Twitch is the biggest name in game streaming right now, with many contenders coming and falling. Now however it has some serious competition in the shape of Youtube Gaming and it seems to have made them sit up and take notice of their own faults.

Today at the first TwitchCon event, Twitch announced that a handful of new features were coming to the streaming platform early next year and the two biggest changes of note seem to be an attempt to compete with Youtube invading ‘their’ space. Most importantly of the two; Twitch will soon let you host video uploads without streaming it live first.

The video uploads means that you can record yourself playing a game and edit it into a cutdown format, before uploading it onto Twitch who will host the video for you and allow you to customise its thumbnail, description and tags as well as letting you put a bunch into a playlist. Stop me if this sounds in any way familiar. It’s a far cry from the Twitch that set expiry dates on the hosting of VoDs of your past livestreams.

However the other big thing is that Twitch are finally following the curve and are updating their video player to finally rid it entirely of Flash. Many other video sites, including Youtube, have already ditched Flash in favour of HTML5 and Twitch has already made a partial step in theirs being part-Flash, part-HTML5. This does tax computers though so the update will be welcomed by many, myself being one of them.

Other features will include things like a dedicated Playstation app coming at the same time and improved whisper functionality as well as many other smaller tweaks and fixes that will hopefully allow Twitch to just run smoother. Popular and wide-used it might be, but everyone who has used Twitch as a streamer or viewer knows that it could do with some improvement and it seems like we might finally be getting some at last. That’s good.

Shame there’s nothing you can do to patch out trolls in the Twitch Chat.

Today’s Homefront: The Revolution developer session was a bit of a surprise today here at geek towers. We all expected Homefront 2, as the Devs from Dambuster Studios also joked about at the start of the session.

What we got, was a more than pleasant surprise. We started seeing what we first thought was another open world dirge fest. What we saw, was a structured area game (including green, yellow and red zones where gameplay takes place as separate maps), that including stunning graphics and effects including weather effects, such as fog and rain that creates puddles that then dry out naturally as the tarmac warms up again and a real day/night cycle (an overly inflated one by the devs to show it off to better effect). To the near end of the presentation showing off the dynamic enemy spawn areas, meaning that no two people doing the same mission will see the same troubles.

It’s this dynamic enemy placement that Digmbot and I most found interesting. The idea that a snipe could be around any corner, or as you walk through a building, a full enemy patrol with an APC may be there to surprise you (or for you to surprise)

They ended the session with a bit of info about the map they were using at EGX this week, which also happened to be the Gamescom map aswell this year, and that they had been pulling player activity info the whole time. Including where people died in the map, how they died and which enemy killed them, including one sniper who accounted for the most players deaths (apart from self inflicted ones). The funniest statistic was how many players had set themselves on fire. Not been set on fire from an enemy as none in that zone had flamethrowers or similar, but had walked through flame (your clothes are flammable) and even those that had misused Molotov cocktails (including one guy who must have dropped one at his own feet at the very start of the zone, which they took great delight in laughing about, I hope that guy wasn’t watching)

This all culminated in a beautiful looking game that I went from not caring about to being determined to play it tomorrow when I’m back at EGX and may even get early next year when it’s out!

Great Job Dambuster Studios!

Homefront: The Revolution is slated for a Spring 2016 release on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and STEAM

David Braben and members of Frontier Developments took to the EGX stage today to talk about the future of Elite. They started off by showing the Horizons trailer and talking in detail about everything coming to the game.

For starters, Horizons will allow players to land on planets, with rocky planets being sized at up to seven times the size of Earth. Players will be able to enter an orbital cruise mode to allow them to move around the planet quickly, and from there will be able to drop down into the atmosphere and cruise about. Once they decide to land, they will be able to deploy an armed exploration rover. Mining and exploring human settlements are just a few of the things Frontier hinted at as activities once on a planet. In addition, they also confirmed that Season 2 of Elite will finally bring us multicrew ships and fighter bays for the larger vessels. This means that you can deploy a small parasite fighter from a larger ship and use it to escort a fellow crew member as they explore in their rover. Or, you could leave your ship on autopilot and deploy in a fast, powerful fighter to take on those nasty pirates sneaking up on your flank.

