Gravity continue to lead the standings in the NA LCS this week while TIP, TL, and CLG are all tied neck and neck. Unfortunately, this past weekend TDK secured their auto relegation position in the NA LCS and will not compete in the Spring 2016 split.
Team SoloMid is one game behind the pack in 5th place, while Dignitas has fallen to sixth. Cloud9 continues to look strong and show improvement after a very disappointing start and middle of the split. They won their first match against NME and just narrowly lost their second match against CLG.
Publisher Square Enix has released the debut trailer for Life is Strange Episode 4 ahead of its release date on July 28.
Entitled ‘Dark Room’, Episode 4 follows Max as she pursues her investigation surrounding the disappearance of fellow student Rachel Amber. This fourth and penultimate chapter will ship on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.
A promotional blurb from Square Enix reads: “As the End of the World party approaches, Max must use her powers to put all the pieces of the puzzle in place.”
Meanwhile, Square Enix has also revealed that Life is Strange has surpassed one million sales since the release of its debut episode in January. “This is a huge achievement for the small team working on the game,” the publisher said.
Developed at Paris studio Dontnod, Life is Strange has been widely praised by critics for attention to detail in depicting student life, along with how a time-reversal mechanic is threaded into its gameplay.
GameSpot’s Life is Strange Episode One Review described it as “an involving slice of life that works because its situations eloquently capture a peculiar early-college state of mind.” Reviews for Episode 2 and Episode 3 were similarly positive.
Dying Light may be adding vehicles into the zombie survival title as part of a new line of DLC, its developer has teased.
A new video from Poland studio Techland highlights content made available for Dying Light in the six months since release, closing with the words “and we’ve still got more,” followed by a shot of a dune buggy revving its engine above empty fields. That trailer can be seen below.
It is unclear whether the suggested vehicle DLC will take place in a new area or in the original setting of Harran.
In June, Techland chief executive Pawel Marchewka hinted that a major expansion to Dying Light is in development. Regarding the future of the game, Marchewka said: “We are thinking about maybe something really of bigger scope.”
In the six months since its release, Techland has released three paid DLC packs for Dying light including The Bozak Horde DLC, which was released in May.
In 2013, Techland announced the fantasy hack’n’slash game Hellraid, but has said that for the time being, its resources are being concentrated on Dying Light.
Dead Island developer Techland’s open-world zombie game Dying Light has another expansion in the works, this one involving vehicles. That’s according to a new video released on Thursday in which Techland teases the “next big addition” to the multiple million-selling action game.
The video, called 180 Days of Content, highlights all of the major expansions released for Dying Light in the half-year since its launch back in February 2015.
Skip ahead to about the 2:10 mark to get a glimpse at the upcoming vehicle-focused expansion.
There isn’t much to go on at the moment, but it looks like players will get to drive buggy-style cars. Dying Light producer Tymon Smektala said in a statement that Techland will show the expansion to media at Gamescom in August, with its “big public reveal” coming soon after that.
“We’re really excited to finally be able to show this major project we’ve been secretly working on since the release of the game,” Smektala said. “This is Dying Light from totally new angle, but with everything fans love about the original still at the core.”
Seattle Seahawks star Marshawn Lynch is the top-rated overall running back in Madden NFL 16, according to player ratings released this week. But the Seahawks apparently were unhappy with Beast Mode’s 98 Trucking rating–and they let developer EA Sports know.
What they might not have expected, however, was an epic comeback from EA Sports involvingthat play from Super Bowl XLIX. Take a look at the Twitter exchange below to see how it all went down.
As GameSpot sister site CBS Sports reports, people are still talking about Seattle’s decision to throw from the one-yard line in Super Bowl XLIX. Clearly, the topic still has legs.
Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima has shared an image of what he’s calling the “final” poster for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain–and it’s certainly quite a sight to behold.
It depicts Snake and Quiet covered in blood, with the text reading, “Stained in blood, the aftermath of revenge.” The poster will be displayed in “limited” stores starting in August.
There is some amount of controversy surrounding The Phantom Pain. According to GameSpot’s sources, Kojima will leave Konami after the game ships. Just recently, a voice actor for the series claimed that the game’s developer, Kojima Productions, had disbanded. What’s more, new videos suggest that Kojima himself may have referenced his own forthcoming departure from Konami.
What do you make of the poster? Let us know in the comments below.
Microsoft has granted victims of revenge porn the option to remove sexually explicit content of themselves from its cloud services.
The new powers come by way of an online form that allows users to report instances of sexually explicit photos or videos of themselves. The form also includes a section for users to include related documents including police reports and restraining orders.
t is not clear how Xbox Live is used to disseminate revenge porn, nor to what extent.
