Space Pirates and Zombies 2 is a sequel to an indie game called Space Pirates and Zombies from 2011. Right now the sequel’s been in Early Access for about a year, but it would seem that the developers of the game have been having some trouble behind the scenes and because of it a much anticipated gamemode has had to fall by the wayside.

Developers MinMax Games put out a post on their Steam community page recently that broke the news to the game’s community that unfortunately the planned multiplayer arena mode has had to be scrapped, along with a lengthy apology for having done it. The problem it seems that is due to a lack of multiplayer backend functionality in the Unity game engine that they’re building the game in, they just can’t get Arena to work as well as they feel good releasing with the game. They state that they “have tried four new multiplayer solutions as well as made a good try to resuscitate the legacy networking from Unity 4. But at this point we feel that the mounting wasted time and dead ends are really hurting development progress.”

As mentioned, many players were really looking forward to the multiplayer and had even hoped that the game might one day get a co-op campaign mode too. Needless to say, the scrapping of Arena has kind of nipped those hopes in the bud. It does seem though that the majority of players have taken the news well, with most of the responses to the post being quite positive and a number of players saying that they have respect for MinMax’s honesty with them about the state of the game and the now-dropped feature. Always nice to see people on the Internet acting rationally for once.

If you’re curious about the game though, you can pick up Space Pirates and Zombies 2 right now from the Steam store for $19.99/£14.99.

At the moment Microsoft are pushing their idea of cross-play between Windows 10 and Xbox One hard. ReCore and Gears of War 4 were both released as Xbox and Windows exclusives, with Play Anywhere also being a big thing they’re currently pushing. Halo Wars 2 will be the next, coming out on February 21st and according to Phil Spencer Microsoft are planning to focus hard on PC gaming in 2017.

His words were that Microsoft has a “bigger and more differentiated” first-party lineup for this year, with highlights including Sea of Thieves and State of Decay 2. Spencer believes that “2017 is going to be an incredible year for Xbox One and Windows 10 gamers” but they’ve still got a ways to go before they can overcome the reputation for PC gaming that ‘Games For Windows Live’ left them with years back.

Only time will tell if Microsoft can live up to the promises Spencer is making. I hope that they will somewhat, I really am looking forward to Sea of Thieves with the other station staff. If you want to read the full interview where Spencer talked about this, the full article can be found over at VG247.

One of the big things about multiplayer survival sandbox games is that… well, griefers are a thing. People who get their kicks ruining other people’s stuff when they’re off-server (and sometimes still on-server) are generally not thought of highly, but people still do it. Now it seems it’s become such an issue for one recently released that the developers have had to step in to put in a fix.

Conan Exiles’ official servers have been suffering from EU players logging on to find out that while they were sleeping players from the NA and Asia regions have come in, and destroyed their camps overnight (and vice-versa). Obviously this doesn’t feel fair to them and Funcom have agreed because they’re now region-locking official servers – which means only EU players can access EU servers, NA players access NA servers and so on.

“We have decided to East/West region lock the official servers for three reasons. The language barrier and the different playstyles is proving jarring for a lot of players. Also, the vastly different time zones between regions made offline raiding an unavoidable issue for a lot of players who would wake up to all their stuff being completely ruined.”

This does mean that for the moment there’s no official servers for Asia, SA or Russia but Funcom are hoping to get some up within the next week. The other snarfu in this has been that clans who are formed of players from multiple regions have suffered a little bit, and some players are even asking for a refund on their game because of it.

Either way, if it was that much of an issue region-locking had to be done it really has to be for the best. From what I’ve seen of it, Conan Exiles is a challenging game to play, so I can see why people would consider griefing to be a very big issue in this game.

It would be fair to say that Bethesda releases are often very much anticipated. After all, everyone spent ages trying to decipher what any little piece of news meant about when Fallout 4 was coming (along before it was actually confirmed to be a thing that existed) and they continue to do the same with The Elder Scrolls 6. Bethesda projects are big.

Now in an interview Bethesda’s executive producer Todd Howard has revealed that not only are Bethesda currently hard at work on three projects – they’re “bigger than anything [Bethesda has] ever done.” Sounds exciting. According to Howard two of those games are “classically Bethesda” while the third is a mobile game which doesn’t sound that exciting until you remember what a success Fallout Shelter was.

Talking about the two larger projects Howard said: “We have two larger projects that are more classically the scale of what we do, but even bigger. We overlap the projects so we’re working on them at the same time, but they’re staggered. I can’t talk a lot about them, but I can say that they’re bigger than anything we’ve ever done. They’re a bit different, but definitely in the wheelhouse that people are used to from us.”

Obviously as I mentioned above, people are speculating that one of these two larger games has to be The Elder Scrolls 6 but only time will tell. Bethesda has their usual Sunday slot at E3 though, so maybe we’ll see some news there when it takes place in a few months time?

It’s time for the yearly shake-up of Hearthstone’s meta, and as the Year of the Kraken goes out, the Year of the Mammoth comes – and fittingly with huge changes.

The most obvious of those are the rotation of certain sets of cards out from Standard to Wild. Joining Naxxramas and Goblins vs. Gnomes are the cards from The Grand Tournament expansion, as well as the Blackrock Mountain and League of Explorers adventures. This should see the Wild meta become vastly different from the one in Standard, as more sets are now Wild-exclusive. Adding to this, there will be a few of the Classic cards made Wild-exclusive owing to how often they pop up in play right now:

• Azure Drake
• Sylvanas Windrunner
• Ragnaros the Firelord
• Ice Lance
• Conceal
• Power Overwhelming

These six cards the developers feel contradict what they’re trying to do in the creation of Standard and Wild; to diversify the cards used and make the meta more interesting for players. Because these six were often seen as auto-includes, Blizzard feel that it’s time for them to rotate out into what they’ve dubbed their ‘Hall of Fame’ set of cards. While they had entertained the notion of allowing a full dust refund for these cards, they have decided that goes against their other goal of making Wild seem like fun – so if you own any of the cards that are going out in the Hall of Fame set you’ll get the full dust value of that card (up to the number of cards you can put into a deck) the first time you log on after the Year of the Mammoth has begun!

The next big thing for the Mammoth is that instead of going between Adventures and Expansions, this year we will have 3 inputs of expansions that add around 130 cards – which means a LOT of new cards coming this year. But for those who enjoy the colourful stories of Adventures (I’m one of them), never fear – the storytelling is coming to the expansions to help make them even better and cooler. These will be in the form of option single-player missions that expand the lore behind each expansions card set. Additional details about this new idea will be revealed at later dates.

Blizzard are also going to be trying to incentivize Wild, with them collaborating with third-parties to promote additional Hearthstone tournaments that use the Wild format, as well as an upcoming Heroic Tavern Brawl that will utilize it.

Also before the next expansion (theorized to be Un’Goro themed) Hearthstone will have for a short time, daily login rewards to claim. Dust, gold and packs will all be on offer, as well as “a few other surprises” before the expansion’s launch “to blaze a trail for everything our next expansion has to offer.” One of these could even be the new Hero that Blizzard are planning to release. New Rogue Hero Maiev Shadowsong will be available to gain after the next expansion launches, just by winning 10 games of Heartstone in either Standard Ranked or Casual modes. Given that all the others have required payment of some sort or to use another game, it’s nice to have one we can just earn by playing this game.

And that is basically what we can expect from the Year of the Mammoth, as far as Blizzard have announced. It sounds like a lot of fun is in store.