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Dreamfall Chapters completed its Kickstarter years ago. As in, it has delivery dates for tiers dated as far back as 2013. The Kickstarter page is still being updated through with news, and the latest piece is the announcement that the long-awaited ‘Final Cut’ version of the game is coming to bring the game on par with an upcoming console release.
The update says that the Final Cut contains alterations that the team have wanted to implement “for years — along with requests and suggestions from our players and community.” This includes changes to character art, shaders, music, animations, lighting, gameplay… pretty much a lot of the game is being tweaked to make it better. Also coming are some special features that will be revealed much closer to the Final Cut’s release date of March 24th.
The developers, Red Thread Games, also took some time in the update to apologise for the delay of some updates that players have been waiting for since September. One of these is a German language patch which is currently in QA testing and they hope to get out before the Final Cut release. Another update which is going into the game is the ‘Benefactor’ patch which will be adding in a few of the missing in-game rewards for the backers – including the Benefactor’s Wall the patch is named after. Said wall lists all of the Kickstarter backers and will be found in Marcuria after the patch is implemented.
It’s been a long road to the finish, but no good game is rushed. Hopefully the Final Cut will be the pinnacle of what the backers were hoping for in the game.
Over the last few weeks, the Professional eSports Association has been seeking to set on their own CS:GO league, in which a number of teams would be invited to compete for a prize pot of a million dollars in the first year. However, when put to a vote it seemed that the teams were not interested due to concerns over long-term financial growth – which has now led to the PEA announcing that the league will now no longer go ahead.
The problem came down to competition with the ESL Pro League, which offered both profit and revenue sharing with the teams involved, as opposed to the PEA’s offer of sharing just the profit. Therefore more players voted to compete in the EPL’s league, seeing the gains they could make as much more long-term as opposed to only short-term gain from the proposed new PEA league. Another factor that had an effect on votes was that teams preferred the EPL’s current more open structure and treating eSports as its own entity, as opposed to the PEA’s idea of trying to fit old style sports franchising models onto eSports teams. In the end, the vote saw five of the six teams voting to stay with the EPL.
In a statement a spokesperson for PEA commented that “since the time of the original announcement of the PEA CS:GO league, it has become clear to the PEA organizations that there isn’t sufficient financial support in the ecosystem…to profitably operate a third prominent online league, due to the oversaturation of the marketplace and the recent upward spiral in operating costs.”
At the moment Bioware are slowly drip feeding the Internet information about the upcoming Mass Effect game, Mass Effect: Andromeda. We recently had a trailer come out, and that was huge. Now something’s been revealed which isn’t quite as huge, but welcome none the less – Andromeda will have native controller support for its PC version.
The news was revealed via a tweet sent out by Andromeda’s lead designer, Ian S. Frazier yesterday:
In case it wasn’t clear: yes, we now support controllers on PC. 🙂 But personally? I’m looking forward to showing off m&kb controls! #space
Neither Mass Effect 2 or 3 had controller support for PC, so this is a step up from those games and welcome to people who prefer to use a controller for their gaming. Further, you will apparently also be able to switch between controller and mouse and keyboard control seamlessly. That means if you prefer using controller for one thing and mouse and keyboard for something else, Andromeda should be able to allow you to do that with little problem. Hopefully.
There’s plenty more news to come about the game before it finally releases on March 21 in North America and on March 23 in Europe, so stay tuned.
As Overwatch continues to be played by many and new updates are applied to rebalance the meta and introduce new characters, as well as add content for events, so will bugs also slip in every now and then. Some become known as exploits to allow people to do things they shouldn’t.
A new one has come to light in the last few weeks, in which players found a way to use Mei’s ice wall ability to push players through walls into areas designated as out-of-bounds. Obviously this allowed for hiding players to attack enemies without much danger to themselves, and that sort of ruins the match for everyone. Now Blizzard have located and apparently squashed the bug, and have promised that those found to have been intentionally using the exploit to give themselves an advantage will see punishment.
“This bug was surprisingly tricky for us to track down but we believe we have identified a fix.” wrote game director Jeff Kaplan on the game’s forums. “Our hope is to have it fixed… but there is always the chance that our fix could fail. We’re currently testing to verify the fix. This bug is clearly an exploit and we consider this cheating. Do not attempt to reproduce this bug. We will be taking action against those who abused this exploit… exploiting game mechanics like this comes at a cost to those you are competing against. We take aggressive action against people who abuse game mechanics, hack or cheat. This case is no different.”
Already people are reporting that they’ve found their accounts suspended for having used the exploit, and one Reddit user has reported that they’re on a week long ban for it.