As well as deleting offensive images from both OneDrive and Xbox Live, Microsoft is also willing to remove such material from Bing search results.
Microsoft’s chief online safety office, Jacqueline Beauchere, detailed the new procedure in a blog post on Monday. “We want to help put victims back in control of their images and their privacy.” Beauchere wrote.
“Revenge porn” is a term for the publication of sensitive, and usually explicit, images of a person’s ex-partner. A recent report from UK police has shown that British Law enforcement is dealing with the largest volume of revenge porn allegations in its history.
It is not clear how Xbox Live is used to disseminate revenge porn, nor to what extent.
Microsoft is the latest in a long line of web-based companies taking measures to combat revenge porn. In March, social media site Twitter banned the practice, while internet giant Google took the decision to delist revenge porn results from its search engine.
As of writing, Microsoft’s form has only so far been made available in English but, Beauchere explains, it will be expanded to other languages in the coming weeks.
“Clearly, this reporting mechanism is but one small step in a growing and much-needed effort across the public and private sectors to address the problem.”
John Smedley, the founder of Sony Online Entertainment and chief executive of its reformed company Daybreak, is stepping down from his role as head of the company.
It is not immediately clear if Smedley was asked to leave or if the move was his decision.
The well-known games executive had managed his company for close to two decades, forming it in 1998 under the name Verant Interactive. In 2000, Sony purchased the San Diego business and renamed it Sony Online Entertainment, with Smedley still in charge of day-to-day operations. Then in February, Sony sold the firm to Columbus Nova, and Smedley’s studio was renamed Daybreak.
But in recent years Smedley has been repeatedly targeted by a convicted hacker and internet troll, Julius “Zeekill” Kivimaki, who managed to ground a plane that Smedley was on board in 2014 by issuing a hoax bomb threat.
An increasingly bitter row between the two has begun to boil over into social media. In early July, Smedley appeared displeased by the decision of a court in Espoo, Finland, to not imprison Kivimaki despite convicting him of more than 50,000 internet-related crimes.
At one stage, Smedley appeared to threaten Kivimaki, writing: “His parents need to be held accountable for his actions in addition to his going to jail. So I’m coming for you Julius.”
Now, in a statement issued to GamesBeat, a representative for Daybreak explained that Smedley was taking time off, and would return under a different role.
“I can confirm that John Smedley will be taking some time off from the company for the near-term and transitioning to a different role to be determined,” the spokesperson said.
“Upon finalization of his plans, further communication will be provided.”
Speaking to GameSpot two weeks ago, Team Liquid’s Xpecialpredicted a LCS format change to best of two matches, instead of the best of one games that teams play currently. The support player believes the alternative league style is more competitive, in part because it forces teams to adapt.
Xpecial’s teammate, Quas, believes that best of two’s add more excitement to the game, though he suggests that best of three might be even more ideal. Alternatively, Fenixenjoys the possibility of upsets in matches and the feeling that any team can walk away a winner in a best of one game. In an upcoming interview with GameSpot, Team Liquid jungler IWDominate expresses appreciation for a best of two format where teams clash once a split – a schedule that would allow teams to only visit the studio once a week.
On CLG, both Aphromoo and Pobelter want the suggested format change. Pobelter thinks the change would make NA LCS more interesting and that playing more than one game at a time could help the region’s chances on the international stage. Aphromoo agrees with his teammate, but also would like to see the change because he dislikes the current pro player plight of traveling to the studio and spending the day there, only to play a single game.
Gravity’s Bunny voted against his coach in an interview with the pair. Cop believes a best of two format better represents the strength of the teams playing. While Bunny admitted that he agreed with his coach, he feels that only having to play a single game a day is a better experience for LCS players.
Finally, Lemonnation reiterated comments he had made previously on reddit: best of two is the favored format of the Cloud9 support due to his belief that it adds more strategy to the game and allows a balance of blue and red side gameplay from both competitors.
((Editor’s Note: The original version of this article did not include IWDominate’s stance. This was a mistake and has been corrected.))
Human beings are often afraid of new things. And apparently, I am afraid of moving my own floating cities.
The city in question was Deepcastle, the capital city of my burgeoning water-based empire in a recent game of Civilization: Beyond Earth – The Rising Tide. As I made my initial turns, a pop-up message told me I could move my city, and wouldn’t stop popping up until I did so. Eventually, I moved the city a few tiles to the south, but it cost me production, and left me wondering if ordering my metropolis through the ocean like a giant sea-slug was worth it. In time, I might be able to move to a strategically advantageous position, but it was too early in the game for me to have a grip on benefits of the slow city-moving process.
