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Payday 2’s been going for a long while now, mainly because just when you think you’ve seen the last of it, Overkill Software bring out a new DLC for it.
This time, the DLC is the Scarface Character and Heist DLC Packs – and yes, that means it’s based around the film. Check out the trailer:
The new playable character is Tony Montana, wielding his famous gun alongside a chainsaw and a new ‘Kingpin’ class. What that means is that Montana can inject himself with adrenaline, allowing him to soak up more damage whilst mowing people down. Useful for those heists full of police pouring in from absolutely everywhere. Pacino’s not voicing the character unfortunately, but the voice actor who portrayed the character in Scarface: The World is Yours is there to fill in.
The Scarface Heist Pack also adds a new heists to the game, in which the player team can infiltrate the Sosa Cartel mansion from the Scarface film, hoping to steal back what was taken as well as taking out the Sosa to boot.
The Scarface Heist Pack is retailing at around $6.99/£4.99 while the Character Pack costs $4.99/£3.99. And if only one person in the party owns the Heist pack, everyone can play that mission which is pretty sweet.
You have to admire Overkill’s dedication to their heist game, adding more and more content on top. They’ve made the game stick around a lot longer than anyone would have originally guessed.
Fans of HiRez Studio’s 3rd person action MOBA SMITE will know that the developer loves to runs sales, in game events and generally just throw things at players. This is partly due to the fact that they want you to spend money on skins. But, when the skins are as generally high quality as the ones HiRez turns out, you can’t really blame them. With the holidays here, HiRez is ratcheting up the in-game goodies even more. From Saturday Dec 17th at 5 a.m. EST until Tuesday, December 20th at 5 a.m. EST players can earn triple worshippers, experience and favor in SMITE. This makes the weekend the perfect time to work on your mastery levels with Nike and that pesky Fafnir.
And if that wasn’t enough for you, once Triple Everything Weekend ends on the 20th, the 7 Days of Saturnalia Event will begin. Similar to Triple Everything Weekend, thjis second event will offer Double Everything as well as free gems for completing quests themed around the in game pantheons. From HiRez themselves:
Beginning Tuesday, December 20th until Monday, December 26th, join in the 7 Days of Saturnalia once again! Indulge in free Gems, Pantheon Chest Sales, and double Experience/Worshipers all week long.
Each day, there will be a new Pantheon specific Quest players can participate in that will yield 25 Gems upon completion. That means you can earn up to 175 Gems during Saturnalia! Each Pantheon Quest and Pantheon Chest will be available for 2 days.
Kudos to HiRez for giving players a full ten days of Christmas gifts, especially those who might still be trying to earn some gems and finish off those Odyssey purchases in order to get that sick Anubis Tier 5 skin. Go log in and own some people on the Battleground of the Gods people, HiRez is literally throwing gems at you to do so!
In what seems a massive vote of confidence in the watchability of eSports for the mainstream, Riot Games and BAMTech have just announced a long-term partnership. For those unaware, BAMTech is a subsidiary of Major League Baseball’s media group, with the remit of commercialising partnered content and delivering it to viewers worldwide on new media platforms, like streaming. So it seems to be quite the big deal.
The new broke earlier on both the Wall Street Journal and Nasdaq with the details of the deal being laid out. BAMTech will pay a minimum of $300 million for the “exclusive” rights to stream and monetise League of Legend competitions through to 2023 – which suggests that they will no longer be broadcast on Twitch but the details of that aren’t clear yet. Riot’s co-founder Marc ‘Tryndamere’ Merrill has assured people on Reddit that the deal is not “platform exclusive” though, so it’s looking likely that Twitch will still play host to streams of future LoL competitions.
Riot are hoping to make use of BAMTech’s expertise in sponsorship and advertising for the benefit of League of Legends eSports competitions and the fans’ ability to watch and engage with the content. “We’ll… be collaborating to push the boundaries of the eSports viewing experience, elveraging BAMTech’s best-in-class technology to create additional possibilities and opportunities for fans to access, and connect with, League of Legends.”
Revenue beyond the $300 million will be shared by BAMTech with Riot when the mainstream company begins to make money out of the deal, although percentage shares are not known at this moment. It is a sign though that eSports are on their way to becoming something more widespread and a lot less ‘niche’ than they once were possibly.
This year is Ubisoft’s 30th anniversary, and earlier this year at E3 the company announced that they were planning to celebrate this milestone by giving away copies of some of their games. Each month one game was added for free onto Ubisoft’s Uplay platform for the PC, and each month as the new game was uploaded the game for last month was taken down and with it your chance to grab it if you hadn’t already.
Now Ubisoft have given everyone another chance to grab the games they might have missed, by offering all the games as a bundle for this weekend only. Logging into your Uplay on your computer or heading over to the Ubi30 website will let you claim the bundle for youself, for seven free games. There’s also a badge for Uplay accounts available too.
The games, for those who don’t know, are:
Prince of Persia Sands of Time
Splinter Cell
Rayman Origins
The Crew
Beyond Good & Evil
Far Cry Blood Dragon
Assassin’s Creed III
If you want these games, you have until Sunday to claim them, so be quick.
Over the weekend, rumours began to abound that Crytek were once again facing some financial troubles after a post that was posted on both Reddit and Imgur by the same author talked about how employees across all studios were not being paid, how this had been going on for months and even that one studio was on the block for selling off. Other sources came forward around the same time to media outlets, saying pretty much the same thing.
Now one ex-employee who recently quit has launched his own crowdfunding campaign to raise legal fees. He plans to sue Crytek for the unpaid wages he and others are owed. Ludvig Lindqvist is an FX artist who once worked at Crytek’s main German studio in Frankfurt from March 2015 until last week when he quit after two months of waiting to be paid for his work. In his GoFundMe campaign, Lindqvist has said that “Crytek has failed to pay salaries on time starting May 2016,” and provided screencaps of his last four salary statements to show proof of payments being delayed or missed entirely.
The funding goal of his campaign is about €20,000, and he has said that any excess he raises will go towards other Crytek or former Crytek employees who wish to emulate his example is suing the Germany studio, or if there aren’t any will go towards gaming-related charitable causes such as Special Effect and Able Gamers.
There are more rumours now that a lot more employees than just Lindqvist have quit their positions at Crytek recently, and so far there has been no public statement from the studio themselves telling their side of the story. Whatever is actually going on with Crytek, all the evidence so far does not suggest a good ending to this entire story.