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Valorant's upcoming path-to-pro mode is designed for aspiring esports stars
Riot Games is planning a major overhaul of the game's professional scene.
Neon, Valorant's newest agent, brings sprinting and sliding to the game
Neon is a hyper-aggressive duelist whose kit is all about increasing the tempo of matches.
Battlefield 2042’s Hazard Zone mode is about collecting intel with your team
You might be able to win a round without firing a shot.
Tom Clancy’s XDefiant is a free-to-play, team-based FPS
The factions are based on characters from across Ubisoft's Clancy games.
'Farpoint' studio Impulse Gear will release a VR hero shooter this summer
Among the characters in 'Larcenauts' is [checks notes] a sentient, brawling mushroom.
'Valorant' is getting a Gun Game-inspired mode on February 17th
The more kills you and your team rack up in Escalation, the worse your loadout gets.
'Crysis Remastered' is coming to PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch
If you ever wondered if the Nintendo Switch can run Crysis, the answer it turns out is yes.
Riot's competitive hero shooter 'Valorant' enters closed beta next week
If you've been patiently waiting for a chance to play Riot's new competitive first-person shooter, you won't have to wait much longer to see what the League of Legends studio has been working on in secret all these years. The Valorant closed beta starts on April 7th in the US, Canada, Europe, Turkey and Russia, with expanded availability to come in the months leading up to the game's official launch sometime this summer.
Riot's five-on-five hero shooter is officially called 'Valorant'
Riot's foray into the highly-competitive first-person shooter genre finally has a name: Valorant. The eight-letter word isn't too surprising given it leaked with a bunch of other details last week. Still, it beats the 'Project A' codename that we've all been forced to use since the title was announced last October. A teaser video and the official Valorant site confirm that the online-focused five-on-five shooter will launch sometime this summer.
Riot begins leaking details about its competitive shooter 'Project A'
Riot Games shared precious little about what its Project A team-based shooter would entail besides a "character-based" focus, but more details are coming to light. Former Counter-Strike pro player Henry Greer (aka HenryG) reports that Riot invited him to play Project A at its European offices, and the title is apparently similar to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with a dash of class-based elements from games like Overwatch. You're still trying to plant or defend against bombs, and buying weaponry from a resource pool that carries over from round to round. However, characters each have their own abilities that need to be purchased at the very start of a round. There are even CS-like maps with chokepoints and lanes.
The Weeknd's new music video is the FPS you never wanted to play
Canadian music artist The Weeknd dropped a music video today for his just-released single False Alarm, and it's a doozy -- a bank heist gone bloody from a gun-toting robber's first-person perspective. If you love a bleak FPS experience of unwilling hostages, shot cops and dead buddies backed by lyrics about hollow modern romance, this is the vid for you.
Rumor: Leak suggests the next WoW expansion is nearly feature-complete
So, ready to jump on the rumor mill? Because it's churning out big stuff about Blizzard today. An anonymous source from inside the company has apparently claimed that World of Warcraft's next expansion has quadrupled its art outsourcing and is nearly feature-complete. The source also claimed that Hearthstone is doing banner business, with its next expansion set to release in April with a heavier PvE focus. Darker news was revealed for the other franchises under the company's banner. The next part of StarCraft II is done but with no release date. Overwatch is in the midst of debates over business model and payment plans, with the studio pushing for a 2015 release but most likely going for 2016. Meanwhile, Heroes of the Storm has low expectations among the upper management and the Diablo III team has been "completely gutted." It's up to you you believe the rumors, of course, although come April, they might look rather plausible.
Destiny dev: DLC mistakes won't be repeated
Destiny designer Luke Smith recently addressed concerns over Bungie's future updates for the game. Namely, Smith said "the mistakes [Bungie] made with the DLC1 reward economy will not be repeated," in a NeoGAF thread, admitting the developer's previous attempts at expanding the first-person shooter with add-on content resulted in a few problems for players. Smith claims the developer will avoid mistakes such as "vendor gear invalidating the effort of [Vault of Glass] Raiders" and exotic gear upgrades resulting in a talent reset. "Our philosophy about rewards/loot continue to evolve as we see how players play and react," Smith wrote. He noted that item drop rates appear to be "much improved" in the Crota's End DLC compared to Vault of Glass, and that Bungie plans to "improve acquisition stories and frequency" as well as "lessen the grind and get players to the fun parts of their arsenal faster." It issued a hot fix for Destiny in December to boost the drop rates for the Crota's End raid mission. [Image: Activision]
Exo Zombies invade Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare trailer
The latest trailer for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare shows off the game's upcoming downloadable content, Exo Zombies. Arriving as part of the first content pack, Havoc, Exo Zombies features the voice acting talents of John Malkovich, Bill Paxton, Rose McGowan and Jon Bernthal. The Havoc DLC pack will launch on January 27 for Xbox One and Xbox 360. Havoc also includes four multiplayer maps, the AE4 assault rifle and Widowmaker custom variant. While the Havoc DLC can be purchased separately for $15, season pass holders will receive the pack at no additional charge. Advanced Warfare's $50 season pass grants access to three other pieces of downloadable content: Ascendance, Supremacy and Reckoning. Activision struck a deal with Microsoft to bring Advanced Warfare DLC to the Xbox platforms before it arrives on other systems, so the publisher has yet to offer a release date for Havoc on PS4, PS3 or PC. [Image: Activision]
Blizzard's Overwatch bumps into trademark issues
Remember when no one knew what Overwatch was and we were all speculating it was some sort of expansion based on the fact that the trademark had been filed? Oh, it was a more innocent time. Unfortunately for that trademark, it might be having a little bit of a problem after all, as it has come to light that another company filed an earlier claim for the trademark that would supersede Blizzard's use of the name due to likelihood of confusion. The trademark that has already been filed is for an app that can be used to provide enhanced functionality for paintball matches, laser tag matches, and the like. Both trademark applications are currently suspended pending investigations, so it remains to be seen whether Blizzard will be pushing forward or will change the name of the game to something legally different. Like Oversupervise, for instance.
Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition hits PS3, Vita in January
Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition will launch on Vita and PS3 in January, Devolver Digital announced via Twitter today. The game will arrive in North America on January 13, 2015 and in Europe the following day. The port was revealed in August 2013, months after its launch on Steam in March. The PC, Mac and Linux versions of the Megaton Edition includes the core game as well as three DLC packs, and is still available for $10. It also received competitive and co-op multiplayer gameplay modes in a January update, allowing up to eight player to duke it out across the three platforms. The PS3 and Vita versions hit a few bumps since Abstraction Games took on the porting duties; the games were submitted to Sony in May and ran into "lots of certification issues" as of September. [Image: Devolver Digital]
Titanfall update gets cooperative, adds ranked play
The next major update for Titanfall will land tomorrow on Xbox One and PC, Respawn announced today. The patch is the "biggest update ever," according to the developer's blog, which revealed the inclusion of new modes in the update. For starters, Titanfall players will have a new "Frontier Defense" cooperative multiplayer mode in which teams of four stand their ground against waves of AI enemies, getting assistance from stationary turrets and loadout crates. The other major addition is ranked play, which will be in beta through the end of the month. Respawn's dedicated discussion on its ranked play system for Titanfall notes that players will receive "Rank Chips," which act as "expensive pedometers" that measure players' prowess in the game. Players will have the ability to turn off their Rank Chips as well, so ranked play in Titanfall won't boil down to a separate set of maps or playlists. The update will introduce a multitude of other fixes and improvements, such as the ability to go full-screen with the mini-map, a "sudden death" addition to Capture the Flag mode and seven new Titan insignias. [Image: EA Games]
Splash Damage's Extraction reverts title to Dirty Bomb
Naming things you love is hard. We face a fresh dose of indecisiveness at the sight of every in-game character naming screen, and there are plenty of deleted, re-entered and deleted-again ideas that eventually get scrapped in favor of the default suggestion. Brink developer Splash Damage must be dealing with a similar style of indecision, because this week it switched the name of its shooter, Extraction, back to Dirty Bomb, the title it was originally revealed under. The related press release explains that switching the name back to Dirty Bomb was done to "better fit the game's unique personality." That's sort of fair if you consider that its firefights take place in a post-disaster London, rife with Private Military Companies fighting over the radioactive area's abandoned goods. Dirty Bomb is currently in closed beta on PC, but you can apply to get in on that if your interest is piqued. A release window for the public version has yet to be offered, but when Dirty Bomb does invite everyone to battle over territory and riches, it will offer dedicated servers in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. [Image: Splash Damage]
Destiny gets classy with PS4 gameplay trailer
Destiny, the Bungie-developed multiplayer shooter set in "the last city on Earth" (our guess is Boise, Idaho), received a new video today. The developer discusses its approach to crafting the game and briefly explains the skills and abilities players will use that are unique to each of Destiny's character classes. The gameplay shown in the trailer is from Destiny's PS4 version, but the game will also arrive on September 9 for Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PS3. Bungie recently offered a look at the game's loot after announcing plans to launch a beta version of the cooperative FPS in July. We spent some time with the "$500 million bet" from Activision in video preview form back in April. [Image: Bungie]
Everything is black and white with VisionEck on PS4
Developer VizionEck announced its black-and-white game for PS4 today, which is also called VizionEck. If that's not confusing enough, it also offered a minimalistic trailer with shifting dichromatic shapes, barely sussing out just what the eck the game is. Lead developer and founder of Michael Armbrust described the gist of VizionEck on the PlayStation Blog, revealing that the game is technically a first-person shooter (Right? We totally thought so too!). Though Armbrust insists the mysterious trailer contains lots of "secrets and game features" hidden in its frames, he says players control a cube known as a Ranger, whose health is indicated by the brightness of its outlines. The multiplayer-focused game seemingly pits players against one another as they can blend in with other cubes, or the black backgrounds as their health is depleted and their cubes go dark, working to take others out. Armbrust noted in the blog's comments that the game does contain single-player modes and that the developer is looking into using Project Morpheus for VizionEck. He also confirmed via the game's Twitter that VizionEck is "exclusive to PlayStation." [Image: VizionEck]
