David Braben and members of Frontier Developments took to the EGX stage today to talk about the future of Elite. They started off by showing the Horizons trailer and talking in detail about everything coming to the game.

For starters, Horizons will allow players to land on planets, with rocky planets being sized at up to seven times the size of Earth. Players will be able to enter an orbital cruise mode to allow them to move around the planet quickly, and from there will be able to drop down into the atmosphere and cruise about. Once they decide to land, they will be able to deploy an armed exploration rover. Mining and exploring human settlements are just a few of the things Frontier hinted at as activities once on a planet. In addition, they also confirmed that Season 2 of Elite will finally bring us multicrew ships and fighter bays for the larger vessels. This means that you can deploy a small parasite fighter from a larger ship and use it to escort a fellow crew member as they explore in their rover. Or, you could leave your ship on autopilot and deploy in a fast, powerful fighter to take on those nasty pirates sneaking up on your flank.

They also discussed the inclusion of looting and crafting. Mining and looting from wrecks and other sources will allow players to craft unique weapons and items for their ships. This could range from changing the color of your lasers to creating a weapon that causes system malfunctions on an enemy ship. They then revealed….BOBBLEHEADS. Thats right, bobbleheads are coming back. Those of us who played the original beta grew quite fond of our bobbleheads, and I for one am glad to see them making a comeback. For a limited time, a David Braben bobblehead is available in the Frontier Store.

The final bit of information worth touching on is the inclusion of the Cobra Mk 4 and the Viper Mk 4. The new Cobra was revealed in the Horizons trailer, while the new Viper was just revealed today. It trades some speed and manueverability for better internals, making the ship much tougher.

Elite Horizons and Season 2 are due out this Holiday season.

While it’s still in beta, and while I am still recording footage and composing more detailed thoughts on Warhammer: End Times- Vermintide, I thought I’d jot down a few brief impressions.

First off, the game is beautiful. While it has yet to be optimized, for the most part it runs well. Some weather and lighting effects aren’t in place, as it is still in the final stages of tweaking and optimization. But overall the game looks and runs great. Combat is meaty with real weight behind it. Speaking of combat, I think that may well be where Vermintide will nail the horde shooter. So many titles in this genre rely on gunplay, but Vermintide forces you to get up close an personal as you hack limbs and heads off. Or pulp said heads with a warhammer. And no, those are not exaggerations. In my efforts to save my Bright Wizard, I stepped in close with the dwarf, bashed the Skaven back with my shield and then brought my hammer down on his head. Much to my surprise and delight, his head pulped into a gory mess of blood and bone, sending his still flailing body stumbling backwards. It was satisfying and visceral.

Levels are expansive and reward exploration. Enemies are sneaky, dropping from walls behind you or erupting from the sewers and back alleys. The game has a nice sense of pacing and flow, and each class is truly unique. The Witch Hunter is an arrogant bastard who wields a sword and a brace of pistols. The Brithg Wizard can lay down massive AOE damage from afar, but don’t overuse your abilities or you will -quite literally- explode.

More thoughts are coming, but for now, Verminitide looks VERY promising. Its pretty, fun to play and nails it’s aesthetic.

Today Sony took to the stage at EGX 2015 to talk about the advancements they have made with their own Playstation VR system.

Like Valve’s similar panel yesterday they started off with a little history, tracing the roots of their Morpheus headset way back to the Sony Glasstron headset which was released to markets almost 20 years ago with little LCD screens and a limited frame of view. More recently we’ve had the Eyetoy and Playstation Move controller that laid framework for what Playstation VR is now.

With the Playstation 4, Sony feel they finally have enough computing power in a machine to push the high-grade experience of Playstation VR they want – teaming up the Morpheus headset with the Playstation Move controllers or the Dualshock 4 as well as the Playstation Camera to form an entire experience package to allow for placement in the world as well as being able to interact within it.

Sony felt that triggering natural responses to the situation simulated was the big aim of successful VR and to that effect showed off some of their pre-built experiences – one called The Deep that had participants in a diving cage viewing beautiful fish and an angry shark, as well as a series of them collectively entitled “The London Heist” in which character interaction, virtual object manipulation and then finally both at once in a high-octane situation were simulated for the player. They were adamant that The London Heist was not just a demo of VR or made as a ‘proof-of-concept’, they went through and made it as they would any other triple A game to make it as enjoyable as possible to sell people on the idea that VR could work and work well. Already they say third-party studios have had a “hugely positive” response to the package.

