Logic Artists sends word on their kickstartrer page that the launch of Expeditions: Conquistador is Imminent.

Hello again backers and welcome to one of the very last project updates for Expeditions: Conquistador.  The long awaited and speculated release is finally at hand, and we are very eager to deliver our release build to you all, but first, the update news:

What?

The full version of the game Expeditions: Conquistador, this very Kickstarter project is on the last leg of its amazing journey! But some of you may not know that we did a fair bit more than we promised for this game in our original goals here on KS, so you are in for an even grander gaming experience than you might be expecting!

For starters we achieved our first two stretch goals, even though we didn’t reach the stretch pledge numbers. So every time a player promotes one of their expedition members they can select from 30+ passive abilities to boost the unit in combat. Our second stretch goal also was reached, we created greater variations in character models, and further boosted the quality of the character animations as well.

We also implemented two concepts that came out of KS Backer suggestions: the Player Fortress-- which you as the player can capture and improve, and the detailed camping system which also includes ‘tinkering’ a skill in which the unit can build equipment or research expeditionary improvements.

We also implemented something that we really wanted to do as well, a Multi-player skirmish mode. And while we got some negative feedback for it, if you enjoy the game, and enjoy the combat, you will most likely also enjoy the PvP. It is available in two modes oldschool Hot-seat (taking turns on the same computer, like back in the days before the internet), and TCP/IP which will allow you to play with a friend on a different computer, whether you are on Windows, Mac, or Linux system.

It has been a long and exciting road, we want to thank you for being such helpful and supportive backers, it is with your shared thoughts and feedback that we’ve been able to complete this project. Expeditions: Conquistador is something we are very proud of and we hope you enjoy it.

Where?

Expeditions: Conquistador will be available on all of the distribution channels we asked you to choose from earlier in the project, that includes GoG, Desura, and GamersGate but we are also pleased to announce that leaving Steam Greenlight and partnering with bitComposer has got us now on Steam as well. While hints have been made to that end throughout various discussionary forums around the web (including here), we wanted to wait until we had the SDK in our hands before we started getting too excited. The good news is that our preliminary work with it has taken quite nicely to our code and we’re ready to announce a release date.

But before that, Steam is decidedly not DRM-free and that may not matter to some of you but it does matter to others, so we are offering a Steam key to each of you our backers who pledged 15 dollars and up on top of the GoG, Desura, or GamersGate option you selected in the Backers Survey. If you would like a Steam key simply private message us using your kickstarter account with tagline ‘Steam ID’, send us your actual steamID in that message, and we will send a key directly to the Steam account you message to us once the keys are generated. This should prevent any of you who want a Steam version but don’t want to publicly lose your anti-DRM street cred. here on Kickstarter from being found out-- if that type of thing is of particular importance to you. To be double clear, you will be getting a DRM-free key to one of these three sites: GoG, Desura, and GamersGate, and if you want a Steam key write to us, we will send you one of those as well.

Back to more news, bitComposer is doing more than just putting us on Steam, they have also offered to help with regionalizing and distribution in Russia (and perhaps Germany if all goes well), this is terrific news for us all as we don’t have the manpower or resources ourselves to do a proper Russian or German translation. We also have provided a tool for users to play with their own translations if they want to (some people requested this feature), the readme file explaining the process is included in the game build.

When?

The long awaited release date: May 30, 2013 (Which is before the end of Q2 by a whole month!). Once the game is up on the various distribution sites we will be able to generate the redeem codes for each of you based on the platform you chose already in the survey.

GameBanshee has posted a preview of the soon to be released The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing.

The interface for Van Helsing is about what you would expect for an action role-playing game. The camera gives you an isometric view of your surroundings, and the left mouse button does the bulk of the work, allowing you to move, attack, and pick up loot. You can also use the right mouse button for a secondary skill, press the Q key to quaff a healing potion (all of the healing potions are the same, so a single key is enough), press the R key to switch between melee and ranged attacks, and press the shift key to attack without moving.

What you do in Van Helsing, for the most part, is kill stuff. During the early part of the campaign, you encounter bandits, werewolves, mechanical men (who look a lot like British redcoats), harpies, and more. You also talk to people to pick up quests and purchase equipment, which sometimes requires you to make decisions. For example, at the end of one quest, I had to make a choice about killing or freeing a werewolf. I decided to let him go, and later I got a reward because of it. I also saw some places where I had to choose what to do with quest items, where different actions give different rewards.

