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Nowadays eSports is growing so fast. It’s all about big tournaments, big prize money, teams and sponsorships… or at least it is for most eSports.
However, a South Korean player has made history by becoming the first player to win a major final event on his own. That is, without the backing of any team or even a sponsor. Byun Hyun Woo or ByuN competed in the Code S division of the Global Starcraft II League and beat out Kim “sOs” Yoo Jin in Friday night’s finals, taking the match 4-1. This means he won the top prize of 40,000 Won ($34,000) and a straight seeding into BlizzCon’s WCS finals in November. And remember, he’s done this without any of the helping or backing of most players or teams.
His opponent sOs is a two-time World Champion and so entered the match as the favourite, however ByuN’s clever play managed to hamper his opponent’s economy and win him the match causing quite the upset on the competitive scene around the world.
It’ll be interesting to see if ByuN will have picked up team offers and sponsorship deals by the time he appears at BlizzCon in a few months’ time.
Warner Bros have announced that they are planning to release the remastered versions of the first two Batman Arkham games during the next month of the year.
The Batman: Return to Arkham set will include both Batman: Arkham Asylum and its sequel, Batman: Arkham City in remastered versions which will include all of the Game of the Year content and downloadable content ever released for both games. The games have apparently been done with improved graphics, shaders, updated models, environments, lighting and more through the use of Unreal Engine 4 and will retail at a suggested price of £39.99 with a PEGI-16 rating.
The game will release on both Xbox One and Playstation 4 and the date has been set for an October 21st 2016 release.
Previous Bethesda games have seen releases of special editions that included all the DLC packs in a game alongside the base game, including Skyrim – so in a way it’s not a surprise that the game that was billed at first as “Skyrim but with friends” is also getting one.
The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Edition is a release for PC, Xbox One and Playstation 4 that will see the base game as well as all four of its current DLC packs put together into one package to attract new players into the world, with players venturing across all corners of Tamriel in a search for quests, loot and adventures with friends. Costing £49.99 for the console versions and £39.99 for the PC version, Gold Edition will have all of the content from Imperial City, Orsinium, Thieves Guild & Dark Brotherhood from the start, as well as including a Palomino horse mount and 500 of the game’s in-game currency, Crowns, for all new accounts.
As well, existing players of the base game will be able to acquire the four DLC packs through the in-game Crown Store. The Guilds and Glory DLC pack is new and will be available for a discounted price of 5,500 Crowns – when the Crowns price of buying them all separately is 9,500 that’s quite a discount.
Among the new ‘mid-generation’ consoles that are coming, Sony’s entry is going to be the “Playstation Pro” which is kind of like a Playstation 4.5. The console will be supporting 4k and HDR, and many already-released games had been confirmed to be getting patches to make them look their best on the new machine.
Only now, there might be a twist in the tail for these post-release patches.
Speaking to Japanese site Game Impress Watch, an executive vice president at Sony Interactive Studio (Masayasu Ito) gave some hints that these patches might actually end up costing you money to access. He said that ‘it will be different for each title’ and that it depend on ‘the thinking of each licensee’ when expressly asked whether money would be involved in the updates. At that point he was talking more about third-party developers but when pushed to clarify about Sony’s own published titles Ito responded ‘I think it will vary for each one of our titles.’
A number of games have already been confirmed for the updates, including Uncharted 4, Shadow of Mordor and many more popular, widely-played titles. If we do have to pay there’s likely to be an uproar, but the details have come via a translated interview and thus there might be something lost in translation – maybe the costs are only development ones.
Either way, it’s best to wait for official announcements before we pick up the torches and pitchforks.
Bethesda kind of made some history when they allowed for user-made mods to be used on their Xbox One version of Fallout 4 months ago. Sure, the implementation had some teething issues (mainly centred around the lack of checks that allowed for some unscrupulous people to upload other people’s PC mods as their own content), but all in all most people were pleased that the console was finally getting to use something that had been a PC mainstay for a while.
Bethesda had planned to allow for their Skyrim remaster to follow suit, saying that they intended to allow for mods on both their Xbox One version as well as the Playstation 4 version. Only now it seems like that won’t be happening; at least for the Playstation 4 version owing to the fact that Sony aren’t going to allow Bethesda to enable the modding in a way that Bethesda really needs to make it a thing.
In a post on their site entitled “PS4 Mod Update” Bethesda wrote the following:
“After months of discussion with Sony, we regret to say that while we have long been ready to offer mod support on PlayStation 4, Sony has informed us they will not approve user mods the way they should work: where users can do anything they want for either Fallout 4 or Skyrim Special Edition.
Like you, we are disappointed by Sony’s decision given the considerable time and effort we have put into this project, and the amount of time our fans have waited for mod support to arrive. We consider this an important initiative and we hope to find other ways user mods can be available for our PlayStation audience. However, until Sony will allow us to offer proper mod support for PS4, that content for Fallout 4 and Skyrim on PlayStation 4 will not be available.
We will provide an update if and when this situation changes.”
Obviously this is going to be a huge disappointment to Bethesda fans on the Sony console. So far it seems like this is going to be the only version without mod support, something that has arguably kept the Skyrim scene alive long past the time when the 2011 released game should have faded a little.
What are your thoughts on this? Tell us in the comments.
