Torment: Tides of Numenera was crowdfunded on Kickstarter a while back, and this included a number of stretch goals. However, time has gone on and updates on progress have been made. One user on the r/Games Reddit took to compiling a bunch of those posts together to show that actually a few of those stretch goals aren’t actually going to make it to the game’s final release.

SnakesPaw put together a list of posts from both the InXile and the RPG Codex forums that confirm what is being dropped. These include two of the companions, the crafting system and the game’s Italian localisation. There had previous calls from fans for InXile to release a list of stretch goals that wouldn’t be met, but were told simply that “seen many of our stretch goals so far” and that promised goals like “the Ascension, the Labyrinth and its added elements, expanded epilogues, deeper companions” would feature in the final game.

The game was meant to contain nine unique companions to recruit, but when a trophy list of the game was leaked online two of those promised companions seemed to be missing from the list. These two companions were a character called Riastrad, as well as a ‘living ball of goo’ companion known simply as the Toy – added at the $2 million mark of the campaign. After questions and multiple threads, line producer Eric Schwarz of InXile Entertainment eventually made a statement that confirmed that the companion roster had been “slightly reduced” from the team’s initial plans. This was apparently to ensure that they had the time and space to concentrate more on the other seven companions’ stories to allow them to feel fleshed out so no one felt “incomplete”.

The crafting system cut had certainly already been confirmed as cut, as Schwarz said that the system just wasn’t meshing with the design of the game, “everything ended up feeling like an MMO-style system, and that just didn’t fit Torment’s gameplay.” Assets from this have now been purposed into other areas of the game, like Cyphers, Artifacts and companion armour upgrades among other things.

As for the cut localisation, InXile have said that the “costs for Italian localization would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and our stats and sales of prior RPGs showed the number of Italian backers and sales we could look forward to were too low to support those efforts.” Italian backers are now able to contact the InXile support team to request of refund of their money if they should so wish.

Just goes to show, even the most well-funded games sometimes run into troubles.

Arc System Works have announced that a new installment for the retro beat ’em up series Double Dragon is being worked on and in fact is due out very, very soon. Acting as a direct sequel to Double Dragon III: The Sacred Stones, Double Dragon IV is done in a more 8-bit style that harkens back to the old school pixel art of the original NES game.

There’s been a trailer released for it too:

The story is suitably 80s-esque. The brothers are attacked in the desert by a biker gang known as the Renegades and Billy’s girlfriend is kidnapped and held hostage by the shadowy and mysterious Okada clan. The game will see Billy and Jimmy travelling across the world and beating up all they come across with both fist and foot.

The game will come with the expected and traditional local co-op game mode in which you can tag team the levels with your friend; but will also come with a 2-player competitive mode that sees the brother fighting each other, a Challenge Tower mode that lets to battle your way through levels of enemies to try and reach as high as you possibly can. Also during the Challenge Tower, you can unlock certain bosses from the story mode after you pass a certain point – with a secret boss available if you reach the top.

Double Dragon IV will be releasing at the end of the month, on January 30th. Check out the Steam page for more information.

Planet Coaster’s due to get a nice big patch sometime around April, but Frontier have decided to do a smaller one, patch 1.1.3, before it to address some of the bugs and quirks of the game, as well as adding a new ride that can be built.

One of the major quirks about the game had to do with guests queuing for rides or sometimes refusing to queue for rides with no queue. This one hasn’t been fully addressed by Frontier in this patch, as there’s so many bits of data that determine a guests’ queuing that they’ve had trouble pinpointing any one thing that is causing the problems. For now they’ve decided to make a tweak that means park goers will now join longer queues, as well as another that fixes how they access the ride queues as well which should hopefully stop them seeing empty queues as full for some reason.

The ride itself is called the Scizzer and has been based off real life Scrambler and Sizzler rides. Guests are swung around on a twin axle centrifuge on a flat surface, and being a fan of the real-life rides they sound brilliant.

Other fixes and additions in patch 1.1.3 include the stamping out of a notorious gift shop bug, a new option to remove certain items from sale in the shops, language options for Korean and Chinese both Simplified and Traditional. There’s also been additional Guest Thoughts added to help players better understand what problems need addressing.

All the patch notes are available on the Planet Coaster forums and there should soon be more details available for the big April update there too.

Recent patches to Overwatch have seen balancing changes to Roadhog’s hook among other things, making the hook a bit easier to escape and a bit harder to aim. Yet it seems that even with all the balancing, the hook still manages to cause players problems.

Right now as of patch 1.7, Roadhog needs to have players in his line of sight to hook them, and once said player breaks line of sight the hook should come detached. At least that’s the idea and for the most part it works out well. Yet it’s been discovered (and documented in gfycats by Reddit user tehGraboiDs) that if a hero with a dash or command jump move is hooked and then uses afore-mentioned move to move out of line of sight the hook stays connected and the captured hero is still pulled up in front of Roadhog.

Research into this by players seems to suggest that it only occurs if the captured hero dashes or jumps across open space though, as the hook will still break off if the hero gets behind an obstacle. This suggests that it’s a glitch where the hook’s code is still reading the captured hero as being ‘in line of sight’ as they’re in open space and thus it’s keeping the hook active. At least, this is what seems to be happening right now and is a pretty good guess.

Expect the next patch to bring more alterations to Roadhog’s hook then. At least for once this is a glitch that you probably won’t get banned for, but still – don’t be silly and abuse it okay? Don’t want to see anyone getting in trouble.

Gears of War 4 already had some cross-playing capabilities between Xbox One and PC players, allowing them to team up for the co-operative modes in game. However, you know gamers and especially gamers who consider themselves good friends relish the opportunity to completely ‘own’ their friends in competitive multiplayer. Well, if you love doing that and you and your friends own Gears of War 4, I have good news for you.

Social Quickplay is now going to see cross-playing extended towards competitive gameplay. So finally you can shoot your friend’s head from your camping spot and watch them expire in a pool of blood, before they respawn and repay the favour of course. Microsoft recently held a beta for the feature, with over 115,000 participants taking part in over 750,000 matches to test matchmaking and other capabilities of this gamemode. Both platforms apparently had similar K/D ratio results, score and kills. Match quality was also perfect for most players, so the feature is being rolled out soon.

I’d say that if you’re going to give it a go though, don’t expect perfect results first time. 115,000 people is a lot, but more might possibly stress something to breaking point before Microsoft get everything running shipshape. Not saying it’s going to happen, just be ready for minor issues.

Core multiplayer will be separate from Competitive, so if you’d rather limit your pool of random players to people on the same platform as you, you’re still able to do that as well.