So far I'd say that The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing looks pretty good.  I liked the theme of the game, with fighting evil creatures in dark caves and forests, and I also enjoyed the rapport between Van Helsing and Katarina, who have amusing conversations with each other.  I didn't see much of the main storyline (you receive a plea for help from somebody in Borgova, but I was still on my way there when the preview build ended), and so your ultimate goal in the game is still a mystery, but I'm optimistic that it will be fun and surprising based on the writing samples I've seen so far.  Look for Van Helsing to be released at the end of this month

Full Control is back with the next update for Jagged Alliance: Flashback. The game is half funded with 13 days left.

Community Efforts

The community is hard at work and have several competitions and initiatives going to promote our campaign.

The success of the campaign will be determined by getting more backers. So every community driven effort counts. We are very happy about every little push you give.

BIG thanks from here!!!!

Steam

Steam Group

You can join the new steam group created by the community, in order to get a shot at receiving free steam key for the game once the game has been released, the more people in the group the more keys to give away!

Bear’s Pit initiatives

Merc One-liner

"Write a Merc One-Liner and Win a $220 Pledge", sponsored by galf and open to all JA:F backers (and only backers). All you need to participate is a bit of inspiration and a screenshot of your pledge sent to gdalf's inbox. If you already pledged more than $220 you can always gift the goodie bag to a friend. Let's not make gdalf feel like his effort and money went unappreciated, ok?

BIG BAD BEAR meme

The "BIG BAD BEAR meme thread (with an occasional hamster snack)" creativity contest that we're running in order to provide social network memes for those who need to plug the game (or just have a laugh). Even FC tried their hand at this http://imgur.com/yJi4X3e

BioWare programmer Owen Borstad has a new post on the official BioWare blog to explain how he created a  Qunari logo/symbol from the Dragon Age series.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing with sizes, trying to figure out how big I wanted it, at what size to print it out, etc. I made a smaller version as a prototype, which looked decent even if I didn’t finish it (I don’t have a picture of this; it was destroyed in one of my trips to and from work). After making the prototype, I discovered I had it backwards (inside out), as I didn’t want my numbers to show when I finished making it, so I fixed that up, then re-exported and re-imported.

I finally decided how big to make it so as to fit on the wall, and saved out a PDF of the exploded structure (see PDF). I printed it on 11×17 Cardstock Ledger paper, and started cutting it out. I had to score the thing backwards to what the PDF said to do to keep the lines and numbers on the “inside” of the structure.

After gluing the back all together with thinly spread white glue and cutting/scoring every piece, I finally started assembling it. It turned out that gluing the “boxes” and then gluing to the back was the easiest way to put it together, and so I eventually finished gluing to the back, then worked on “zipping” the model together.

After a total of about 30 hours, I finally finished it, and cut a circular hole in the back by which to hang it, re-enforced the hole, and stuck it on the wall with a pushpin. And that’s how I came to be the prince of… oh, wrong story, anyway, that’s how I made the giant logo! I might do another one if I feel like it, or go do something completely different for my next project.

Edge has a new article on the founder of the Nexus Mod sites Robin Scott.

Scott got into the game website business when he was 15, and had built and sold two networks by the time the Nexus was rebranded in 2007. He is now 26. In the eyes of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, he is his company’s fifth employee, alongside four programmers: two for the site and two for Nexus Mod Manager, an increasingly invaluable tool for all but the most hardcore modder.

“But I don’t really see myself as an employee,” he says. “I reply to all the private messages and emails because I want to keep the site going. As soon it becomes a pain, or I stop enjoying games, I think there might be an issue, but it’s not. I’ve got three monitors in front of me. I’ve got shares running down the left-hand side of my monitor, because I do quite a lot of the share market. A lot of people say that I must be doing pretty well. And the Nexus does do pretty well, but the money it does pretty well with just goes right back into hiring more people and buying more servers.”

Scott blogs regularly about the trials and tribulations of running such a bandwidth-hungry monster without totally selling out. Things have certainly improved since the days when the sites would regularly crash, keeping him up in the dead of night restarting MySQL. Nowadays, bedtime is just after 2am, taking him past US peak time, and breakfast is at around 10:30am, after which he gets right back into the routine. He starts by checking emails and private messages, most concerned with site registration delays and the like, and three hours later he talks to the programmers.

“They’ll show me what they’ve been doing, and I’ll try to show them what I think it should look like. I’m working on a few new designs for the Nexus sites right now. Every once in a while I’ll dabble in the code, but it’s so far above me now that I can’t just bring up a PHP file and start editing away. It just looks like Japanese to me,” he admits.

