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For those of you who don’t know, there is another Lord of the Rings game on the way. Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is set in Tolkien’s iconic world where you play as a ranger named Talion… who is dead. Talion was resurrected by a mysterious wraith that also thirsts for vengeance against Mordor and the Dark Lord Sauron.
The game was originally set to launch on October 7th but Warner Bros are ‘responding to fans excitement’ and have moved the games release forward to September 30th for consoles and October 2nd for PC gamers. It seems that developer Monolith productions are listening to their fans and looking to genuinely please them. This title is certainly one to watch for Lord of the Rings fans as it is chronologically set between the Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Ring.
Are you excited by Shadow of Mordor, or are you more like our Station Manager who is currently in the basement sharpening knives and muttering about blasphemy and the Inquisition?
The people behind the popular mech FPS game, Titanfall, are planning something special for the next update, called simply Update 5. They’re introducing what has been called a ‘black market currency’ into the game, which is really a system for earning points.
The points can be earned in-game through completing certain set challenges or selling on unused burn cards, and can then be used to trade for burn cards which might be a better fit for your play style. The thing that is most obvious at a glance though is that this is a currency that can only be earned in the game; there is currently no plans to make the currency purchasable in any amounts for a sum of real-life money.
The update will also include Daily Challenges, possibly as the ones set up to earn players the new currency. The PC version is also getting some better support for multiple GPUs and the upcoming DLC Frontier’s Edge will introduce three new maps to the game.
There’s currently no ETA for Update 5, but patch notes are due to be released some time next week.
The Crew is now in Beta, and I’ve been playing around with it a fair bit. Ubisoft and Ivory Tower’s new open world racing game has a lot of interesting ideas. But how well does it actually play? Well dear reader, thats why this article exists! So read on for my thoughts on The Crew closed beta for PC!
The Crew starts out with an action packed chase sequence that has you driving a truck offroad in a bid to elude pursuing police. Once you lose them, you enter a race in the nearby city of Detroit. Then…your brother shows up and asks you to accompany him to a gang meeting? Then he gets shot? And you end up in jail until an FBI agent offers to let you out in return for helping her take down a corrupt agent and your brother’s murderer? If this sounds like a rejected plot for a Fast & Furious movie, then you didn’t go ahead and check your brain at the door before jumping into The Crew. Stellar storytelling is clearly NOT a top priority here, and I found it was better to just tune out the nattering of your NPC friend Zoe whenever she popped up in the corner of the screen.
Once you drive yourself through the Death Star sized plot hole that is the story, things thankfully start to get better. Immediately you are given the cash to buy one of four starter cars before hitting the open road. Then..Zoe shows up again. This will become a common theme, but it seemed that every time I was settling in and enjoying The Crew, Zoe would pop up to nag me about something. Once you get your first few races out of the way, you are allowed to pretty much do whatever you want. This is where the game really starts to get interesting for me.
The entirety of the United States makes up the map in The Crew. Obviously, its not a 1:1 recreation and I find the selection of cities such as Detroit, New York, etc to be a bit wearing on the eyes. Things get better when you venture west , but I still saw far to much of grey city streets with grey buildings and grey skies. Eschewing the missions Zoe constantly tried to foist off on me, I decided to take a drive from Detroit to New York. The game let me do that without throwing any invisible walls in my way, much to my (pleasant) surprise. Even more pleasantly, as I cruised the highways at ludicrous speeds, slamming into tour buses full of unsuspecting victims and incurring no discernible penalty aside from the few seconds it required me to accelerate back to top speed, I came across challenges. One had me launching my car off of a ramp towards a landing zone. The further I jumped, the more points. Another had me slaloming in and out of gates littered along the highway. They provided nice diversions and gave me hope that driving in the game would be overall entertaining.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to be the case. While I am aware that the game is in Beta, I found no such distractions when I chose to venture westward from Detroit to Salt Lake City. Instead, I was greeted by a bland expanse of open road, populated by overly chatty players whom I could not seem to turn off in my voice comms…and not single challenge to be seen.
Fortunately, the game is decent looking. Some people will argue that it looks great. And it probably does on console. Unfortunately, much like the recent Watch_ Dogs, the game is merely competent on PC. Textures are of mixed quality, the frame rate is locked to 30 FPS and the damage modeling on the cars is so awful I actually stopped and searched the options menu for a way to turn it off. Mud and snow effects stick to the bottom of your screen, and while they are a nice touch at first, they quickly become distracting. The in car view is nicely detailed, but utterly impractical for long term driving. It is noteworthy that I was unable to find any of the offroad races, and I will update this article once I do.
You might be thinking to yourself that I seem to have very mixed impressions of The Crew so far. Truthfully, I do. Once I did a little judicious tweaking and unlocked the games 30 FPS artificial cap, it went a long way towards solving the niggling control issues I had. That being said, the lack of things to do and the somewhat lifeless feel of the open world have me concerned going forwards. Is the game fun to play? You bet it is. The customization, sense of speed (even at 30 FPS) and overall presentation (aside from Zoe. SHUT UP ZOE!) are slick, polished and well implemented. I look forward to what Ivory Tower will do with their new IP. Unfortunately, unless something drastic changes, I won’t be seeing to much of it as I can’t justify paying full retail price for The Crew if the final game doesn’t improve by leaps and bounds over this beta.
The Crew, the new open world racing game from Ivory Tower and Ubisoft has been getting a lot of attention recently. Unfortunately, some of that has been rather negative because the game is locked at 30 FPS on PS4, XBox One and…PC. While some people might say that 30 FPS vs 60 FPS isn’t that big of a deal, others will disagree. Particularly in racing games, lower framerates introduce input lag, leading to that floaty disconnected feeling you might have experienced before in other games. Fortunately, the engine isn’t hard locked at 30FPS. Follow these simple steps and enjoy your new 60 FPS version of The Crew (PLEASE NOTE: The Crew is in Beta and this fix may not work for everyone. If you experience instability, simply reverse the steps to restore your previous framerate.)
The news has just been announced that Battleline Hardline, the latest installment in the Battlefield series in which you take the action from the battlefield of martial combat as a soldier to that of the city streets as a police officer or criminal, has had its release date pushed back to some time in 2015.
While originally scheduled to be released in a matter of months, DICE and Visceral said they have pushed back the release to work on a number of things the feedback they got from the Beta brought up. This includes multiplayer “innovation”, single-player story depth and stability, the last one being of gigantic importance after the problems that the last installment Battlefield 4 had even months after its launch and the reputation it gained as a result.
“This has been a focus for our team since day one and we’re going to be using the extra time to continue to optimize the game for a stable launch,” said DICE VP Troedsson, saying that the team learned a lot from Battlefield 4, more from the Hardline Beta and that the extra time would give them a chance to find and squash those issues before the game’s actual launch.
