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During the summer while the Olympics were on, Overwatch had some Summer Game limited edition loot boxes in-game. Now it seems that they’re about to do the same with Halloween, as well as releasing a comic to boot.
Caught by a user on Reddit while browsing the Xbox Store, the photograph taken by the user reveals to us a bit about the next big special event in the Overwatch calendar. The end date for it is fittingly on November 1st, at 4pm PT, and if it follows a similar time period of availability as the Summer Games we can expect the boxes to show up sometime next week – possibly on Tuesday when the next patch goes in for the game. The box description seems to be written as such:
“Trick out your collection by picking up Halloween loot boxes, available for a limited time. Every loot box contains up to four cosmetic items, including at least one halloween skin, highlight intro, emote, victory pose, player icon, voice line or credits that you can use to unlock other items. More than 100 halloween items are waiting to be unwrapped!
“If your Halloween loot box contain an item that is already in your collection, you will instead receive coins.”
There’s also another hint to the ongoing Sombra teasing Blizzard have been getting in, with her logo appearing on the purple candy in the background. Whether this means that she’s going to pop up in some form during the Halloween celebrations before becoming an actual character (or maybe even a surprise addition to the game as playable!) before BlizzCon is unknown and probably being speculated on as a type this out.
As for the comic, it was first leaked through digital distributor Comixology’s subscription alert system and will involve Junkrat as a mad scientist, Mercy as what appears to be a witch and a Headless Horseman Reaper. It’s fittingly been named Junkenstein. It’ll be releasing on October 12th.
FIFA 17 came with a lot of things, including a story mode. Unfortunately it seems that in the midst of making this year’s game “the most realistic ever” and adding “intuitive AI”, EA didn’t fully cross-check all the fake social media tags they used in game. One of them is an actual Twitter handle, and the owner’s not impressed.
Story mode involves you playing as a young up-and-coming footballer called Alex Hunter, and includes a social media feed that mimics Twitter’s own. The fake users provide some commentary on performance and use the type of language you’d expect to see on there. Just not quite as filled with colourful language and all spelt correctly. One of these “fake users” has the name of @CalWong – a real-life tag shared with a Cartoon Network director of all people.
Calvin “CalWong” Wong has unfortunately become a target for a Twitter mob because of this, receiving abuse in the style typical of online mobs. Mr. Wong himself has little interest in the game and is not pleased to have found himself suddenly being targeted because of this mix-up and is only receiving more abuse from users who can’t get why he’s not pleased to find himself in the game.
Fortunately EA have agreed to remove his tag from the game, patching him out in a coming update. This is a good example of why it’s a good idea to check these things first before you do it.
The news that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered was going to be coming with the next Call of Duty game – Infinite Warfare – in a double-game bundle was something that was greeted with a lot of enthusiasm by fans of the series. Remasters seem to be quite popular right now, I myself am really looking forward to getting to try the remastered Skyrim which I’ll be getting for free (Legendary Edition rocks).
However, someone’s noticed a little detail that applies if you decide to get Infinite Warfare on disc. Activision seem to have decided to go against the done thing of giving out a download code in the box and that means that if you want to play Modern Warfare Remastered, you’re going to need to have the disc for Infinite Warfare for your platform of choice inserted before you can run the game.
While this is likely a move to stop people from buying the double-game bundle for just Remastered, it hasn’t gone down so well with gamers. When the bundle was first announced, a lot of people plainly said that they would be getting the double-game bundle just for the Remastered game. The fact that you need the Infinite Warfare disc means that those people who didn’t want that game can no longer try to recoup some of the purchase price by selling on the newer game, and the Remastered version of the classic game is presently not going to be available in any other way. Activision obviously saw these comments about only wanting the Remastered game, and so have made the decision to stop those buying a disc copy selling it on.
What do you think of this move? For or against it? Let us know in the comments.
So a few hours ago, the studio behind one of the most popular indie hits of the last few years – The Escapists – announced that the game is going to have a sequel which will be even bigger, better and will contain a feature missing from the first game: multiplyer.
The trailer above does a good job of showcasing a range of the new things we can expect. For one thing the graphics are now a bit more 3D looking and have more subtle colour variation. A whole bunch of new things are going to be available, from items to craft, methods of escape, prison activities and more. One of the biggest overhauls seems to be that the game now has a much more detailed combat system. In the original you won fights based on your strength, if you were armed or if you were quick enough to punch and run away before you got hit back. Now with a lock-on system and blocking, it should be a lot more strategic than before.
The announcement trailer is only for the Playstation 4 so far, but given the popularity of the previous game and how excited people are for this sequel, expect to see more platforms added to that list as more information surfaces.
The Division is getting a big overhaul soon with update 1.4. Ubisoft is trying to make the game more challenging, and to pull that off it sounds like all gear, armor, weapons and skills are open for big changes. While the entire post over on the website is pretty involved, we can hit the high points briefly to give an idea of what it is Ubi is trying to accomplish.
“One issue facing The Division today is that the power difference between optimized and non-optimized builds is too great. We still want people to optimize their gear and min-max to their heart’s content, but in order to balance the game, we need to reduce the gap between the two extremes. As part of Update 1.4 we also want to bring back the shooter feeling, add more decision making and hard choices when building your character and add more variety to the viable builds.”
Gear
All World Tier 2 and higher gear will have stats for Firearms, Stamina and Electronics
Stat overlaps between gear have been removed
Gear scores will be adjusted to match High end gear scores withing the same World Tiers
All gear will lose their skill bonuses.
Backpacks, holsters and knee pads will gain new performance mod slots
Weapons
New DPS formula on weapons has been introduced, but is a work in progress and will change over the course of the PTS.
The damage and roles of certain weapons have been changed. Some weapons have seen a damage increase; others have had their damage lowered.
Named weapons will not be changed in this update.
Weapon mods will now come with one major bonus and an amount of smaller bonuses, depending on the quality of the mod.
Damage bonuses are now additive instead of multiplicative, reducing the current spikes in damage which made the game hard to balance.
The Firearms stat will become a much more significant source of damage output, leading to more decision making when building your character.
Weapon talents have been rebalanced; some have been buffed, others have seen their numbers reduced.
Skills
Electronics will be the main source of Skill Power.
Skill Power will not scale linearly anymore, instead it will follow a curve of diminishing returns.
Certain skills are currently much more popular than others. Some skills are overpowered, others underpowered or bugged.
Skills have been rebalanced to fit the new game balance or to bring them up to par, in the hopes of creating a more varied meta.
First Aid no longer allows for multiple heals, since those happened due to a bug. First Aid’s healing has been increased to make up for this fix. It will now heal instantly.
Smart Cover and Pulse have been reworked. Smart Cover is now more defensive and Pulse’s high damage boost has been lowered to make it balanced with the new enemy health.
Ballistic Shield and Support Station have been given more health. Support Station’s healing has been increased.
Many bugs associated with skills have been fixed.
There are a lot more changes, and I’d recommend digging into the complete post if you are a serious player of The Division. No word on when update 1.4 will be released for all platforms, but if you play on PC the Public Test Server is up and running as we speak.
