Cast your mind back to November 2017, and you may remember Faker’s tears as three-time world champions SKT T1 were beaten in the final of the League of Legends World championships. Thwarting SKT at the final hurdle were Samsung Galaxy, who lifted the Summoner’s Cup after a resounding 3-0 win. Now, as is tradition, a set of skins celebrating the team’s win are making their way to the game.
As League of Legends’ competitive scene continues to change, so does the way in which teams perform on the World stage. With that in mind, Riot has been tweaking the way in which they decide on who gets a skin in the wake of a victory.
Check out our list of the s.
In a recent thread, product manager Riot Supercakes said that “over the last year, we’ve evolved and updated our approach to selecting the skins we make to celebrate the team and players who win Worlds. As teams continue to experiment with their rosters, we’ve had to reevaluate our criteria for the skins."
Only six players on a winning team will be considered for a skin. In order to earn a new cosmetic, a player has to have had an impact on a team’s progression out of the group or play-in stages, or has to have participated in at least one knockout game.
The latest map to be added to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Sanhok, contains a pretty major glitch. And not the kind of glitch that involves your motorbike randomly spiralling across the map, in a clumsy but charming way. This is the kind of problem that’s easy to replicate, which will undoubtedly cause headaches for those players who fall foul of it until it’s fixed.
The exploit occurs in a specific spot outside a building the Na Kham village, in the south-west corner of the map. In the spot, the texture of the ground and the actual collision box of that same piece of ground don’t actually match up. What that means is that there’s a gap between where you’re standing and where the ground appears to be.
Check out our list of the .
While you’re standing up, that’s no big deal - you seem to be sunk up to your knees, but you can move around just fine. When you go prone, however, you disappear from sight entirely. That’s bad enough on its own, but when you consider you can shoot through the ground because it’s not really there, it’s causing even more problems.
Mainly, those issues revolve around unsuspecting players being caught out by players who have already become aware of the glitch, and are lying in wait to score some easy kills at the beginning of the round. The position of the village on the edge of the map means it’s unlikely to be the cause of many endgame upsets, but early game ambushes are likely to be pretty common.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is the next title in Activision’s illustrious FPS series. It is set between the events of Black Ops 2 and 3, but marks a huge departure for Call of Duty in that it’s the first entry to not feature a traditional campaign. In its place is a battle royale mode called Blackout, which joins the core multiplayer and zombie mode to make it the most multiplayer-focused COD yet.
Owing to its setting, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 promises a return to a near-future where drone warfare is commonplace - not quite boots on the ground, but not space warfare either. Working on the 15th instalment in the main series, and the first with a story arc to make it past three games (four if you count World at War), developer Treyarch will have a tough job shrugging off any series weariness while still appealing to hardcore Call of Duty players.
Love COD? Then you will love these .
So, what can we expect from Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 when it deploys on PC? Here is everything we know about Black Ops 4, from its release date and upcoming beta, to the gameplay and modes we want to see.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 release date
Expectation and excitement is building as the hype machine rolls ever onwards to a potential August / September release for Nvidia’s new GTX 1180 graphics cards, and an enterprising Vietnamese retailer, H2 Extreme Gaming, is taking the opportunity to squeeze some pre-order cash out of gamers.
For the low, low price of 31,800,000 VND - which is about $1,400 or £1,050 - you can bag yourself a pre-order of an MSI GTX 1180 Gaming X with 16GB of GDDR6. Which is a bit of a bargain, as everyone knows non-existent graphics cards are more expensive than real ones. It’s just one of those internet rules, like the one about the amount of online hate you’ll get from putting a lady on a game cover without her wearing a bikini/boob armour.
Check out our pick of the that actually do exist right now.
Now, we’re not disputing that, when it comes to the crunch, MSI will be right there producing red and black versions of the when they’re good and ready. But that’s not now, and sites taking pre-orders for the cards before any pricing has been announced are doing very bad things.
The also had a listing for an card too, but that has since been taken down. Maybe the so obviously photoshopped image the site used had something to do with it. They hadn’t even bothered photoshopping the ‘GTX 1080’ from the top side of the box.
If you’ve ever wanted to know just how infuriating a particular Dark Souls boss is, the Ankkoro smartband may one day be able to tell you. This Kickstarter smartband utilises four sensors to sense your emotional state and potentially inform the game or an entire audience of Twitch viewers how you feel - whether that’s happy, sad, stressed, worried, or even bored.
The Ankkoro bracelet monitors your body temperature, gestures and movements, skin reaction, and heart rate to create a constantly updating image of your emotional state. The creator’s believe this tech has the capacity for a huge range of applications, from game development to real-time events in-game.
