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Galactic Civilizations III has added custom factions to the game recently through the beta 5 update. Now Stardock want the players to get involved and stretch their creative muscles via a competition.
Players can design their own factions through the in-game editor, adding racial traits, government type, ship design and the design of the aliens themselves; and then enter them into the Faction Design Competition for a chance to see them added to the final game. Oh, and there’s $1,000 up for grabs as well. If you fancy going a little further then you can add some of your own art and edit existing assets to make a custom faction; a little more complicated but Stardock have put together a tutorial if you fancy taking this route.
Submissions are open until April 29th, and then Stardock will pick eight of their favourites to be featured on the main site for the community to vote on which one that they’d like to see. The most voted for will be added to the game as a minor faction and their creator will win the $1,000.
If you enter, good luck! We’ll be rooting for you!
Grinding Gear Games has just announced that their free-to-play game Path of Exile is due to get a new expansion soon, available free to all players.
Named “The Awakening” it’ll add a lot of new content including a new story set after the original tale Path of Exile told, new items and even more additions to the game’s already spider-web-like skill tree. 13 new gems will be added to game, along with the ability to summon elemental golems to fight for you, 70 new unique items and a new equipment set called the Maraketh Weapons.
The information about the new expansion’s story from Grinding Gears says “Travel north from Sarn to Highgate and delve into the darkness that lurks beneath the mountains there. Explore all-new areas and face the legends of Wraeclast as you seek to put an end to the Nightmare.”
There will be a beta for The Awakening from next week, beginning on April 20th. More information about the expansion as well as a sign-up for the Beta can be found in the link below.
Grand Theft Auto V for PC launches next week, and we’ve gotten a peek at the physcial copy which comes in a box set containing 7 DVDs. Those that have been following GTT V will be aware that the game clocks in at a hefty 65 gb. DVDs have long been the medium of choice for PC games, but this would seem to indicate that games are getting a bit to large for DVDs these days. Interestingly, a Dual Layer DVD holds about 8.5 gb, meaning that 7 of them would hold 59.5 gb of data. So it seems likely that even those who purchase the physical addition will still be looking at a hefty download before they can play.
Grand Theft Auto V releases world wide on PC on April 14th and is available for digital pre-load now from Steam and the Rockstar Warehouse.
Today, they’re worth quite a bit less. The tokens are in-game items which can be purchased for $20 and exchanged for gold or game time, with their value in gold determined by the market. Blizzard said last month that it would set an initial value and then let it fluctuate based on supply and demand. And fluctuate it has, with the Token shedding a full quarter of its worth in gold in a single day.
At launch, a $20 Token was initially valued at 30,000 gold, and actually pushed beyond that in the first few hours after release. But then it started to go down, down, steadily down, and now, according to wowtoken.info, your $20 Token now equates to 22,405 gold, more than a quarter less than the starting price.
The slump is not entirely surprising. As VentureBeat points out, the great likelihood is that players rushed to buy Tokens as soon as they were launched, then dumped them on the auction house to turn around some quick gold. And it’s not as though 22k is an inconsequential sum, either.
The potentially interesting part is what happens next: If the gold value continues to fall, players could be tempted to forgo their $15 monthly subscription fees in favor of Tokens, tradeable for 30 days of game time, purchased with gold. Will Blizzard take action to stabilize the market? My guess is that they’ll eventually settle into a sub-30k stability, but given how the Diablo 3 real money auction house turned out, a small part of me wonders if maybe WoW Tokens could have unforeseen effects on the way the in-game economy is balanced.
For more info on the WoW token system, follow this link!
