” and made it so that assists will no longer be awarded points. The map rotation will also be carried over from Inferno Control, which featured the following maps featured in the line-up:
In the latest Inner Circle podcast, ID@Xbox director Chris Charla said “I would love to see [No Man’s Sky]” on the Xbox One, but that it was up to the game’s developer, Hello Games.
Charla understands that a lot of developers might be avoiding Microsoft because of the parity clause, but he said more developers need to simply reach out to Microsoft and talk about it.
“If you’re worried about policies,” he said, “we try to be really easy to get in touch with. When we talk to developers, we try to be really transparent. Don’t assume that something you read on Neogaf is our policy, just talk to us.”
The parity clause, which requires games launch on the same day they do on other platforms like the PlayStation 4 or PC, has been the topic of some controversy among gamers and developers alike. It was put in place, according to Xbox director Phil Spencer, to make Xbox One owners feel “first class.” As Charla discussed in the podcast, however, it can also make gamers feel left out when a game they really want doesn’t launch on the console because of a business decision.
Earlier this month, Charla said that Microsoft isn’t as strict about the parity rule as people think, saying, “If it’s a situation where a developer needs to ship serially on consoles because they don’t have the resources to simultaneously ship, we totally get that. It’s no problem. Our6 goal is to make sure that if a developer wants to ship their game on Xbox one, that they can ship their game on Xbox One.”
Charla added that Microsoft doesn’t want developers taking a payment for exclusivity on another platform and then releasing “some months later” on the Xbox One without adding something to make it “fresh” for Xbox owners.
2K Sports has announced a new WWE mobile game, which it says in a press release is the “first simulation-based WWE video game.” The game is due out this spring across iOS and Android devices for $8.
2K says the WWE 2K game (that’s it’s official title) aims to offer “authentic gameplay in a mobile format” by way of incorporating many of the features found in the console editions on mobile. This includes live multiplayer, various unlockables, a create-a-character mode, and more.
Here’s a quick rundown, courtesy of 2K, of everything you can expect in WWE 2K for mobile.
Playable roster of many fan-favorite WWE Superstars, including John Cena, Hulk Hogan, Sting, Triple H, Undertaker, Daniel Bryan, Roman Reigns, Seth Rollins, Dean Ambrose, and Bray Wyatt;
Authentic WWE action, including three match types, full WWE Superstar ring entrances and comprehensive move sets;
Create-a-Superstar;
Career Mode;
Live Multiplayer Matches;
Unlockable Rewards.
WWE 2K is in development at Visual Concepts and n-Space. It’s not the first WWE 2K game for mobile devices, as 2K also operates the free WWE 2K Supercard game, which has seen more than 6.8 million downloads since its first arrived in August 2014, according to a press release.
For a closer look at WWE 2K for mobile, check out the images in the gallery below.
It’s one thing to see a hand-picked comparison video , it’s another to sit down with the real thing ourselves, so I thought I’d fire up the fan-made (but Valve-endorsed) Half-Life 2: Update and see just how improved Valve’s classic shooter really is.
We’ve never been here before, but it sure feels like we have. It’s hard to watch the first five minutes of Axiom Verge and not feel just a little bit Metroid-y.
