The team behind the Skyrim Together Reborn (opens in new tab) multiplayer mod has turned its attention to something new: HogWarp, a multiplayer mod for Hogwarts Legacy.
Hogwarts Legacy is a big, sprawling game, and its setting and story—a tale of kids attending a massive, ancient magic school—is a natural fit for some sort of multiplayer component. Yet it’s strictly a singleplayer game.
That may not be the case forever, though. HogWarp, like Skyrim Together (opens in new tab), is designed to give players the ability to congregate and play together in the famed school of magic. And it’s not just an idle dream: Even though Hogwarts Legacy only went into full release on Friday, the Together Team (opens in new tab) has already shared a video of a test build in action. There’s not a whole lot going on, but that’s definitely two students running around in one Hogwarts.
Mod maker Yamashi told me in a Discord chat that the focus of the mod is “on co-op and roleplay.” The goal at this point is to enable up to eight people to play together, although that could change depending on how development unfolds.
“Our aim is to figure out how to do the basics such as spawning characters with the player’s appearance, animations and NPCs,” Yamashi said. “We are not going to create any multiplayer specific content ourselves, we want to provide a stable framework so that people can enjoy the vanilla game and maybe extend it themselves later on.”
Currently, Yamashi is working on HogWarp alone, although two members of the Skyrim Together team are “ramping up on the code base” with an eye toward joining the project. As for how they got a test building running so quickly, Yamashi credited pre-release work on Stray (opens in new tab), a very different sort of game, and a connection that baffled me for a moment until they explained that it uses Unreal Engine 4.27.2, the same as Hogwarts Legacy.
(Yamashi also clarified, sorry to say, that a Stray Together mod is not in the offing: The pre-release work was related to “creating all the tools to help reverse engineer [Hogwarts Legacy] quickly and understanding the workflow,” and that there was never actually a functioning Stray multiplayer mod.)
A test build of HogWarp is available to Yamashi’s Patreon (opens in new tab) subscribers, but they warned that people who sign up for it “have to expect something very barebones and buggy” at this early stage of work. As for a wider release, “it’s very hard to say, [but] hopefully we can release a proof of concept to everyone within this month, if everything goes according to plan!” Full functionality is still at least “a few months” away, however.
When the HogWarp mod does go into wide release, Yamashi confirmed that it will be open source, so users will be free to do or create whatever they like with it.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1676332689_The-Skyrim-Together-team-is-working-on-a-multiplayer-mod.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-13 23:26:302023-02-13 23:26:30The Skyrim Together team is working on a multiplayer mod for Hogwarts Legacy, and there’s already a prototype
If you didn’t hear, one of the most-played games on Steam last week was actually a demo. Today would have been the end of the latest alpha for PvP dungeon crawling extraction game Dark and Darker but the developers have extended the playtest another three days.
“Due to the earlier downtime with the trading post, matchmaking, and lost playtime for players that were falsely banned, we have decided to extend the playtest until Feb 16,” Ironmace says in a news post. “We also plan to use the time to address issues that are inconveniencing players and to continuously improve the game.” So far, Ironmace has pushed out a total of five hotfixes since the alpha began last week, including lots of bug fixes and a nerf to wizard casting limits.
It’s worth giving a shot if you’re keen to be on the cutting edge of what could be a rather popular battle royale-adjacent game when it eventually launches. I’ve long enjoyed the PvP tactical thrill of royales and extractions games, struggling though I do with my FPS skills, and came away from the demo quite pleased to report that Dark and Darker proves extraction shooters don’t actually have to be shooters.
I spent several more hours diving into the Forgotten Castle with my pals over the weekend and I’m definitely experiencing a familiar PvP glee whether I’m winning or losing. Proximity chat can sometimes mean making pacts with other teams or just rolling real hard on an overly cocky wizard wearing only his underpants while slinging fireballs. You know the type. I still take issue with the exfil portals only taking one teammate at a time out of the dungeon, but the unusual constraint has created some really edge of my seat moments while my team watches our last member snag their nail-biting exit.
You can download the demo over on Steam and start making your own way through the dungeon halls until Thursday.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1676325405_Youve-got-three-extra-days-to-play-in-the-Dark.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-13 21:30:032023-02-13 21:30:03You’ve got three extra days to play in the Dark and Darker alpha
Hogwarts Legacy (opens in new tab) is a game about going to school to learn to cast magical spells so you can commit horrific acts of violence (opens in new tab) at a rate not often seen in tween-oriented coming-of-age tales. But if you really want to kick ass, you might want to forgo magic in favor of something a little more vegan.
