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Valve has been busily working on their Steam Controller for some time now. Initially, the controller debuted with two touchpads, and a touchscreen.The touchscreen was later dropped in favor of added buttons. Now,SteamDB has uncovered a new design of the pad, this time with an added analogue stick. Its likely this won’t be the last change to Valve’s new controller, and the changes made to date seem to be heading in the direction of more traditional gamepads such as the 360 pad or DualShock controllers. With Valve having pushed the release date of the controller from 2014 to sometime in 2015 theres still plenty of time for tweaks.
An open letter to Valve has been published, signed by many leading security specialists and game developers, calling out Valve on what they see as a disorganised and woeful approach to security regarding the reporting of bugs, the fixing of them and the rewarding of those people who make the bugs known to Valve.
The three main cores of the letter are addressed one by one, with the letter questioning Valve’s lack of a ‘bug bounty’ program that made sense. While they did note of some reportees receiving rewards of virtual items, the events were not frequent enough to give them hope and in some cases they note that reportees might even have come off worse for making the bugs known. They pointed out the worry that gamers could fabricate bugs in hope of reward and also pointed towards the bug bounty programs of other websites and media such as Google’s which offer rewards from $100 to $2000 for the reporting of a bug. The idea of being rewarded in virtual items was not considered to be enough of a draw for those security experts that could be trusted to seek out harmful coding bugs, as they wouldn’t see it as worth looking for little to no reward.
The lack of a clear space to report bugs to was also questioned, as well as Valve’s speed in tackling them and closing exploits. They used the well-known Heartbleed bug as an example, citing that it took up to 24 hours for Valve to patch and even then they didn’t put out a mass password change request to users or provide much information to gamers using their products. The letter says that there was evidence of data being leaked from Valve while the patching was going on, so they find Valve’s fixing of the exploit to be unsatisfactory.
Valve responded quickly, acknowledging the problems outlined in the open letter and saying that it has made them do a review of their security procedures. They pointed to a recently created site (http://www.valvesoftware.com/security) as the place to report bugs to and said that they believed their security measures were “robust but we understand that we haven’t been completely transparent about the process and that has created some confusion”.
They did say that there were no plans to put in place any formal bug bounty program, although separate Valve teams such as the Team Fortress 2 one can and often will offer in-game items as an incentive for players to report bugs to them. They also denied ‘punishing’ those people who reported bugs to them, only taking measures to prevent such bug reveals becoming damaging to the community.
The Elder Scrolls Online was Bethesda’s attempt to move into the market of the MMORPG game, using the lore of their already well-established Elder Scrolls series. It gained a lot of attention because of the name attached to it, the amount of lore that could already be found in previous Elder Scrolls titles and the idea of roaming through lands from all of those previous games combined into one huge map? All very appealing. And now it’s coming to Steam.
Announced ahead of the Quakecon weekend, the news was tweeted out from their Twitter account today, Bethesda revealed that the game was coming to the popular distribution platform this day with more details to follow later.
The game itself is universally acknowledged as being okay, if not great. A number of patches have fixed some of the worst game-breaking bugs, but like most MMOs it is a lot more fun with friends playing with you. To be honest though, some of that is down to the amount of hype around the game being very hard for a great many games to live up to. That and being a subscription-based model of game can be a big turn-off for some players.
Will you be thinking about getting TESO now that it’s coming to Steam? Tell us in the comments below!
Good news for all of you who like to take advantage of a bargain. A mistake in the Steam listing for the double pack of indie game The Red Solstice means that not only is the pack being sold for the price of one copy of the game – it’s also currently 40% off. What’s more, you won’t get into trouble with the developers for taking advantage of the error.
Developers Ironward are going to correct the error tomorrow, but for now they’re not opposed to people taking advantage of the mistake. This is probably a good thing, as it does mean that not only can copies of their game get out to a wider audience with this impromptu sale, because it’s a multiplayer game this means that the servers will be filled with enough people to hopefully fill the 8-player squad and give it a good long life.