“Steam Workshop’s been great for a lot of things, but if you look at the Valve games, they’re making games like Dota 2 that they’ll give away for free, then they’re making so much money on those microtransactions. The one thing I do buy is the subscriptions to the tournaments; that’s brilliant, I really love that idea. But if you look at TF2 and Dota 2, it’s not the modding you and I know. It’s not the modding Nexus does. It’s a completely controlled, exclusive-to-Steam modding where they get to choose the mods that go on their service based on how well they think it will sell.

“If you say to mod authors that they can start making money out of their mods, are they going to be inclined to share their secrets, the stuff that they found that makes modding easier? That makes it great? Or are they going to hold on to it, because [that] means fewer people are doing what they’re doing? The general dilemma we’ve got with modding at the moment, with what Valve are trying to do, is that people are now competing financially with other people and are going to be a lot less helpful.”

Edge has an interview with Elder Scrolls Online’s game director Matt Firor.

The last few years haven’t been kind to traditional MMOGs. What, in your mind, is the key to bucking that trend?

The biggest single thing you can do to ensure your MMOG is successful is take your time and do it right. You only have one chance to launch, [so] you’ve got to make sure that you have a full range of features for a full range of people. I like to think of it more as we’re making a world that we want people to live in. Yes, there’s a game there, but there’s a lot of games in the game. We want to make sure there’s just a ton of stuff for you to do.

There will be players whose first Elder Scrolls game was Skyrim and whose expectations have been set by that game. How do you communicate the ways in which you’re different?

Well, we exist in the same universe. We’re making an Elder Scrolls game, but we’re not making Skyrim 2. So I think the Skyrim guys had that same problem when they went from Oblivion to Skyrim: “Your last thing was Oblivion, how could you possibly top that?” We’re not trying to ‘top’ Skyrim. [It’s] a fantastic game – if you wanted to play Skyrim, go play Skyrim, right?

What is your relationship with the Elder Scrolls community? Could it be improved?

I think that the reaction that we had when we announced the game was more about having heard game developers say things about games for a long time and then [not seeing] what they were talking about. A lot of the mixed reaction that we got was [aimed] in that direction. It wasn’t necessarily about Elder Scrolls. There was some of that, but mostly it was, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard of [action-based] combat systems, we’ve heard that. We get into the game and it’s the same old thing.’ We want people to get in and play. We’re not going to sit them down and give them a presentation, they’re just going to sit down and play it.

Was the decision to add a firstperson mode based on public demand?

Yes and no. We always knew it was something players were going to want. We couldn’t actually do it – and we’re still in the process of doing it – because when you have other players seeing your character from a different distance from where you’re seeing it, a lot of systems have to be designed. We needed to make sure we had the thirdperson working first, not just because it was your camera, but because it’s how everyone else sees you in the world. But we’ve known for a long time that we were going to do it.

Modder trancemaster has released a new version of his Morrowind Rebirth mod for Morrowind. Those interested can download the mod from here.

And here is the complete changelog for this latest version of Morrowind Rebirth:

Rebirth Fixes

* Rebalanced the lengths’ (again) of the spears. The reach of the spears should differ depending on the length of the spear (in-game mesh size), something which I didn’t take into account the last time.
* Dren Plantation fixes. A tree were floating, an overhang were clipping through the wall and a lamp pole and its lantern hung in mid air.
* Golam Urellas’s and Fairne’s shacks’ had the wrong script attached to the doors, making it impossible to enter either of them.
* The door Chun-Ook (The big ship in Ebonheart) had the wrong teleport marker (took you to the Ashlands).
* Changed “Jhamondile Dremon’s home” to “Jhamondile Dremon’s House”, also fixed some floaters inside.
* Somehow I managed to remove the travel-markers for the Slave Market in Suran, all fixed now.
* Moved the travel-marker outside Vivec, it displayed “Ascadian Isles” instead of “Vivec”.
* “Scourge”, a Daedric Battle Axe were restored. Enchantment/Model was missing.
* Llaala Girendal & Rleno Medan, Ald-ruhn Temple had no assigned head meshes.
* Jhamondile Dremon, a imperial In Caldera were incorrectly set as a trader.
* Fixed a typo which made it super-expensive to use the MG travel-service.
* Several fixes and improvements to the Imperial Legion Barracks, Caldera.
* The Black Goblet in Suran had the wrong script attached to the doors.
* Reduced the cost for elemental shields (nerf from previous change).
* Tarvyn Faren, a dumner at Vivec Entrance had duplicate records.
* Corrected a missplaced door on top of Lighthouse in Ebonheart.
* Removed Skooma bottles and Nordic Mead from Shenk’s Shovel.
* Silver Katana was changed from Two-Handed to One-Handed.
* Fixed the ground at the entrance of the “Eight Plates”.
* Added ownership to all lanterns in Caldera/Pelagiad.
* Dwemer weapons are no longer refered as “Dwarven”.
* Removed some script fixes (not needed due to MPP).
* Fixed a typo in “Drunk Dumner”, to “Drunk Dunmer”.
* “Templar Shield” to “Imperial Templar Shield”.
* Fixed a floating doorframe in Shenk’s Shovel.
* Anti-cloned the Buoyant Armigers’, Ghostgate.
* Removed 2 missplaced doors, Ald-ruhn Temple.

