Even before it released The Sims 4 was causing waves, but none of them were in the pools that had traditionally been one of the central points for The Sims as a game series. In fact, pools were one of many things there weren’t to be in the latest game from Maxis’ long running simulator series and that didn’t sit well with long-time fans.

Well it seems that the pools are returning! Hoorah! Now you can amuse yourself by plunging your pixellated charges into the water and removing all the exit points then watching them drown again. Lovely.

And it seems that with pools comes a wide level of customisation. All shapes, sizes, levels and designs of pools are now available for you to build for your Sims. And the patch that’s re-added the pools has also added the swimwear option for your family as well as fixing a handful of bugs and performance issues.

So, hopefully now all waves will stay confined within the walls of the pools where they belong from now on.

Ubisoft are having a fairly large assault on Christmas this year. They’re due to release three big titles around the holiday period, but the listings are strangely absent from the November and December listings for Steam’s UK store.

Assassin’s Creed Unity will release in Europe on November 13th, Far Cry 4 on the 20th and The Crew will appear on December 2nd. This is when it will be available to purchase in stores as a hard copy and also as digital copies across the world from all digital distributors except Steam in the UK. Ubisoft say that they’ve been in talks with Valve but as of right now the games would not come to Steam in the UK.

The reasons behind this strange exception aren’t clear, but it’s likely to have something to do with the pricing. The physical store copies will be retailing for around £55 and the digital copies are only a fiver cheaper in Ubisoft’s uPlay store and other digital retailers with the games selling for £49.99. Currently Steam doesn’t really sell games at a price above £40 so it’s likely that the high price of all the games is the sticking point.

Maybe the games will come to Steam at a later date, but if a compromise isn’t reached soon Ubisoft will potentially be missing out on a little market share this Christmas from the Steam gamers.

In a hat trick of Blizzard’s crackdown on Hearthstone botting in the last week or so, the most popular Hearthstone botting program out there – Hearthcrawler – has been shut down by the tool’s creators.

Apparently the creators contacted Blizzard themselves according to the goodbye message which is now all that remains of the site at warcrawler.com; and have chosen to willingly shut down the tool before they get into big trouble with the game developer themselves.

“This is our last official announcement. The recent ban wave in Hearthstone hit a lot of users.

 

After discussing this with Blizzard, it’s clear we have to take off our services/products now. Please note that we’re not going to be commenting further on this.

 

Thank you all for being part of our community. We are very sad about this but you also know botting is against the rules and we all knew that the day when our products doesn’t work anymore would come.”

The recent bans come after the cheating and using third-party programs to automate play was revealed to have penetrated all the way to the top of the ranking ladder with at least two users having admitted to win trading as well to reach Legendary rankings. Thousands of accounts have either had temporary or permanent bans from the TCG already and Blizzard have said that any further culprits caught will have harshly punished as a result.

In very recent news (so recent it’s only an hour old) the makers of free-to-play MOBA game Dawngate have announced that they are no longer planning on continuing the development of the game.

A post from Matt Bromberg, Group General Manager that was put up on the game’s website, and quickly reposted to the game’s sub-Reddit announced this to the game’s community saying that while Keystone Games had entered into the project with “great hopes and expectations” about Dawngate they ultimately weren’t seeing the progress they’d hoped for.

Dawngate was a new genre for Electronic Arts for whom Keystone is a part of, and the game has been in beta for around 18 months, with 6 of those being an open beta. Feedback from the players had resulted in some growth for the game but not enough for Keystone to justify continuing further with it.

The game will continue to run for another 90 days now, with refunds being given to all players who spent money during the beta period – most should be processed and done within the next 10 days.

They finished the post by thanking the community for their support and recognised the skills and talents of the team who had worked on the game, calling it a “labour of love”.

Dawngate site “An important announcement about the future of Dawngate”: [x]

Reddit post: [x]

A new bundle is going up on Humble Bundle soon and it’s a little bit different.

Crowdfunding is a very popular way to fund new games now it seems, but recently a number of titles have either not made their targets in time or have been pulled before their end because they hadn’t picked up enough momentum to justify carrying on. People are becoming more and more picky about where they place their money for crowdfunding, as there’s no guarantee that a funded project will get finished and you’ll get the items you backed for.

Croteam though are offering a bundle that will allow them to finance their next game and you’ll get what you pay for immediately. Sounds good. The game they’re trying to fund is Serious Sam 4 and for that they’re offering 6 Serious Sam games – Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter, Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter, Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, Serious Sam Double D,Serious Sam: Kamikaze Attack!, and Serious Sam Public Test 2. And there’s a chance to grab Serious Sam 3: BFE Deluxe Edition and Serious Sam 2 if you beat the average price paid.

Humble allows you to split your money between a few different places (Humble, the developers, charities etc.) but all the money Croteam receive is going to be put into the development of Serious Sam 4. So they’re selling you games, to fund the making of new games.

… Wait, that sounds familiar. Haven’t we done this already?