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The Civilization games are fairly well liked. The most recent entry into it though suffered from being that game to follow a popular predecessor. Civ V once fitted with its DLC entries was a very good game, and Beyond Earth fell a little short of capturing me in the same way.
Now however Firaxis have announced the first DLC for Beyond Earth, entitled Rising Tide. As the name suggests it adds a lot to the game that is mainly based upon embarking upon alien seas to allow for colonisation of the ocean as well as mine resources from it. It’ll also expand the role of diplomacy among other new features:
Building floating settlements and accessing natural resources hidden beneath the seas of the alien planet, while alien beasts with unique abilities inhabit the water and challenge players in distinctive ways
Shaping the diplomatic landscape by upgrading traits, changing diplomatic relationships, and leveraging the benefits of your allies, all with political capital
Unlocking a dynamic set of Diplomatic Traits while activating different combinations in response to the changing world
Playing as one of four new factions, including the Al Falah, a group of nomad explorers descended from wealthy and resilient Middle Eastern states
Investing in multiple Affinities to unlock hybrid Affinity units and upgrades for the first time;
Collecting and combining alien relics via a new Artifact System that unlocks powerful benefits
Exploring one of two new biomes, Primordial world, an untamed biome rife with volcanic activity and indicative of a chaotic landscape still forming in the new world
Riding Tide will be releasing this Autumn and will retail at around £20.
Robot Entertainment’s new spin on the MOBA is in closed beta, and we were lucky enough to get our hands on a key. Here are Digmbot’s first impressions of the new game.
This past weekend, ESPN2 aired the finals of the Heroes Of The Storm “Heroes of the Dorm” tournament. Two teams of college students from Arizone State and Cal Berkely competed in Blizzard’s as yet unreleased MOBA, with Blizzard paying all four years of the winning team’s college tuition. The telecast was met with mixed reactions, with some lauding the placement of eSports on TV opposite NBA and MLB games, and others criticizing the idea, calling it ridiculously stupid. I won’t get into the frankly ignorant remarks made by ESPN’s own Colin Cowherd, although if you want to hear them for yourself click away.
In the aftermath of all the attention, much discussion has arisen about eSports and their validity. In particular, one article that caught my attention was from Re/Code, with the rather catchy headline “Video Games on ESPN? It’s Time to Stop Pretending eSports Are ‘Real’ Sports”, which you can find here. Now, being in journalism myself as well as a YouTuber, I’m no stranger to creating catchy headlines. Just look at the one you clicked on to get here. However, I find that it is at least helpful if the content of the article under that headline has at least some relationship to reality. Unfortunately in the case of the Re/Code piece, that didn’t happen.
The very idea that eSports are somehow pretending to be “real” sports is, frankly, ludicrous. As many readers will know, I head the eSports coverage for this site and have followed the eSports scene for many years. In all my time covering StarCraft, StarCraft II, League of Legends, DOTA2, Smite and other games, I have never once heard anyone involved with the eSports community refer to it as anything other than eSports or competitive gaming. Likewise, competitors are never referred to as athletes. Instead they are commonly referenced (by themselves as well as casters and media) as competitive gamers. The reason for this is simple: eSports/competitive gaming and pro gamer/competitive gamer are descriptive terms. They literally describe what the activity or participant is. So, you aren’t off to a good start when the title of your article contains a patently false statement.
Moving on, lets address the idea of channel surfers shouting “Nerds!” and flipping past the event. eSports doesn’t need TV. It never has, and never will. As I write this article, there are 257,027 people watching eSports on Twitch.tv. On a Tuesday evening. There are no major events going on. These are simply people that want to watch eSports. We live in an on demand society. Cable TV is going the way of the dinosaur with subscriber numbers dropping consistently as people “cut the cord” and turn to Netflix, YouTube and Twitch for instant, tailor made entertainments. In the final analysis, all the investors in eSports see is viewer numbers. The International, DOTA2’s World Championship, turned in viewer numbers that are usually only rivaled by things like golf’s Masters, the Superbowl and the State of the Union address. The very concept that the eSports leagues care at all what people on network television think of their content is ludicrous. This also ties into another statement made in the Re/Code article: that calling eSports a sport is like calling a YouTube video a TV show. Nobody does that. And as I pointed out above, eSports doesn’t call itself a sport.
Indeed, the idea that Blizzard, Valve and Riot are attempting to turn the ground-up phenomenon of eSports into something bigger is completely accurate. If a bit outdated. StarCraft is huge. It has been for years. Likewise for Counterstrike, LoL and DOTA2. The phenomenon has already arrived. It’s sitting on Twitch.tv right now, commanding a massive amount of views. The idea that these companies somehow have an inferior complex and must try to get onto ESPN to validate some juvenile need to be accepted is laughable. Certainly, the advertising revenue from televising a few events hasn’t hurt the scene any. But it is no way critical to the survival, or even growth of eSports.