 

Rebirth Additions
* A major overhaul for Ebonheart. The inner courtyard have been redesign along with better visuals for the main plaza.
* Better sorting for some misc items. Example: Wooden items have “Wooden” prefix, “Wooden Bowl”, Silverware items have “Silverware” prefix, “Silverware Knife” etc.
* A minor overhaul for Balmora. Removed a massive amount of rocks around Balmora to make it more fps friendly.
* A minor overhaul for Seyda Neen. Mainly landscape improvements.
* Anti-cloned Imperial Guards (most of them anyway).
* Better name-prefixes for potions.

CD Projekt RED has finally relesed the REDkit Mod tool. The mod tools are available for free on its official website. At this point in time you need a password and username just to download the mod tools.

Projekt RED announces the launch of REDkit, the ultimate set of tools for crafting non-linear role-playing adventures. Available for free via http://thewitcher.com/redkit, REDkit is based on the development tools used to create CD Projekt RED's award-winning game, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing launches on Steam on May 22, 2013, and GamingNexus has a two hour gameplay session of the game live on Twich.tv. Keep in my mind were I live it's still May 9th for at least 8 more hrs.

Beginning at 9:00 EST tonight, we’ll be streaming a two hour gameplay session of the game live on Twich.tv. I am going to build a new character, from scratch and give you some insight on the first couple hours of the game. We’ll be fielding questions in the chat section of the feed as well and will do our best to answer them. Come check it out tonight!

Ghost of a Tale developer Lionel Gallat, who is currently running a campaign on IndieGoGo, has been interviewed by Rock paper Shotgun.

RPS: Let’s talk in a bit more detail about the game. What sort of game is it going to be, and what can we expect from it?

Gallat: You play as a little mouse. This mouse gets to an island and this island is populated by undead rats. Something has happened on the island that is not normal. You came to the island for a reason, though, and you have a quest, which is to get to the tower of Periclave, which is the name of the island itself. That’s the underlying struggle. When you get to the island you start to discover what had happened there, and why it happened. I think it will not be too much of a spoiler if I say you are going to meet a ghost. You are going to help him, somehow. It’s really about exploration, about discovering things, and it is not at all focused on combat. In the alpha trailer there is a moment where you get some kind of a weapon and start whacking at the rats, and that was fun to do, but it does not reflect the gameplay that I have in mind. It is about stealth. The mouse is not powerful at all, and it is engaged in a very dangerous adventure, it is perilous, and so it is really a game about exploiting this fact, not about fighting through enemies that are twice your size.

RPS: Can you talk about those gameplay mechanic ideas at all?

Gallat: Well there will be puzzles in the sense that you need to find your way through the island. There will be some mechanics and mechanisms which involve discovering things that are not of use at first sight, but when you look, really look, you find out their purpose. There is also going to be a good deal of stealth, and avoiding of confronting enemies directly, because that is not going to work. Indirect methods of confronting enemies will be important. We will have quests and objectives of course, but I think of it more like an adventure than like a Dark Souls or something.

In a new blog Jay Barnson shares his ideas on how Frayed Kinghts 2 can be made more social, withou it turning into a social game.

Sometimes, with a single-player CRPG (especially for a guy like me, who often doesn’t finish a game until a year or more after it’s “current”), it’s a pretty lonely experience. Not that I usually mind – I gravitate towards these kinds of games because there are times I really just want to enjoy an adventure all by myself. Unless I am stumped or stuck and looking for a solution, I tend to ignore any community of players out there.  But other times, I really like to hunt down a forum or something and see what other people are saying about the game, especially if it leads me to better understand the game or the possibilities for enjoyment. That’s something I’d like to foster, but it’s really hard to do in a little indie game. If you assume that only 1% of the players are predisposed to take that kind of initiative and contribute to the discussion, that’s not a lot of people.

