hostages
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Rainbow Six: Siege to include male hostages, too
Rainbow Six: Siege was the surprise finale of Ubisoft's E3 conference, featuring a team of players descending on a suburban home where a woman was held hostage by a group of heavily armed bad guys. The woman cowered while the house exploded around her, and she was referred to as "The Hostage" throughout the demo, passed back and forth between enemies and rescuers as if she were a flag to capture. The apparent objectification of the woman didn't sit well with many viewers – but the game will also feature men as hostages, Technical Artist Oliver Couture told RPS: "We're also gonna have male hostages. That's part of the plan." Ubisoft decided to use a woman hostage in the E3 demo for a specific reason, Couture said. "I know some people asked about the hostage in the demo. I mean, when we did that design we felt a lot of empathy with the hostage. We wanted people to want to protect her. If the hostage gets killed a team loses the game, so we wanted players to care about the hostage so that's the design we chose." Men aren't worthy of empathy, apparently. Couture described the technical aspects of the hostages in Rainbow Six: Siege as the epitome of next-gen. "We're trying to define next-gen with the hostage," he said. "We call that a 'living hostage.' So she'll react to explosions and things like that. It's pretty cool. She'll cough because of the dirt in the air, she covers herself when there's shooting – those sorts of things. We want the player to be able to move her into different positions, for there to be fluid controls. It's a balance between player comfort and reality." [Image: Ubisoft]
Amazon bolsters UK streaming library ahead of tomorrow's relaunch
Tomorrow, Lovefilm becomes Amazon Prime Instant Video, and unless you take advantage of the various early adopter discounts, it'll cost you an up-front annual fee of £79. On the upside, the company is pushing to add more TV shows to the service in the hope of clawing back some of Netflix's lost ground. First up, Amazon has signed a deal with Warner Bros. that'll see the first seasons of Arrow, The Following and Revolution appear on UK Prime within the next few days. The agreement will also see Hostages and The 100 appear in 2015, with subsequent seasons of all five shows added afterward. At the same time, the retailer has confirmed that UK users will be able to watch its original TV comedy Alpha House, which is a bit like House of Cards, but with more jokes.
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We're in your docks, kidnapping your flightmaster
With the disappearance of dishonorable kills, many people are hoping for the return of innovative world PvP. As an example of "innovative world PvP," and how angry people get when it actually occurs, we present last month's Mal'Ganis Flightmaster Hostage Crisis. Mal'Ganis is a fairly overcrowded PvP server, hosting both some of the world's best guilds (Ret, Elitist Jerks) and some of the world's best drama (the guildmaster who threatened to kill a guy who gquit after spending a month in the hospital.) One of the native Mal'Ganis guilds is Goon Squad, a giant Horde crew that was formed from readers of http://www.somethingawful.com. Goon Squad is known for pranks and odd ideas, the most well-known of which is their "I Summon People Off Cliffs" warlock PvP video. On the night of November 4, Goon Squad snuck into Theramore and kited away the Alliance flightmaster. Soon after, they posted a ransom demand on the Mal'Ganis realm forums: If the Alliance bought out two Lightforge Belts listed for 1500g each in the neutral auction house, Goon Squad would free their hostage. If not, wrote Stuul from Goon Squad, "It would be very unfortunate if we were forced to hold him for the weekend while you try to raid." To encourage the Alliance to pay up, they also camped the Ratchet boat and kidnapped the Auberdine flight master. A large group of Alliance joined in the fun and vowed to hunt down their beloved flightmasters rather than pay the ransom. Goon Squad soon posted that the hostages were in Bael'Dun Keep in the southern Barrens, and challenged Alliance to come and get them. Unfortunately for the Horde, enough people complained to GMs that the incipient world PvP battle was nipped in the bud. Five hours into the hostage crisis, GMs struck down the kited flightmasters with instant Curse of Dooms, killing them and allowing Alliance to fly free in Kalimdor once more. "Your flight masters were slaughtered by a overexcited GM," Arktdnonoobs wrote. "We had no part in their deaths." Goon Squad received commendations from both Horde and Alliance on several servers. Even a CM on the Customer Service Forum, Batta, noted that while the GMs had to kill the flight masters to keep them from being "lost", he admired Goon Squad's ingenuity in pulling off the caper. So is this an example of innovative world PvP, or a bunch of Horde being jerks? Do you have any plans to spice up your server's PvP in the future?
