Recently on Steam forums for Croteam’s puzzle game, The Talos Principle, a number of players have been posting about a strange glitch they’ve been experiencing in the game. It seems that a number of them get to a certain point with an elevator, only the elevator won’t let them out once they’re in and they find themselves unable to progress.

However, this isn’t an ordinary bug. In fact, it’s an intentional one; programmed into the game by the developers and only occurs if you pirate the game instead of buying it. So once again, we have an example of developers tricking the pirates into revealing themselves. Oops.

The bug itself takes place during a key progression point in the game. You need to ride the elevator down to be able to continue, but pirates will find the elevator grinds to a halt halfway up and won’t open its doors to let you out. At least health and safety is still being observed I guess. The developers even stuck in QR code at the base of the elevator to foreshadow it.

Sledgehammer have introduced a new game mode into Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and it’s one for those players who value their accuracy over a good rate of fire.

Named One Shot, it strips out class customisation and gives players a choice of five classes to use, all of whom are equipped with just one weapon – the MORS, a bolt-action railgun sniper rifle and have just a sliver of health. In other words, One Shot is a sniper deathmatch mode.

Of course each individual class has different perks, scorestreaks and exo abilities to give you some diversity in this mode, and you can choose to hide instead of roam around and pick off your opponents while trying to avoid being sniped yourself. It’s up to you how you play and if this mode is for you or not. Classes vary from the Hard Scope, built to be fast, mobile and has an exo suit ability to cloak; to the Irons that is equipped for slightly more close-range combat.

More details can be found here on the announcement post.

Nuclear Throne is a post-apocalyptic roguelike shooter which has been on Steam in Early Access for over a year at time of writing. Developers Vlambeer have been steadily updating the game since then, slipping out an update most weeks to improve the game. Now they have announced that people who have bought the game before the beginning of the new year will be given an extra copy of the game for free to gift to friends.

Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail praised the game’s community for how adept they had become at the game, and said that they hoped by giving out the second copies the community would spread the love of the game with others and bring in “fresh eyes” for the game’s further development.

The game was originally known as Wasteland Kings before the name was changed just over a year ago to Nuclear Throne. so far no release date for the full game has been set by the developers.

Ubisoft have a companion to the PC version of their recent problematic Assassin’s Creed game Unity, web-based and named AC Initiates. Right now Ubisoft have had to put it into a ‘continued state of maintenance’ for a temporary period of time. It doesn’t affect the playing of the game, but it does hinder their ability to access gold Initiates chests dotted around the Paris map.

Fortunately for once in the Unity story, Ubisoft have foreseen the problem and put into a place a fix for the maintenance period. All the gold Initiate chests have been made accessible to all players until AC Initiates is out of maintenance.

Breaking the news on the Unity forums Assassin’s Creed community manager, EscoBlades said that the reason for the extended period of maintenance was down to an effort to “minimize the effect from outages to your experience during this time, as well as to allow [them] work on ensuring the technical stability of the platform.”

“Although AC Initiates will be in maintenance and thus unavailable to access via the web or console browsers, all gold Initiates chests are now unlocked in game for online players.”

As it says above, you will need to be online to access the chests in game. And be quick too if you wish to reap some rewards, Ubisoft haven’t given a concrete end date for AC Initiates to come back up but have said that they aim to keep it in maintenance for the “holiday period”.

Witcher fans have been looking forward to the next installment in the series, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for a time now. The hype grows more for every new trailer and piece of information about the game released. So the news of a 3 month release delay couldn’t have gone down well. The reason behoind it though is that commonly-heard one for delays nowadays – they need the time to iron out the bugs.

CD Projekt RED’s CEO Marcin Iwinski said that they were using the time to run optimisation in various areas of the games and stamp out the final bugs. It should result he says, “in a smoother and more engaging experience and, yes, the game looking better across all platforms.” For now the content is locked so no changes are to be made to the actual content and story parts of the game, which are the bits we’re going to be engaging with during the game and are at the core of any good RPG – especially an open-world one such as this. Iwinski says that The Witcher 3 will have “enough gameplay to keep you playing for weeks.”

As always I maintain that this delay is only a good thing. After all when a game releases with major bugs you’re going to hear about it thanks to the gaming media, and this year has recently brought us a nice big scale game with many bugs of which I’ve written a lot of articles on as the story developed and evolved (I’m sure I don’t need to tell you which one). More time spent on making sure a game works might mean more waiting for the gamers and more cost for the developers; but when a game releases late and works excellently as opposed to on time and is in some way broken it benefits the gamer and the developer in the long-term.