Those of you, like me, that thought Hearthstone was merely a trading card game will no doubt be pretty surprised and no doubt excited by todays news of a new adventure mode coming to Hearthstone in the future.

Curse of Naxxramus: A Hearthstone Adventure is the title of the release announced, featuring several wings, each with their own challenges and bosses to face. Taking place in the necropolis home to an old World of Warcraft vanilla raid that was later moved to Northrend in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, players will get to experience the death filled arena with a brand new board worthy of it’s plagued undead nature.

Be prepared for battle though, chances are this will not be for the feint of heart. The bosses will each have their own unique cards and hero powers so be prepared for whatever may be thrown at you. Featuring Maexxna, the humungous spider, the not so fungi Loatheb, and Patchwerk the abomination, careful not to stare at him or he’ll take your head from your shoulders…. you know, with cards.

The whole adventure will not be released all at once though, new wings will be released over a 5 week period, and with there being an entry fee to try your hand at taking on the demons within, you might just be glad of that extra time.

Also coming with this adventure will be 30 new cards, some of which have already been revealed. These cards are said to not only be available for the new adventure but will also be playable in the normal game modes. This will certainly shake up the ranked matches as new decks and new combos become more popular.

For those of you who are a little bit more casually inclined, you might be interested to hear that after you complete each wing of the necropolis, you will be rewarded with a guaranteed legendary! Soon you could be throwing bananas at your foes with King Mukla, charging headlong into battle with your own Leroyyyyyyyyyyy! or controlling the flow of time with Nozdormu. With the new cards, will we see new legendaries, one has already been revealed, Baron Rivendare, but will there be more?

Who knows, watch this space to find out.

Orcs Must Die is quite the fun franchise. Who doesn’t like placing devious traps and sending those green goons to their deaths? With the sequel, Robot Entertainment gave us even more orc squishing goodness and threw in cooperative play.

Now the developer has seen fit to give us a brand new installment in the series, and this one is aimed squarely at team based combat.

Check out the trailer below and let us know what has you excited about this game:

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In case you’ve been under a rock, heres a quick heads up: GameSpy Technology is shutting down on May 31. GameSpy has been around since 1997, when it was debuted as the server listing service for Quake server IPs.  The service provides multiplayer matchmaking, leaderboards and cloud storage across a range of platforms including Xbox 360, PC, Wii, Vita, PS3, Mac, Nintendo DS, iOS and Android. This technology has been integrated into over 1,000 games. And at the end of next month, GameSpy is coming to an end.

This certainly marks the end of an era. But, more importantly, it could mark the end of access to a significant amount of games, at least on the multiplayer front. While I don’t normally put a lot of stock in Reddit articles, one sub-forum has been busily compiling a list of games affected by the shutdown. The list is quite impressive. Here are a few highlights:

Arma, Arma 2, Borderlands, Halo: Combat Evolved, Star Wars Battlefront 2, Saints Row 2, Dungeon Defenders (Non Steam version).

Those are just games that are confirmed to be  affected. The “Status Unknown” sections is much longer, and MUCH scarier. Now, before you run about screaming that the sky is falling, a number of companies and publishers have come out stating that solutions are either in the works or already waiting to be implemented. These companies include Bohemia Interactive, Activision, Capcom and Epic. Still, a wide array of publishers including EA, Bethesda, 2K Games, Sega and Ubisoft have not announced plans to deal with the sudden cessation of GameSpy services.

For the Reddit thread detailing games and their current (probably) status, click here.

Farewell GameSpy, we hardly knew you. (But I hated you while I did.)

At the recent Eurogamer Expo event in Birmingham, 4 developers from the world of horror games took part in a developer session all about fear and horror in games. This got me thinking, what is the future of the horror genre going to look like?

The possibilities of what a game can do has come leaps and bounds in recent times, the new generation of consoles and graphics cards are letting developers create photo-realistic creatures that move and act so fluidly that it’s easy to forget they’re only computer generated. But it isn’t just the appearance that’s been improved; creatures in video games are now being made to act and think, you can’t rely on memorising set paths anymore.

What does this all mean?

