Ah Blizzard, you never manage to have a trouble-free launch of an expansion to a game do you?

Earlier today the long awaited next expansion to the popular online free-to-play card game Hearthstone went live. The Grand Tournament adds over 130 new cards to the game, all of which I’ve revealed in previous articles. There was also the option to pre-purchase a bundle of 50 of the new card packs as well as an exclusive cardback for pre-purchase for around £34.99, which is an offer a number of us in the station took up.

Unfortunately no big release is without its hiccups and from around fifteen minutes before the scheduled time of release, Hearthstone’s servers were being flooded with players eager to begin getting to grips with the new cards and open their pre-purchased 50 packs. This led to a lot of players being unable to log on with some even reporting the queue numbers being blank or reading in excess of 3 hours. Eventually Hearthstone was taken down for maintenance about an hour ago to try and get things running again and as of time of writing is still down, although it is estimated that it should be back up any time now.

At least this time it’s just server issues and nothing more severe. Just an annoying thing and so a lot of us will have to open their 50 packs tomorrow. I’ll be one of them, so join me on stream tomorrow at 6pm BST as I open them up!

[plumwd_twitch_stream channel=”sanitariumfm”]

A free patch is being released for all those who own the Risen 3: Titan Lords game on Steam which will greatly enhance the graphics of the game.

Piranha Bytes have made significant upgrades to the graphics and the patch is totally free; but if you run a 32-bit operating system you’re out of luck, the patch is only available for users of 64-bit operating systems. The full list of updates reads thus:

• Improved texture resolution for items, objects, foliage, terrain, particle effects, characters, monsters and other in-game models.
• Improved draw distances and viewing ranges.
• Larger caches, leading to smoother frame rates and less LOD streaming.
• The introduction of a new state of the art post-process effects such as bokeh depth of field and HDR bloom.
• Addition of a new physically based, more visually realistic cloud rendering technique that adds even more spectacular skies and sunsets to the dynamic day/night cycles.

The patch will be automatically applied to all with the automatic updates enabled on their Steam clients and enough bits, and while the vast majority seem to be having no problems it’s worth noting that a few have reported the loss of save games and some performance issues with the new patch downloaded. So might be best to wait off a little while to see if the patch is further tweaked to prevent these issues.

Age of Wonders 3 already had a pretty good level editor in the game for players to use to make their games a little bit more customised to their liking. Now the developers have announced that they’re going to add mod tools to the game in the future

Triumph announced the plans in a recent blog post. The tools will be implemented within the next patch for the game and will be compatible with Steam Workshop as well as various other mod making avenues. You’ll be able to effect certain parts of the game like the game balance and you can add new specialisations and units; however you won’t be allowed to tweak the core gameplay, models or textures with the tools provided.

Mods will have a switch in the launcher to turn them on and off, and will be useable across the single-player and multiplayer parts of the game; so no mods that give you an unfair advantage. More rules and features will be made clear in a future announcement.

Wildstar is due to go free-to-play in Autumn and its now taking beta registrations ahead of this transition, in a bit to attract new players to the game.

New players will get access to two character slots, four costume slots and two bank slots for free, although subscribers will get more slots and various other benefits as a result of paying for them. However even if you’re not subscribing you will still have access to the full game, all classes and all skills. However all players will have to sign up to a ‘Signature program’ to be allowed to create guilds and gain access to some other perks.

Both types of player will inhabit the same server space though, which means that those currently playing will soon probably see an influx of new players for them to play with. Or troll. Either and or.

Following a statement from Daybreak Game Company that president John Smedley was taking some time off and stepping down from his role into a different one, it seems that it’s been confirmed that he has fully left the company for good.

The move comes as the result of a harassment campaign by a hacker group that saw Smedley’s financial details leaked online and a bomb threat being made. It resulted in Smedley taking to Twitter to vow he’d track down and bring down those responsible, even threatening to pursue the parents of the hackers in court. He stepped down not soon after and his Facebook lists him now as the CEO of a new, as of yet unknown company.

Daybreak confirmed the leaving to GameInformer, “On behalf of Daybreak, we wish Smed well in his new endeavors. Any questions regarding his new business should be directed to him.”