It’d be nice if the game itself made it easy. And, to be honest, it’d probably help sales if the game made it easy for players to broadcast to their social networks that they are playing the game and doing exciting stuff. However, I grew pretty disgusted by all the Facebook & Twitter messages from certain games announcing the discovery of a certain flower or rock in a game I don’t give a crap about. That’s “doing it wrong,” in my opinion. Decent idea, poor implementation, maybe. Bombarding friends with stuff like that isn’t a good idea.

I especially don’t want the experience ruined by having out-of-game notifications pop up while playing, inviting you to broadcast something or to visit a website or any crap like that. Then again, these days, certain people seem to enjoy nothing more than posting status updates everywhere they go and with everything that happens to them in the real world, so maybe that’s not so bad. I really don’t know.

From my perspective, I feel like when I’m playing a CRPG, I want to be sucked into the game completely, so that the outside world disappears for a couple of hours. That includes little real-world reminders popping up or out-of-game achievement announcements or any of that crap. That’s my ideal player experience. Maybe not all players are like that. But I think that later, when a player is finished for the night, or has a minute during a lunch break at work, or is waiting to pick up your kids from dance practice, or after the game is completed but for fond memories, the game world can still there, with a network of other players to share it with.

Greenlit Gaming interviewed Anne and Ville Mönkkönen the creeators of Driftmoon.

Something I didn’t expect from Driftmoon was to enjoy it in a manner similar to a really good book. I found the characters to be quirky and the dialogue charming! What made you decide to create a game with such an emphasis on its written elements?

Anne: Thanks! Wonderful to hear you’ve found similarities between Driftmoon and a good book. One of the benefits of working together has been the fact that we’re usually not short on ideas when we get the chance to toss them around together. That means we had a lot of stories to tell. Both of us also enjoy reading good books (when possible), and playing story-heavy games, so it felt natural for the first game we did together to put an emphasis on the adventure, and the story.

Ville: To me the most important part of a roleplaying game is the story and the characters, so that’s where we’ve put most of our development time into. We had a lot of fun writing all the dialogue, I’m definitely going to miss that. First one of us would write a rough draft, then each of us would go through it taking turns revising the dialogue, and playing with the kids.

The story in Driftmoon isn’t your typical “dark and scary tale” often seen in games nowadays. In fact, it’s often quite the opposite! What kind of reaction do you hope players get from the story?

Anne: I’d really like Driftmoon to be a feel-good game, a game that would leave you smiling, so it’s always awesome to hear playing Driftmoon’s managed to brighten up someone’s day. I know that’s what I’m hoping for the most. Calling Driftmoon the cure for depression might be a tiny exaggeration, but that would be a pretty remarkable achievement for a psychologist, don’t you think?

Ville: My favorite feedback is: “Playing your game is like being wrapped in a warm blanket with a cup of hot cocoa on a cold winter night.”

Last week an update came available for Legends of Eisenwald that informed us that patch 0.85 is out and tha the first stage of beta has been concluded, with these being the highlights of that patch:

• French translation added; 
• Quest journal significantly expanded - quests are marked on the mini map and tabs for all, completed and not completed quests are shown correctly;

• Personal items are displayed in the info window of a character; 
• Added calculations of payment for mercenaries and units without castle support; 
• The cost of hiring depends on the relationship to buildings owners; 
• Skills are displayed in the info window of a character; 
• Added icons of a character’s hiring status (mercenary units, followers, regular units with castle support have no icons).

They also could use more votes to get greenlighted on Steam.

According to Flixist Warner Bros. is going to make a new film series about the fantasy role-playing tabletop game, Dungeons & Dragons. This is not the first time a D&D movie was made for the big screen.

Warner Bros. is set to develop a feature film franchise revolving around the fantasy role-playing tabletop game, Dungeons & Dragons. And before you ask, yes there was a previous Dungeons & Dragons that was made back in 2000 starring various actors such as Marlon Wayans, Jeremy Irons, and Thora Birch. Let’s just that it is a very, very bad movie.

Regardless, it seems that Warner Bros. is set on restarting the film franchise with a script from screenwriter David Leslie Johnson (Wrath of the Titans). Producing the film will be Roy Lee (Oldboy, How to Train Your Dragon) and Courtney Solomon who produced and directed the original Dungeons & Dragons. Also jumping on board is Allan Zeman who served as the executive producer of Dungeons & Dragons will be the executive producer for this as well. I believe there is a trend developing here and it isn’t a good one.

