Ok, EGX Rezzed 2015 kicked off today and teh press were invited to check out ArenaNet’s 40 minute demo of the new Heart of Thorns expansion that’s coming soon

The first thing that jumped out at me was how the game honestly feels like nothing has changed… at all…

So rather than roll a new character and try the new Revenant class, I decided to basically make my main lvl 80 necromancer that has served me well since day one of the Guild Wars 2 release. And again, nothing new. apart from having to bind the controls slightly based on how I’ve played the game from release, the game felt exactly as it has the whole time.

The demo kicked off with a quite nice intro sequence in typical Guild Wars 2 style, but you very quickly realise that this is mid campaign, as you have no idea WHY they are doing what they are doing and what for, and this lack of info drops you squarely into what appears to be a Destiny’s Edge/Pact team up against a new jungle dragon, which quickly goes HORRIBLY wrong, leaving you and a few survivors to make your way through the jungle to save other survivors and find out what happened to Destiny’s Edge and the rest of the very quickly destroyed fleet.

What DOES happen very quickly is the learning of your first Mastery Point, this leading to learning how to glide for short distances. I must admit, I used this only once, to jump between a platform for a boss event that you stumble on pretty much straight away. This was interesting, albeit typical GW2 style, everyone is in it for themselves, 99% of people won’t help you if you are downed and the rest only for the extra experience for helping you back up, not for team work at all

This was a fun boss fight though, much more movement from the boss, a Wyvern instead of a dragon this time, on a roundish platform, although his rotation of moves got memorised very quickly and his fire breath attack is reasonably easy to evade. It was still enjoyable though, but I can see it getting boring quickly if too many people did it regularly, but then this is the problem with all the GW2 world boss fights

Now, some reading this will ask why I didn’t try the new Revenant class and there are two reasons… 1, I plan to make one and live stream it on release. and 2, I had to wait in the que to play this for nearly two hours. I watched every other person play one, apart from the odd veterans like me that wanted to see if our main class had changed.
Now the Revenant looks interesting, and I’m sure I will enjoy it when I play it, but really? If I wasn’t going to get it to stream, I’d wait a while after release and get it at discount.

I must say on a personal note though, the day was made all the more fun by the awesome Gaile Gray, the Guild Wars 1 community manager that always had time for us idiots in GW1, even the super opinionated ones like me and the PVP community, and although I very much doubt this gets read by anyone at ANet, I highly recommend the devs listen to the Lady Gray and bring back Lions Arch and International Districts, the game needs more conga lines and Froggy

505 Games, a global publisher of video games, Overkill, a Starbreeze Studio, and film director Demian Lichtenstein brings you the live-action PAYDAY web series.

 

Director Demian Lichtenstein, of “3000 Miles to Graceland” commented, “The PAYDAY web series has been a solid and very close collaboration between all parties involved. I have never experienced such a high level of commitment to excellence from PAYDAY creators Bo and Ulf Andersson, to the rock-solid input of game director David Goldfarb, and the combined efforts of the powerhouse global teams at 505 Games, Starbreeze, Overkill, Solaris, Equilibrium and Lightstone. Simply said, this is the best experience of my career.”

 

Executive produced by Greg O’Connor of “Warrior” and “Pride and Glory” fame, the web series was filmed on location in Los Angeles with a crew of over 100 and sets the scene for the next steps in the evolution of the PAYDAY story.

The series can be watched live on your PC or Downloaded, episode by episode to watch how and when you want

We’ll have a full review later this week

Greetings fellow Hearthstone players and enthusiasts, I have some fantastic news to share with you.

The Blizzard team have announced a new Hearthstone adventure at Pax East this afternoon; Blackrock Mountain.

Just like Naxxramas before it, the new adventure has you tackling a classic Warcraft themed raid, going up against bosses with unique battle styles. You can play with your own decks in Normal and Heroic mode, and pre-programmed decks in the Class-specific mode. Each new wing will become available on a weekly basis.

The Blackrock Mountain expansion boasts 31 new cards to unlock, 3 card backs and a Ragnaros fire themed board. The new cards are based around the awesome, magnificent, amazing DRAGONS! You will be able to build a dragon-themed deck, complimenting the legendary dragon cards already available.