The game itself is a Kickstarter funded game, set in the future on the surface of Mars where a solar storm has cut all contact with a capital colony called Tharsis, and even as the storm continues to rage you are sent to find out what has happened to Tharsis, controlling a squad of space marines against an alien threat similar to Space Hulk.
Hopefully the accident will turn out to be a happy one for The Red Solstice and its developers, Ironward. If you’re unsure, try the demo on the Kickstarter page first… but hurry if you want to take advantage of the accidental offer.
Thought it was time to dig into some of the Indie Games out there that are still in Beta form. Thought I’ll start it out with a First Look at the game Nekro which is in Early Access Beta on Steam.
In Nekro you play as a man who was executed. Feeling betrayed by his god he takes up service to an evil god called Kleer the Lord of Chaos. Kleer turns the man into an undead necromancer and charges him to slay the King of the land you travel though. In turn you get to enact your revenge by killing everything in your path.
When you start the game you get to choose what type of Nekro you want to be. There are currently 3 to choose from with more to be implemented in the future. Each Nekro has different abilities and attributes, as well as 2 unique attacks bound to the mouse buttons.
The first Nekro is the Alchemist. He has a long range attack but lower armor. He is also able to heal by throwing down a vial which he and his minions can stand under. If you shoot his attack though the healing area, his attack gets stronger.
The second Nekro you can choose from is the Grim Keeper. His attacks consist of throwing grenades at medium range dealing high damage. He is also able to swing his sack of grenades at people to knock them back. Combining his attacks causes you to hit the grenade like a baseball with the sack causing more damage on impact.
The third Nekro they have available is the Outlaw. The Outlaw is a primarily melee brawler with high armor and close range attacks. The more damage he does with his main attacks the stronger he gets. His secondary ability is a chain which allows him to pull victims closer to him so he can deal close range damage. It also gives him life steal as well.
After you choose your Nekro you get to check out your first summon. Summons are the minions you can summon to help you wreak havoc though your journey. You are automatically given one called Scourge which is demonic snakes which cause high area damage and can also be used to make minions out of inanimate objects in the levels like pumpkins. Later as you level and progress though the levels you are able to unlock more summons. Usually you are made to choose between two at a time. Once you choose you can’t get the one you didn’t choose. So you need to think carefully on what types of minions want to help you; whether it be flying bat like creatures or a creature you can summon under someone that would chomp them.
Now that you got your character set up its time to enter the game. Each level consists of an area with people, creatures and animals that can all be killed. Each level usually has a certain goal, like collecting a certain amount of souls (i.e. killing everything) or killing a certain number of a certain type of character. Some levels are even boss battles. First one being against a character called Mayor Biscuit, a hard to kill man with a top hat and monocle.
While you would think that all you do is just go around killing everything in sight you do need to think though how you go about the levels. As you go through the game you come across tougher enemies that can really do some damage to you if you aren’t prepared. Usually you will need to skirt the area outside the main town part where most of the enemies are. To prepare for battle you need to find corpses, either ones lying around or ones you make and either eat them for the blood that is used to summon minions or use them to summon extra minions. Most of the time this would lead you to killing mostly farm animals like chickens and pigs at first to build up your little army.
Once you have your army of minions it’s time to kill everyone. It’s best not to agro too many enemies at once because it is easy to get over run at times even with your summons helping you. Just take your time and you should be fine and don’t forget to collect more blood to summon even more minions.
In between each level there is a voice over reading out a journal of the character you are playing. The voice acting as well as the journal entries can be quite amusing at times and gives the game a nice humor.
This game seems like it will be a good game to replay multiple times. With different characters and different summons load outs you can come up with, I can see you having a different experience each time you play. There is also local and online multiplayer so you can play with friends.
I can’t wait to see where this game goes in the future and I can’t wait to continue to have a bloody good time playing it.
Nekro Early Access Available for PC, Mac, and Linux on Steam.
Check out the trailer:
*Note: Remember this game is still in development so not all features are in the game yet. Remember Beta is Beta.