Hopefully Warner Bros. knows what they are getting into.

[via Collider]

It seems Lord British wants your help renaming the tier titles for new and old backers.

Greetings and Salutations!

Lord British has a request to make of you, his Royal Subjects.  We are in the process of defining the new titles for new tiers and would like your input!  Our current thoughts are to add the prefix Royal to many of the Kickstarter only titles, making the basic title available to any new pre-launch pledges.  We would like to know what you think of that!

And then, there are a few titles that just didn’t seem to work with the Royal Prefix, like Lord (and have been left blank in the chart below).  So we would like some feedback as to what titles should be given to new backers for those tiers.

We are also open to considering new names for the existing tiers.  For example, during the Kickstarter campaign, some players suggested that “Lord of the Manor” be changed to “Archduke”.  So if you have any suggestions for alternate titles, now is the time to share your feedback!

Please leave your feedback in the comments, or preferably on the forums in the following thread: Community Feedback Request for New Tier Titles.

Snowbird Games continue their bug-fixing for Eador: Masters of the Broken World. The update can be downloaded using the game's auto-update utility. Here is the list of changes.

Fixed:

— ‘Endless siege’ bug.
— Berserk barbarian animation caused the game to crash.
— Selected building is not correctly highlighted in the city screen.
— Effects bug of ‘A portal to Chaos’ event.
— Battle starts before some of the dialogues are over.
— Capitals generating on neutral terrain types.
— AI controlled hero doesn’t attack the castle’s garrison while it’s under siege.
— Delays in selection, giving orders and showing tooltip for units.
— Problem with necromancy skill and hero information display after the battle.
— Inability to sell an item in some cases.
— Bug that caused heroes to receive new skills and parameters earlier than intended.
— Attack of the enemy castle with no units in the garrison.
— Bug with provinces capturing where defenders could become guards in some cases.
— Karma transfer from the shard map to the astral.
— Killing a skeleton during a battle could cause the game to crash.
- Added information display of other players’ spent points.
- Updated prices for units, spells and items.
- Improved chat.

Well this time we have a small preview of NeverWinter from GameSkinny. The writer is not happy with the game and writes why.

Everything in Neverwinter feels empty and useless.

The truth is that the game feels hollow. A fun combat system can't make up for a lack of depth, nor can it make up for a game-and-business model that aims to squeeze as much from the player as possible. Cryptic deserves no praise in this release.

I've played around 60 to 70 hours of the game since open beta began, and I'm still not clear why the standard copper, silver, and gold currency is included in the game at all. While there are certainly several items you can purchase from NPCs with gold, often you can get those same items with Astral Diamonds.

Astral Diamonds are, in practice, the game's primary currency. You use them to exchange for Zen (cash shop currency), buy and sell things on the auction house, and some items can only be bought with Astral Diamonds. Identification scrolls are one example that is completely baffling. Aren't they common enough to just keep to gold currency? Why should I spent my hard-earned diamonds on identification scrolls, when every other supply can be purchased with gold?

The above is not to say that the Astral Diamond currency isn't common, but you need such massive amounts for anything worthwhile that I just feel like I'm being ripped off in-game.

I got 600k for purchasing a founder's pack, but that 600k's worth is undeniably low in-game. It costs 300k to 600k on the auction house to buy a bag. A bag! And let me tell you, those people selling bags on the AH didn't get them from playing the game, they got them from the cash shop. How is this good, non-predatory game design?

It's hard not to feel like Cryptic and Perfect World Entertainment are taking us all for a ride. Their reputations in this field speak for themselves, and sadly Neverwinter has not proven to be the exception to the rule. The PvP is fun, but it's not fun enough to justify the mess that is the rest of the game. There is simply no excuse for the game's lack of depth, distinct void of challenge, or currency clusterbang.

The game had and has a lot of potential, but as it is now Neverwinter is not worth playing or investing even a few hours of time into. Five days in, I already found myself regretting the purchase of the Guardian of Neverwinter pack. This is not worthy of being related to Dungeons and Dragons, even the bastard child that is 4th Edition. If this is where the MMORPG genre is going, I think I may have to take a hiatus.

EA and Bioware annnouced that Star Wars: The Old Republic has more than doubled it's income since going F2P. Polygon has all the details.

Monthly average revenue for Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare's massively multiplayer online role-playing game, has more than doubled and subscriptions have increased since adopting the free-to-play model last year, Electronic Arts president of labels Frank Gibeau revealed in an earning's call today.