I’ll leave you with one final thought:
Last year, ESPN president John Skipper said of competitive gaming: “It’s not a sport – it’s a competition.” Bravo Mr. Skipper. You understand what the rest of us already understand. It is a competition. We don’t call it a sport. Nor does anyone else. I’m not in the habit of calling out other writers, but in this case I’ll make an exception and remind all those that are reading this of the number one rule of writing: Research. Or, rather, since the article in question contained numerous links to sources that I would certainly consider research…make sure you actually read and understand you research before making statements on it that will potentially endanger someone’s life due to asphyxia from hysterical laughter. I know I had a bit of trouble breathing after reading that article.
What do you think readers? Sound off in the comments below.
With those 117 characters, SimCity lead gameplay scripter and designer Guillaume Pierre revealed the sad news that Electronic Arts has closed down SimCity studio Maxis Emeryville. After 12 long years, the company have apparently decided to close the studio in order to consolidate Maxis IPs into existing Maxis studios.
EA confirmed the closure and intentions with the following statement:
Today we are consolidating Maxis IP development to our studios in Redwood Shores, Salt Lake City, Helsinki and Melbourne locations as we close our Emeryville location. Maxis continues to support and develop new experiences for current Sims and SimCity players, while expanding our franchises to new platforms and developing new cross-platform IP.
These changes do not impact our plans for The Sims. Players will continue to see rich new experiences in The Sims 4, with our first expansion pack coming soon along with a full slate of additional updates and content in the pipeline.
Although Pierre had additionally tweeted “everyone’s out of a job” in reference to the studio’s employees, EA included a further paragraph in their statement in regards to the affected employees:
All employees impacted by the changes today will be given opportunities to explore other positions within the Maxis studios and throughout EA. For those that are leaving the company, we are working to ensure the best possible transition with separation packages and career assistance.
At this time, it’s unknown how many employees will be affected by the closure.
Maxis was founded by Will Wright and Jeff Braun in 1987, and was acquired by EA in 1997. The studios are well-known for their town-building and life-sim franchises, SimCity and The Sims respectively; but following the adoption of a new engine in their latest title, Sims 4, causing a large loss of content from that found in previous games; and a disastrous attempt to revive the SimCity franchise in 2013 as an online game which was plagued by numerous technical and design flaws as well as server instabilities, Maxis’ future under EA has found itself on an unfortunate downward spiral.
The market for eSports is expanding quite rapidly at the moment, with tournaments of the best players in the world drawing huge crowds to watch their matches. So it makes sense that Y-Combinator-backed Kickback is looking to make their mark on the scene.
They’ve already provided a free server hosting service for the Minecraft community last summer, called Triangle; and now they’re planning to build on top of this existing system which is hosting over 200,000 server already to put in place ways to help the competitive maps work much smoother.
Their method treats the entire experience as a single product; able to run the match-hosting servers, arrange the games, codifies the rules for the game and even keeping track of each player’s wins and losses within the game. They’re already testing out with members of the Minecraft community that has come to be using Triangle; with matches ranging from two to ten players, in game types from team-based combat to free-for-all. Community members are also able to contribute maps to help diversify the content available.
This matchmaking service is provided free to players just as Triangle is, provided they’re just playing for bragging rights. However if they want to actually bet money on it, players can pitch into a prize pot from as little as $1 to bet that they’re the best player and stand a chance of winning money in the process.
One of Kickback’s co-founders, Vlad Nov has said that the paid dynamic of these matches has helped the startup in two ways. Having money on the line obviously helps the experience, giving the game a different atmosphere from a match just for bragging rights – you’ve another reason to want to win over all the other players. But Nov says that those players who win also tended to be the service’s most vocal activists, bringing in more friends to play with them and so growing the potential number of users who would use the system for the offered aspects that they couldn’t get elsewhere.
Right now they’re working on utilising the enormous power Twitch has for bringing an audience to gaming-related content by making it possible for players to jump into a match being streamed from the web app of the service, hoping to make it so that matches can both be watched and joined in with should the fancy take you. The other two big focuses are attempts to further widen the number of map types available and also the types of matches within Minecraft.
Kickback also hope to be able to build similar systems around other games that maybe are not as well known and easy to modify as Minecraft is. The backend code and matching making systems were actually designed to be carried over though to make it as easy as possible for this to be done, so maybe we’ll see this system expand to other games fairly soon.