Prefer to take the traditional approach to gaming? Here are the we have had our mitts on.
Currently only a handful of titles are supported by the smartband. Four out of the six listed games are VR titles, which the creators believe will separate the bracelet from other biometric devices. After all, Ankkoro isn’t the first of its kind, but while others were often head-mounted - and therefore incompatible with VR - Ankkoro isn’t so limited due to its location on your wrist.
These games will directly interact with the information provided by the smartband in a variety of ways - from saving short clips when your emotions spike, to actually changing how the game plays to infuriate or scare you. The project also outlines uses for developers in game-testing for the most frustrating areas of a game or experience, and Twitch integration, allowing you to share your emotional state with your viewers.
Christian Picciolini is a prominent former member of several American white supremacist groups. Having been recruited at the age of 14, he understands well the tactics such groups use to seduce and indoctrinate new members. During an AMA session on Reddit last night, he cautioned of one such tactic in particular: preying on marginalised youths in multiplayer games.
Asked about recruitment tactics in his day (he was himself ensnared in 1987), Picciolini says "we sought marginalised youth and promised them 'paradise'. Today they are using nefarious tactics like going to depression and mental health forums, and in multiplayer gaming, to recruit those same people."
Pressed on how this plays out, Picciolini says "they drop benign hints [of their racism], and then ramp up when hooked." This is a good illustration of why low-key or 'dog-whistle' racism is so insidious. Picciolini says this happens in most major multiplayer games, including "Fortnight [sic], Minecraft, COD, all of them."
if you'd like to take a look, and in particular.
We've asked for comment from Activision, Epic, and Mojang about this behaviour in their games, and will update this story if we hear back.
Phoenix Point, the upcoming strategy game from XCOM creator Julian Gollop, gets a second backer build tomorrow. Last week, developer Snapshot Games announced that Backer Build Two will release on July 3, adding plenty of new features to the turn-based strategy title.
The first of those is the game’s fourth class, the Technician. The new character comes with a deployable turret, as well as a brutal melee attack - he can use the mechanical arms on his back to damage and stun nearby enemies. For a more conventional approach, the Technician can also use his Assault Rifle and grenades.
Check out our list of the .
Phoenix Point Backer Build Two also brings The Armadillo to the game. The new addition is an armored vehicle with a roof-mounted turret, and is the first drivable vehicle to be added to the game. Characters can access it through a rear hatch, and proceed to drive it around the map, although its sheer size means that there will be a few places it can’t reach.
Other features include improved aiming, camera rotation, and updated procedural generation. If you’re a preorder customer already, you should receive an email sometime tomorrow with a unique download link. If you’re not, however, there’s still a way to get your hands on the game.
What goes into bus simulation? The same ingredients that go into your favourite triple-A action games, it turns out. There’s an open world, but it’s no backdrop to gunfights or fire propagation - here it provides an urban landscape to drive your passengers across safely and punctually. And there’s an AI director sending commands to hundreds of NPCs, but they’re not enemies - simply the civilians you’re picking up, dropping off, and sharing the roads with.
Bus Simulator 18 developer stillalive looked to Unreal Engine 4 for the newest iteration of its game. The studio wanted to go bigger, drawing on Epic’s expertise in level streaming, the technical trick that powers so many open worlds. And for the roads, stillalive made use of a piece of software you may already be familiar with - Cities: Skylines.
Want to see sprawling landscapes, urban and otherwise? Try one of the .
But first: remember how Left 4 Dead’s zombies had an unseen director? Bus Simulator 18 has its own, pushing the zombie-like commuters this way and that in order to make the streets around you convincing in their simulation of city hustle and bustle.
Left 2 Drive
“We spawn the pedestrians and vehicles around the player,” lead designer Alexander Grenus explains. “Neither know where they want to go.”
Fortnite fans will be acutely aware that there’s an enormous, reality-defying rift hovering in the sky above the game. That’s a remnant of the Fortnite rocket, which launched across all games on Saturday afternoon. However, as well as that one enormous fissure, the rocket left a few more mementos behind.
One of those is part of the rocket itself, a casing which dropped from the vehicle during launch and has embedded itself in Anarchy Acres. However, as the missile zipped back and forward across the map, it seems to have also left a couple more, smaller tears in the fabric of existence. And those tears are getting bigger.
Check out our list of the on PC.