Chinese Chomping Cabbages are a magical plant that, as their name suggests, like to bite. The Harry Potter wiki (opens in new tab) says they have “the ability to chomp on foods, such as carrots,” but it also quotes Professor Pomona Sprout as warning her fifth-year herbology students that they’ll need to learn “how to avoid getting chomped by the Chinese Chomping Cabbage,” effectively confirming that that they’ll munch on pretty much anything that comes into range.
It turns out that you can take advantage of that aggression in Hogwarts Legacy, to the point of becoming “completely op,” as redditor CumboJumbo (opens in new tab) put it in a handy “Become a Cabbage Guru” explainer.
“You need the Herbology 3 trait (found in special Bandit Camp chests with four legs, reload save if you dont get it) and the Fertiliser talent (Room of Requirement section in Talents menu),” CumboJumbo wrote. “Herbology 3 will boost Cabbage damage. Put it on all of your clothing items for 6 stacks of damage. Fertiliser generates an extra Cabbage for free. You can have 6 Cabbages out at once this way (giving you 24 Cabbages for your max inventory of 12).”
You’ll also want to build four potting tables, with three medium pots each, in the Room of Requirement (opens in new tab), which will give you 12 cabbages every 12 minutes. That’s a whole lotta cabbage, baby.
It sounds very silly, yes, but it also appears very effective. Here’s CumboJumbo absolutely wrecking a forest troll with a half-dozen cabbages:
The cabbage build fares equally well against groups of conventional enemies, too.
Cabbages also apparently synergize well with other plants in Hogwarts Legacy, and are especially useful for stealth builds. “I’m using all of the [Room of Requirements] plant perks, dash rolling into a big pack of mobs using mandrake will usually kill everything within the stun alone,” redditor joshwah_ (opens in new tab) wrote. “You can use all of your plants while stealthed without it breaking stealth, making this build even stronger when combined with stealth perks.
“Summoning 2 Tentacula and 6 Cabbages you will be killing most bosses within seconds. You will rarely need to be summoning more than one plant at a time when killing general mobs.”
It’s possible that Avalanche Software (not Avalanche Studios! (opens in new tab)) will nerf the cabbages, or plants in general, at some point in the future, making these veggie-based builds less badass than they are right now. For the moment, though, if you really want to roll OP, get out there and roll some cabbage.
Courtesy of YouTuber Rognarr Atheo, here’s a more detailed breakdown on how to put together your very own OP cabbage build:
Steam Next Fest, the biannual event that scatterguns hundreds of game demos into your eager face for a week before rudely yoinking them away again, has come to an end. That’s a bummer if you missed out on the chance to try the demo of a great game, but the good news is that a few free demos aren’t expiring just because the Fest is over.
That includes the demo for a game you absolutely shouldn’t miss: Shadows of Doubt from ColePowered Games. The demo will remain live for a few more days.
🚨ATTENTION ALL DETECTIVES🚨We aren’t ready for the case to go cold just yet 🧊📂We’ve decided to extend your #SteamNextFest demo investigation until Thursday Feb.16th! 🕵♀️🤝🕵♂️https://t.co/HMGp6KToqTFebruary 13, 2023
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“We aren’t ready for the case to go cold just yet 🧊📂,” the official Shadows of Doubt account tweeted this morning. “We’ve decided to extend your #SteamNextFest demo investigation until Thursday Feb.16th!”
That’s great. Even though I’ve played it twice already, I’m not ready to stop.
Shadows of Doubt has been a big, intriguing blip on our radar since it was revealed at The PC Gaming Show back in 2020. It’s a first-person stealth detective adventure set in a fully simulated sci-fi city. Picture Deus Ex spliced with Blade Runner and you’ve got the vibe. Now imagine you’re a noir detective with a bunch of murders and mysteries to investigate in any way you choose, and you’ve got the rest.
The demo is fantastic. Once the game has procedurally generated the entire cyberpunk city, its dystopian history, and all of its inhabitants, you wake up in your apartment as a note is slipped under your door asking you to locate a missing person. After gathering up your detective toolkit and finding the person’s address in the city directory, you head out into the rainy night to snoop around. Investigate the crime scene and murder victim, gather fingerprints, read emails, examine phone records, and even go through the trash—you never know where an important clue might be found.
Each citizen of the hundreds living in the city has a name, a home address, a job, and routine they follow through the city as they work or enjoy their leisure time, and you can snoop around in their lives and discover their connections to other characters. Every single building in the city is fully modeled, so there’s nowhere you can’t go: break into offices and homes, hack security systems and watch surveillance footage, talk to people of interest, interrogate suspects, and even perform an arrest if you think you’ve got your perp. Throw in a conspiracy corkboard where you can arrange and connect evidence with red strings, and Shadows of Doubt will appeal to any armchair detective out there.
