Atari’s recently been announcing reboots and remakes of some of their classic IPs. Alone in the Dark and Rollercoaster Tycoon had already been announced as some and now Atari’s going to be rebooting… Asteroids? As an open-world survival game? Wait, what?

The new game will be called Asteroids: Outpost and from the sounds of it, doesn’t sound too bad a concept. It sees you plonked down on a moonrock and tasked with turning the place into a profitable mining business, using the resources you dig up to upgrade and earn money to expand in a sort of self-sustaining manner. Your base itself will be customisable in game too, but Atari haven’t elaborated on how. The original game kind of makes an appearance with the fact that asteroids will rain down in showers from time to time and you need to shoot down any that might be threatening your mining operation else it’ll end up causing you damage.

Atari itself say that they’re hoping most of the challenge from the game will come from the multiplayer mode where players will have to fight for the best sites on the same moonrock chunk.

“Asteroids is one of the most iconic titles in Atari’s portfolio of more than 200 games and franchises, and we’re looking forward to ushering the game into today’s digital gaming era,” Atari CEO Fred Chesnais said. “We’re paying homage to the original Asteroids by incorporating classic features such as asteroid blasting capabilities, while introducing a completely new premise and gameplay. Asteroids: Outpost will appeal to both fans of the classic Asteroids as well as enthusiasts of immersive survival games and expansive MMOs.”

What do you think? Does this game sound interesting to you? Does it really deserve to be an Asteroids game given that it’s such a dramatic departure from the classic?

An update to The Long Dark will bring many things, including a way to potentially scare off the wolves that roam around and bite your face off.

Torches can now be crafted and brandished against wolves, potentially making it so that they will be scared off and leave you be. Other additions include a new region, Pleasant Valley – a rural mountain valley, some new wildlife and harvestable plants. There are also some bug fixes to the game, as well as general improvements that just make the game better.

All the changes are listed below:

Major additions

•  New Region! Pleasant Valley. Nearly 10 square kilometres of rural mountain valley.
•  New Mystery Wildlife! Keep your eyes open.
•  Harvestable Plants. Collect Old Man’s Beard Lichen, Rose Hips, and Reishi Mushrooms and craft natural remedies.
•  Torch Brandishing. Craft Torches and Brandish them against Wolves. You might scare them off!
•  Visual Inventory. Completely redone Inventory screen with improved navigation and embedded Repair and Harvesting actions.

General improvements

•  General improvements to wildlife AI, to support better player decision-making about Fight or Flight response and clarify wildlife presence and intent.
•  Predators are now attracted to the smell of Blood (bleeding wounds, raw meat, etc.) and will come investigate if within range.
•  Scent is now affected by Wind speed and direction.
•  All Beds now have a Warmth value displayed in the Rest interface.
•  Bedrolls now lose Condition and must be maintained. It’s possible to find multiple Bedrolls in the world.
•  All fires now visualize their state (ignition, full burn, cooling off, coals) through flame, sparks, and smoke. Smoke also respects wind direction.
•  Various new sounds, and many previous sounds have been replaced based on a new foley recording session.
•  Many UI improvements throughout.
•  Updated Silent Hunter and Pacifist achievements to clarify they need to happen in the first days of a game (not after many days have already passed).
•  German and Russian translations have been fully updated.

Bug fixes

•  Fixed Exploration achievement
•  Achievements are not sent to Steam if player is dead.
•  Fixed key binding issue with AltFire.
•  Fixed discrepancy between time survived and time of day.
•  Fixed scroll wheel issue on right side of container screen.
•  Fixed issue when dying during a load scene fade
•  Fixed issue with failing to Transfer All showing incorrect info on screen afterwards.
•  Fixed issue with fishing huts sometimes not blocking wind
•  Fixed issue with phone wires dropping at game start (physics)
•  Fixed inaccessible Prepper Hatch bug
•  Fixed issue where First Aid items were disabled if used, then use was cancelled, then the item was dropped
•  Fixed issue where Log could show incorrect days in a new session after dying.
•  Fixed errors in Calorie Burn amounts being displayed for Resting, Foraging, Ice Fishing and Harvesting
•  Increased navmesh accuracy to address a variety of pathfinding issues
•  Fixed issue with dropped items sometimes being inaccessible
•  Fixed issue with campfire disappearing if cancelling out of creating a fire in a stove.
•  Display correct Calorie Burn on the UI for activities when in Pilgrim and Stalker modes

There’s been a number of little episodes in eSports in recent weeks. Now in the competitive League of Legends scene, one rather bizarre and honestly worrying episode has come to public light. The team known as MeetYourMakers has been discovered to have been using some terrifying tactics to keep their midlaner Marcin “Kori” Wolski in the team after some disputes over back-pay he was owed. Basically the MCM manager, Sebastian “Falli” Rotterdam, threatened to seize Kori’s mother’s home if he left.

