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One of the world’s most notorious hackers is stepping out of the shadows: Sombra, a mysterious infiltrator who uses information to control those in power.
Sombra is a master manipulator who can hack her enemies, temporarily blocking their abilities. In addition, she can hack health packs and Torbjörn’s turret, making them useless to her opponents. She uses her fully automatic Machine Pistol to take out her enemies, getting into position using her Thermoptic Camo, which allows her to become invisible and move more quickly for short periods of time. This gives her the ability to slip past enemy defenses undetected, but she’s instantly revealed if she takes damage or attacks an enemy. She also has a Translocator, which can be tossed like a grenade. When it’s activated, Sombra is teleported to its location (even while it’s in flight).
Sombra’s ultimate ability, EMP, discharges electromagnetic energy in a wide radius, hacking anyone caught within range and destroying enemy barriers and shields. To learn more about Sombra, click here.
New Feature: The Arcade!
Discover brand new ways to play Overwatch in the Arcade. Choose from a variety of regularly rotating game modes, maps, and rulesets that don’t quite fit into Quick Play or Competitive Play. Whether it’s 1-on-1 duels, 3-vs-3 skirmishes, our alternating selection of brawls, or special rulesets like “no hero switching,” you should have no problem finding a game that fits your mood. Experience is earned just like any other mode, but you can also earn Arcade-specific rewards, like Loot Boxes!
New Arena Map: Ecopoint: Antarctica
Bundle up for a journey to Ecopoint: Antarctica, the former Overwatch installation where climatologist Mei-Ling Zhou was once stationed. While researching severe weather anomalies in the region, the station was hit by an intense polar storm. Running out of options and low on supplies, the team decided to cryogenically freeze themselves until the storm passed. They believed that it would only be for a few months, but Mei awoke nearly a decade later.
Ecopoint: Antarctica is a compact new Arena map that features multiple new game modes, including a 3-vs-3 battle and 1-on-1 duel. Check it out in the Arcade.
Season 3 of Competitive Play
Competitive Play’s second season will end on November 23 at 4PM PDT (November 24 at 0:00 UTC), and the third season will begin on November 30 at 4PM PDT (December 1 at 0:00 UTC). During the week-long off season, you’ll still be able to queue for matches using the Competitive Play ruleset, but your skill rating will not be affected and no Competitive Points will be awarded.
We’ve also made a few adjustments to the skill rating system for season 3. Players will be distributed more broadly across the skill tiers, which means that your season 3 rating will probably be lower than the previous season.
Developer Comment: When season 2 started, we had more players in the Gold and Platinum skill tiers than we originally intended. This meant that skill levels varied widely for players within those tiers, and some players were achieving inappropriately high rankings during their placement matches. These players typically began the season by having their skill rating adjusted downwards after their first few matches. For season 3, skill ratings will be slightly lower after your placement matches, allowing them to increase as the season begins. After you play enough matches, your skill rating changes will return to normal.
In Ubisoft news that isn’t about their ongoing fight to not be taken over by Vivendi, five executives of the company have been accused of using their insider knowledge to profit on the stock market. Of couse, the accused executives deny all these claims and some are even seeking damages against the people accusing them.
The accusing party are the stock market regulator for France – Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) – and have accused the CEO of Ubisoft Montreal Yannis Mallat and four other Ubisoft executives of selling up stock in the weeks before October 15th 2013. This was just before the publisher announced delays for two of their then-upcoming games – Watch Dogs and The Crew. After the announcement Ubisoft’s stock dropped by 25%.
The AMF have seen this and theorised that the executives sold up their stocks before the delay announcements were made, because they knew about them and wanted to get the money before their stocks were suddenly worth an awful lot less. Insider trading laws in France prohibit this by the way, so it’s a serious accusation to make.
On Ubisoft’s side, Mallat has told Canadian newspaper La Presse that he had no such insider knowledge to have acted upon. Ubisoft as a whole have answered with a statement that they’re well aware of the accusations and the individuals involved “vigorously dispute their implication in this matter and the AMF’s interpretation of the facts”; and the CEO and co-founder of Ubisoft Yves Guillemot, says the accused “have his full support and trust”.
In the statement the publisher said, “Ubisoft itself has not been charged by the AMF. Moreover, three of the Canadian team members implicated in the AMF’s action today filed a motion with the Superior Court of Québec demanding that the procedure be declared invalid and seeking damages against AMF France and AMF Québec.”
Proceedings will continue through this month at the Commission des Sanctions in Paris.
It’s time for another update in the world of gaming Kickstarter campaigns.
Starting off as we usually do with previously covered campaigns, there are no ends to report, but two projects – Agony and The Bird Told Me To Do It – have reached their goals with time to spare. Now it’s onto stretch goals for them both! A Little Less Desperation is also now within €1,000 of its goal with 17 days to go, meaning it could well end up finishing completing its raised amount.
However, on the other side of the balance, we’ve a lot of campaigns who are far short of their targets and are running out of time to reach them. Drawing Dead, Cloud Runner, Alone in the Woods and Death Witch: Bloodline are all struggling and probably won’t reach targets set without a major push; while Space Wars: Interstellar Empires has a little less ground to make up but still has a long way to go without much time time meet it.
A card game starts us off, and it comes from the same people who created Exploding Kittens so… you know, funny stuff.