One of them showed up near Lonely Lodge. Over the weekend, it’s grown from something barely visible to a fracture several metres across. It also happens to have swallowed up the sign welcoming players to the Lodge itself. Across the map, something similar is happening at Motel, as a second split appears to be expanding over there as well.
Some players have also noticed that the crack in the sky that started all of this off is also growing in size. A documents the changing shape of that initial fissure, from a few minutes after it appeared, to what it looked like last night. Spoiler alert - it’s already grown an awful lot.
I find that the passage of time is now more or less defined by the arrival of new Fortnite weapons, and thankfully, this week is no different. The Drum Gun is the latest means of destruction heading to Epic’s battle royale.
As is well-established tradition at this point, the new weapon first appeared in Fortnite’s ‘new updates’ section, which opens up as players log into the game. The Drum Gun shows up there, and its caption says it comes “with a high capacity drum magazine and a quick rate of fire.”
There are plenty of them out there, so we've gathered the most worthy into a list of the best .
Players who came to Fortnite from PUBG might recognise the gun as similar to the DP-28, which appeared in Bluehole’s offering to the genre. Fans of 1920s Americana will likely enjoy the Drum Gun for its easy comparisons to the weapons popularised as part of the Mafia’s arsenal. It’s likely no coincidence that the weapon has appeared in the same week as the Hardboiled and Gear , which are both fashioned after old-timey detective outfits.
As to how it’ll handle in-game, I’m slightly unsure what role the Drum Gun is supposed to fill. We already have two automatic siege weapons - the LMG and the Minigun - with high ammo capacity and a quick rate of fire. It could be that the Drum Gun reduces recoil to make it more useful than either of those guns in actual firefights, rather than a means of destroying cover. That said, we already have plenty of assault rifles and SMGs to help out in those situations.
The survivors in State of Decay 2 are usually pretty bummed out, and honestly, who can blame them? They’re trying to squeak by in a ravaged world crawling with undead horrors. They have a couple reasons to celebrate now, though - for one, Undead Labs announced that State of Decay 2 now has 3 million players, and for two, American Independence Day is this week.
To mark these events, there’s a new DLC out called the Independence Pack, which appropriately enough features Revolutionary War costumes (for zombies) and a trio of over-the-top vehicles for survivors. And naturally, there are four brand new fireworks, which we Americans use to celebrate the birth of our country for some reason.
If you enjoy walking with the dead, check out our list of the .
The new vehicles are all pretty distinctive. There’s the decidely un-vegan Meatwagon, which sports a pair of longhorns on the hood and a USDA-stamped raw steak skin. Then there’s the Pyrohawk, a hatchback painted with an A-10 Warthog theme. And obviously, you’ve got the ultra-patriotic Burninator, a beefy variant of the Rams 5 pickup with a firey eagle paint job.
In the spirit of July 4th, the Pyrohawk and Burninator spew fireworks in a way that combines red-blooded American patriotism with green-blooded zombie incineration. To activate them, just honk the horn. The fireworks will knock off any zeds hanging onto the vehicle, but bear in mind that this will draw from the fuel tank. The Burninator drops hunks of meat out of the back doors, which will lure zombies away from you - very handy in sticky situations with roaming hordes. You'll also get a selection of new ranged and melee weapons.
Destiny 2 is due for a pretty important update this month, as Solstice of Heroes is set to kick off July 17th with Update 1.2.3. With it comes new Prestige versions of Raid Lairs, and some much-needed adjustments to Crucible. Destiny 2 will also be getting a new event called Armsweek, which some database-scouring redditors have unearthed new details about.
Armsweek seems to be a carryover from the original Destiny’s Arms Day, during which the Armsmith would allow players to order specific weapons. This new incarnation, described as “the celebration of deadly craftsmanship” in Destiny 2’s database, is adding a bunch more to do, and it seems that there are several Exotic catalysts tied to Armsweek activities.
Lock and load up your games library with our list of the .
Redditor u/aussie_halo has compiled a , and they’ve added the five tied to the Armsweek event. Fighting Lion, Hard Light, The Prospector, Rat King, and SUROS Regime all have catalysts tied to kill counts during the Armsweek event.
Catalysts for Legend of Acrius, Telesto, and Sleeper Simulant are all found by completing the new Prestige Raid Lairs, according to the database.
Certain Exotic weapons are tied to Armsweek Nightfall strikes. The Prospector, Hard Light, Rat King, and SUROS Regime all fall into this category. Interestingly, these Nightfalls won’t feature the mutators normally added to missions like this, and during Armsweek, you’ll use a specific weapon loadout from Lord Shaxx to complete them.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has some big shoes to fill lore-wise as the next big FromSoft game. Studio president and game director Hidetaka Miyazaki has packed the Soulsbourne games with their own arcane myths and legends, and it looks like this time around he’s weaving that approach into a story that’s borrowing heavily from the history of Sengoku-era Japan.
