Just as it might be true that for smartphones, if you can imagine it, “there’s an app for that”, when it comes to modern videogames, often if you can imagine it, “there’s a mod for that” – be it from flooding the majority of the world in Grand Theft Auto 5, to making Thomas the Tank Engine rain from the sky in Skyrim. World of Warcraft is no exception – but perhaps the most interesting mod yet is not an actual game mod, but one modder’s interpretation of a new look for the game.

Recently, a modder named Daniel Luchau decided to give one of the game’s most famous environments – and the hometown of newly created Human characters – a visual facelift through the use of Unreal Engine 4. In order to recreate The Elwynn Forest, Luchau took standard assets as seen in Unreal Engine 4 Tech Demos and combine them with actual models imported from World of Warcraft, though some of the latter’s textures were retouched for better visual splendour. While Luchau is keen to express that his video of the work so far is “an early build” – this only touches the surface of what Unreal Engine 4 can offer and many details and textures still look rough – there are many impressive moments even in the two short minutes of this preview. Outside of Elwynn Forest, players will recognize Goldshire, the second quest town in the area; as well as Westbrook Garrison, with the infamous wanted poster for Hogger outside…

Enough talk, take a look for yourself:

Feel free to head on over to the Forum to let us know what you think 🙂

One of the most popular and well-known torrent distribution sites in the world, EZTV, has closed down. Surprisingly, it had nothing to do with the cops, or lawyers.

As TorrentFreak report, the site—which has served up TV show downloads for a decade—has been brought down by scammers, who took over EZTV’s domain name in what’s being calling a “hostile takeover”.

The scammers are still trying to operate EZTV, but given the nature of their takeover—company names were impersonated, and even the personal domains of EZTV’s founder Novaking have been seized—many other major torrent sites like KickassTorrents have banned EZTV uploads, and everyone’s being urged to avoid the site like the plague.

EZTV rose to prominence over the years due to its simple design and clear goal: to host episodes of every major (Western) TV show on the air. By only linking trusted and quality torrents, it developed a reputation as the place to go to get hold of a TV show.

As sad as it is for the site to get hit like this, maybe it’s a good time to go out. Ten years ago getting hold of TV shows in a timely manner was a pain in the ass! These days, between Apple, Google, Amazon and cable streaming services there’s really not many excuses left for not being able to pay for a show.

Yesterday, right on cue, WoW Tokens went live.

Today, they’re worth quite a bit less. The tokens are in-game items which can be purchased for $20 and exchanged for gold or game time, with their value in gold determined by the market. Blizzard said last month that it would set an initial value and then let it fluctuate based on supply and demand. And fluctuate it has, with the Token shedding a full quarter of its worth in gold in a single day.

At launch, a $20 Token was initially valued at 30,000 gold, and actually pushed beyond that in the first few hours after release. But then it started to go down, down, steadily down, and now, according to wowtoken.info, your $20 Token now equates to 22,405 gold, more than a quarter less than the starting price.

The slump is not entirely surprising. As VentureBeat points out, the great likelihood is that players rushed to buy Tokens as soon as they were launched, then dumped them on the auction house to turn around some quick gold. And it’s not as though 22k is an inconsequential sum, either.

The potentially interesting part is what happens next: If the gold value continues to fall, players could be tempted to forgo their $15 monthly subscription fees in favor of Tokens, tradeable for 30 days of game time, purchased with gold. Will Blizzard take action to stabilize the market? My guess is that they’ll eventually settle into a sub-30k stability, but given how the Diablo 3 real money auction house turned out, a small part of me wonders if maybe WoW Tokens could have unforeseen effects on the way the in-game economy is balanced.

For more info on the WoW token system, follow this link!

Some time ago, Amazon launched a new online storage service called “Glacier”, so named because it was designed with a view to act as “cold storage” for your files. Glacier offered cheaper storage for those files you just HAVE to keep online, but don’t have a need to access on a constant basis – such as backups. In a clear case of “anything you can do, I can do better”, Google have responded by launching their own similar service, known as Google Nearline.

Google Nearline is a new service to host historical data and files you don’t expect to use very often. For example, say you’re a student. You’ll probably want your latest essays and coursework, research notes and so on immediately accessible via Google Drive to work on as you need ready for the upcoming deadlines; but what those essays from a year ago or older that have long since been passed to your teachers or professors and marked? They might be worth keeping for later review or research, but you probably won’t be needing to read those very often any more, right? That’s what Nearline is for. It’s the kind of cloud storage that businesses often need, but ordinary people may not want, especially if it isn’t cheap.

Luckily, keeping things cheap is something Google has been very aggressive about recently. Back in March, the company slashed Drive storage pricing across the board, cutting the price of its 100GB Drive tier by more than half and lowering the cost per terabyte per month to just $10 USD. With Nearline, however, Google are allowing customers to fine-tune their spending and storage requirements to the exact penny if they so choose – the service charges by the gigabyte, at a rate of just a penny per GB per month.

Google Nearline also offers advantages in other areas, according to the company. One is in its speed – while services such as the aforementioned Amazon Glacier require several hours before the stored data can be retrieved once again, Nearline is able to serve data in around three seconds. It also integrates with other products in Google’s Cloud Platform portfolio, making it easier for pre-existing installations to tap into the system.

Google’s moves are a reflection of the cut-throat industry online storage has become, where any company that doesn’t move fast will crash and burn rapidly. Even as storage offerings become cheaper and faster for the consumer, the profits on offer continue to shoot up as more people embrace online solutions to store data where they can easily get to it later – whether it’s personal, private or business. With Microsoft’s Azure platform proving itself one of the company’s most profitable divisions; and storage-based companies such as Box and Dropbox raising millions in investor funds, competition is always hotting up.

505 Games, a global publisher of video games, Overkill, a Starbreeze Studio, and film director Demian Lichtenstein brings you the live-action PAYDAY web series.

 

Director Demian Lichtenstein, of “3000 Miles to Graceland” commented, “The PAYDAY web series has been a solid and very close collaboration between all parties involved. I have never experienced such a high level of commitment to excellence from PAYDAY creators Bo and Ulf Andersson, to the rock-solid input of game director David Goldfarb, and the combined efforts of the powerhouse global teams at 505 Games, Starbreeze, Overkill, Solaris, Equilibrium and Lightstone. Simply said, this is the best experience of my career.”

 

Executive produced by Greg O’Connor of “Warrior” and “Pride and Glory” fame, the web series was filmed on location in Los Angeles with a crew of over 100 and sets the scene for the next steps in the evolution of the PAYDAY story.

The series can be watched live on your PC or Downloaded, episode by episode to watch how and when you want

We’ll have a full review later this week