EA announced that the MMO would adopt a free-to-play model last July, and the transition took place in November 2012. Since then, Gibeau said the game has grown significantly.

"Since it was induced in November, we've added more than 1.7 million new players on the free model to the service," Gibeau said. "And the number of subscriptions has stabilized at just under half a million.

"The really interesting thing that's happening inside the service right now is monthly average revenue for the game has more than doubled since we introduced the free-to-play option. And as we look forward, we're going to continually invest in new content for the service and for players every six weeks or so."

Techland's new game Hellraid looks to recapture the magic of '90s PC gaming. To showcase their ambitions Techland has released a small trailer. Eurogamer has a small article with more information also.

Bethesda Softworks announced their schedule at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2013.

Bethesda will be showcasing their recently announced projects The Evil Within and Wolfenstein: The New Order, as well as The Elder Scrolls Online. However only Wolfenstein: The New Order and The Elder Scrolls Online will be playable at Bethesda's booth.

The presentation and playing the games at the booth should take an average of 2 hours. 

For those attending E3 the booth number and hourly booth appointment time are as follow:

Bethesda Softworks Booth Number: 523, South Hall

Hourly Booth Appointment Times:

Tuesday, June 11:

12:00pm; 1:00pm; 2:00pm; 3:00pm; 4:00pm & 5:00pm

Wednesday, June 12:

10:00am; 11:00pm; 12:00pm; 1:00pm; 2:00pm; 3:00pm; 4:00pm & 5:00pm 

Thursday, June 13:

10:00am; 11:00pm; 12:00pm; 1:00pm; 2:00pm; 3:00pm & 4:00pm

RockPaperShotgun has a new article on Obsidian, and how they still want to work on another StarWars RPG. 

We now live in a world where The Sims: Star Wars or Need for Speed: Tosche Station could become things. I’m not saying it’s likely (though the former would not shock me in the slightest), but Star Wars is under new management, so who knows? For now, all we can say for sure is that BioWare, DICE, and Visceral are actively adding their own chapters to the space opera, but we won’t see results from those initial efforts until at least mid-2014 – and much later, in all likelihood.

You’ll remember, however, that Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II developer Obsidian also has a rather ambitious idea floating around, and – last we heard – it was about to lay it before the greatest Sith Lord of them all: Mickey Mouse. So then, what happened there? And where does Obsidian’s new Star Wars RPG end up now that EA’s pulling the strings? I got in touch with Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart to find out.

First up, Disney. Turns out, the developer never actually ventured into the hallowed halls of the House of Mouse. The reason? Things were simply too unstable at the time.

“As for Disney, we didn’t end up talking with them directly, since we were waiting to see what might happen with the license as a whole,” Urquhart explained to RPS.

Now, however, all the pieces have fallen into place, and Urquhart’s ready to see if there’s room for Obsidian in EA’s master plan.

“We are certainly going to try,” he said. “We would love to work on another Star Wars game, and if it was possible for us to hook up with BioWare and EA to do so, that would be pretty amazing.”

In this post-funding Kickstarter update for Original Sin more information on scripting is presented.

In this moving pictures part of the update, Bert, our resident script guru, explains how it is possible to implement "generic behaviours" that affect all npcs in the game world, and thus increase the amount of reactions they have. He gives a bunch of examples of what you can do with Osiris, the scripting language used in Divinity: Original Sin, just to get you thinking of all the things you could be doing with it.

In other words - characters in Divinity: Original Sin react.

There is also information on Paypal closing soon:

Paypal pledging is still possible but will finish this weekend, meaning that in practice it'll stay open until monday morning GMT+1. Right now the counter is at $57.596,60. 

We will add the total number of backers via paypal to calculate the size of the lair beneath the phantom forest, and at that time we'll also take stock of the amount of Facebook likes to calculate the amount of Bellegar encounters Divinity:Original Sin will feature.

And more information on precessing the pledges: and rewards

We've answered quite a lot of private messages and mails about how pledges are going to be managed, and in an effort to save our fingers a bit, here's an overview of how we envision things will work:

• All backers (Kickstarter+Paypal) will receive an account at The Larian Vault

• Your account will contain an overview of your rewards
• If we need information from you to send you your rewards, you'll be able to fill it in there
• You will be able to add extra add-ons to your reward tier via The Larian Vault too. Not all add-ons will be available, but there will be quite a few. You'll also be able to upgrade your reward.

Larian Studios' Swen Vincke has penned down a new article, which this time is about the press attention (or lack thereof) in their Kickstarter campaign, the effort it took them and the quality of (p)reviews in general, concluding that it is better to be selective in where you devote your attention to.

