Back in May when Gamespy was on its way out and the developers scrambling to give their older library some way to continue with multiplayer support beyond that, Relic the makers of Dawn of War began their work to allow their games to escape the shackles of that other platform supposedly destined for the chop, Games for Windows Live. They managed to untangle the first Dawn of War game back then, placing it into the support of Steamworks instead.

Now they’ve managed to release the patch that frees Dawn of War 2 with a patch today. Relic have had to remove a number of things from the game though to enable support to continue. Players of the game have lost access to the LAN multiplayer, Referee mode, and the option to pause during multiplayer but at least the multiplayer still works.

Meanwhile Games for Windows Live is still alive. The time when Microsoft will elect to finally terminate it is currently not known, as supposedly the platform was supposed to cease existing a few months back.

As far as fighting games go, Mortal Kombat has a long and somewhat infamous history of being not too shy about showing off the blood and the gory fatalities that probably played a role in keeping the series popular for so long.

Trailers for the latest announced game, Mortal Kombat X, were made public a few months ago. Now a release date has been announced for the game. April 10th is the day you can expect to get your new fix of the famous fatalities.

Unfortunately to unlock one of the characters, four-armed Goro, you need to actually pre-order the game which sucks for fans of the series who enjoy the character. There’s a chance he could later be available in DLC but paying extra for a character that had always been included before might rub some the wrong way.

As an MMO The Elder Scrolls Online was quite hyped up. It was a multiplayer experience set in the world of the Elder Scrolls, a chance to finally go questing with your friends, gather supplies and do what many of us had dreamt of since we played our first game in the franchise. However since the game has had a somewhat lukewarm performance. Now the publisher Zenimax Online are trimming down their number of staff.

Bethesda’s Pete Hines has said though that the layoffs are not down to how ESO has performed though, and are rather the type of layoffs that happen around this time of the game’s life. Simply: they hired more staff to help with the launch and first few months of its life, and now they were parring down the team to only what was truly needed.

“As is the norm for games of this type, we had ramped up a large workforce to develop a game of vast scale, and ramped up our customer service to handle the expected questions and community needs of The Elder Scrolls Online at launch. Now that we are nearly 6 months post launch, we have a thriving online community in a game that runs smoothly.”

There have been steps since launch to improve the quest-freezing bugs that plagued the open beta of ESO’s life and recently a new area for long-time high-level players was introduced called Craglorn; an area that’s set to expand again as Upper Craglorn gets added to the map.

Well, after the minor drama-hiccup of Bukkit’s abortive shutdown, in which it emerged that Mojang own Bukkit much to the surprise of many people; it seems that all is still not well between Mojang and all the people who made up the Bukkit project. One of the main coders has filed a DMCA notice that has resulted in CraftBukkit being taken down from the site it was available at.

The coder, who goes by the name of Wolvereness is responsible for a great many lines of code that make up the backbone of the Bukkit API that enables mods to work for clients and for servers. The DMCA, which has also been filed against fellow API client Spigot, alleges that the code that Wolvereness added to the project is being used without fair authorisation or credit under the terms of which the code is licenced. Also because of Mojang’s recent enforcement of the EULA, the DMCA also says that Bukkit itself is in violation of its own original GPL/LGPL licence. It’s actually somewhat more complicated (and confusing) than that, but this seems to be the basic gist of what is taking place.

As of the time of writing there has been no comment from Mojang, any of its prominent employees, or EvilSeph, the former lead of the Bukkit project on the situation publicly about what is happening behind the scenes or to reassure people that things can or will be resolved. The lead of Spigot has posted a news post about the DMCA and has since filed a counter notice.

We will be keeping an eye on events as they play out and will hopefully be able to update you as soon as something happens that will tell us whether or not this is indeed the end of Bukkit as we know it now.

Bukkit forum – “It’s time to say …”: [x]
Spigot Forum – “DMCA’d”: [x]
Reddit – “CraftBukkit, a hugely popular Minecraft server plugin, is taken down due to a DMCA claim. (xpost /r/minecraft)”: [x]

After the fan petition that made Blizzard put it into the game and the data gained from the datamine of the beta a week or more back, some gamers in the Warlords of Draenor beta have located where the tribute to late comedian and actor Robin Williams looks to be placed.

On a small island located off the coast of Talador, a user by the name of Haldhur found a genie NPC that is named ‘Robin’. The NPC is summoned by rubbing on a placed item called the Ever-Burning Lamp to which he will emerge and quote “INFINITE COSMIC POWER!” before shrinking down and quoting “Itty bitty living space.” before waving goodbye.

The island also contains a large split egg that could be the possible future location of the Mork-like human male character discovered in the datamine as well as some stuffed toys that could be a reference to Toys.