The best place to go for breakdowns of Miyazaki’s lore is YouTuber Vaatividya, who has produced a video that pieces together the scraps of information about Sekiro that we’ve seen so far, along with some leaks, and assembles them into a pretty educated guess about what Sekiro is about.
Get hyped: here's the list of our .
While some of his information is admittedly based on leaks, key elements were confirmed by press at E3 who got to see a hands-off demo of Sekiro that showed more of the game than the trailer did. Vaatividya also sources the , which provides some additional backstory on a few of the main characters.
The video, which you can view below, explains the setup for Sekiro’s story: You play a shinobi charged with the defense of a young prince, the heir of an ancient clan that’s somehow been driven off or annihilated. The prince is kidnapped by ‘The Commander,’ the leader of the Ashina Clan, who believes the prince’s royal heritage is the key to protecting the area from the advance of a hostile invading force.
After another inspiring and exciting week of speedrunning, Summer Games Done Quick 2018 concluded today in Minneapolis after hauling in more than $2.1 million in donations to Doctors Without Borders.
As ever, SGDQ’s speedrunners served up too many amazing moments to count, but a couple standouts included a Dustforce DX race between fishmcmuffins and Freshmaniac, a speedrun of Warcraft III’s Undead campaign, and Linkus7 showing off some new tricks he’s discovered in The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker HD. The event concluded with an exciting speedrun of Final Fantasy VI.
This year, more than 35,000 people donated a total of $2,123,885, for an average donation of $60.09, surpassing last year’s haul of $1,792,342. This is the first year SGDQ has hit the $2 million mark, and it's the most money the summer event has raised since it began in 2011.
Games Done Quick is about the best speedrunners, so here's our list of the .
This year’s SGDQ proceeds are again going to Doctors Without Borders, a non-governmental organization that began in France and works to help people in areas stricken by violent conflict or disease epidemics. Games Done Quick has also raised money for humanitarian organization CARE, the Prevent Cancer Foundation, AbleGamers Foundation, the Organization for Autism Research, and the Houston Food Bank in the wake of the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
The next GDQ event will be Awesome Games Done Quick, which is scheduled for January 6-13 in Rockville, Maryland.
Real-time strategy games aren't awfully common these days, but back when Blizzard was working on the original StarCraft, the RTS market was booming. Creating a game that stood out among the many RTS titles released in a given year was a challenge, and to face it, Blizzard’s team of developers established a fiercely competitive internal culture. One developer dubbed it "the piranha effect."
Author David L Craddock is wrapping up his second book on Blizzard, titled Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II, and he's given us a chance to read a pre-publication version of Chapter 7: Hubris or Fear, which delves into the intense development of StarCraft.
Blizzard wound up creating World of Warcraft, which is still one of the .
The piranha effect referred to a sink or swim mentality in Blizzard’s programming department, where senior engineers and programmers were intimidating presences for new hires.
"It basically was, if you did anything wrong you can expect the programming team to jump all over it," recounted Gage Galinger, a software engineer who worked on StarCraft.
Craddock's interviewees describe an atmosphere at Blizzard where there was no 'onboarding' process for new hires, they were simply expected to perform from day one. It was a deliberate pressure, since Blizzard was expected to deliver up another hit with StarCraft. Any mistakes were immediately pointed out by senior staff.
"You were so careful with the code. The code was sacred," said Galinger. "If you're going to check something into that code base, it better be fucking spotless."
The countdown finally reached zero, and the rocket that’s been patiently waiting in Fortnite’s enemy lair launched yesterday at 13:30 EST. Players gathered to watch, and for a moment, it looked like a scene from Cape Canaveral, where shuttles would blast off on orbital missions.
The launch was visible from most of the island, but it was also broadcast on in-game television screens, reinforcing that connection to Moonshot and giving the event a certain gravitas. The rocket climbed into the night sky, and the gathered players (generally) looked on peacefully.
But then things got strange. The rocket’s first stage burned out its fuel and detached, tumbling back to Earth (or wherever Fortnite is supposed to take place) and landing somewhere in Anarchy Acres. After a moment’s pause, the second stage ignited, and the rocket resumed its ascent, moving faster until it finally disappeared out of sight, leaving only a contrail.
Fortnite is the only one with hyperspace rockets, but ?