One thing that disappointed me a bit was when I was ready to turn in my completed case at city hall. The game only required me to provide proof that my suspect was at the scene of the crime, which boiled down to a fingerprint I’d collected and some surveillance footage I’d seen. I had way, way more evidence, though, including several incriminating emails I’d printed out proving they were a hired assassin, and I would have loved the opportunity to turn in those, too (“Look at all this Crime Homework I did, justice system!”). Hopefully, in the finished game, there will be a more extensive way to put all your evidence to use.
But it’s still an extremely engaging and fascinating demo, and all of us at PC Gamer who played it recommend checking it out. The demo gives you 90 minutes of playtime, and if you solve the first mystery (even if you botch it) you can gather more side-jobs at notice boards scattered around the city. And when you reach the demo’s time limit, you can just start again. The neat thing about the procedural nature of the mysteries is that even playing the same case over again will give you different leads, evidence, and suspects.
A release date for Shadows of Doubt hasn’t been announced yet, but we’re hoping we don’t have to wait too much longer for the full game.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1676321727_Youve-got-3-days-left-to-play-one-of-the.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-13 20:04:492023-02-13 20:04:49You’ve got 3 days left to play one of the best demos on Steam right now
Prosaically, I’d describe The Last Worker (opens in new tab) as a puzzle/stealth game with six degrees of freedom, reviving that classic style of movement spearheaded by ’90s PC games like Descent (opens in new tab). And it 100% is that, but project lead Jörg Tittel at Oiffy—he is writing and directing, with studio Wolf & Wood developing the game—is clear that he wants this game to rise above the banal.”
“I really think that ‘content’ word is key,” Tittel explained to me. “To have some sort of middleman of a middleman douchebag call your passion project, another child of yours ‘content.’ I want to tear their fucking head off.”
“A bucket of shit has content in it,” Tittel added.
The upcoming game sees players take on the role of one of the titular last workers, the few flesh-and-blood employees remaining at a city-sized warehouse of a fictional, Amazon-style company. The Jüngle corporation combines the globe-bestriding might of a cyberpunk megacorp with the happy-faced sterility of one of our real-life megacorps, with a stylish, fashionably dressed CEO urging you to make people’s dreams come true through customer satisfaction.
You fly through this cavernous warehouse on a mobility scooter/forklift, delivering packages to their proper supply line, and I especially appreciate the preview holograms of your deliveries. One standout from the game’s demo was an infant VR kit—in pink, “for girls.” Protagonist Kurt is ultimately recruited by an activist organization, and you have the choice to sabotage your workplace, or keep making those “dreams” come true.
I think we’re all working in that fulfillment center at the moment.
Project lead Jörg Tittel
Tittel explained to me that members of Oiffy’s team or their families had worked for Amazon or other warehouse owners in the ecommerce age, but that they also felt the setting could serve as a familiar touchstone for the menial, degrading nature of life more broadly in the 2020s. “I think we’re all working in that fulfillment center at the moment,” he mused on the subject.
Tittel cites Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please, as an inspiration for this sort of dueling incentive structure, another game where there’s a tension between just doing your job and maybe doing the right thing instead. “It was a game that created a lot of conversation around it, not necessarily about politics,” Tittel explains. “The game was sort of abstracted enough but it made people at least think about what it might be like to work for the government or border control.”
One of the puzzles you’ll face in The Last Worker (Image credit: Oiffy, Wolf & Wood)
Tittel also points to Firewatch as a big influence, and you can see that DNA in The Last Worker’s first-person presentation, focus on an oft-overlooked blue collar profession, and storytelling carried by a large amount of dialogue with a limited cast. Tittel does note, however, that he “wanted more mechanics” out of Firewatch. “I wanted more gameplay, I wanted more mechanics, I wanted to be able to do more, but I really appreciated the storytelling. And I appreciate the immersive nature of the story.”
The Last Worker injects “more gameplay” with its focus on puzzle solving and eventually stealth: the simple prosecution of your job eventually morphs into covertly sabotaging your workplace in the name of a higher cause. Tittel singles out Metal Gear Solid as a last major influence on the game, noting that he loves how it “so seamlessly interweaves storytelling and a sort of narrative on the fly with awesome stealth elements.”
“We want to have a sense of suspense and stealth, except we want to do it in six directions,” Tittel elaborates. “To be able to have this flying pod that lets you do stealth in six directions is a new thing, and it feels really nice, both in and out of VR.” This footage (opens in new tab) from The Last Worker’s demo last year shows off some of the game’s six degrees of stealth gameplay. You have to sneak through a meat processing facility after hours, using crates transporting livestock on an assembly line as cover from security drones and static cameras.