To unlock the first of the three card backs, you need to reach rank 20 or above in Ranked play during the March season. The second is available when you pre-order Blackrock Mountain, and the third is yours once you beat all the bosses in the expansion.

The best news about Blackrock Mountain is that it will be available to play next month! Depending on you region, you will be able to pre-order the expansion on 29th or 30th March.

Well it was a fun 12 years, but it's time to turn off the lights and put the key under the door. #RIPMaxisEmeryville

— Guillaume Pierre (@MaxisGuillaume) March 4, 2015

With those 117 characters, SimCity lead gameplay scripter and designer Guillaume Pierre revealed the sad news that Electronic Arts has closed down SimCity studio Maxis Emeryville. After 12 long years, the company have apparently decided to close the studio in order to consolidate Maxis IPs into existing Maxis studios.

EA confirmed the closure and intentions with the following statement:

Today we are consolidating Maxis IP development to our studios in Redwood Shores, Salt Lake City, Helsinki and Melbourne locations as we close our Emeryville location. Maxis continues to support and develop new experiences for current Sims and SimCity players, while expanding our franchises to new platforms and developing new cross-platform IP.

 

These changes do not impact our plans for The Sims. Players will continue to see rich new experiences in The Sims 4, with our first expansion pack coming soon along with a full slate of additional updates and content in the pipeline.

Although Pierre had additionally tweeted “everyone’s out of a job” in reference to the studio’s employees, EA included a further paragraph in their statement in regards to the affected employees:

All employees impacted by the changes today will be given opportunities to explore other positions within the Maxis studios and throughout EA. For those that are leaving the company, we are working to ensure the best possible transition with separation packages and career assistance.

At this time, it’s unknown how many employees will be affected by the closure.

Maxis was founded by Will Wright and Jeff Braun in 1987, and was acquired by EA in 1997. The studios are well-known for their town-building and life-sim franchises, SimCity and The Sims respectively; but following the adoption of a new engine in their latest title, Sims 4, causing a large loss of content from that found in previous games; and a disastrous attempt to revive the SimCity franchise in 2013 as an online game which was plagued by numerous technical and design flaws as well as server instabilities, Maxis’ future under EA has found itself on an unfortunate downward spiral.

This is the Third (and final) installment of the Five Nights at Freddys trilogy. This game is set 30 years after the first game. The Freddy Fazbear Pizza incidents are a distant yet horrifying memory. A man decides to make a horror house themed around the dead pizza place. They try to find authentic Freddy Fazbear pizza items. They found a few masks here, a few pictures there, some voice recordings. Until they suddenly found one -An animatronic that looks like a golden Bonnie. Thats where things start going down hill. It’s not even turned on and yet it’s… moving… and there are other things bumping around and the systems are all going screwy.

The gameplay is vastly different from the other two games while also keeping some things. Scott Cawthon listens to all of our complaints on how we can’t pay attention of the cameras so he makes the game fully about the camera system while also adding a few other things. You have to pay attention to 3 different systems Video (which is the one thing he keeps throughout the games), Audio which is the only thing to protect you from the animatronic (it distracts him), and Ventilation, if the Ventilation goes down you start to black out and hallucinate. This game only has one Animatronic but it’s not the only thing you need to worry about. Other animatronics which are now hallucinations are back (Foxy, Chica, Freddy, and Ballon Boy (there are more but you go have fun finding them). The only way to avoid them is to ignore them which means switching cameras fast. This makes the game quite stressful because if you stare at them for to long then you get attacked forcing some of your 3 systems to go down. But if you ignore them then you might miss seeing where our Bunny Friend (named Spring Trap) is and that’s not quite a good thing. This does make the game more suspensful because if any of those things go down it takes time for you to reboot them back up and with multiple systems being down it takes all the more time being away from the camera. But if you go back to the camera you might get attacked by an halusination and if that happens more systems go down which takes longer to defend yourself and if… well I think I made my point. Theres not much to the story sadly, though it does give you some closure explaining to you on what happened to the animatronics and what happened to the murderer. I won’t say anymore then that.  If I had to give this game a score out of 10 it would be a 6.5/10. The gameplay has vastly been improved and it’s quite scary and suspensful. Sadly since I’m a story whore this lost alot of points for me. Anyway this is Nekokitwolf sayyyyinggggggggggggggggg caio.