As part of Gamescom’s first set of livestreams, EA showed off a number of their properties and talked about some of the things we could expect to see from some of their biggest upcoming games.

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Among the games shown was the much anticipated followup to the Titanfall game, Titanfall 2. Through trailers and talk, we found out that Titanfall 2’s beta will take place over two weekends with the first taking place this very weekend. The betas will be deemed technical tests, in which Respawn will be trying to get as many people in as possible to stress and probably break the game so they can know what to fix. The beta will only be including people in both consoles though as we covered yesterday, unfortunately PC players will not be included in these tests.

The beta will only show off a small slice of the game, with two maps and two game modes – Bounty Hunt and Pilot vs Pilot – being available for the first beta; the second beta also adding on another game mode – Amped Hardpoint which is a slightly changed up version of the old Hardpoint game mode from the first game. There will also be two new titans available, Ion with a vortex shield and Scorch with the fire weapon.

If you’re looking to play in one of the betas, they’ll be taking place from August 19th to 21st and then the weekend after that, August 26th to 28th. Then the full game will be coming later on in the year in October.

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The other big game presented was of course Battlefield 1, set in the First World War and with battle taking place over land, sea and air. Again we had a trailer but a lot of the talk was around the different modes of battle (horses, tanks, planes are all useable vehicles) and a game play demonstration of four matches (that last one being unplanned to resolve the draw) showed off the chaos of a battlefield in a fairly destructible environment.

Talked up were two other points, the armoured train behemoth that one side can call in during the battle based on which side is losing at the time it is made available and the specialised ‘Elite Classes’ of soldiers which spawn as pick ups on the field that can be acquired by a player and then transform them into a soldier with a particular speciality but weaknesses in all other areas.

A beta was also mentioned for Battlefield, with the beta opening up for PS4, Xbox One and PC on August 31st. At first only people who have signed up at battlefield.com as Battlefield Insiders will be able to play in the beta but it will eventually be opened up to all players a little further down the line.

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The last thing that caught our attention during EA’s stream was little more than an announcement of something that will be releasing at the end of the year.

EA have been working in partnership with Lucasfilms to make a Star Wars game based off the upcoming Rogue One film – a VR game at that. Titlled Star Wars Battlefront: Rogue One X-Wing VR Mission you will take to space as one of a wing of Rebel-aligned X-Wing pilots in fights with TIE Fighters and possibly a Star Destroyer too was hinted at. However, there was not a lot of information as they had to keep most details under wraps for now.

However, the game will be available to owners of the Star Wars Battlefront game on PS4 for free when it launches during the holiday season at the end of the year.

Twitch has changed a lot in the past few years, and it seems like things will be changing even more. Today the company announced that they are acquiring Curse.

 
“Please join us in welcoming Curse, a leading global multimedia and technology company focused on content and products specifically for gamers, to the Twitch family.”

Curse, of course is a prominent company involved in voice communications, chat and gaming mods as well as wikis and guides. The release from Twitch goes on to say “This acquisition will help provide gamers with the tools and resources they need to achieve the ultimate gaming experience, a mission shared by both Twitch and Curse. Together Curse and Twitch will help gamers connect, interact, and share information with one another.” 

From a business perspective, this is a huge acquisition for Twitch. Curse has more than 30 million unique users per month. There is a huge opportunity here for Twitch to extend their community and content offerings through this acquisition. In addition, Twitch already has strong options in place to monetise content and subscribers on it’s own platform. The acquisition of Twitch could potentially open up other avenues for Twitch to gain additional revenue, as well as incorporate Curse’s voice chat technology into the platform. While no definite plans have been stated, the Twitch announcement did say they are excited for the many possibilities ahead. It will be interesting to see what comes of this merger in the next few months.

If you enjoyed your time with Sunless Sea, you’ll be glad to know that its first expansion, Zubmariner, has finally been given a release date. That and it’s not all that far in the future either. It’s also gotten a new trailer:

So October the 11th will be when the expansion is released which will take you from your boat and the port towns of Fallen London and the Unterzee into the dark depths of its surface. It promises to be as much of a decision making and encounter filled game as the base game was, with terrifying looking ‘zee-beasts’, management of oxygen reserves, and the all surrounding darkness meaning you’re reliant on your sonar to pinpoint anything down there.

Narrative director Chris Gardiner says of the expansion: “Beneath the Unterzee it’s dark, hostile, littered with plunderable wrecks and haunted by the worst horrors of the Neath… The ports on the zee bed are a level weirder than those on the surface, and their inhabitants have been changed by the deeps.Some are hiding, some are hateful, some are mad. Some are all three, and have very big ambitions.”

Those who purchased the base game through Early Access will be getting the expansion for free. Otherwise it’ll be available for £7.99/$10.99 on GOG, The Humble Store and Steam come October 11th.

If players find an exploit there is usually someone willing to use it. Even if it ruins the fun of others around them also playing the game.

Pokémon Go has been very successful there’s no doubt, and one of the big features for players is locating and fighting for the possession of the Gym locations dotted around their area, hoping to turn the area all red or blue or yellow for their chosen Team. However many people are finding that Gyms can no longer be won because the person in control… has placed an Egg inside the Gym.

When you win the possession of a Gym you must leave behind Pokemon there for passing challengers to do battle with, and your fellow teammates can add their own to help boost the Gym’s defences against being taken away from your Team’s possession. However, an Egg is an unhatched Pokemon. They therefore have no character data or stats assigned to them and therefore cannot be battled with – meaning that the Gym can’t be switched from a Team’s allegiance and neither can anyone gain XP from the Gym via battling. It also allows the player who placed the Egg in there to continue to earn the Pokécoin rewards they get for holding onto the Gym without any fear that they’ll lose it.

So far numerous Gyms in the New York area have been locked up like this, and as news spreads Gyms across the world might soon find themselves forever frozen in a Team’s possession.

At least until Niantic are able to patch this exploit out. God knows what’ll happen to all those Eggs then… maybe redistributed to more responsible Trainers?

Titanfall 2’s open beta is due to make its appearance onto consoles soon, but Respawn have announced today that unfortunately PC players won’t be getting the same treatment.

In the statement Respawn said that they’ve still got some hardware compatibility issues, meaning that as of yet they’re not ready to have the game tested across various PC builds yet so PC players will be left out of the open beta.

CEO of Respawn Vince Zampella said “We’re still making a lot of tweaks and changes to the renderer, the game, and effects so we haven’t run the game through the hardware compatibility lab yet to detect and handle a large variety of hardware – video cards, CPUs etc… So, currently the PC game isn’t as easy to throw out for testing as the console is, because of the additional variables and configurations that we need to support.”

However there’s more to it then that, as Respawn have decided that if they released the beta to PCs players would datamine it for information about the single player part of the game. That information would then be spread about online everywhere and Respawn feels that would spoil it for everyone.

“We realise this is a big disappointment for our PC fans, but we feel this allows us to concentrate on the real purpose of the tech test and focus on the server stability and scalability. Rest assured we’re confident in our ability to deliver a great PC experience for launch. We appreciate your understanding, and we look forward to seeing everyone on The Frontier this October.”

Given recent problems with PC ports for other games, you have to hope that they do have a testing period with PC players at some point before release. Gamers are beginning to see bad PC ports as something to be expected, and it’s something that needs addressing if it’s ever to change.