I’m intrigued by the prospect of vertical stealth offered by The Last Worker’s six degrees of freedom. (Image credit: Oiffy, Wolf & Wood)
While Tittel certainly “hopes they will fucking sell shitloads of copies” of the game, he’s most interested in sticking in players minds and giving them something they want to talk about. “I do think that games are not the future, but the present, and not only that, but the biggest art form in the world, the biggest entertainment medium. It’s also the biggest time sink.”
Thank you very much tech guys, we’re good.
Project lead Jörg Tittel
“I think games don’t make you violent,” Tittel goes on, “I think they make you silent.” The director hopes to create something that contrasts with the “white noise” of live service-style games, that actively engages the player instead of inducing a soporific effect. He was quick to clarify that he doesn’t believe this is a purely intellectual or didactic sort of exercise, however, but an appreciation that can come from mechanically inspired games: “I have a profound relationship with Sega Rally, I really do. Or Rez, I fucking play Rez Infinite and think that it’s profound. It has a philosophy behind it that you can sense.”
Your floating mobility scooter has a cheeky little rear view mirror where you can look up and see your smiling face. (Image credit: Oiffy, Wolf & Wood)
With that said, The Last Worker doesn’t shy away from the politics of the moment, with Tittel explaining, “Just because our game happens to be about end-stage capitalism doesn’t make it anti-capitalist. What [The Last Worker] says is, capitalism has reached this stage where it’s like being at the deathbed over a terminally ill patient. Just because you call them terminally ill doesn’t mean you hate them, you’ve just identified the fact that it’s ill. And soon it’s going to be gone.”
The game’s Jüngle corporation seems to reflect not a sense of disdain, but rather exhaustion and annoyance with the figure of the tech maverick laying claim to the future and trying to shape culture and the economy. “Thank you very much tech guys, we’re good,” Tittel quips. “You’re essential, but you’re just the tool makers. We are the ones who are now creating the narrative for the future. And so leave us the fuck alone.”
“We’re not a fucking tech industry,” Tittel asserts about games. “We’re culture.”
The Last Worker is currently set to release some time this year, playable on both standard displays and in VR, and you can wishlist the game on Steam (opens in new tab).
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1676351064_Our-reality-has-become-one-giant-Amazon-Fulfilment-Center-says.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-13 19:57:092023-02-13 19:57:09Our reality has become one giant Amazon Fulfilment Center, says designer of this provocative game about the warehouse of the future
CD Projekt has confirmed that the addition of detailed vaginas (opens in new tab) to female monsters was in fact a mistake, and will be removed.
There was already plenty of nudity in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, but the next-gen update that arrived in December upped the ante somewhat. As we saw last week, both the Crones of Crookback Bog (in their human forms) and the vampiric bruxae that appear in the Blood and Wine expansion were given significantly changed pubic areas in the update, taking them from a “Barbie doll situation” to the full monty, complete with visible labia and nicely coiffed public hair.
You can see the changes thanks to screens posted on Reddit, which for obvious reasons I would not recommend clicking on if you’re at work and they’re not cool with full frontal nudity.
(Or, I suppose, anywhere that M-rated content is considered inappropriate. Anyway, apply your judgment as you see fit.)
We speculated that the new look came courtesy of one of the many user-made mods incorporated into The Witcher 3’s next-gen update, particularly since CD Projekt didn’t seem aware of it it: The studio told Kotaku (opens in new tab) shortly after the new-and-improved graphics were discovered that it was “looking into it and will have more information in the coming days.” Sure enough, it later confirmed that mistakes were made, and will be changed.
“The textures in question are an unintended result present in the release version,” CD Projekt said in a statement. “This is something we are working to address.”
It all seems a bit overcooked to me. CD Projekt has never been shy about nudity (at least when it comes to women—I don’t recall any male characters running around au naturel, although apparently it was discussed (opens in new tab) at one point) and this seems like a fairly minor tweak as far as that goes: They’re still unclothed, just slightly more detailed. The landing strip trim is maybe a little anachronistic, but that’s what mods are for, right? Geralt got new hairdos (opens in new tab), after all, so why not the Ladies of the Wood?
Unfortunately, CD Projekt declined to comment on its reasoning for the vagina reversion, or to say when it expects the change to be made. It did confirm separately that it’s working on new performance patches (opens in new tab) for the game, however, aimed at improving CPU core utilization, DirectX 12 stability, ray tracing, horizon-based ambient occlusion, and crash issues.
The Angry Miao Cyberboard Terminal Mechanical Keyboard is the most ridiculous keyboard I’ve encountered in a long while. For just $810 (opens in new tab), you too can time travel back to a pre-Y2K era where all your favorite hackers were incredibly attractive, wore tight black leather outfits, and primarily moved in slow-motion (opens in new tab).
