Today’s big Internet controversy involves butts, as these things so often do. An Overwatch player complained about one character’s butt-centric victory pose, prompting the game’s director to say they’re removing it. When Overwatch’s closed beta returned earlier this year, Blizzard added skins, emotes, and poses for characters. Among other things, fast-talking, faster-walking time travel demoness…
Once upon a time, Pillars of Eternity and Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian was working on a major Xbox One RPG called Stormlands. Then it got canceled, and Obsidian had to lay off 30 people, a large portion of a relatively small staff. Turns out, Tyranny, Obsidian’s new RPG in which evil has already won,…
Stardew Valley may look like a game about farming, but it’s actually about people. And OK yeah, also a lot of farming. In Stardew Valley, you can befriend and, in some cases, romance characters in the game’s tiny rural community. You give them gifts, learn more about them over time, and experience special events with…
In major multiplayer games like Overwatch, what comes after a big patch is almost more interesting than what it’s in it. This is certainly a, um, standout instance of that. As part of the latest big Overwatch beta patch, Blizzard added a new escort level, Route 66. The level is home to the notorious Deadlock…
Price of individual products: $68.17. Your cost: $99.99. Hmmmm. Steam’s running a big sale on Ubisoft games this weekend, and it’s pretty exciting. Even newer games like Far Cry Primal have had their price tags trampled by mammoths and yelled at by weird frightened NPC dudes. The sale is definitely worth a look. Buuuut all…
Overwatch got a new update this week, and it’s a big one. It’s also a good one, for the most part. In addition to the usual balance tweaks, the ramifications of which will likely become more clear with time, the update added five main things: a new escort map called Route 66, a new Hearthstone-inspired…
Don’t like the look or feel of the ever-divisive Steam Controller? Valve just released all the information you’ll need to modify or rebuild it. You can grab the complete package, which comprises the Steam Controller’s mechanical CAD geometry, right here. Valve briefly outlined its contents: “The archive contains several eDrawings viewer files: from Creo Express…
Ever since HTC and Valve’s Vive VR headset was announced, people have been comparing it to Star Trek’s Holodeck. Now that Valve is letting people make their own Steam VR backgrounds—between-game hangouts, essentially—someone put two and two together. Reddit user illogical_cpt came up with the background, which Steam user Bradllez uploaded to Valve’s new VR…
Sometimes we play games because we want stories, or otherworldly out-of-body experiences, or to drive a Euro Truck. Other times, we just want to kill some shit. Slain happily obliges. Slain is a new sidescroller coming to Steam today, and it looks excruciatingly solid. It combines chunky pixels with gothic Castlevania-style environments, an elemental combo…
When Darkest Dungeon first launched on Steam Early Access in February 2015, it was almost universally beloved. A unique, polished, fleshed-out experience on Early Access? It was practically unheard of. So it was all happily ever after from there, right? Hardly. For a few months, things went according to plan. The punishingly difficult dungeon-crawler RPG/trauma…
Overwatch finally has a release date, but the closed beta is still humming along, with frequent updates tweaking balance and adding new maps and modes. Everybody wants in. Some, uh, more than others. Darkust#6214‘s Overwatch Beta: The RPG is a surprisingly robust text game about the process of watching, waiting, and hoping beyond hope for…
Chris Le designed a Counter-Strike weapon skin in Vive VR. Le, a BFF of Danny Trejo, used a Google 3D painting program called Tilt Brush to do it. In it, you walk around and draw on thin air. It’s one of the more interesting Vive apps I’ve tried, and watching someone use it to make…
EA Sports UFC 2 is a game that does its damnedest to imitate every element of the UFC broadcast experience (except for the weird part where it pretends commentator Mike Goldberg knows what he’s talking about). By and large, it works. It’s in the particulars that EA falters. Khabib Nurmagomedov is a UFC lightweight fighter…
Let’s get this out of the way upfront: Tyranny is not Pillars of Eternity 2. It’s a different animal, a decidedly more sinister one. But the gulf between them is more than skin-deep. After dozens of hours, I still haven’t finished Obsidian’s classic PC RPG revival, Pillars of Eternity. Don’t get me wrong: it’s great.…
Slowly but surely, Valve is wading back into the murky waters of letting people charge for mods. Unfortunately, it seems that in some ways, history is repeating itself. Last week Valve launched DOTA 2‘s new Custom Game Pass functionality. Instead of allowing mod makers to charge for the whole of their creations—potentially roping them off…
Stardew Valley is the humble farming game that’s taken Steam by storm. People are in love with it to the point that they’re buying legit copies of the game for pirates. They’re also modding the crap out of it. All because one guy decided the PC needed its own grown-up version of Harvest Moon. Yes,…
In Ark: Survival Evolved, your character just kinda poops sometimes. It’s a little alarming at first, in the same way that I imagine pooping for the first time in real life is. The origin of that funny mechanic? Grimly serious. Turns out, Studio Wildcard co-founder Susan Stieglitz came up with it in order to get…
Recently at GDC I got to try out Valve’s new collection of VR game vignettes, The Lab. It was cool. It was also… another set of scattered ideas. It’s been years since Valve released a big game. The Lab is Valve’s Vive launch title, and it strings a series of VR minigames together with an…
Elsinore is a game where you play as Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. She’s stuck in a time loop, ala Groundhog Day or Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Her goal? To prevent Hamlet, a Shakespearean tragedy so tragic that it borders on ludicrous, from ending tragically. I took a look at the game while at GDC…
Meet Brock “The Problem” Kucao, aka Spider “The Spider” Spider. He may not look like much with his neon wildman hairdo and 29 instances of the same tattoo, but he’s gonna win the crap out of the UFC featherweight title. I’ve played about seven hours of EA Sports UFC 2 now, and I’m digging it……
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