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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]
First CoD: Advanced Warfare DLC aims for late-January launch
Havoc is the title of what publisher Activision is calling an "epic DLC pack" and the "definitive DLC offering" for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. In less grandiose terms, it's known as the game's first DLC pack. Alongside the trailer beyond the break, and the images found above and in the gallery below, Activision sent over a brief synopsis of what's inside the near-future shooter's first major addition. Included are four new multiplayer maps, two new weapons and the Exo Zombies cooperative mode, which is less notable for its undead enemies than for its human protagonists played by big-name, established actors like John Malkovich and Bill Paxton. It appears that Microsoft has struck up an exclusivity agreement with Activision as the Havoc DLC "will be available first, exclusively on Xbox LIVE for a suggested retail price of $15 on January 27." There's currently no word on when the DLC will reach other platforms. [Image: Activision]
Blood Pact: Destruction 101 at 90 in the end of Mists
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill mentions in a quick announcer voice that green fire spells are sold separately. So, you just boosted to 90 on your warlock and...now what? This whole pet deal is bananas to you and maybe you've heard that destruction (often abbreviated as "destro") -- is a simple spec, so you figure you'll try that one out first. but where do you start? And how can you learn without embarrassing yourself? Let's start, shall we?
Blood Pact: Weak Aura strings for warlocks
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill dares to share her stash of Weak Auras with the internet. Since I primarily take my own screenshots, we've seen my Weak Auras in action already. I've talked a little about how this addon and TellMeWhen can accomplish some of the same user interface goals. Now, we finally get around to the big request -- let's see some warlock Weak Aura strings. The usual caveat applies here: these are my Weak Auras and they work fine for me within my own setup of playing a warlock that is unique to me. I'm sure someone will find my Burning Embers graphic irrelevant, but I remind you, to each her own.
Blood Pact: A mini-grimoire of warlock macros
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill discusses macros for warlocks. As of writing, I'm far away from my stash of screenshots for my WeakAuras, so I won't have a post full of example strings for you quite yet. But the discussion of macros for warlocks came up on Twitter, and I can write a while about those while away on a wintery vacation.
Blood Pact: Multitarget DPS and situational awareness
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill discusses how to handle one, some, or many whelps. Before BlizzCon, I left off with the beginnings of how to put together your UI. While it would be easy to generate a post of macros and Weak Auras import strings, that wasn't my intent. User interfaces in WoW are varied and can be unique to the player, so I think it's a greater lesson to learn how you can design your UI to help you, rather than to help patchwork import settings together for you. So while the setup of unit frames may have seemed incredibly basic to some readers, knowing where some set frames are helps you take control of how your targets are presented to you. Much like healers considering a raid frames grid to be a central part of a healing UI, having damage targets at the ready is a central if often subconscious part of a DPS UI. Today is another basic topic, but it too has a subtle effect on how a proper UI setup can aid in DPS.
Embers of Caerus September update details explorable demo and team changes
Forsaken Studios has released its September development update video this weekend for Embers of Caerus, and in it, we get details on a new community manager, some issues the team is having with funding, and the upcoming exploration demo that's in the works with a new engine. As technical director Dave Belcher explains in the video, the investment hurdle merely means that the team will need to step it up a bit to show off more of what the game is at this point, with the possibility of more crowd funding in the future. Belcher explains that the game will be moving from Havok's Vision engine to the Unity engine (temporarily) for new prototypes, which should help show potential investors (both large and small) what the game is all about. Check out the entire 18-minute video just after the jump for more on what the team has been up to in the last few busy months.
Blood Pact: Dark Soul, glyphs, and more PTR fun
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill attempts many experiments both on live and PTR realms. Last week, I had this whole thing planned to talk about the Thunderstruck scenario of damage with the olde Glyphe of Lyfe Tapp style Archimonde's Vengeance. But literally before the deadline, the PTR builds finally caught up with the PTR patch notes and Archimonde's Vengeance was completely replaced by the new Archimonde's Darkness. Unfortunately, I didn't feel like I could spend at least 1000 words on a double cooldown; today, I can't even break 150. But before we get seriously into settled number-tweaking things like the datamined loot, let's talk about some other changes on the PTR.
