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Following on from the announcement of their new game Lego Dimensions to release at some time in the future, Lego have lined up to take on another aspect of gaming. They’ve not only revealed their other new game, Lego Worlds, it’s already available through Steam Early Access for about £11.
Lego Worlds takes on the sandbox builder game, spawning players in a procedurally generated play area that can be altered to your liking with in-game Lego sets and built upon to make your own worlds. Just like Minecraft.
The game will feature an array of creatures from ostriches to dragons, vehicles like a giant earth-moving drill and character customisation options. Build, dig, make big worlds, ride animals and fight skeletons. The Early Access version is currently missing some features and sets, but so far the reviews are good for this game. A little competition would be good for Minecraft and maybe this is a good thing for both games and they can co-exist…
… But the trailer for the game doesn’t wow me as a long-term Minecraft player. I’ve always found the art style of rounded entities/creatures next to blocky landscapes to be a little bit distracting and not in a good way. Unfortunately Lego Worlds has this art style and it niggles at me in some small but significant way. As well, no matter how many characters are available for the customisation options it will never equal Minecraft’s customisation of applying a player-made skin to a simple base.
I don’t know. I want to like this game, and I hope it does well enough. But from the small bit I’ve seen of it in the trailer, there seems to be something missing that made Minecraft great. Something that even the Vanilla game had.
I hope that I’m wrong and it proves to have that sparkle after all.
Guild Wars 2 players get a chance to head into the Heart of Thorns this evening—that is, if they’ve already got a key to enter into the jungle expansion’s closed beta. The test consists of three two-hour sessions staggered throughout the day. Players who found a rare portal during last month’s Dry Top and Silverwastes events will be able to create a new beta character to test out a small portion of the new expansion.
“Participants will be able to use a revenant—or any of the existing eight professions—to play a small amount of expansion story content, followed by two beta versions of outposts and their corresponding adventures in part of the Verdant Brink map,” explains a news post on the Guild Wars 2 site. “An early, partially completed version of the day/night cycle meta-event experience from Verdant Brink will also be available.”
ArenaNet says they’ll be adding additional participants, picked from email addresses subscribed to the expansion’s newsletter.
Here are the times of the closed beta tests:
– 11:30 am – 1:30 pm PDT / 8:30 pm – 10:30 pm CEST / 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm BST
– 3:30 pm – 5:30 pm PDT / 12:30 am – 2:30 am CEST / 11:30 pm – 1:30 am BST
– 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm PDT / 4:30 am – 6:30 am CEST / 3:30 am – 5:30 am BST
For those without access, the test isn’t under any NDA restrictions. That means you can expect the beta to be streamed by players during each test window.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt hasn’t been out long so it’s getting little updates still that tweak performance and make things look better. The latest one is no different.
The latest patch improves high-end textures and boosts Nvidia Hairworks performance. Also standard for a patch, bugs and fixes have been put into this patch as well as adding keyboard remapping and the Prologue area now offers a few new cards for Gwent, a card-game within the game itself.
The full breakdown of the 1.04 patch is on Steam as below:
Rebinding of all keys is now available after switching on the ‘Unlock Bindings’ option in the Options\Key Bindings submenu.
Corrects an issue in the dialogue system that might have caused dialogue looping in certain scenes.
Fixes an issue with incorrect behavior of Wild Hunt warriors after they were affected by the Axii Sign.
Corrects a bug that caused spontaneous combustion of gas clouds.
1280 x 720 resolution is now properly displayed as a valid resolution option.
Fixes boat stuttering in cutscenes.
Texture rendering quality for the high and ultra presets has been improved.
Further improvements made in NVIDIA Hairworks performance.
A few additional gwent cards are now available in the Prologue area.
Fixes an issue where users with usernames incorporating non-Latin characters were unable to import saves from The Witcher 2.
Includes a series of overall stability and performance improvements.
Fixes issues related to alt + tabbing and minimizing the game window.
Updates the game icon.
Enlarges the loot pop-up window in the UI.
Fixes an issue where, in certain circumstances, the comparison window could extend beyond the game borders in the UI.
Upgrading items included in gear sets no longer destroys rune sockets on said items.
Introduces small tweaks in the UI for Gwent.
Corrects some missing translations in localized versions.
I love good mysterious teasers for games, because they often show how creative the developers are with their games. It’s fun too for the players who are waiting for the game. So the latest development with Soma is interesting to say the least.
The studio behind the upcoming psychological horror game, Frictional Games, retweeted a partial URL that was originally posted by the PathosII Twitter account.
The link when completed leads to a terminal that seems to be hiding some secrets, although a little knowledge of DOS is needed. Using the “help” command should give you enough knowledge to help you navigate though. So far a couple of videos have been found, along with distorted imagery and a block of what appears to be encoded text. That’s not yet been decoded and there are two further folders that are currently inaccessible. Whether they will be unlocked later is unknown.
Frictional is responsible for Amnesia: The Dark Descent and hope to use what they learned from that game to make Soma an even better horror game. Soma entered beta last month and they hope to have it on full release sometime later this year.
If you’re a Minecrafter who likes to check out the latest apps, beware when checking the Google Play store. Reports are coming in of a number of scareware apps disguised as legitimate apps are hiding in the store to try and fool the unwary.
The apps themselves promise access to a number of cheats for the popular blocky game. In reality the apps will scare the user into downloading malicious programs mascarading as anti-virus software using banner advertising. The malware will then charge the victim €4.80 by SMS per weekly if they activate the “anti-virus program”.
Currently its estimated that over 30 of the apps are in the Store, and all seem to have been made by the same person due to similarities shared between them all. They all seem to have somehow bypassed Google’s Bouncer screener program and have therefore been downloaded by unsuspecting Minecraft fans an estimated 660,000 and 2.8 million times over the past nine months.
As always, be careful what you’re downloading people. This just proves that even stringent security processes won’t end up catching everything.
