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'PUBG' developer considers region locking for smoother gameplay
PlayerUnknown's BattleGrounds came out of beta last December, and earlier this month creator Brendan Greene promised a much slicker game going forward. It's no secret the game has suffered from hacking problems in its short lifespan, so now the team -- despite earlier rebuttals -- says it's considering region locking after all.
Why Warlords of Draenor needs a pre-expansion event
Lately I've been thinking about Warlords of Draenor and how I hope it returns to the tradition of pre-expansion launch patches with big world events. Let me tell you a story. I was talking with a friend about the period at the end of Burning Crusade when the crates began spawning in major cities. He reminded me that neither of us had really paid much attention - his guild was in the process of breaking up over M'uru/Entropius and I was tanking for a guild working on clearing Black Temple at the time. We were busy, is what I'm saying. So busy, in fact, that one day we found ourselves running for our lives from an Ironforge that was completely infested with the walking dead. Other players were now zombies. The auctioneers were dead. It was all chaos and madness. Now, for a lot of people, the zombie invasion was a load of fun. It was new and different, something you didn't see in game every day. Some of my guildies went over to Orgrimmar and joined forces with Horde players they knew (Norgannon was a smallish and incestuous server in those days, all the Alliance and Horde players seemed to know one another) to form roving gangs of undead, laying waste to all, Horde or Alliance. They had great fun. For me it was a huge pain in the rear end.
DOTA 2 patch files hint at microtransactions, more
As is their wont, players have been rustling through some of the test build files for Valve's upcoming Dota 2, and they've found signs of some interesting (but still unofficial) features already. First and foremost, Valve hasn't yet determined exactly what the monetization model for the game will be, but it seems microtransactions will be a part of that model, as there are various announcers (including Half-Life's Dr. Kleiner), character taunts and skins, new hero items, and a few other goodies that may be purchasable either with an in-game currency, or with real money.There are also new kinds of couriers to buy (animal pets, basically, that will ferry items back and forth from your base), and there's one more consumable: Something called souls. A "Repentant Soul" will supposedly get players out of the "low priority punishment queue" when used, which suggests some sort of "pay or be punished" system. Gabe Newell mentioned just such a system last year, where he talked about Valve charging players "based on how much fun they are to play with." In other words, act stupid in game, get punished, and then you may have to pay your way out of jail.Finally, "treasure caches" are mentioned in the files. They'll probably work the same way that Team Fortress 2's crates do, where you get items that need to be unlocked with a key. This is all good news for those waiting for Dota 2 -- since Valve said it wouldn't worry about monetization until the fun was in there first, the game must be almost done, right?
Wasteland Diaries: Scavenger's guide
The economy in Fallen Earth is due to get a major overhaul in the next month. The devs have been pretty tight-lipped about what exactly is going to change. They may do something as bold as doing away with NPC vendors altogether (unlikely) or maybe just tweaking the rarity of materials (confirmed). Since we aren't exactly sure what is going to change, we can't really prepare ourselves properly, can we? We can guess which materials are going to become rarer with the revamp by looking at the recipes, but they will be undergoing changes as well. So trying to figure out what to hoard for the new economy is purely a guessing game. I don't want to get into theorycrafting on what may or may not change economy-wise. I'll leave it up to your best guess as to what materials you think you'll need to stock up on. My purpose in this post will be to help you get said materials. I can't think of a single material in the entire gameworld of Fallen Earth that is out of my grasp. I'm pretty sure I can find anything. I have compiled a list of useful materials and the best places that I know of to find them. There are some things that I will not divulge, but I'm going to be very generous considering most of the loot tables will be drastically altered very soon. Click past the cut and have a look at the list.
WoW China hit with more censorship upon relaunch
World of Warcraft is finally getting back up on its feet in China, but it seems that it didn't do so without making some concessions to China's censorship. We know that when The9 was still in charge, they had to make multiple graphical edits to the game to avoid showing off exposed bones, such as altering the Forsaken models and turning player corpses into gravestones, rather than a skeleton heap.Now that NetEase is in charge, they've had to make some changes to the game as well, though perhaps not as substantial. Potentially funnier, though. According to this Chinese website, severed heads and skulls have been covered up. Literally. Item icons that would show heads or skulls in other regions of the world are now bags, chests and crates in China. This includes things like Van Cleef's Head, and even spell icons like the ones used by Ruin and Improved Corruption have been replaced by bags.
BlizzCon: Convention Center setup
I just sauntered over to the Convention Center here in Anaheim to see what I could see, and the results are in the first exclusive gallery of pictures from BlizzCon, available right there below!There's nothing really groundbreaking here, unfortunately-- it looks like they're still setting up the banners (so I'll go over and check again later today), and I couldn't get close enough to get a really good look inside the Exhibit Hall. But they're definitely close to being done-- while there's lots of carts and equipment around, not much is coming in or going out. I did see a pallet of boxes, but I couldn't get close enough to read what it said on them. Here's an original size version of that one if you guys want to try to decipher what might be in there.Unfortunately, no "Wrath of the Lich King" banners yet, but I'll keep my eyes open and bring you more when I find it.Update: Added some more banners, because when I stopped by this afternoon, they were done putting them up.%Gallery-5417%