It seems that if Kori left the team he would be in “breach of contract” and because his mother signed his pro gaming contract the manager felt the need to make the threat about her losing the house. The entire episode began last season with a team known as Supa Hot Crew, which in some ways evolved into MeetYourMakers when it split as a lot of the management overlaps between the two. Kori played for Supa Hot Crew and it seems that towards the end the team stopped paying some of their players, because Kori claims to be owed months’ worth of pay from last season. MYM have said that the debt isn’t theirs to pay back though, its Supa Hot Crew’s. Not surprisingly, Kori has decided that if he isn’t going to get paid he wants to leave. That’s what triggered the manager’s bizarre threat against the house.

Unfortunately for Falli, Kori had been recording the conversation. He took the recording to the media, with a big article appearing in the Daily Dot, and a complaint having been filed with Riot eSports and the boss there Nick Allen. Although MYM have issued an apology, Riot have already begun an investigation into the incident with Allen tweeting out “We take the safety and well-being of players very seriously. We are, and have been, actively looking into the situation between Kori and MYM.”

It’s not the first time MYM have been called out for rumoured unsavory practices. A former MYM coach/manager has spoken about the team keeping money for themselves that was meant to go for coaching staff and former Fnatic top laner Paul “sOAZ” Boyer has tweeted out that he’s rather jump off a bridge than play for them.

Who says eSports isn’t like real sport? It’s just as dramatic sometimes it seems…

Valve have opened up the Steam Inventory for Steamworks developers to use, enabling them to use Valve’s tech to create and store items earned or bought within games. It also allows for players to use the Steam Marketplace to sell items to the rest of the community. Cool.

The inventory and marketplace have been around for a while, being the cornerstone of some of their most popular titles – most notably Team Fortress 2 and its huge collection of wearables/hats. Now it can be used for other games outside of Valve titles.

The announcement of the new service read: “With today’s Steamworks SDK update, we’ve released The Steam Inventory Service beta, a new feature available to developers with games or software on Steam. The Steam Inventory Service is a set of new Steamworks APIs and tools that allow a game to enable persistent items that have been purchase or unlocked by individual users without having to run special servers to keep track of these user’s inventory. With this service, a game can easily drop items to customers based on playtime or can grant items based on specific situations or actions within the game. These items can be marked as tradable through Steam or sellable via the Steam Marketplace. Developers can also configure recipes for crafting different combinations of items that result in more rare, unique, or valuable items.”

A day one patch for Evolve will contain bug fixes and tweaks, as well as some balancing tweaks – mainly focused around a balance of the Wraith’s abilities.

The infographic for the recent Open Beta shows that as far as matches won, the balance is mostly on point with Hunters winning only just over 1% more matches than Monsters did. However they did note that the Wraith, which hadn’t been available for play during the Alpha, won matches more than 70% of the time and so most of the balancing will be done to this monster to hopefully bring it into line with Goliath and the Kraken. The changes are mostly nerfs, although there have been some improvements to other lesser-used abilities to encourage their use a little more.

In the nerfing camp we have that Wraith can no longer use its warp ability while cloaked, it will now break the cloak and make the Decoy vanish which stops Wraith escaping as much as they used to. The Decoy ability now takes 30% longer to cool down too, which discourages its over-use in battle. The big attack of Supernova is now also less powerful, its damage having been cut for 10%.

However on the other side of the balance, the Abduction ability now has a slight increase on its radius, having been extended by .5 of a metre for a total attack radius of 3.5 metres. The Warp Blast radius has also gone up by another .5 metres too which gives it a damage radius of 8.5 metres. Nice.

Other than that Turtle Rock reports that the Open Beta shows that all the other characters in game are actually hitting a pretty equal balance, with the changes made to Kraken having given it a 52% win rate during the Beta.