Following the news of Leonard Nimoy’s death yesterday, players of the game Elite: Dangerous soon came up with a petition to ask that the station in New Yembo that was funded through a Community Goal be named after the actor, most famous for his role of Spock in the original Star Trek series.

Today both on the topic about said station on the E: D forums, and through the official Elite: Dangerous Twitter page, Frontier have confirmed that they are going to name a station in Nimoy’s honour but not the one in New Yembo. Instead a station in the LHS 3006 system will be named for him, where the game’s version of the planet Vulcan orbits. The station will be close to the planet in question.

Speaking on the forum Executive Producer Michael Brookes said: “Just a heads up that there’ll be a Nimoy Memorial station added in the Wings update (1.2), so the Yembo station is still open for other suggestions.”

The news has been fondly greeted by players both on the forum and through social medias across the net. Frontier said on their Twitter that right now they’re looking for the “most respectful way possible” to implement the in-game tribute.

.@ChrisUK27 @SciFiHour @katerussell that’s right. Working out how to do it in the most respectful way possible!

— Elite Dangerous (@EliteDangerous) February 28, 2015

It takes something special to make more than half of a Kickstarter goal on its first day, but it does happen. The latest occurrence of this is an MMO game called Crowfall which at time of writing has made $558,567 of its $800,000 target and still has 28 days to go.

Crowfall is being made by a company called ArtCraft Entertainment, a company that contains people who have worked on games such as Ultima Online, The Sims Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic. The game has you playing as immortal warriors called “Crows” chosen by the gods to travel to dying worlds and collect resources and the souls of the mortals there before the world dies off forever, and takes place between the Eternal Kingdoms and Campaign Worlds.

The Eternal Kingdoms are permanent but lack resources acting as a ‘home base’ for your player character as well as a ‘kingdom’ you set the rules within, and you can allot land to other players who swear fealty to you. The Campaign Worlds are where most of the actions takes place but each one lasts only a few months each. The terrain in each of these temporary worlds is voxel-based and apparently will be totally destructible as you compete and form alliances with other players, while crafting, building and fending off monsters as each world collapses further and further into nothing. The rules for each Campaign World can vary wildly too, from races allowed to participate to the world’s ‘end-condition’ which could be as simple as a set amount of time passing to how many battles have been fought – they will depend on the type of world (The Infected, God’s Reach, The Shadow or The Dregs).

Characters are kept between Campaign Worlds, and there will be the option to customise characters with 12 ‘archetypes’ (character types) and Advantages/Disadvantages that you can select to create your character. You can also acquire and customise weapons and gear as well as abilities and other things. You will be able to have up to 3 characters on a single account.

With the Kickstarter doing so well, stretch goals are probably already being considered by the team behind the game, although given that its still early days there haven’t yet been any hints as to what they could be. ArtCraft hope to get a first release with partial functionality into Alpha testing by late Summer 2015, with the core module estimated for Winter 2016.

We’ll be watching this one and hoping it does well, and if you’d also like to find out more click the link below for the Kickstarter and site for the game.

Crowfall Kickstarter: [x]

Crowfall Site: [x]

Diablo 3’s about to get a patch (2.2.0) that’s going to hit the Public Test Realm soon. It’ll add many things like new Legendary armour sets, a new type of Adventure Mode bounty, new Goblins to chase and much, much more besides. However, there are some things such as a new in-game currency, timed experience boosts and cosmetic items that won’t be available in all parts of the world.

Blizzard posted an update on the patch that cited “Some new features may start to show up in data mined information for patch 2.2.0 that will not apply to all regions,” citing five that won’t apply to the Americas specifically.

• A new currency called “Platinum”
• Timed experience boosts
• New cosmetic items including wings, non-combat pets, and character portraits
• References to stash space and character slot expansions
• A new UI element that references the above information

Taking a look at these, it looks as if Blizzard might be thinking about adding microtransactions to the game for regions outside of America. Blizzard themselves seemed to confirm this by saying in the same post “We recognize that many players have expressed an interest in microtransactions being added to Diablo III. While we may explore this model in some regions, we have no immediate plans to implement such purchases anytime soon for the Americas region.”

When queried, Blizzard said that “There are a lot of different factors that go into decisions like this, including various regional or local market considerations. We know that some of these features would be ones that players in several regions might enjoy, but we don’t currently have plans to support these in North America, and we don’t have any other region-specific details to share at this time.”

Interesting decision. Do you think America might see the microtransactions implemented in the future too?

Colour is used quite extensively in many games to notify all kinds of things, most usually good, hostile, neutral characters in RPG, MMO and other games that require fighting. World of Warcraft is one of those games. However, it’s a fact that some people aren’t easily able to tell between some colours due to having been born with one of the types of colourblindness that has an effect on vision. Because of that, Blizzard’s next patch for their long-running MMO will contain some new options to help those with colour vision issues be able to determine things that are usually shown through use of colour.

The patch will contain three new sets of filters in an Accessibility menu, made to help players with protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia. Each set of adjustments will be available via a dropdown selector and will have a ‘strength’ slider so you can tailor the filters, with the right removing more problematic colour wavelengths as it goes further to the right hand side.

Also, the rarity of items that is usually denoted by colour can be switched to instead show this information in text instead through the accessibility options, so ‘Rare’ and ‘Epic’ as well as the other rarities will actually show up in a form that is easier to see for those with colour blindness.

A recently registered trademark that covers computer and consoles games, as well as “on-line gamin services” has just been registered by a mystery company. However, given that the trademark is for “Elite: Deadly” chances are, it’s Frontier Developments that has registered the trademark as part of the future of their massive game Elite: Dangerous.

The trademark was spotted by Neogaffers and while the visible listing for the trademark on an EU registration site doesn’t have a company name listed as having been behind it, there is a representative listed, Maguire Boss.

As of yet it’s not sure what Frontier are planning to use this name for, if indeed it is them who has registered the trademark. It could be part of an expansion, a DLC, a sequel (although at this point that’d be premature) or maybe even a tie-in app for the game. All that can be done now is to sit back and wait until more news surfaces before we find out what the ‘Deadly’ in Elite shall be.