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While the Wasteland of Fallout 4 is, as always, awe-inspiring, large and full of things to do; most people can agree that one thing it lacks is… well that simple natural beauty it had before the War. Side-effect of nuclear fallout don’t you know? It also lacks much in the way of the changing of the seasons as time moves on, even though there is a dating system in the game (which decorates Diamond City in festive cheer if the date hits December 25th in-game fyi). That might also be down to the nuclear fallout, but it’s a little less clear.
However, it’s been over 200 years by this point and obviously there are some modders out there who thought that Boston and the Commonwealth really ought to have recovered a little bit better than this. So a number of mods have been released through Steam Workshop and NexusMods for the game, and one person released a mod that not only brings some green life back to Boston, but allows for the cycling of the seasons as the days pass:
The video seen here demonstrates how the Seasons mod changes the game around you, with an apparently minimal impact on the FPS of your game depending on your machine’s specifications. Imagine leaving Diamond City in its festively decorated form on December 25th and stepping out into the winter wasteland outside. A white Christmas never felt so awesome or felt so dangerous.
Of course, the video maker has used other mods in the video to enhance the effect. Those mods are the Subtle ENB mod that plays with the colour balance to make the colours crisper in the daytime and darker at night, the True Storms mod that enhances the weather effects of the storms that blow in from time to time in the Wasteland (rain, thunder, storms and radiation rains) and a character modeller mod called Caliente’s Better Bodies Enhancer that gives your some more options to play with upon character creation. All four of the mods seem to work together nicely with no suggested framerate drops in the gameplay section of the video, which is always nice to see.
If you’re aching to get a little bit more from Fallout 4, the mods are linked below from their NexusMod pages.
SMITE has released it’s first god in the Japanese Pantheon, Amaterasu the Shining Light. As always, its time to jump into an Arena match and test out the new god’s abilities!
Klei Entertainment’s Don’t Starve: Shipwrecked hit Steam Early Access in December, and already it seems to be shaping up to be just as good a game as Don’t Starve was. Now the official forums have had a ‘roadmap’ published that outlines how Klei are going to build the game.
Designer Bryce Doig was the writer of the forum post, promising some new content and tweaks to come. New content itself will be added to the game every three weeks started mid-January and will continue until the end of February, after which the studio will spend time squashing the bugs out of the code as well as making sure the balance is fair.
“In the December 17th update we released Walani, but we still have three more characters to go,” writes Doig. You can also look forward to new beasties who’ll be looking to devour your survivor when extra bosses are introduced to the game. “The world in Shipwrecked has a noticeable absence of large creatures,” says Doig. “Right now, we have three new bosses planned for Shipwrecked: the Tiger Shark and two other yet to be named horrors.”
There’s even going to be a link between the island worlds of Shipwrecked and those settings from the original game, with a portal that will allow you to move between them which work very much like Caves already do in the game, unloading the current world and loading in the one you’re travelling to.
If you’re wanting to go along for the development ride, the game is on Steam now for £3.99/$4.99.
The Division is one of those games that I can’t quite remember when I first heard about it. Part of that is because a lot of gaming events tend to blur into one when you look for their trailers, and another part of that is possibly down to the delays in release it’s suffered.
However in this week’s Humble Weekly Bundle, Ubisoft seem to be trying to make some amends for the delays by offering beta keys for The Division. The pack is a bunch of Tom Clancy games, including numerous Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six games, and you can secure the beta key if you pay over the average ‘pay-what-you-want’ price of $9.58. And extra 42 cents will also secure you Splinter Cell Blacklist and Ghost Recon: Future Solder.
Of course, we don’t actually know when The Division is coming out, or when the beta will be other than sometime early this year. The money goes to charity though, so you’d be supporting a good cause even if you were sitting on a key for a little while.
The CEO of Gazillion Entertainment, the company behind the Marvel Heroes game, has announced that he is due to leave the company to work on his own projects after seven years.
David Brevik was formerly the president of Blizzard North for 11 years previously and said that he missed the game developing side of his job.
“As CEO, I spent most of my time running the company” Brevik said in the post he made on the Marvel Heroes’ forums to announce his leaving. “After doing this for several years, I really want to get back to developing games and programming. I got into this industry to make games and I miss the day-to-day creation process.”
He said that the decision to leave had been tough to make as he loved Marvel Heroes and while he’ll still be playing the game and streaming it he’s “going back to doing the things I love most: programming and making games.”
On the subject of Marvel Heroes’ future and the big 2016 update next month Brevik is confident that the Gazillion team have it handled suitably. “We have an incredibly talented staff here, and I know the game is in great hands, I believe in the future of the game and I know a lot of amazing things that are being worked on.”