They also discussed the inclusion of looting and crafting. Mining and looting from wrecks and other sources will allow players to craft unique weapons and items for their ships. This could range from changing the color of your lasers to creating a weapon that causes system malfunctions on an enemy ship. They then revealed….BOBBLEHEADS. Thats right, bobbleheads are coming back. Those of us who played the original beta grew quite fond of our bobbleheads, and I for one am glad to see them making a comeback. For a limited time, a David Braben bobblehead is available in the Frontier Store.

The final bit of information worth touching on is the inclusion of the Cobra Mk 4 and the Viper Mk 4. The new Cobra was revealed in the Horizons trailer, while the new Viper was just revealed today. It trades some speed and manueverability for better internals, making the ship much tougher.

Elite Horizons and Season 2 are due out this Holiday season.

While it’s still in beta, and while I am still recording footage and composing more detailed thoughts on Warhammer: End Times- Vermintide, I thought I’d jot down a few brief impressions.

First off, the game is beautiful. While it has yet to be optimized, for the most part it runs well. Some weather and lighting effects aren’t in place, as it is still in the final stages of tweaking and optimization. But overall the game looks and runs great. Combat is meaty with real weight behind it. Speaking of combat, I think that may well be where Vermintide will nail the horde shooter. So many titles in this genre rely on gunplay, but Vermintide forces you to get up close an personal as you hack limbs and heads off. Or pulp said heads with a warhammer. And no, those are not exaggerations. In my efforts to save my Bright Wizard, I stepped in close with the dwarf, bashed the Skaven back with my shield and then brought my hammer down on his head. Much to my surprise and delight, his head pulped into a gory mess of blood and bone, sending his still flailing body stumbling backwards. It was satisfying and visceral.

Levels are expansive and reward exploration. Enemies are sneaky, dropping from walls behind you or erupting from the sewers and back alleys. The game has a nice sense of pacing and flow, and each class is truly unique. The Witch Hunter is an arrogant bastard who wields a sword and a brace of pistols. The Brithg Wizard can lay down massive AOE damage from afar, but don’t overuse your abilities or you will -quite literally- explode.

More thoughts are coming, but for now, Verminitide looks VERY promising. Its pretty, fun to play and nails it’s aesthetic.

Today Sony took to the stage at EGX 2015 to talk about the advancements they have made with their own Playstation VR system.

Like Valve’s similar panel yesterday they started off with a little history, tracing the roots of their Morpheus headset way back to the Sony Glasstron headset which was released to markets almost 20 years ago with little LCD screens and a limited frame of view. More recently we’ve had the Eyetoy and Playstation Move controller that laid framework for what Playstation VR is now.

With the Playstation 4, Sony feel they finally have enough computing power in a machine to push the high-grade experience of Playstation VR they want – teaming up the Morpheus headset with the Playstation Move controllers or the Dualshock 4 as well as the Playstation Camera to form an entire experience package to allow for placement in the world as well as being able to interact within it.

Sony felt that triggering natural responses to the situation simulated was the big aim of successful VR and to that effect showed off some of their pre-built experiences – one called The Deep that had participants in a diving cage viewing beautiful fish and an angry shark, as well as a series of them collectively entitled “The London Heist” in which character interaction, virtual object manipulation and then finally both at once in a high-octane situation were simulated for the player. They were adamant that The London Heist was not just a demo of VR or made as a ‘proof-of-concept’, they went through and made it as they would any other triple A game to make it as enjoyable as possible to sell people on the idea that VR could work and work well. Already they say third-party studios have had a “hugely positive” response to the package.

They have also said that right now they’re putting huge consideration onto the limited space people will have to play within their own homes and that they have been working with their designers to make sure that the headset will be comfortable for those players who wear glasses to use for longer periods of time. They also say that since playing a VR game is controlled in such a natural manner for us that VR could be the thing to remove the entry barrier for those people new to gaming.

Unfortunately though the panel didn’t bring any details about when we can expect to see the headset device released or what price we can be expecting; as well as our being told that because virtual reality gaming is such a different concept to the traditional gaming now in order to be backwards compatible games would need to essentially go through re-development.

In terms of the presentation as a whole though, Sony did make virtual reality seem like a fun, entertaining and over all very interesting new step in the world of gaming. Showing off the gameplay and how it worked did a lot more for me then just hearing someone talking about the specs of the hardware would have.