Blood Pact: Combat log kung fu for warlocks
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill is finishing out the World of Logs posts while she hunts for BC-era battle pets. Have you ever tried to read the combat log? Maybe you're on the PTR testing a spell change or you want to know how often a new trinket procs, so you open the combat log chat window and start reading. You get twenty-something lines down before you realize something horrifying -- that's only one second of combat. Your jaw slowly falls to the floor and you reach up to pull your hair out as you contemplate reading a combat log for an entire raid fight -- that can sometimes last more than six hundred seconds and includes far more actors than just you and the training dummy. Luckily for us, when events are printed in a specified format without too much variety, computers can read and process --or parse -- these lines magnitudes faster than we humans can. World of Logs has graphs and charts to help us understand our performance, but it also includes what is basically Google for your combat log. Just like there are tips to speed up and pinpoint your browser searches, there are tricks you can use to query events better in the World of Logs expression editor.
Blood Pact: Share the love of dead mobs with MoP AoE
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill enjoys exploding things, whether by smashing mobs to gore splats as a Diablo III barbarian or by chaining together multiple Seed explosions. A bugged Nightfall won't stop me from enjoying the new Seed of Corruption. I am completely willing to channel Drain Soul on full-health trash just so I can get a 'burned Seed and 'burned Curse combo off on the next pack. Chaining Seeds together is too much fun to pass up. With this new beta build, Mannoroth's Fury received a little nerf, and I thought about all the new AoE abilities for warlocks. Every spec has multiple AoE options now, both small-scale and large-scale. Even better, no spec feels like a mindless spamming anymore. Even affliction's constant casting of Seed requires a little setup.
Star Wars Galaxies producer's letter talks space bounties, new player ships
Star Wars Galaxies just launched its 19.12 Entertainer update, but that doesn't mean the dev team at Sony Online Entertainment is taking it easy. Tony "Teesquared" Tyson has posted a new producer's letter to the official SWG forums that offers a hint of what's to come over the next few patches. The main thrust is the ongoing development of Galactic Civil War 2, and Tyson says the update will be released in three parts. Part one will focus on the space game, part two will involve player cities, and part three will be "a balance pass on the different GCW systems including planetary control." The space update looks to be particularly juicy, with a new player ship and space-based bounty hunting on the way. The new hardware is a Scurrg H-6 prototype bomber, an example of which is the heavily modified Havoc flown by the Feeorin pirate Nym in Star Wars lore. The Scurrg will be available to freelance pilots, and Tyson says the team is also planning to add new craft for Imperial and Rebel pilots in a future patch.
Fan made EVE video Day of Darkness II blows away players and devs alike
A well-crafted science fiction story can deal with powerful themes. Fans of television shows like Battlestar Galactica know very well that a story of humanity's struggle for survival has a particularly strong emotional pull. The creators of EVE Online recognized this long ago, creating an extensive body of lore about the races of New Eden and their clashes with one another on a galactic scale. Their long history of conflicts creates endless ripples of discord felt by later generations, resulting in the subjugation of entire races countered by the will to be free of such tyranny. The struggle to survive in the face of a great threat is central to the EVE Online machinima "Day of Darkness II", which is nothing short of exceptional. It's a short film created in-game by EVE player Dire Lauthris and a retelling of a key bit of EVE's lore. In fact, Lauthris drew upon one of the actual Chronicles called "The Breakout". Day of Darkness II focuses on the strife between the Caldari and Gallente races of New Eden, turning back the clock to a historic battle 200 years ago between the Caldari State and the Gallente Federation.
Stunning EVE machinima depicts struggle between New Eden's factions
The sci-fi setting of EVE Online provides a great amount of material for players interested in creating machinima. But it's not everyday that a short film as good as Clear Skies or Havoc comes along. Then again, it's also not every day that something created by a player draws accolades from the game's creators -- but that's exactly the case with the work of EVE player Kyoko Sakoda, in "War Has Come" -- which beautifully captures the game, set to a cover of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower." Sakoda writes, "This is one of my first thematic works. I know the Bear McCreary version of the song may sound like it is out of place for a few hardcore sci-fi fans, but I could not justify using any other cover. Enjoy, and write feedback if you wish. I'm always looking to improve my storytelling, direction, and editing and compositing skills." We've got "War Has Come" embedded for you below the cut, and it's well worth a look. We just wish Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" was a longer song...
