Earlier this month we were given a first look at the new Rollercoaster Tycoon World and the main common consensus was… not great. The game was pretty much compared to Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, one of the game’s predecessors  that came out over 10 years ago in 2004.

In a blog post though Executive Producer “Mattlab” said that the reason the game looks like  it does right now is because it’s in a pre-alpha state and has a long way to go before it is completed.

“Since the switchover of our development team this past Fall, we have focused on core functionality and ‘under-the-hood’ engine work. This is why there has not been significant visual progress on the title,” he wrote. “Engine work is critical to the overall stability of a game, and it requires significant labor and time to get right. We knew in the Fall we still had a lot of work to do to achieve the core engine we wanted—one that could support a game like RCTW. Now, however, we are able to finally continue working on the higher level functionality and visuals.”

He does say that Atari hopes to have the updated graphics ready to show off this summer. “We hope to take full advantage of the many new environmental, lighting, and shadow improvements as well as many other features in our original Unity 4.6-based engine to create a game that looks great. Our early results are extremely promising.”

As of yet, there is no launch date for the game but it’s fair to say that a date should be announced sometime this year.

Hawken, the free-to-play PC mech shooter has been in a bit of a pickle for some time now. The game was developed by Adhesive Games, who have been pretty quiet for the last few months. It seemed that support for Hawken was coming to an end, as password resets, forum functionality and game updates were completely stalled. So you can imagine our surprise when Joshua Clausen of Reloaded Games delivered the following announcement on Facebook:

“I’m pretty excited to *now* be able to announce that Reloaded Games is the new owner of Hawken .It’s a seriously great honor to be a part of the Hawken story, and I want to see it thrive .Once the forums are up we will post more information (they’ve been taking a lot longer than I was hoping).”

In a nutshell, Reloaded Games plan to:

• Fix password reset
• Fix more deployment stuff
• Fix a bunch of tool sytems
• Plan new updates and futuure changes
• Get forums working again
• Fix more backend systems

An interesting, if somewhat vague list. It seems that Hawken might live to shoot another day. And that can only be good for all of us, as nothing goes together quite as well as giant mechs and giant guns.

All those of you waiting to log back into The Elder Scrolls Online, you can go ahead and do it now. Zenimax have made the Tamriel Unlimited update for the game live already, a day sooner than expected. This means that once you’ve bought the game, it’s yours to play as much as you want – the subscription is now gone. At least if you have boxed copy, Steam players had to wait a bit longer.

Some bits of the update aren’t live yet though, the purchasing of the in-game currency, Crowns, doesn’t seem to be live and not all of the allotments have been distributed yet to players although Zenimax say everyone should have theirs by Friday. There’s also a bug with Champion points not showing up which can be fixed with a simple relog.

The update is live even if you let your account lapse, so if you feel like getting back into it now’s your chance.

If you were interested in getting Interceptor’s 2013 remake of Rise of Triad but still haven’t, get yourself over to GOG quickly. They’re giving away a limited number of free copies.

There’s 30,000 copies going for free, and it’s a game that’s a recreation of a 1995 FPS with five dstincy characters. They’re trying to take down a cult known as the ‘Triad’ and has multiplayer mode if you want to play some old-school shooter game action.

If you miss the free copies the game is 80% off this week anyway so win-win.

There are many topics of debate in the gaming industry, and one of the biggest is the issue of piracy and how best to combat it. Some studios will use methods such as CD keys to combat it, while other games get programmed with hidden bonuses that trigger if a game is pirated and makes the game difficult or impossible to play. Paradox though plan to cut down on piracy for their new city-builder game Cities: Skylines simply by regularly updating it over Steam for free so often that it will always be more up to date than any cracked version.

This stance on tackling piracy was outlined by Paradox’s VP of Acquisition, Shams Jorjani, who spent a few hours last week clarifying it. He pointed out that services such as Netflix were so popular even in an age where if you look hard enough online you can find most programs available for free, simply because it offered a fair service that wasn’t really available elsewhere. Paradox previously used this update strategy with Arrowhead Games’ Magicka.

Since this, Jorjani has had tweets from people who may or may not have pirated the game who appreciated not being branded as hated criminals and enjoyed the game so much that they soon all went to actually buy it so they could get access to the regular free updates that were being offered by Paradox. Also of interest is the amount of people who said that they originally pirated the game purely because they had been burned before by the launches of games like SimCity, not wanting to waste money on what could potentially be another letdown.