Well, if you take a look back to a game like Bioshock, here the true scares come from the scripted events. The first time you play it through and the dead body on the table leaps at you when you get close, the first time you encounter the creepy little sisters or their Big Daddys, it’s terrifying. Setting this script lets the developers create these perfect moments for the scares to happen, they can orchestrate it so that everything is working as they want it to be.

Surely this must be the best way to scare someone? Removing all the error, the chance that the dead body may not notice you and might end up being no more than a corpse in the corner. Why are they going away from this perfect construct, removing the script and letting the players ad lib their own story? Suspense.

Suspense is where the real fear lies and game developers know this now, whether they knew it already and needed the tools to create this ultimate fear is unknown, but what I do know is that suspense is the future. Ok, so that dead body can end up being useless, but now, with the player knowing that anything could happen at any moment, every moment becomes the time when a creature could appear. As broken as DayZ is in it’s current state, with zombies walking through walls and all, the suspense is incredible. When I think of a game with suspense, what comes to mind is dark, dank, confined spaces; a room cluttered with junk dimly lit with limited ways of escape. But DayZ is set in wide open fields, the map is huge and scarcely populated with urban areas, yet all the time you’re on your guard and that’s what makes a horror game. Never letting you feel safe.

One final mention is to VR, I’m still not sure just how big of an impact it’ll have in gaming, but the one genre that would benefit the most from it, is horror. Putting you into that scenario and making you believe that you are really there is a huge thing, when a monster jumps at you, it won’t stop at the edges of your monitor… oh no, it won’t stop at all. What you see won’t be a figure on a screen, it’ll be there, in front of your entire vision, close enough that you should be able to feel it’s breath hitting you in the face.

So whether it’s still a hit or not after it’s recent set-back, I still can’t wait to see what it brings to the world of fear.

Theres been a lot of news coming out of ArenaNet about the April feature pack for Guild Wars 2, and today they dropped a huge announcement. Starting on April 15th, GUild Wars 2 is going to be getting Megaservers. That sounds great, because clearly Mega is better than normal, right?

So…what does it actually mean. Basically, ArenaNet is making it easier to play with friends on every PvE map, no matter their homeworld. This change is geared at creating a more social experience for players. In essence, the new system is going to make it more likely that you’ll be placed on a map that has more of your friends/guildmates, people who speak the same language as you, and more people that you regularly see in game. According to ArenaNet, this will lead to maps having more players adventuring per map, giving you a better experience overall.

With the new system, ArenaNet is ditching overflow maps. Instead, the system creates as many maps as needed, assigns players to the version that makes the most sense based on factors like party, guild, and language.Interestingly, it seems the system will dynamically create new maps as needed, eliminating that artificial limit that had people bouncing off of servers as they tried to get a group of friends all in one place. In addition, all maps are now created equal, so it becomes more about the people you are playing with, rather than trying to get into that one map instance that has spawned the right encounter you need to get that nice shiny level 80 helmet. While the system weights the load in favor of players now, it is using a ton of data gathered behind the scenes to do this. No, ArenaNet isn’t spying on you. But they are leveraging all the in game meta-data they have access to to try and optimize your PvE experience in Tyria.

Personally, I’m excited about this. It can be hard to get together enough people to tackle difficult encounters (looking at you Tequatl) during non-peak hours, not to mention the fact that certain Living World moments require a large group – unless you like being pounded into the ground. The new system should make it a lot easier to get a group together to tackle these when I want to play in the middle of the afternoon, instead of waiting till evening primetime. Of note, however is that this does NOT remove region restrictions. Players are still grouped by NA and EU servers. It also does not change your homeworld, nor does it change which world receives Guild Influence. ArenaNet also hasn’t announced how this will be affecting world bosses and World v World yet, though they do promise that information will be coming soon.

All in all, it seems like ArenaNet is making a concerted effort to make the PvE experience more seamless and more player oriented by allowing you to join up with friends and guildmates more easily. The Megaserver system launches with the APril Feature Pack on level 1-15 maps, cities and the PvP lobby. Once ArenaNet is satisfied everything is working correctly, they’ll roll it out to the rest of Tyria by the end of 2014.

For more on Guild Wars 2 and the Megaserver roll out, stay tuned to Sanitarium.fm