To say that The Matrix heavily inspires the design of the Cyberboard Terminal (opens in new tab) mechanical keyboard would be the understatement of the century. This wireless keyboard is made from a “transparent, sandblasted black polycarbonate,” which gives it a grudgingly ’90s look. The metal counterweight would make for a sturdy typing experience. It also supports Bluetooth 5.0 as well as USB-C connectivity.
Its LED panel display makes this thing truly dope (and wildly expensive). This shows off a green “cascading digital rain effect” as you type, reminiscent of a certain code you see in that movie with Keanu Reeves.
It seems like the green rain effect is the only one the LED panel can manage, according to the product listing, which is surprising. However, I’ve seen some user videos of previous similar Angry Miao Cyberboards with custom displays (opens in new tab). It’s also kind of weird that the panel faces away from you, so you can’t see the neat typing effects. Call me weird, but if I’m paying over $800 for a retro-cyber keyboard with cool effects and a great type feel, I want to see the cool effects, damnit.
There are hot-swappable switch sockets with per-key lighting. The bundle includes an Icy Silver Switch, 80 x Kiwi Switches, and Ink Black transparent keycaps so that green really pops through. Though if you have your preferred switches, you can use those instead.
As you can see and hear in the typing test video above, it does have a serious yet aggressively nerdy quality you want in something that looks exactly like what your parents think a hacker’s keyboard looks like. I love it.
The base kit costs $600, which includes the keyboard case, plate, PCB, toolkit, and counterweight. The $810 bundle has everything in the base kit, Icy Silver switch, 80x Kiwi switches, and Ink Black keycaps.
Like most products on the Drop, there’s only a brief window to order the Cyberboard Terminal (this one has about a week left), with an expected ship date of April 14, 2023. Thankfully, I have yet to be paid because we all know what I do with my paycheck, given the opportunity (opens in new tab).
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1676318081_This-800-mechanical-keyboard-had-better-let-me-actually-hack.jpg5761024Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-13 19:38:552023-02-13 19:38:55This $800 mechanical keyboard had better let me actually hack into the Matrix
As someone who’s overwritten more than his fair share of Destiny 2 articles, I have to doff a grudging cap to game director Joe Blackburn, who just dropped 5,439 words on Lightfall and the year ahead. Clearly he does not have to deal with the PC Gamer peer editing system. As with previous ‘State of the Game’ addresses, the treatise is a wide-ranging tour of the biggest areas of improvement the team is working on, framed by Bungie’s major philosophical goals for the game. It also reveals the names of the next two seasons, which are ‘Defiance’ and ‘Deep’, and says that Bungie plans to be (slightly) less secretive about seasons ahead of time.
There’s a ton to take in, and whilst I can’t exactly promise a tl;dr, we have distilled the manifesto down to its seven most important points. Starting with…
1. Crafting is being toned down but enhanced perks are coming to almost all weapons
The introduction of weapon crafting has created a tension between players who miss the excitement of having a ‘god roll’ drop in the wild and those who prefer having a deterministic path to a precise set of weapon perks. Blackburn lists several major changes coming to the crafting, with the most notable being: “Fewer of our total weapons will be craftable and more of our weapons with long term sources will get value from random perk rolls.” Honestly, that’s not surprising. Towards the end of this season Bungie altered the vendors so that patterns were on a daily rather than weekly lockout, likely indicating much of the player base was nowhere near a full collection and needed to catch up.
He also addresses the issue that Adept raid weapons were less desirable than their craftable equivalents, stating that starting from Season of the Deep it will be possible (with time and materials) to enhance the perks on Adept weapons from the Lightfall raid. “Enhancing allows your dropped weapon to start levelling up, use mementos, and gain access to both enhanced perks and enhanced intrinsic properties, but only the enhanced versions of the perks and Masterwork that are already on the version of the weapon you are enhancing.”
This change will eventually roll out to almost all non-craftable weapons, though Blackburn notes there’s some technical stuff to solve first. In another nice quality-of-life change, we’re also told non-craftable weapons will stop dropping as Deepsight (ie ‘red border’), which should help reduce confusion.
Right now, outside of Master and Grandmaster activities, Destiny 2 is very easy. Arguably this has always been the case, but things came to a head last year with the release of the Light 3.0 subclasses. Buildcrafters have been able to spec into almost permanent uptime for a chosen subclass’s most powerful abilities, and that’s made it easy to steamroll pretty much whatever the game throws at players.
