It’s been 17 years since the release of Baldur’s Gate, which, of course, makes this the perfect time for an expansion pack.

Last night, the folks at Beamdog—best known for releasing Enhanced Editions of the two Baldur’s Gate games—announced Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, a new entry in the series that’s set place between BG1 and BG2. Siege of Dragonspear will run on the Infinity Engine, they say, and it’ll tell a new story after the death of Sarevok but before the rise of Irenicus.

In case you’re not familiar: the Baldur’s Gate games are top-down isometric RPGs that follow strict D&D rules and let you pause during combat. They’ve held up really well today, especially BG2, which remains one of the greatest games ever made.

And now we’re getting a new one, developed by some ex-BioWare folks who have spent the past few years porting and enhancing those old Infinity Engine games. Says Beamdog:

The events between Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition are at last revealed in this exciting new expansion to the original game.

Though Sarevok is dead and his plan for war averted, peace eludes the citizens of Baldur’s Gate. A crusade marches in the north, seizing supplies, forcing locals into military service, and disrupting trade along the Sword Coast. A charismatic warrior known as the Shining Lady leads this army, her background shrouded in mystery. Can the rumors be true—is she, like you, the child of a god?

The closer you get to the Shining Lady, the more you realize your father, the dead Lord of Murder still casts a long shadow upon your path. Baldur’s Gate has put its faith in you, but you must determine whose interests you truly serve before you face the Shining Lady among the ruins of Dragonspear Castle…

Isometric RPGs sure are making a comeback, huh? There’s no firm release date yet, but the folks at Beamdog say Dragonspear will be out relatively soon for PC/Mac/Linux and then later this year for iOS/Android too. Hopefully it will be a worthy addition to the franchise.

One of the hits of last week in the gaming world was NotGames’ little parody game NotGTAV, has just gone through a strange day.

The story starts earlier, when a DMCA takedown notice was filed against the game by someone who was thought to be from Rockstar. This led to NotGTAV being removed from Steam and NotGames receiving this e-mail from Valve:

Valve received a DMCA copyright take down notice about your NotGTAV game on Steam, at [infringing Steam Link].

 

[Name], on behalf of Rockstar Games, alleges that your game uses the Grand Theft Auto V acronym and title GTAV, and your game title infringes its copyright in http://store.steampowered.com/app/271590/.

 

As a result, we have unpublished your game from Steam.

Now as a parody game, NotGames knew that this could have been a problem. But as NotGames’ Emma Kendall said, “We made sure we’d taken all reasonable steps from our side to let them know what we were doing.” and the game itself was donating money to a British charity as well. Not to mention that the only GTA related thing used in the game was… well, just the name. Thus while the team worked on a rebrand Rockstar were contacted about this. And their reply?

They had nothing to do with the claim, nor did they know who had filed it.

Valve began an investigation into the DMCA claim being false, and this eventually led to the game being republished on Steam after a few hours due to Valve making the decision to treat the claimant as a false one. NotGames posted to the game’s Steam page with news of what had happened and the words “NotGTAV lives!!!!!!”

In typical NotGames’ fashion though they have taken the events in stride and while the game will now not be rebranded or changed, the rebrand’s new page and art design (“you may be able to tell it was done in a bit of a hurry”) as “NotDMCAV” will be up on the page for a few days because (in their own words) “gives us a huge giggle”.

Having had NotGames on our Indie Game Show in the past, it’s good to see that they’ve come through this with the game and their reputation unharmed. It does highlight though that like all copyright systems on the Internet, abuse of the system can happen and often seems to happen against those people who do the most good. As I said above, this game donates profits to a charity.

Hopefully Valve are looking into measures to prevent similar things happening. It’s good though that they managed to get the mess cleared up and solved fairly quickly though.

The shoot ’em up, or shmup, has a long and storied history. R-Type and Arkanoid are classics, while Blue Flamingo brings new ideas to the genre. And now Pixel nest studios has given us Steredenn.

Currently  in Beta on Steam,Steredenn combines pixel graphics,  heavy metal and roguelike elements into one package,  and the results are. ..well…we think video speaks louder than words for this game

Get Steredenn here.

Sega have registered the website domain www.dawnofwar3.com, presumably in advance of a new Space Channel 5 game announcement.

OK, so it might well mean a sequel for Relic’s muscular strategy game is on the cards—Company of Heroes 2 was a while ago, after all. Whois Lookup states that the domain was registered back in 2011 by Sega of America, and updated on March 26th of this year. Meanwhile, the registrant’s email address appears to be that for Relic’s IT department.

While Sega could just be registering the domain to protect it from squatters, a couple of years ago Relic did say that a new entry in the series was a “strong possibility”. If you’re wondering why you should be excited about a third Dawn of War, then you should grab the first and second games on STEAM while they are on sale.

Thanks, Reddit.

EVE Online is a big game, famous for being one of the most player-driven ones today. It’s also quite well-known for being somewhat hard to get started in. Because of this CCP have decided to make that introduction a bit easier to gain traction with.

Talking on the EVE Forums, CCP wrote: “Nothing is set in stone yet but it seems likely that we will try and move new players towards starting with significantly more SP. Maybe between 1 and 2 million.” with the skill points being set to be sunk into the ‘core’ skills of the game as opposed to specialisations.

The core skills are the ones that are useful for all ships, meaning that new characters will be able to have a foundation off of which to build their specialisations – one that would previously have come from around 2 months worth of play. Things like ship armour, shields and targeting range will be affected by this.

Of course, there are some players who are opposed to this system but it seems that generally most current EVE players are in favour of this boost, acknowledging that the start-up has always been one of the biggest barriers to getting new players into the game and having the stay for a long time.