A recent update to Ubisoft’s The Crew game has patched a number of bugs, the most amusing being one that enabled some cars to accelerate so fast while going in reverse they were actually going faster facing backwards than when they were facing forward. Whoops.

As well as this, a number of other tweaks have been made the the handling and performance of several makes of cars as well as fixes to bugs that occurred when a friend who left the game would still display as being Online, when tracking progress of unlocks through awards and many other issues and bugs. This is along with general improvements to such things as the framerate when in Cockpit Mode and the AI. Also halted in their tracks are the bug that caused players to sometimes lose all their save data (unfortunately the data can’t be restored) and one that allowed for a wall-riding exploit, thanks to a change in the friction applied to side barriers along roads.

The patch isn’t just for fixes though, it’s added new content to the game. A PvP mode now exists for ten different circuits that calls for you to eliminate other players and four new faction missions have been added to the game. Great if you’ve already completed what was already available.

While bug fixes are always a good thing (when they work and don’t break other things), it’s a little sad to see The Crew’s unintentional tribute to Big Rigs infamous reverse bug bite the dust.

The testing of Beta updates by players is a long standing thing among the PC gaming community, with a lot of games offering an opt-in beta program so players can try out the new versions before they officially release and also point out bugs that the developers might have missed. It’s a good practice overall and now Bioware are looking to bring such testing to Dragon Age Inquisition in order to “foster better communication between our players and developers.”

The program will give access to patch 5, which will be the largest update to the RPG since it released. This is mainly down to introducing an entire new area known as the Black Emporium described as “a mysterious underground shop run by an immortal proprietor”, and will sell powerful items as well as something called the Mirror of Transformation that lets you change the voice and facial appearance of your character in case you’ve grown tired of the one you chose in selection. You can also use crafting materials to change the colour tint of your attire.

As well as this, new controls have been added with shader quality now available in the graphics menu and also the ability to bind an auto-attack key to the mouse has been added. The other changes Bioware are keeping quiet about though.

Signups for the program will be available via the Keep program and will open sometime “in the near future”. It’s not yet known if Bioware plan to continue the program past this one update or spread it out to other games. Nor do we know just when patch 5 will release, as it needs to undergo the certification processes on the console versions.

If you’re a mobile gamer, you know all about the ‘freemium’ game model. You get a game for free and the in-game purchases are really cheap… but then they start to add up and before you know it you’ve sunk more money into the game than you’d have spent buying it in the first place. Freemium games have been designed to be addictive and while some companies do it well and treat the gamer as a customer, the problems of the ones that treat the game as a money mine are clear.

Today however it seems that Apple have decided to take a stand, adding a new section to the front page of the App Store called ‘Pay Once & Play’. In other words, it promotes only games that you pay for once and that do not contain any in-app purchases or extra content that needs paying for to unlock. The section is further arranged into sub-sections of Recent Releases, Blockbuster Games and App Store Originals. This includes games such as Thomas Was Alone and Minecraft alongside the likes of Threes, Leo’s Fortune and many others. It’s already in the UK App Store and should be rolled out to the US Store soon if it hasn’t been already.

Apple has taken other steps to combat misleading freemium games that advertised themselves as ‘free to play!’ despite hiding major features of gameplay behind in-app purchases. It added a label that was added to indicate a game contained the purchases, and then changed the text of the button for Freemium games from ‘Free’ to ‘Get’ to save more misleading of customers.

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.

After an earlier patch broke mod-making for its players, Techland is now planning on the development of “free and extensive” modding tools for their game Dying Light. And what’s more, the developers are asking the players to tell them what they’d like to see made, mod-wise. No matter how weird or wonderful it is.

“Modders were a massive part of our gaming community since Call of Juarez 2 and Dead Island — and we wish to continue that with Dying Light. This invitation is only the first stage of our cooperation with the gaming community. After the modding tools are released, we plan to actively support the coolest mods created by players. We want to give creative freedom to the players to help keep Dying Light fresh and interesting even many years after their release. We want to thank players for the support they have shown us and are looking forward to their ideas where Dying Light can go from here.”

For this, Techland have made a new forum especially for the use of mod-making and discussions on what mods players would like to see, as well as their implementation and sharing I’d assume.

Any ideas for mods you’d love to see in this game?