Gen Con, the granddaddy of gaming conventions might be looking for a new home. The event is held every year in Indianapolis, Indiana and brings in an estimated $50 million to the city’s economy thanks to its massive attendance (56,000 attendees last year alone). That could all be in jeopardy thanks to a controversial bill known as SB 101. This bill will prevent state and local authorities from interfering with businesses’ and individuals’ “exercise of religion unless the government can prove it has a compelling interest and is doing so in the least restrictive means”. To break that down, the bill would provide business owners and individuals with legal protection to engage in discrimination based on religious grounds.

This is a serious concern to Gen Con organizers, as the attendees of the event are  “made up of different ethnicities, cultures, beliefs, sexual orientation, gender identities, abilities and socio-economic backgrounds”. In a letter to the governor, owner and CEO of Gen Con LLC, Adrian Swartout,  laid out a rather clear viewpoint stating “Legislation that could allow for refusal of service or discrimination against our attendees will have a direct negative impact on the state’s economy, and will factor into our decision-making on hosting the convention in the state of Indiana in future years.” 

If Gen Con does decide to move, it will have a huge impact on the city. The Indiana Convention Center has been enlarged at a cost of over $200 million dollars in large part to better house Gen Con. The economic fallout from losing the estimated $50 million the convention brings to the local economy will also be severe. But even more concerning is the idea that a piece of legislation like SB 101 could actually be passed into law in a modern society. Needless to say, this will be a story we will follow closely.

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An earlier update that released this month means that the developers of the game Rust, Facepunch Studios, have made it so that every player of the game has now been assigned a permanent in-game appearance. Because it’s coded to your Steam ID, every character created on your account will look exactly the same.

Facepunch founder Gary Newman said that the decision was because it’s “just like in real life, you are who you are – you can’t change your skin colour or your face. Everyone now has a pseudo unique skin tone and face. Just like in real life, you are who you are – you can’t change your skin colour or your face. It’s actually tied to your steamid.” He does say though that there’s a lot of work to still be done and that they would be adding more combinations so that character faces might still end up changing.

However it’s not gone down well with everyone, especially those who liked being able to customise their characters. Quite a few are hoping that future updates will bring the ability to add scars or tattoos on top of the parts that won’t be able to change, or will add in the ability to have female characters. Others have actively looked for ways to change their characters.

Newman hopes that this idea will diversify the game, adding in characters of races who are less represented in gaming and reminding people that everyone’s still human no matter what.

It has been announced that the next installment in the Batman: Arkham series has had its release date delayed by a few weeks, pushing it back from June 2nd to June 23rd.

Batman: Arkham Knight was originally supposed to have been released last year but Warner Bros then decided to delay the release until 2015, with the date of June 2nd being announced soon after. This further delay is probably down to wanting to make sure that the game is as functional as possible.

In a press release from the developers they explain the delay by saying “We’re a developer that hates to make any compromises, so we are sorry to say this means it’s going to be just a little bit longer until you can play the epic conclusion to the Arkham trilogy.”

The game will be released on the platforms of PC, Playstation 4 and the Xbox One. Pre-ordering the game will net you the Harley Quinn and Red Hood story packs.

In an interview with PCGamesN, the game’s director Eric Dodds spoke about how the new Dragon cards coming in the next Hearthstone expansion Blackrock Mountain next month were going to shake up the game and how they tailored the expansions to balance as well as expand the game.

He said that their aim with the expansion whether they’re smaller like Naxxramas and Blackrock or larger like Goblins vs Gnomes, is always to shake up the metagame and to make players want to create new deck types by asking what the new cards can do. He also said that they aim to introduce cards to solve problems that they’ve identified in the metagame, often working on cards to shift that balance around three to six months in the future of Hearthstone and inventing cards to cover possible metagame shifts that could come up, although he admitted that they’re often taking a guess.

On the subject of nerfing cards Dodds said that unless a card takes the game “into an unhealthy place” that they don’t think about nerfing or changing it. He gave the example of the Undertaker card which he says the team felt was being played in too many decks, so it got cut down to be not as ridiculous as it once was. He said that the Dr. Boom card which many saw as being too overpowered as well was not considered at the moment to be a card that made the game less fun to play, so they weren’t thinking about touching it. He also said that cards would be changed rather than removed from the game.

Blackrock Mountain is going to be released next month sometime in April and can be pre-ordered now.

The end of season 2 of Diablo III is nigh say Blizzard, the company having set an end date for it as well as announcing the start date for the next season. Season 2 will be ending on April 5th and Season 3 beginning on April 10th. The downtime might also bring with it the latest patch update, and a wave of new content too.

Patch 2.2 has been on the PTR servers being tested for a little bit and it’s rebalanced classes as well as new legendaries. It seems ready to go, so go look up what it’ll bring to prepare yourself as its implementation could come during the 5 days between seasons.

The exact times for the end of Season 2 are as follows:

• North America: Sunday, April 5 @ 9:00 p.m. PDT
• Europe: Sunday, April 5 @ 9:00 p.m. CEST
• Asia: Sunday, April 5 @ 9:00 p.m. KST

Season 3 will be starting shortly after at the following dates and times for each region:

• North America: Friday, April 10 @ 6:00 p.m. PDT
• Europe: Friday, April 10 @ 6:00 p.m. CEST
• Asia: Friday, April 10 @ 6:00 p.m. KST