Those of you who follow the gaming community might remember the announcement of a little game called Hatred back in October. The trailer was for a game about mass-murdering innocents and quite rightfully caused controversy. Some said that the developer Destructive Creations should be free to create whatever they wished, while others noted that it probably wouldn’t do much to undo the stereotype of video games being seen as the cause of many a violent incident in the past.

Fast-forward to the 15th of this month and a Greenlight went up on Steam for the game, which within a couple of hours shot up the list of Steam Greenlight’s most wanted games to become seventh. The reason it didn’t get any higher is because Valve took the decision to remove the Greenlight page with Valve’s Doug Lombardi being quoted as saying, “Based on what we’ve seen on Greenlight we would not publish Hatred on Steam. As such we’ll be taking it down.”

To their credit Destructive have not thrown a fit about the decision saying that they “fully respect Valve’s decision” and remaining confident that their game has a market. Given that it had over 13k up votes when it was taken down, they have a point. Their full statement is below:

“Dear Hatred Fans,

 

“As you know today we’ve launched our Steam Greenlight campaign for Hatred.

 

“Unfortunately after couple of hours Steam shut it down giving the below as reasons behind their decision:

 

“’We wanted you guys to know that based on what we see on Greenlight we would not publish Hatred on Steam. As such we’ll be taking it down.’

 

“Even though games like Manhunt or Postal are still available on Steam we of course fully respect Valve’s decision, as they have the right to do so. In the same time we want to assure you that this won’t in any way impact the game’s development, game’s vision or gameplay features we’re aiming for. The game is still to be released in Q2 2015 as planned.

 

“Moreover we don’t treat this as a failure because yet again this showed us a huge community support we’re totally overwhelmed with. After only a couple of hours Greenlight campaign being live, Hatred gathered 13,148 up votes and ended up on a #7 on Top 100 list.

 

“This is the best proof for us that there are diehard Hatred fans out there, waiting for this game to be released. And that we need to keep going to deliver them a game that offers exciting and challenging gameplay.

 

“The whole situation only pushes us forward to go against any adversity and not to give up. It also makes us want to provide our fans Hatred pre-orders sooner, as many of you have asked for them.

 

“At the end of the day you, gamers will judge if we were able to do a game that’s simply fun to play.”

What do you think? Were Valve right to remove the Greenlight, or should Hatred be allowed within the Steam Store? Tell us below in the comments!

A forth Assassin’s Creed Unity patch had been expected to be released today, a patch that it was hoped would fix all the remaining issues with the game that had so many that it even made the mainstream media. Unfortunately seems that said patch will take longer than thought.

In an update Ubisoft announced the delay and provided only a vague window for when it will be coming out.

“As stated last week, we’d expected to release the patch today (and we know that many are anticipating its release), but we are choosing to hold off until we can give you the improvements we’ve promised.” they wrote in the update, stating that the reason they needed to hold off was due to having to update the map of Paris to bring about “major performance improvements” to give players “the high level of quality [they] deserve.” Shame that it didn’t seem to be an issue to release the game with that high level.

Ubisoft have only said that the patch can be expected within a few days. Just another in the long saga of Unity being one massive headache for Ubisoft.

An AMA by Blizzard for Hearthstone took place today on the Hearthstone sub-Reddit. In fact it finished just under an hour ago at time of writing.

AMA in case you’re not aware, stands for Ask Me Anything. It’s a popular way for game developers and other media persons to let their fans ask the questions on their minds, and lets some official information get out there without the hassle of arranging official interviews.

The main piece of information of course is the release of the game on Android tablets today. Community Manager Zeriyah was the one of the three Blizzard staff members involved to link to it stating “You have no idea how bad we wanted to talk about this during the AMA.” The game is already free to download on Google Play in Canada, Australia and New Zealand as the first step on the rollout of the game, with downloads coming to the Android app store and Google Play worldwide in the next few days. There will be a free pack of Classic cards waiting for players who try the game via their Android tablets and of course the collections will be shared across the platforms so if you’ve already built up a small collection you’ll have access on your android tablet too.

Other things that came up during the AMA included that Blizzard are still weighing up the pros and cons of adding new classes to the game (listing one con as making it harder for you to get specific class cards in packs with more classes) and that they’ve recognised that newer players are at a disadvantage with the way Matchmaking is currently working and are working on solutions to that (“We had taken steps to make sure brand new players were not matched against players who had already built massive collections, but we recently found some issues there and have been working to make it better”).

As far as what we can expect in future updates they are considering new types of daily quests to add to the random quest pool as well as trying to think up new ‘fun events’ for the community such as the GvG cards becoming available in Arena mode before the actual expansion’s release; as well as trying to find a good way to add additional deck slots to the game for players who have been with the game for a while.

If you want to read more of what was asked and answered, follow this link to read the entire AMA thread at the Hearthstone sub-Reddit: [x]

Hi-Rez is getting ready to drop a new god. This time out, it’s Awilix, Mayan Goddess of the Moon. As an assassin she comes with incredible mobility and a devastating kit. Time to hit the Public Test Server and try her out!

Years ago Blizzard released an expansion to the then much younger MMO known as World of Warcraft. With it came the introduction of a new class for your player character: the Death Knight. They were named a ‘Hero Class’ and could start the game at Level 55. The only barrier was that in order to have a Death Knight you needed to already have a character that was over that level before you could create one.

Fast forward to the WoW of today, many expansions and updates later and Blizzard now see that barrier as unnecessary. So they plan to remove it entirely.

“With availability of the level 90 character boost, we feel the requirement to have a character level 55 or higher to unlock the Death Knight as a playable class is no longer relevant.” said community manager Nethaera. “The plan right now is to remove the limitation sometime next week, at which point players will be able to start a new Death Knight (which still begins at level 55) without first having to reach level 55 on another character.”

Although it’ll be of most benefit to new players, they will still need to wait a little while. Nethaera notes that in order to remove the barrier to creation, they will need to make some client-side changes so Blizzard will plan to include its removal within a scheduled content patch.

The next patch will be the introduction of the Blackrock Foundry raid during the early parts of next year, or barring that possibly Patch 2.1 at the latest.