EVE Online films nominated for Machinima Filmfest 2008 awards
CCP Games announced that two EVE Online machinima have made the list of nominees for awards at Machinima Filmfest 2008: "Clear Skies" and "Havoc." The Machinima Festival is one of the major machinima events held annually. The full day event will take place on November 1st in New York City. Clear Skies is an imaginative blend of EVE Online's galactic backdrop with Half-Life 2 character models, and is a Best Long Format nominee. Much of the film takes place within ship and station interiors, and represents two years of hard work by its creator, Ian Chisholm, as well as Richie Powles and John Guthrie. Clear Skies has been well-received by the EVE Community, with the announcement thread garnering 50 pages of praise and climbing.Havoc is a newer machinima, nominated for Best Sound Design, Best Short Format, and Best Voice Acting. Havoc was created by Anil Kamath (Sound Design and Music), Chris Newcombe (Visual Design and Editing), and voiced by Sarah Murray. Like Clear Skies, Havoc is proving to be quite popular with the EVE playerbase, but holds appeal for a more general audience as well. The film is short, clocking in at one minute in length, but in that time nicely juxtaposes the grit of New Eden's setting with gorgeous visuals filmed within EVE. Like Clear Skies, Havoc is well worth a look. Video embeds of both machinima are found below the cut:
15 Minutes of Fame: Kara to Illidan in six weeks
15 Minutes of Fame is our look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes – from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about.Are server firsts worth pushing for – really pushing for, as in four hours a night, five times a week, for a month and a half? For Havoc-A of Cairne, time had no bearing as they raced from Karazhan to Illidan a mere six weeks after forming their guild. They pushed through the content so quickly that some members were still sporting blues when they first met Illidan. The team racked up a list of server firsts during its ascent: first Illidan kill, first off-hand Warglaive (maybe a server first Legendary), first Zul'Aman bear mount, and Alliance firsts for Azgalor, Archimonde and last half of Black Temple bosses.Now that the guild has had time to come down from the high, we wondered, do they think it was all worth it? Signs point to yes: the guild's GM, Meliadoul, is still waxing rhapsodic over the team's accomplishments, the bonds formed and the pride that carried them forward as a group. 15 Minutes of Fame visited with Meliadoul to find out the root of Havoc's need for speed.
MotorStorm dev talks SPU usage and 'cooperative rendering'
Scott Kirkland, the Technical Director behind MotorStorm, sat down with Beyond3D recently to talk about some of the more technical details of developing the intense off-road racer. They cover a pretty wide range of topics, from Evolution's contributions in developing the Havok 4.5 physics middleware, to culling unseen vertices in order to increase rendering performance. Here are a couple highlights:On SPU usage:"MotorStorm only uses between 15 and 20 percent of available SPU resource, so we're aiming to achieve a 5 fold increase in SPU performance, which should allow us to do some awesome stuff!"On using the SPUs and RSX for cooperative rendering:"The leap in performance provided by [the SPUs] gives us the bandwidth to significantly reduce RSX time spent processing vertices that don't contribute to the final scene. The favoured approach is to use SPUs to generate minimal scene/instance specific index and vertex buffers from compressed data."It is a fantastic read, and well worth checking out. It gets EXTREMELY technical at a couple points, so don't feel bad if your brain catches on fire. I set off the fire alarm twice.
Warhawk, MotorStorm, & other bootleg GDC PS3 videos
So, are you tired of bootleg stills from the upcoming PS3 titles featured at GDC? (Or bootleg videos from current-gen titles like God of War 2?) Well, it looks like you're in luck, as we've got a few fuzzy PS3 videos from Phil Harrison's speech, courtesy of the embargo-ignorin' folks at Multiplayer.it.What we have above is a clip from the developer demo of Warhawk for the PS3. A voiceover describes the "ambient warfare" to be used in the air-combat simulation game, as well as the innovative mix of "Cell-based software rendering with RSX-based hardware rendering" to produce the graphics. For all you coders out there, it was also interesting to note that the programs running on the Cell's SPUs were not written in low-level assembly (easing development, but possibly degrading performance).While we wait until E3, when a playable version of Warhawk was promised to be delivered, here are a few more PS3 videos from GDC that you might find interesting (with a few unfortunately quite incomplete): Streamed video of MotorStorm GDC footage, also with a voiceover. Streamed speeded-up video clips (no audio) of Warhawk, Getaway 3, Lair, the Havoc physics demo from Heavenly Sword, the bullet-ridden car model demo, and even that video concerning Rachet & Clank. Streamed (basically) audio-only video from Resistance: Fall of Man. [Thanks, Reaktorleak89, Fan, & Da'Cheez; via PS3 Fanboy & QJ.net]See also: MotorStorm, Resistance and more: pictures from Sony's GDC keynote God of War 2 GDC video leaked online Multiplayer.it's report on Phil Harrison's GDC keynote (in Italian)
