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The Elder Scrolls Online is due to get an update similar to Skyrim’s Hearthfire, in that players will soon be able to purchase and fill with items to make their very own dwellings. The update was originally mentioned at E3 this year back in June, and now a rough ETA has been put on it – Feb 2017.
Named Homestead, the update will be free and introduces 40 different homes across the map; all within base zones on launch, none within DLC-only areas. There will be over 2000 items to buy or craft as well for your chosen home, and the dwellings will be styled after the game’s ten playable races. There will be a variety of sizes too from small living spaces such as Inn rooms to huge manors with large outside areas included, and homes will be instanced to save players all rushing for the best plots of land when the feature launch. Fast travel to homes and the ability to invite friends and guild mates will also be available, and all homes are secure from other players who would try and steal furniture and other features from your home.
Bethesda wrote about Homestead: “Unfurnished homes will be available for purchase with either in-game Gold or with Crowns in the Crown Store. Fully furnished homes will be available for purchase through the Crown Store with Crowns. Players will be allowed to preview homes prior to purchase, whether furnished and unfurnished.”
For further information, visit the game’s official site.
About a week after dataminers found and revealed a bunch of details about what to expect from Overwatch’s winter event, Blizzard have officially revealed the date of when it’ll start – December the 13th had had previously been guessed.
Dataminers had already revealed a lot of detail about what was coming, although it was all pretty vague. For example we knew that a new gamemode would be coming, but not what it’d be; as well as which characters would get new skins but not what they’d look like. It did reveal some interesting details though, including that Torbjorn was the only character who would be getting a skin, a highlight animation and an emote through the special loot boxes – so was probably quite important for this update.
I’m a storyteller by my nature. I love a good story, love hearing them, making them and telling them. So when an indie RPG about stories came up, I was enthusiastic to give it a go. I love RPGs and stories, so it seemed a good match.
The game in question is Torn Tales by Twistplay and published by Chilled Mouse. The game follows a team of three storybook protagonists as they venture through a landscape mashed together from many different tales and corrupted by a jealous storyteller who was jealous of his own works not getting the attention he felt they deserved. Now the three fight through the obstacles ahead of them to return to their own stories.
The three protagonists are Robin Hood, who plays an archer archetype, Dr. Jekyl, who is melee, and lastly Snow White, who acts as a mage. The game is portrayed from a top-down view, with a minimap letting you sight ahead a little way as to what is coming. Movement is done by clicking where you want the characters to head, which eventually manifests itself in rapid-fire clicking to direct them. The path ways are fairly linear in the game and it’s next to impossible to get lost if you pay attention. Enemies give experience which will then go towards a level up for characters, which will give skill points to be assigned and unlock new special abilities which can then further upgrade over time as more points are assigned to them. It is possible to switch your lead character as well, rotating between the three.
The game does have pickups in the form of assignable trinkets, which will improve some aspect of the character it is assigned to. There are also health pickups which help you keep your characters healthy, along with save points represented by stands with a book upon them.
The game itself is good fun to play and engaging. I certainly enjoyed playing it, and it was challenging in some aspects, requiring me to learn enemy attack patterns and strategise how best to take on a battle. I also feel the storybook and fairytale aspect is a big plus for the game, it’s a unique little thing about the game.
However, I feel the graphics could have been a bit better although they’re not bad. The best visuals are in the storybook-esque cutscenes and they’re still images. However this is an indie so I’ll let it off there. I also wish there’d been more characters to recruit and change but again, indie does mean limitations sometimes. They don’t actively have a big effect on how much I really liked the game though in the end.
Torn Tales is going to be coming out on Steam in January. If you enjoy small, well put-together RPGs, you should probably at least give this one a look. It’s worth your time.
Ever since the game was revealed, there were rumblings about how well Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare was going to do. Even packaging it with a remastered copy of Modern Warfare, which originally picked interest way up, turned out to be a bust when it was discovered that the disc copies wouldn’t play the remastered game without the Infinite Warfare disc – stopping gamers from buying the bundle for just the remaster.
Release brought more ridiculousness, with Microsoft refunding one PC player because he was one of only TWO players online looking for a match (because cross-platform play hadn’t been allowed by Activision). Now stats are coming out showing that the game’s sales are down around 50% compared to last year’s Black Ops 3 sales. Ouch.
The information comes via NPD sell-through data sourced by two Wall Street analysts. Share sin Activision Blizzard have recently dropped around 20% since it peaked in mid-October this year, and COD sale worries that were around even before its release are likely to be a part of that. The figures are very close to the physical Gfk Chart that was released in November showing that first week sales were down 48%. At the time people pointed out that it didn’t include digital sales, which count for a lot of sales nowadays and also that the news about the second game not working without the disc could have had an effect on sales too – however now it seems that the figures were very accurate.
“Infinite Warfare units came in 17% shy of our expectations, down close to 50% year-on-year,” Cowen analyst Doug Creutz wrote. Elsewhere, another Wall Street source told CNBC that sales were actually down 51% year-on-year.
A little while ago the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), a body that monitors and regulates the stock market in France accused a handful of Ubisoft’s executives of insider trading. Ubisoft of course refuted those claims, but now the AMF have decided they are convinced enough of wrongdoing to issue sanctions against the individuals accused to a combined tune of €1.2 million.
AMF have alleged that during a period in early October of 2013, Ubisoft Montreal CEO Yannis Mallat and four other executives sold up stock, knowing that the company’s share prices would drop when it was announced that both Watch Dogs and The Crew were going to be delayed until 2014. Both games at the time were very anticipated and the value of Ubisoft’s stock did indeed drop by 25% in the wake of the announcements.
The breakdown of fines levied are as follows:
Ubisoft Montreal CEO Yannis Mallat – €700,000
Ubisoft VP of corporate affairs Francis Baillet – €200,000
Ubisoft worldwide studios exec director Christine Burgess – €200 000
Ubisoft Montreal VP of executive operations Olivier Paris – €100,000
Ubisoft brand development director Damien Moret – €15,000
Ubisoft have said that they intend to appeal the decision against them. Their argument hinges on saying that Mallat nor any of the other four had any sort of insider knowledge that they would have acted upon when deciding to sell on shares.
“Ubisoft acknowledges the AMF’s decision, but continues to assert that the people involved acted in good faith,” a Ubisoft spokesperson said in a statement. “We are convinced that these team members did not intentionally commit any acts contrary to market regulations.”
They went on to say that “the processes and timetables” that are involved in the making and production of major games at Ubisoft mean that there was no possible way that any of the five could have been aware of or anticipate Yves Guillemon’s decision to delay the games’ release dates. They also said that “the AMF’s decision represents a serious misunderstanding of the game development and production process at our company and common to our industry.”
