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It may seem hard to believe, but as of tomorrow (15th May 2014), Diablo 3 will be two years old. Cake and singing songs just isn’t in the style of the popular dungeon-based Hack-and-Slasher, however. Nor is a single day of celebration enough. No, Blizzard has something better in mind.
To celebrate the game’s second anniversary and the community that made it all possible, Starting tomorrow and running until May 22, players who log in to defend Sanctuary will receive double Rift Fragments as well as a +100% boost to their chance to find Legendary items.
While the buffs will apply to all characters; and will stack with other buffs a Player may have to add further bonuses to their drop rate etc, those with a console version of the game are unfortunately excluded – this event is for PC & Mac only. However, as Console releases already have better drop rates than the PC equivalent, this is hardly a big loss. What MIGHT be a big loss is the timing, as many Diablo 3 players are complaining the week-long event falls into a period where many students are completing major exams – thus limiting the time they have to take advantage. However, the most hardcore of Diablo 3 players are already clearing their schedule to make room for a whole week of non-stop action.
Whether you’re a casual or hardcore Diablo 3 player, looks like Diablo’s demons better prepare for a lot more bloodshed than usual.
Sony have kicked off a big sale on the Playstation Store, dubbed ‘May Madness’ in which there are many discounts on titles across their console range from more recent Playstation 4 and Vita releases all the way through to retro PS2 and PSone titles. The Sony Store website notes that there is ‘up to 65% off’ some games, with some having been discounted to less than £5.
Roughly a hundred different games have been included in the sale which is taking part in Europe and Australia and include titles such as XCOM Enemy Within, a Resident Evil 4/Code Veronica bundle and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. There’s also some brilliant retro classics thrown in there like Theme Hospital and Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee. The discounts will be in place until June 5th with a few exceptions such as Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z.
Nordic Games seem to have decided to try an experiment with their Planetary Annihilation game. They’ve decided to offer a proper boxed, hard-copy of the game on Amazon. This is the same version of the game that is currently on Steam Early Access. In other words – this is not the finished game that is being sold here.
The boxed version won’t actually be released until June 20th, but it is open to pre-orders costing £39.99, which is a tenner more than it costs on Steam right now. It will of course be updated like the digital copy, both requiring an Internet connection to receive them. So why is Nordic offering a hard-copy of a game that isn’t finished yet?
We think of it as an alternative to the typical pre-order, where you usually get cosmetic DLCs, skins and stuff like that, instead of actual gameplay,” Nordic said in an interview, adding that they wanted to try out this idea for themselves to see how many people would be interested in buying the boxed game. They’re also including a piece of content exclusive to this version, a playable in-game commander supplied by Uber Entertainment.
Planetary Annihilation is currently in what Nordic have called its ‘gamma’ phase. It is a big update but still not a final version, just a phase in the development as they continue to update the game in the ‘next few months and weeks’. This could mean that picking up the game even a month or two after its release could mean a sizeable download before the game is even playable.
Guess we’ll see how well this experiment will work out for Nordic and their game. What do you think? Is offering what is essentially a ‘beta’ game for full price something you are okay with or do you think ‘Early Access’ is beginning to go too far now?
The rumours about the technical specifications of Watch Dogs have escalated this week, mainly due to a passage on the website of Playstation.com that said “Hack everything as you make your way through Chicago’s underground as you experience Watch Dogs in a way that only PS4 can provide, at 60 frames per second in 1080p,”. However, the passage was then amended recently to remove the last bit, which left everyone wondering how Watch Dogs was really going to run.
Ubisoft have now released the actual statistics, saying that on the Playstation 4 the game will run at 900p and on the Xbox One at 792p. Both games will run at 30fps rather than the 60fps some were hoping for. However this was a choice made, says creative director Jonathan Morin in a blog post, simply because they wanted to focus more on the gameplay than the technicals and also simply because as more open-world game with a lot of dynamic elements higher resolution and framerate would be much harder to keep consistent than for a corridor-based shooter. Even though Watch Dogs was originally supposed to release half a year ago, the time was spent making a better game to play, not simply to look at.
In the same blog post Ubisoft have also outlined the differences between the versions of the game for the next-gen and last-gen consoles. In single-player mode the only difference will be areas containing a few less NPCs in the PS3/Xbox 360 versions without any supposed effect on the core gameplay. However on the multiplayer side, the Decryption competitive multiplayer mode and the ability to free roam with multiple players will not be included for the last-gen versions, which might not sit too well with some gamers still with the older consoles.
Watch Dogs will release for the PS4/ Xbox One/ PS3/ Xbox 360/ PC on May 27th, with the Wii U version being released later on in the year.