I now curse my fears, thanks to the words of lead producer Andrew Frederiksen, who filled me in on the intricacies of water-city management. In retrospect, my unwillingness to step out of the traditional Civilization box meant I never got to experience some of the expansion’s more interesting features. I relied on settlers to expand–a typical Civ approach. But I had only scraped the surface of empire expansion.
“The idea is that you’re painting your terrain,” says Frederiksen. “You can still buy hexes, but you don’t gain from just culture growth. Now granted, you do get more culture going from a water city to virtues, so we offset the fact that culture isn’t used for border growth by making it more useful for virtues. When you grow, you grow at least three tiles at a time. Because as you grow, you’re pushing that whole front, which is actually significantly faster than you would ever grow a land city. But you’re sacrificing production. It’s fun, but it’s also a tradeoff. You have to choose when you’re doing it, you have to choose how far you do it, because you can only still work the tiles a certain distance away from your water city.”
If you travel a lot this way, you do risk leaving improvements behind, though the natural resources remain–at least for now. “It was a question at one point as to whether or not that would happen. Don’t be shocked if I am wrong and that changes at a later date!” says Frederiksen. But there are advantages to sacrificing improvements in the name of mobility that you may not have anticipated. “There are circumstances where that’s a good decision, because you want to move your capital city up to the front, because it’s got really good defense, and it’s really strong. And I want that to guard these straits so no one comes in without my say-so, I want to hold it tight. Whereas other people may choose to just paint a small little circle that they can defend and stay within it, and that’s fine too. But you can paint it along, and one of my favorite things is to hug a coastline, paint all the way up, and purchase colonists and drop them behind me, like popping little cities out.”
Alas, if I had thought of these possibilities, maybe I wouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss the idea of making Deepcastle a mobile home. Not that I wasn’t enjoying other benefits of naval exploration. Being the bloodthirsty type that I am, I focused on virtues from the “might” category while commanding a small force of gunboats to investigate the area, annihilating alien life along the way–at least, up to a point; I didn’t want to rile up the fauna too much, just enough to keep exploration lively. The sea life looks rather terrifying: piranha-like rippers are ready to tear your patrol boats to shreds, and sea dragons wield tentacle-mouths lined with razor-sharp teeth. Aliens or not, it was a pleasure to move with fewer restrictions out of the gate–though don’t assume that speedier movement at sea than on land is a guarantee of success.
“You don’t have hills, you don’t have mountains, but that’s OK, because water gameplay is not supposed to be exactly the same,” says Frederiksen. “We wanted it to be something familiar, and you have the same kinds of options, but you have new tools to deal with them. So you find that one of the themes of water gameplay is that it’s just faster. And not necessarily always in the number of turns, but units can move in straight lines a lot more often, and a lot of the water units have more movement so they can move further.”
He continues: “You’re in the open waters. It’s like, ‘I think I’m good, I think I’m good,’ and then all of a sudden, an armada can come in, and you’re, ‘Oh no!’ So you have to be more cognizant of how you lock things down, but hydracoral is one of the great answers, the new alien unit-slash-terrain feature, because it functions much like a mountain or a canyon in that no one can move through it unless they destroy it first.”
“You can move up on land to get around it, but that’s one of the advantages, too. You can use it as much for defense for you as it can be a problem for you. Sure, that blocks explorers, but you also know you aren’t going to have a navy come sailing through that strait.”
Ah, hydracoral. They are freaky-looking floating tentacle pods topped by sprouts of coral, and I tended to ignore them as I played, at least until I declared war on CEO Suzanne Fielding because I didn’t like the way she looked at me. As we jockeyed for battle superiority, having a giant chunk of creatureflesh between me and an enemy fleet sure came in handy. What if I was somehow able to seed hydracoral for my own devious devices?
For now, I’ll have to keep on wishing for such a feature, but hydracoral does play into quests related to marvels (not to be confused with wonders). Says Frederiksen, “What you can do is complete marvel quests. There’s marvels, and every map will have at least one. These are these large, three-hex things, and every biome has a unique one, and there’s one unique one for water, so you always get at least one. The water one is called the Hydracoral Overmind. You find one of these, and it’s really big, and it starts a quest, and it starts it for all players. The quest is, ‘Oh my God, you found this crazy thing. See what else you can find out about it.’ In this case, you might have seen a smaller one of these. So what you want to do is go investigate these, and once you’ve investigated enough, you unlock the secrets of this marvel, of this plant.”