They have also said that right now they’re putting huge consideration onto the limited space people will have to play within their own homes and that they have been working with their designers to make sure that the headset will be comfortable for those players who wear glasses to use for longer periods of time. They also say that since playing a VR game is controlled in such a natural manner for us that VR could be the thing to remove the entry barrier for those people new to gaming.

Unfortunately though the panel didn’t bring any details about when we can expect to see the headset device released or what price we can be expecting; as well as our being told that because virtual reality gaming is such a different concept to the traditional gaming now in order to be backwards compatible games would need to essentially go through re-development.

In terms of the presentation as a whole though, Sony did make virtual reality seem like a fun, entertaining and over all very interesting new step in the world of gaming. Showing off the gameplay and how it worked did a lot more for me then just hearing someone talking about the specs of the hardware would have.

The first day of EGX 2015 saw Valve’s Chet Faliszek take the stage in an attempt to try and clear up confusions some people might have on virtual reality and what it is.

The talk started with a little history lesson on Valve’s development of their own virtual reality technology beginning back in 2013. They also experimented with augmented reality technology around the same time, before eventually beginning to push more for the virtual reality when HTC entered the picture. Of course, the two are currently working together on the HTC Vive headset and controllers.

There was then some talk about the Vive, specifically what Valve had done to make sure that it was the best it could be. The cables connected to the headset were explained by saying that so far wireless hadn’t developed enough to give a consistently high enough bandwidth for the video so wired connection was still needed to provide the best experience. Valve hope that they should be able to hit somewhere around the region of 90FPS on a high-end computer this way. Audio was talked about, with 3D positional audio and binaural audio being mentioned. For the Vive simulated binaural audio is being produced to help players position the sound in the ‘world’ around them, through use of filters.

A lot of time was spent talking about the ‘input’ into virtual reality though, with Faliszek saying that the reason Valve, Oculus and Sony have all developed similar means to bring the hands into the virtual world being because the technology used was already around in a sense with the WiiMote (although he stressed it wasn’t actually a WiiMote) being in use as well as the traditional controllers that most gamers are familiar with. It’s simple to pick up and failure of a task is understandable for the player, they realise how it happened. However while eye tracking is being looked into, Faliszek doesn’t think proper full-body tracking will become a proper input for a while yet.

Finally the one thing we were told to take away from this talk was that VR didn’t need a full-size room to work, right now developers should be working to minimise the space needed and also to minimise any disconnect between natural movement input and the visual movements to stop motion sickness. Faliszek said that there should no longer be any excuse for VR to make players motion sick anymore.

What are you up to this weekend? Uh-huh, oh really, great, that’s really interesting.

Wrong: you’re actually playing all the Dawn of Wars.

Because they’re free on Steam for this weekend, and cheap if you want to keep them beyond that.

This weekend you can play Dawn of War, DoW: Dark Crusade, DoW: Soulstorm, DoW: Winter Assault, Dawn of War 2, DoW2: Chaos Rising, and DoW2: Retribution completely free.

That’s about standard for one of Steam’s free weekends, but Sega has used the occasion to add some new content to both games.

The original Dawn of War is receiving a new, official multiplayer map, while its sequel is offering up some extra gear. Here’s a rundown from Sega of what’s included:

“The Temple of Cyrene is a brand new, official multiplayer map we’re adding into the Dawn of War I rotation. This map will be playable in DoW I, as well as the Dark Crusade and Soulstorm expansions. The Temple of Cyrene sits on the blasted landscape of a world scoured clean by the Exterminatus of the Imperial Inquisition. Homeworld of Gabriel Angelos, Cyrene is now a ghost-world of ruined cities and ashen fields. Fight for supremacy amidst the remains of Cyrene’s once-mighty temples. Claim the three critical locations at the heart of the ruins or drive into enemy bases and deliver annihilation.”

Dawn of War II is getting some love aswell:

“In Dawn of War II, we’re giving away four free sets of Wargear; The Vanguard, Sniper, Sternguard, and Destroyer, to equip in the main campaign that were previously only available as pre-order DLC, or as rare loot drops. Now everyone will be able to equip items like the Veteran’s Grenades, Blade of Ulyus, Armor of the Destroyer, and many more to complete your sets!”

If you want to buy the games/expansions, they’re all 75% off for the next few days.