For Lightfall, Bungie is committed to dialling back some of the power creep. A sandbox update is going to increase the recharge time of abilities, the damage resistance applied by Tier 10 resilience is being nerfed, and the cost of resilience mods is being increased. This will be somewhat mitigated by how much easier buildcrafting will be in Lightfall, but for those of us already well versed in mod setups, it should make everything feel a little less free.
Perhaps the more meaningful update to how Bungie is approaching difficulty is on the power level side of things. This season Bungie applied a modifier to its seasonal activity, Heist Battlegrounds, locking players to five levels below its power rating. “We were pretty aggressive with this adjustment in Season of the Seraph and it produced great results, so the base Battlegrounds playlist in Season of Defiance will use the same settings,” says Blackburn.
In Season of the Deep, we don’t plan to raise the Power or pinnacle cap at all.
—Joe Blackburn, game director
Vanguard Ops are also getting a power cap—although not as big as for the seasonal activity. Even Neomuna’s patrol zone is getting a cap. “While we don’t want the entire game to feel like it’s turned up to 11, we think these changes will help the enemy forces patrolling Neomuna feel dangerous and worth your attention.”
Blackburn teases a more major change to how power level works for The Final Shape expansion next year. In the meantime, though, more power level experiments will be taking place for Lightfall’s seasons. “Some of these tweaks might be found in our back end with little transparency to the average Guardian, while others will be front and center. For example, when Lightfall launches, we will have a Power climb that is very similar to that in The Witch Queen, but later in Season of the Deep, we don’t plan to raise the Power or pinnacle cap at all.”
3. Seasons should feel less stale
One of the chief complaints in what was, mostly, a good year for Destiny 2 was that the seasonal model had gotten stale. The formula of playing a fairly simple activity in order to unlock a grid of perks at a vendor has become wearing, and Blackburn acknowledges more surprises are needed. Changes on this front likely won’t be felt in Season of Defiance, which was wrapping up as this feedback increased in volume, but Season of the Deep won’t feature a vendor upgrade system at all. “The same will be true for the following Season,” says Blackburn. “This doesn’t mean players will never see a vendor upgrade system again, but instead means we want to create more varied experimental frameworks and slowly create a wide array of different systems for players to show their investment into seasonal content.”
Blackburn also promises more variety from the seasonal activities themselves, referencing the Shattered Realm from Season of the Lost and Battlegrounds from Season of the Chosen as good examples to aim for. He does note that the team isn’t going to shy away from the big, flavourful themes that Bungie has been experimenting with seasonally, pointing to Plunder’s Pirates and Seraph’s Cowboys in particular. Bad news if you don’t like wacky dress up I guess, but I say bring on the Season of the Medieval Knights.
4. Battlegrounds are being added to the Nightfall rota
Battlegrounds are a seasonal activity, first introduced in Year 4’s Season of the Chosen. Functionally, they’re a bit like strikes—three-player PvE missions where Guardians face down some minor threat on behalf of the Vanguard and our allies. No surprise then that, when The Witch Queen launched, Chosen’s Battlegrounds were bundled together with the game’s current crop of strikes into a newly named Vanguard Ops playlist.
For Lightfall, Year 5’s two Battleground variants—Season of the Risen’s PsiOps Battlegrounds and Season of the Seraph’s Heist Battlegrounds—are being added to the Vanguard Ops playlists.
Those Battlegrounds will also appear in the Nightfall rotation. “This process will begin with the Mars Heist Battleground being part of the Nightfall rotation in Season of Defiance,” says Blackburn, “and we expect more Battlegrounds to be following suit each season.”
This is a neat move. There are, frankly, only so many strikes in the game—which made vaulting a bunch of them somewhat baffling—and so the seasonal Nightfall rotation was getting a bit stale. Grandmaster Nightfalls are one of the most challenging activities in the game, but they’re at their hardest when they’re new—before everyone’s learned the most consistent strategies for completion.
Beyond just the addition of Battlegrounds, next season’s Nightfall rotation is getting a big shakeup, as Bungie is also reworking the Lake of Shadows and Arms Dealer strikes—two of the easiest in the game, and thus also by far the easiest Grandmaster Nightfalls. “Both activities have had their objectives and encounters re-imagined and upgraded to match the combat engagement levels of some of our more recent strike entries, such as Lightblade and Proving Grounds,” says Blackburn, referencing two of the hardest current GM runs.
“We’re excited to see how players tackle Season of Defiance’s first Nightfall rotation where four out of the six Nightfalls will be new or refreshed content coming to the Grandmaster rotation for the first time.”
5. Old exotic missions are making a comeback
Last year, Bungie introduced a new rotator system for raids and dungeons—breathing some life into Destiny 2’s older endgame activities. When featured, that raid or dungeon will give out a pinnacle drop on completion. More importantly, it becomes farmable—letting you earn rewards on each completion, instead of just the first run per character, per week.