“All players can do it,” he continues, “so you aren’t locked out, but doing it sooner is certainly an advantage. For the hydrocoral one, you find the overmind, and you go and find the nodes, and investigate them, and now that you’ve completed the quest, you get visibility around all hydrocoral. You’ll know when units are coming, you’ll know where hydrocoral is and isn’t. It’s a really great boost especially for a water city.”
Diplomacy with the new system is an integral part of the game. It’s not something you can choose to get in or not get in.
Andrew Frederiksen, Lead Producer
“The Xenosiren is a another great one. You can put it over a channel, just drop this satellite over there and the aliens will come and hang out, and all of a sudden, any army coming in there is either gonna be restricted or stopped, or have to deal with them.” The Xenosiren can be used for a number of strategic purposes, actually. For instance, if you set yourself up to gain lots of experience from killing aliens, you could use it to draw your victims towards you, and then shoot them like fish in a barrel. (Rippers in a barrel, perhaps?) Or try using luring aliens in, and then use an explorer’s Leash ability to add it to your own roster of units. As is usually the case with Civilization, the possibilities are great.
That includes the possibilities afforded by the tech web, which is intimidating when you’re first introduced to it, but has been modified to make it easier to make sense of at a single glance. Now, every different type of unlock has a different color and shape on the web, which should make it simple to know what you’re working with–even if you’re color-blind. Additionally, affinity gain is no longer its own icon, but rather a circle around each icon, which improves the visual language.
Of course, you aren’t alone on your Rising Tide voyage. Other civilizations are ready to impede your progress in their quests to achieve victory. Suzanne Fielding was my mortal enemy in the match I played, so my dealings with her were curt at best. Other civs, however, offered more possibilities. I played as Duncan Hughes, leader of the North Sea Alliance, a coalition of British and Scandinavian cultures that retained their seafaring expertise after the infamous Great Mistake. My first act of diplomacy was to make an agreement with Arshia Kishk, the leader of Al Falah. I would cash in some diplomatic capital; she would grant me access to a strategic supply network that decreased my military energy costs.
Diplomatic capital is an important resource in The Rising Tide. How it flows is in part based on character traits specific to that leader. (In Kishk’s case, that means an increased yield from city processes.) In some sense, diplomatic capital is at the center of a microeconomy that develops around the relationships you maintain with other civs. Says Frederiksen, “Diplomacy with the new system is an integral part of the game. It’s not something you can choose to get in or not get in. Even if you want to play that peaceful game, and just stay friends with everyone, and build your warp gate and get your affinity victory, you still had to have military units to defend, you still had to be prepared for what could happen.”
“Diplomacy is much more akin to that, where it’s involved in the game from the beginning, because even if you’re not making trades with other people or declaring war, you’re still working on your own personality traits and upgrading those. And you have to manage your relationships, because you have to decide if people can make agreements with you, or not. And what is that going to mean if I reject everyone? Are they going to hate me and then declare war on me, and then I’m not peaceful? It’s a microcosm, but it bleeds into everything.”
It’s worth noting that leaders are a mouthy bunch in The Rising Tide. Pan-Asian Cooperative leader Daoming Sochua sent me a communique at one point to bemoan my miniscule population. Fielding, meanwhile, taunted me thusly: “You’re not a threat with such a small army.” (Shut up, Fielding.) The purpose these messages serve (think of them as getting text messages from fellow leaders) is twofold. Says Frederiksen, “These are made-up, fictional characters. And because it’s Civ, we don’t have the same narrative structure to introduce them and give them personality. Even where people would bring their own conceptions previously, now we have to tell you who they are.”
“But not everyone wants to go read the Civilopedia and get everything about them,” continues Frederiksen. “Some people just want to understand, and these communiques, and the dialogue that you see when you go into the diplomacy system, you try and make an agreement. They have unique responses to your requests, and these things are meant to drive, not just informing you of what they care about, but also a personality, a flavor. I can understand, ‘This is a more serious person, this is a more jovial person.’ And it just lends flavor. The hope is, you may end up like, ‘I really like being friends with Reginaldo, because his quotes are awesome, he’s a crazy guy. But man oh man, does Élodie get under my skin, so I like being enemies with her, and I’m always going to play that up’.”
“We take the communiques, and the diplomacy dialogue, those are all ways where we can not only share specific information, but flavor as well.”
Civilization: Beyond Earth – The Rising Tide is certainly not lacking for flavor. Aliens new and old dot the landscape, as does that pesky miasma that complicates your voyages. Fully animated leaders in futuristic versions of familiar garb congratulate you and taunt you. And through it all, you struggle with the neverending urge to take just one more turn. Prepare to once again succumb to that urge when The Rising Tide is released this fall.