The point of Bears verses Babies is that you are building an army of Bears (and other creatures) to combat an army of Babies. ‘Bear’ cards drawn can be used to build up your army, while ‘Baby’ cards get played in the middle of the table as part of the army you need to fight. When a player uses a ‘Provoke’ card the Baby army then attacks the Bear army of all the players – and you want to Provoke when you’re ready but your opponents are not. Winning means you ‘eat’ the other army and the player who has eaten the most Baby cards wins.
Bears Vs Babies is already funded, having well exceeded it’s $10,000 target. Still, go check it out if you liked Exploding Kittens.
Next up is a game set in the future aboard a ship drifting powerless above an alien world.
The story of The Station is simple. Humanity has discovered another sentient life on a far planet, but it is in the midst of a civil war. A crew of 3 is sent to see if a peaceful relationship can possibly be established between this new species and humans, but before it can land the station loses all systems. You play a recon person sent to discover what happened and if the crew are still alive to tell their tale.
The Station has made $2,869 CAD of it’s $10,000 CAD target. It has 25 days more to go before the campaign ends.
Another space based game next, and no it has nothing to do with basketball.
Space Jammers is a 1-4 player co-op shooter that sees you controlling a rock band of alien space kittens as they race across the galaxy towards the Galactic Battle of the Bands. Along the way they will face natural hazards, along with space pirates and rival bands. Weapons include both melee and ranged and are randomised as well as the upgrade pickups you can find. Even the bosses can be randomly generated!
Space Jammers has a $9,000 goal of which is has made $1,191 so far. It has 23 days to go.
Return to Earth
Lastly, and continuing the theme of games chosen this week (with the exception of the first) we have a sci-fi adventure game about returning the human home planet.
Return to Earth is a game that the developers want players to explore at their own pace, and make sure to really seek out all the hidden parts of the maps built. Exploration is key here. Combat is done through the many different weapons found in game, as well as through the bombs that can also be used to blast a way onwards for you. The Rewind ability allows you to skip back in time a few seconds as well.
Return to Earth has 29 days to go and has made £102 of its £2,000 goal.
Dishonored 2 released at last, after a long journey of teasers and trailers that all started with its premature announcement by accident on a livestream the day before it was due to be announced publicly. Unfortunately, quite a few people have found that the game has some major performance issues. Our station manager Digmbot did, and identified why as well – a CPU priority issue that couldn’t be changed.
Arkane did their best to help people get past these issues, but this still left a lot of people unable to play because all the suggested fixes weren’t relevant to them or they had tried them already. Fortunately, it seems Bethesda and Arkane are going to give the game a performance patch this week and finally free gamers to enjoy their time in Dunwall.
Speaking via the Bethesda news wire, Arkane Studios wrote: “We have been monitoring the PC forums and social channels and while we’re excited to hear that many of you are enjoying the game, we are disheartened that some of you are experiencing PC performance issues on some systems. We are actively working to provide an update to address your concerns. The patch and its release notes will be available in the coming days.”
The problem have mainly been reported in mid-range systems, although some higher-range systems (like our own Digm’s) are also finding themselves missing a lot of frames. Some console gamers have also been having problems. Hopefully we should have some word on the patch and when it’ll be available soon for those of you holding off until you can play with the amount of frames you expected from the new game.
Until then, some kind souls over on the Steam community forums are busy putting together a set of tips in how you can eke as many frames out of the unpatched version as possible. Give it a check if you’re up for giving the game another chance before Arkane patch it and (hopefully) solve a great deal of these problems.
Just over a week ago at BlizzCon 2016, Blizzard showed off the next expansion for Hearthstone – Mean Streets of Gadgetzan. They revealed a number of cards during the event itself, but in the lead up to the December release Blizzard are slowly drip feeding us more of the 100+ new cards we can expect to receive through the new card packs.
Here are the ones that have been revealed in the last week, put together into Classes:
Paladin
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Hunter
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Rogue
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Warrior
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Tri-Class
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Neutral
As you can probably see, even now there haven’t yet been any cards revealed that are specifically for either Warlock or Shaman decks – a bit of an oddity because you usually expect a fairly even spread of reveals. However looking at what has been revealed so far leads me to think that they’re planning to do the reveals per criminal family, which would account for the big numbers of Paladin, Hunter and Warrior cards revealed in this week’s batch as well as the two tri-class being Grimy Goon tri-classes. Another thing that bears this out is that a sizeable amount of these cards have some sort of a buffing effect on friendly minions – usually randomly chosen ones and often from the hand it seems. I can already see myself using Stolen Goods and Alley Armorsmith in an update to my Iron Wall Warrior deck, as well as Smuggler’s Run in the update to my Tiny Terrors deck I will have to do once The Grand Tournament cards leave Standard in early 2017.
On the Neutral side, I see Dirty Rat being a good count for opponents who wish to play down minions in a certain order. If the right random minion goes down, it could throw off a strategy and force a quick rethink. Sounds just like the sort of ‘underhanded’ thing you’d expect from cards of this expansion. Dopplegangster (as well as being another good punny name) kind of reminds me of the Grim Patron with its ability to spawn two copies of itself upon being played – but obviously with slightly less ability to get crazily out of control and much easier to deal with as well as each of the 3 minions summoned are 2/2!
We’ll see what reveals next week hold for us, and if Blizzard begin to refocus them onto one of the other gangs.