Clearly Bungie likes the system, because they’re planning a similar rotator for exotic missions. The twist here is that it means bringing them back in the first place. Exotic missions are tied to seasonal releases, which means they get swept away at the start of a new annual cycle. Bungie’s website has already been updated to warn that Year 5’s exotic missions—Vox Obscura and Operation: Seraph’s Shield—are getting axed when Lightfall launches.
Bungie says it hopes to reintroduce some of Destiny 2’s most classic missions back into the game.
In Season 22, though, they’re coming back, and they won’t be alone. “Like our legacy raid and dungeon rotators, the Exotic mission rotator will feature Exotic missions from the past that rotate on a weekly cadence and offer great rewards for players willing to dive into some classic content,” writes Blackburn. “In Season 22, this rotator will contain the Exotic missions from Seasons 13, 16, and 19: Presage, Vox Obscura, and Operation: Seraph’s Shield.”
Bungie goes on to say it hopes to use this new rotator to reintroduce “some of Destiny 2’s most classic missions” back into the game. Zero Hour and The Whisper are at the top of my wishlist.
I do wonder what rewards are being planned, though. Vox Obscura’s exotic, Dead Messenger, could be earned from a single run. Operation: Seraph’s Shield has a slightly longer tail—requiring multiple runs to fully upgrade its exotic, Revision Zero—but I doubt it’ll be enough to make a long term rotator viable, particularly with the pinnacle grind no longer being necessary in later seasons.
6. Gambit getting no love, but other ritual ritual modes receiving work
Crucible gets a few paragraphs of attention, with Blackburn revealing the return of Countdown—the bomb defusal mode from Year 1’s short-lived Trials of the Nine—along with a variant called Countdown Rush. Crucible Labs will also be returning for a series of experimental modes, including “Checkmate Control”, which is said to feature a dramatically changed sandbox. PvP will be getting a new map, and the return of two older maps, as well as yet more fiddling to the skill-based matchmaking system. It probably won’t be enough to placate the eternally angry PvP mains, but it’s something.
For Gambit enjoyers, though, it’s a desert out there. The third Destiny 2 ritual activity doesn’t warrant a single mention in Blackburn’s 5,400 word post.
Gambit launched with a lot of potential, but I think has always had a bit of an identity crisis. It’s a PvPvE mode, but one that overly favours the PvP side—a good invader is almost always the difference maker, no matter how well the other players are performing. It’s also a casual, matchmade ritual activity, but one that heavily favours coordination. If you’re visiting just to complete some challenges, or earn the weekly pinnacle, you’re probably going to have a bad time.
We want to take this time before The Final Shape to crisp up our core rituals and pursuits.
—Joe Blackburn, game director
So no word on Gambit specifically, but, if you want to huff some copium, the broader concept of ritual activities—Vanguard Ops, Crucible and Gambit—is addressed. “As we get further away from Lightfall in our seasonal schedule, we are going to make some targeted changes to ritual content based on what we’ve observed about why players engage in this content,” says Blackburn. He notes that more rewards are planned, along with “more options” to engage in ritual activities. “This will include changes such as moving the initial source of obtaining Exotic armor away from Lost Sectors and back into the core rituals, no longer asking players to earn all three of the ritual pursuit ornaments in seasonal challenges, and allowing players to earn more new rewards and complete more of their weekly challenges by playing content of their choice, not just in the newest seasonal activity playlist.”
Blackburn also reveals that Bungie will spend more of Season 23’s development time on ritual activities—making it sound like it will be a smaller season in terms of new stuff so more focus can be put on the old—something that I’ve seen requested for some time. “While this Season will have plenty of new activity and story content, we want to take this time right before The Final Shape to crisp up our core rituals and pursuits as we head into our final expansion of the Light and Darkness Saga.”
7. In-game LFG is delayed until the final season of 2023
In addition to being able to dish out new Commendations to players you’ve enjoyed matching with, Bungie is dialing up the social side of Destiny 2 in multiple ways. “To start, we want to change our game-wide text chat channels from opt-in to opt-out,” says Blackburn, presumably aware of the carnage that could ensure, because he also states that: “We also plan to allow anyone the option to quickly leave channels on a case-by-case basis if the chat is trending in a way that makes their game experience worse.” Mercifully, it will still be possible to opt out of chat entirely in the system settings.