The rocket - or something like it - then appeared to fall back to terra firma, its nose pointed at the ground as four laser beams focused in on Tilted Towers. Once all four had lined up, the rocket’s third engine stage ignited and it hurtled toward its target - only to disappear into a shimmering crack in reality itself.
Another crack opened, this time over Moisty Mires, and the rocket emerged, flying horizontally across the landscape and again disappearing into a crack in the fabric of reality. Another crack opened near Loot Lake, and the rocket burst through at high speed, this time headed upwards. It hurtled back into the night sky, only to disappear again as it smashed a massive crack in… reality itself, apparently.
Looking for games to download for free? We've updated our list for 2018, with all the top free games to play, including Fortnite, Realm Royale, Warframe and dozens more.
A judge has ordered Facebook and Oculus to pay Zenimax $250 million in damages over a lawsuit alleging the virtual reality venture stole trade secrets from Zenimax. It’s half of the $500 million awarded to Zenimax by a jury in February 2017.
U.S. District judge Ed Kinkeade ruled that the lawsuit lacked sufficient evidence to sustain the charges that Oculus founders Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe were responsible for damages over false designation, i.e., failing to disclose the origin of a product they were selling. Kinkeade said this means Oculus and Facebook can’t be expected to pay the $250 million in damages that stemmed from that aspect of Zenimax’s suit.
While they work out the legal issues, here's our list of the .
When the case initially wrapped up last February, the jury awarded Zenimax $500 million in damages, but determined that Oculus did not steal trade secrets, as Zenimax alleged, when it hired id Software co-founder John Carmack away from Zenimax.
In 2014, Zenimax accused Oculus of stealing proprietary VR technology and using it as the basis for the Rift and filed suit. The company has also alleged that Carmack took trade secrets with him when he left to join Facebook and Luckey, a charge which . Carmack has filed a , alleging the company still owes him that amount in contract payouts.
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey sold his company to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014, but left Facebook last year after reporting by The Daily Beast that revealed his involvement .
When you venture out onto West Virginia's irradiated country roads in Fallout 76, you’ll have to leave your console-bound friends behind. Fallout 76 won’t have cross-platform play, and Bethesda says it’s because Sony won’t play ball.
Speaking to German-language gaming site GameStar, Bethesda’s game director Todd Howard said the company had pursued cross-play for Fallout 76, allowing players on multiple platforms to connect and play together in the first multiplayer Fallout game since Fallout Tactics.
Can Fallout 76 hold up to New Vegas, one of the ?
that crossplay simply isn’t possible now, and it’s largely because the PlayStation parent is “not as helpful as everyone would like it.”
It’s a pretty direct expression of frustration with Sony’s recalcitrant attitude toward cross-platform play, which made headlines earlier this month when on the list of platforms that allowed Fortnite crossplay. In that case, PC players can match up with players on Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and mobile, but any Epic account linked to a PSN account can’t play with anyone on another platform.
The full Todd Howard interview is available at , but it’s heavily dubbed over in German. Subscribers can listen to the original interview in English. Howard went into detail on several Fallout 76 subjects, telling GameStar that the always-online Fallout 76 isn’t intended to be as dramatic a break as Fallout 3 was, when the franchise jumped from isometric turn-based RPG to full 3D.
Valve’s move to an ‘anything goes’ approach to deciding which games will appear on Steam is a controversial one, but the company defended the decision by offering up some hard numbers that help describe the scope of the problem at a games industry talk this week in Russia.
Earlier this month, Valve announced that the company would allow any game on Steam so long as it wasn’t either illegal or “trolling.” The move came after outcry over emails the company sent to the developers of adult-themed games, primarily visual novels, telling them to either censor content or have their games pulled from Steam.
Valve might not be doing much curation these days, but we still are! Here's our list of the .
Now, Valve is explaining the subsequent decision to cease curating games almost entirely. Jan-Peter Ewert, head of Valve’s business development, gave a presentation at the Business Conference for Games Industry that laid out some of the numbers the company deals with when it comes to the sheer number of new games coming through Steam Direct.
In one slide, provided via Twitter by , Ewert shows how the number of new games on Steam has increased with each successive indie discovery program. Before Greenlight, which launched in 2012, about five games were released a week. With Greenlight, that number grew to 70 per week, and now with Steam Direct, Valve is seeing about 180 weekly game launches.
Those numbers couple with an ever-expanding Steam playerbase. Ewert said 13.5 million first-time purchasers have arrived on Steam in January through April of this year. They add up to a daunting challenge, wherever you fall on Valve’s decision about curating games.