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If you’ve been playing games for almost any length of time, chances are you know about the Castlevania series. Even if you haven’t played any of the games yourself, the influence that Castlevania has had on gaming is tremendous. There’s a reason we call games with an emphasis on exploration and upgrading your skills “Metroidvania”.
Koji Igarashi is best known for his work on many of those same games. Of course, like many other developers he has moved on from Konami. And he’s taken his love for the 2.5D action genre with him. Enter Bloodstained: Ritual of The Night. While the game is still very early, it seems to be the same situation that led to Mighty No. 9. In fact, Inti Creates is helping with the game. For those that don’t know, Inti Creates made Mega Man 9 and are also doing Mighty No. 9. Even Michiru Yamane is set to compose the score for the game, as he has done for countless other Castlevania games.
The setup for Ritual of the Night is rather familiar. At the end of the 18th century, some alchemists made a guild called….wait for it…the Alchemist’s Guild. Being a guild, naturally they got way to power hungry and started trying to combat the rise of science. Apparently, they thought that using children to lure demons to Earth would be a good way to accomplish this. To nobody’s surprise, the Guild vanishes, a castle filled with demons appear and its up to you to go kick some ass.
While this might not be the most unique setup for a game, I don’t care. Bloodstained looks to bring back the traditional Castlevania style in a gorgeous new package. Since being crowdfunded to the tuned of $500,000 the game has been confirmed for PS4, Xbox One and PC. Now, which will you choose when you pick up the game?
Overkill Software had a success with their Payday games, and so far few seem to hate them for the DLC they’ve released for the second, Payday 2. They committed to supporting the game for a while with free and paid content, and now they’re permanently choosing to slash the prices of both the base game and a few of the older DLCs.
The news was announced over on the Payday 2 website, after the changes had already gone ahead on Steam. There were also a few details about the next update, Meltdown, which will be free and add a new heist, a new mask and some achievements as well.
“Heisters, we’re thankful for your support thus far. As we continue to develop Payday 2, working on additional free updates as well as paid DLC, we feel it’s time to adjust the pricing of both Payday 2 as well as all DLC released during the first 16 months of its lifespan.”
The latest patch (1.05) for Obsidian’s RPG Pillars of Eternity is set to be one of the biggest, and amongst other things it’s going to revise the leveling system for followers. Up until now followers have been using an auto-level system that assigned the stats and abilities as they grew in experience. Now players will have the option of assigned those stats and abilities for themselves to better tailor their experience to their playstyle. Woo!
Other big changes are coming too with save games being able to be renamed (although all saves from 1.04 need to be converted first to work), more item sorting options have been added and a Latest News feature is now on the main menu so players can be kept up to date with things happening with the game.
The patch also comes with a lot of rebalancing of classes and items, spells have been fixed to work the way they ought to (for example inflicted battle-statuses will no longer persist after the battle) and much, much more.
If you fancy having a lot at the full set of patch notes, click the link below.
Blizzard recently uploaded a video to show off several new things coming to the Heroes of the Storm game, including their new hero Kael’thas. But they also snuck a surprise in there. Watch it, see if you can catch it…
Did you see it? In amongst the new skins and mounts… is another new hero. Diablo III’s Johanna the Crusader, shown in a nonchalant way that you don’t see it coming and need to go back to double-check if you really saw her. She’s even in the video title.
Got to love Blizzard’s style sometimes.
Anyway, here’s the list of new things coming soon:
Ever since Frontier announced that their popular game Elite: Dangerous was due to come to Steam, those people who backed the game on Kickstarter and have bought from Frontier’s own store having been asking the question: will we get Steam keys for the game too?
Originally Frontier wasn’t sure if that was going to be possible but due to high demand they seem to have managed to make it happen. Steam keys will now be offered to all PC players who either got their game access through the Frontier store or as a result of a Kickstarter backing. Result!
Thanks for your patience. We’ll soon offer Steam keys to anyone who bought Elite: Dangerous from our store. https://t.co/TjigCCcHlp
“Thanks for your patience.” said community manager Edward Lewis on the game’s forums. “We’ll soon be offering Steam keys to anyone who bought Elite: Dangerous from the EliteDangerous.com store who would like a key, and to anyone who buys the game from our store in the future. We always appreciate it when you buy direct from our store because it means we can put more into supporting and developing Elite: Dangerous, but we know a number of long-time players and backers like to play through Steam and we think it’s fair everyone has that option, not just new players.”