In perhaps the one really disappointing part of the post, Blackburn acknowledges that the Fireteam Finder feature, which Bungie had hoped to have live in time for this summer’s reprised raid, now won’t ship until the final season of 2023, when it will launch alongside a new dungeon. Blackburn does however detail some of the functionality he expects it to have:
“This means a Fireteam Finder that you can queue up for from anywhere in the game. The ability to tag your posts with keywords to describe the kind of group you’re running and the kind of people you’re looking to recruit. The option to create groups where folks can join automatically, allowing you to get right into the action. And the power to create groups where you as a leader can approve or deny each person trying to join up, giving you tight control over the kind of group you’re putting together.”
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/7-big-things-we-learned-from-the-Destiny-2-state.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-13 17:50:432023-02-13 17:50:437 big things we learned from the Destiny 2 ‘state of the game’ address
We are in the early stages of seeing how AI technologies are going to change elements of the world, both online and in the meatspace, and so far the verdict is decidedly mixed. Big tech is betting that it will revolutionise things like search before bleeding into all aspects of how we communicate and engage with the world. But this is powerful and cutting-edge technology, which means one thing: Bad actors are going to try and exploit these things in any way they can.
Deepfake videos have now been circulating online for a while; they are AI-generated clips where a person’s image is superimposed over existing footage such that it looks indistinguishable from watching the real person. These clips are often accompanied by dire prognostications about how they’ll be used in the future and now thanks to TikTok you can view one of the first widely spread examples.
The platform is serving users a scam advert that features an AI-generated version of the enormously popular podcast host Joe Rogan. Rogan is a controversial figure for various reasons, but this ad is absolutely nothing to do with the real Joe Rogan, instead featuring an AI Rogan who discusses penis pills over a video that alternates between shots of ‘Rogan’ talking and a demonstration of how to buy said pills.
Deepfake scams are here, and we’re not ready. pic.twitter.com/NtPKWGCULiFebruary 12, 2023
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Whatever you may think of Joe Rogan, he’s the victim here, and I encourage everyone to watch this video just to see how convincing the scam is. The video sees the fake Rogan extolling the virtues of a product called ‘Alpha Grind’, talking about its bestseller status on Amazon, and talking in a conversational manner that, to my amateur ears, does mimic the presenter’s delivery and style: “If you go to Amazon and type in Libido Booster for Men, you’re going to find it right at the top. Because guys are figuring out that it literally is increasing size and making a difference down there.”
I’ve contacted the real Joe Rogan for comment, and will update with any response.
You would not blame anyone for thinking this is the real deal, and the implications of that are pretty horrendous. It is also depressingly notable that the cutting-edge of tech is here being deployed to sell lonely men penis pills: plus ça change.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1676310769_The-deepfake-scam-era-begins-with-an-AI-generated-Joe-Rogan.png282501Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-13 17:18:362023-02-13 17:18:36The deepfake scam era begins with an AI-generated Joe Rogan pushing penis pills on TikTok
Dead Island 2 (opens in new tab), which has yet to apologise for making me write the words “Flesh system” over and over again, has changed its release date once more. After a parade of delays that saw the game slip from year to year and month to month, Dead Island 2’s final surprise is that it won’t be releasing on April 28. It’ll be releasing a week earlier, on April 21. It’s an Easter miracle, my friends.
You asked for it, you got it. Dead Island 2 went gold and it’s coming out a week early. See you in HELL-A on April 21, 2023.#DeadIsland #SeeYouInHELLA pic.twitter.com/8Gu28bIcUSFebruary 13, 2023
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You’ve got a little over two months until you can see a game that was first announced nearly ten years ago, in the Edenic world of 2014. I have to admit, I’m very curious to see how it’ll turn out. We’ve had two Dying Light games in the vast interim between Dead Island 2’s announcement and release date, and I liked them both quite a bit more than I did Dead Island. I’m hoping the second game manages to grab me more forcefully than its predecessor did.
We’ve heard quite a bit about Dead Island 2 in the last few weeks. Whether it’s the game’s procedural wounding and dismemberment system, known as the—here it comes again—“Flesh system,” (opens in new tab) or its card-based “skill deck” mechanic (opens in new tab), we have a pretty good idea of what to expect come April. I’m cautiously optimistic: everything I’ve seen so far has sounded interesting, and all that remains to be seen is whether the game can still manage to come together after nearly a decade in the oven.
Dead Island 2 will hit the Epic Games Store (opens in new tab) on April 21, with no Steam release in sight as of yet. I wouldn’t worry too much if you’re zealous about keeping your games in one place, though; I strongly suspect Dead Island 2 will join its predecessor over on Valve’s store at some point. Perhaps, I don’t know, around a year after it releases on Epic?
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1676358326_Dead-Island-2-celebrates-going-gold-by-changing-its-release.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-13 16:44:332023-02-13 16:44:33Dead Island 2 celebrates going gold by changing its release date one last time, so now it’s releasing a week earlier
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