Information about Telltale Games’ virtual rendering of the Game of Thrones series has slowly been trickling out to the public in recent weeks. Screencaps, a vague placement of a release date and information about when the games will be set and which family they’d be following have all emerged. Now we have one of those points clarified: a proper release date.

The first episode in the series has been named as Iron From Ice for a while now and listed on Steam for a release sometime in December. Telltale finally gave a date via a tweet and has since been dropping more bits of news, including a trailer due to debut tomorrow:

 

FULL Launch Trailer for #GameOfThrones: A @TelltaleGames Series hits 12/1. Your Story Begins 12/2. #IronFromIce pic.twitter.com/z5OHKHy2Op

— Telltale Games (@telltalegames) November 27, 2014

The game will release on the 2nd of December for PC and Mac, the 3rd for Xbox One, 360 and PS4 and the 4th for the iOS. The game will follow the members of the House Forrester as they seek to maintain themselves during the War of the Five Kings.

Prison Architect is a simulator game in which you build and manage a high-security prison; keeping, working, and most importantly feeding the prisoners in your care. If they don’t get their needs met well enough, you’re likely to have a riot on your hands. Unfortunately the game is still in an Alpha state (even if it’s quite a well fleshed-out one) and that means some issues still need to be fixed, and one especially has been causing the developers a headache for a while.

Smaller prisons do well with just one kitchen and one canteen to feed their inmates, but the problem comes when the prison grows beyond the size that one of each can adequately provide for all the prisoners. The food needs to be kept in a storeroom, then cooked, then laid out in the canteen for the prisoners to fill their foodtrays from. The problem is that more than one kitchen and canteen tends to confuse the AI about where to take the food, which leaves the canteens empty causing hungry prisoners and as their food needs aren’t being met… well, it results in riots.

The last Update, Update 26, attempted to fix this by having the chefs make the food and store it, and it instantly teleported to the canteen when a prisoner requested their daily meals. It seemed a great fix, and then some creative players found a way to exploit it.

Like all staff, chefs are susceptible to attack from armed and rowdy prisoners. One of the work and class spaces you can assign prisoners to is the kitchen they work in; the same kitchen that just so happens to have loads of sharp things in there that would make wonderful weapons. You can see where this is going.

The exploit basically had the players building a kitchen outside of the area that the rest of the prison was located in, ensuring that the chefs never needed to have contact with the prisoners and the prisoners never had the chance to steal knives or attack the chefs.

So Update 27 has come along with a new method of attempting to fix the food issue. A new logistics system will automatically map which canteen prisoners use based on their level of security clearance and their schedule. Chefs can now know how many people will use each canteen and hopefully prepare enough food so that all hunger needs are more adequately met and hunger-based rioting will become less of a problem.

Got to love it when players get creative with the mechanics of a game.

Ubisoft have announced today that the planned season pass for Assassin’s Creed Unity has been cancelled and has therefore been removed from online stores. Those who pre-ordered it need not worry though, refunds might not be forthcoming but instead Ubisoft have offered a free game out of a choice of high-profile titles as compensation.

The move comes after Unity’s rather abysmal launch in which frustrating, game-breaking and sometimes frankly terrifying (in the case of the faceless NPCs) bugs plagued the game tremendously. The story even made it to the main media and gamers were not impressed with the selling of what was a game that appeared nowhere near finished. The free game offers also applies to those who bought the Gold Edition of the game and include these titles as a choice for the freebie:

• The Crew
• Far Cry 4
• Watch Dogs
• Assassin’s Creed Black Flag
• Rayman Legends
• Just Dance 2015

As well Ubisoft are making the first (and possibly only) DLC for the game, Dead Kings, free to all the pre-purchasers of the season pass and Gold Edition. In a statement Ubisoft thanked their community for their continued support and apologised for the issues experienced in Unity.

“These problems took away from your enjoyment of the game, and kept many of you from experiencing the game at its fullest potential,” they wrote.

Ever since it had the trailer shown off at E3 earlier this year, Assassin’s Creed Unity seems to have been one big headache after another for Ubisoft, starting with the comments about female characters being more ‘difficult to animate’ and ending here with the cancellation of the season pass. The game just seems to be bad luck.

Bioware RPGs ought to have companions chatting to you constantly, revealing little details about themselves, the world around them and what they think of events occurring around you. Something that some players have found to be missing from the latest Dragon Age game – Dragon Age: Inquisition.

It has gone unnoticed largely up until now because it was thought that Bioware had taken the decision to make the comapnions less talkative this time round, but after coming together and discussing it on the EA and Bioware forums the developers have now confirmed that it’s a bug. An odd one at that, making it so that dialogue only happens every few hours instead of every few minutes.

There are supposed to be thousands of lines of recorded conversation within the game but something is stopping them from being played and so Bioware are now investigating the bug; asking for affected players to donate their 60+ hour games to help them make sense of what is causing it and how they can fix it.

While it’s a shame that so many players might need to restart their game’s playthrough of the story, I’m sure it’ll be a different and much richer experience the second time around having their companions actually able to talk to them and add much more atmosphere and flavour to the game.

Seems like the developers at 11 Bit Studios are onto a winner. Their latest release is a survival sim game called This War of Mine which takes place within a war-torn landscape of a ruined city and calls for you to scavenge, defend your bases, and generally take care of your little pocket of survivors until the ‘end of the war’ and the end of the game.

The game was released on November 14th and has been floating around the Steam Top Sellers list since then, having made back its development costs in just two days. That’s the mark of a popular game.

There was a patch released to the public today, and with it the news of the recouped costs as well as a few other bits of information like the percentage of players who made it to see the end of the war (less than 11% in case you were curious.) If this has made you curious about the game it’s currently 10% off on Steam right now.

Patch notes are as follows:

Features and tweaks:

• A new radio station, featuring the music by Cool Kids of Death.
• Unlocked two additional dweller setups on higher playthroughs.
• Graphical improvements on various locations.
• Minor changes in French, German and English localizations.
• Minor animation improvements.

Fixes and balancing:

• Fixed “Input Not Supported” bug on Windows.
• Changed fullscreen mode handling on Windows.
• Improved game stability based on crashdumps sent by players.
• “Aggro bug” fix. NPCs should no longer attack or flee without reason.
• Fixed broken trade. NPCs should no longer trade their entire stock for one item (Marketplace, Garage).
• Price changes now have an impact also on selling items to NPCs.
• Fixed an exploit that allowed players to prevent items from getting stolen during night attacks.
• Fixed a bug with getting stuck with only one initial dweller group.
• Fixed a bug with incorrect shelter description when Reinforced Door was built.
• Fixed a bug with visible gendertag in shelter description.
• All achievements can now be unlocked.