Anyway, it was observations like the above one that lead me to conclude that we should start screening who we show the game to, and review the quality of their articles, prior to actually demonstrating the game to them. In the past I abstained from doing that, even when I wanted to know, but now I think it’s good practice. We’ve been perhaps too eager for attention past, and happy to show our creative babies to anybody who passed by. That delivered us some good but also quite a lot ofbad results, the most memorable one being PC Gamer UK giving Divine Divinity 56% wheras their US sister magazine gave it 84% and later put it in their top 100 games of all times. The irony

Perhaps there’s another more focussed approach that might yield more benefits. I remain intrigued by the click-through numbers in our Kickstarter campaign and the link between article appearing/pledge counter increasing. It was clear who had what impact, and the results were very counter-intuitive, at least to my traditional view of games media.

To give you an example – There exists no such thing as IGN, the person. There’s only Joe, John and Daisy working at IGN reviewing and previewing games. If there’s a John who like turn-based fantasy RPG’s and played several of them, it makes sense to show him Divinity: Original Sin, if his editor will let him.

But if Joe, John and Daisy think the world ends with Assassin’s Creed and Battlefield, then perhaps we should not send a version to them, because nothing good can come from it.  You wouldn’t offer mushroom-only dishes to a gourmet critique who hates mushrooms and is the editor of “fabulous cooks that don’t use mushrooms monthly” either.

The Legends of Dawn devs bring us news that their game has over 140 achievements and that this will be fully integrated with Steam (although it also works off-line). In addition there is also news on voice-overs and the beta.

As we informed you on March 20th we got Steam SDK and beside working on voice overs we were studying that stuff. So over the course of last few weeks we have revamped Achievement system. This is mainly due to the fact that now we have access to Steam systems. We are striving to make the game as compatible with Steam as we can. This, however, does not mean that non-Steam players will lack anything. All achievements are available in off-line mode as well.

Our upgraded Achievements panel had three categories with 7 achievements in each category. After these new upgrades we have implemented over 20 achievement categories with more than 142 different achievements. We hope this will make better playing experience for all our players.

Some of these achievements are quite easy to complete and some are really difficult. Some of them even require that you play the game multiple times.

We'd like to hear in comments section about experiences that you had with Steam achievements (particularly with single player RPGs).

And on the beta:

Yet another unexpected and important job is in front of us; Many backers requested the game through GoG and we were already in discussions with them about releasing Legends of Dawn on their platform. However they request that the game should be playable 100% in off-line mode. Legends of Dawn isn't online game however we built it in a such a way that the game requests an IP so the computer has to be connected to router when starting the game. Afterwards the connection isn't needed however this is a limitation that they do not want so as soon as we test the achievement system we'll work on that.

Originally we planned to release the beta as soon as we test all VOs, however expansion of the achievement system and planned work on GoG's request are core features that have to be a part of beta testing so we'll first do all that and then we'll have to learn how to publish the beta through Steam to a selected few testers.

Project Eternity has a new post-funding update that shows concept art, and gives information on the monk class.

                 

Monks in Eternity are different than you might expect. There are no restrictions on armor and weapons – you could wear plate and use a sword, if you wanted to, and the talent system is flexible enough so you could build a great monk that specialized in that gear. But at the core of this class is a little rule about how monks take damage. You see, when a monk gets hit, only part of the damage is inflicted on him or her immediately. The rest is redirected to a Wound, which is an effect that causes damage over time (called a DoT effect) to the monk. That slowly-ticking Wound would only seem to be delaying the inevitable result except for one thing: the monk can get rid of that Wound by using special attacks.

The monk gets all kinds of cool special attacks that do extra effects beyond simply damage and, as a side effect, also eliminate his Wounds. Some of their special attacks include:

• Torment’s Reach - this ability increases the range of melee attacks by 200% for a short duration. Enemies between the monk and his or her target are also attacked. Costs 1 Wound to activate.

• Turning Wheel - if the monk suffers from a DoT effect (including Wounds ticking down), he or she adds a proportional fire bonus to his or her melee damage. This is a passive ability which works automatically whenever the monk has any DoT effect.

• Clarity of Agony - when used, this ability cuts the duration of hostile status effects in half. It lasts for a brief amount of time, halving both incoming effects and ones that are currently on the monk. Costs 2 Wounds.

Each of these attacks makes monks stronger in battle, and many also consume their Wounds, hopefully before those Wounds have done the damage the monks were originally supposed to take.

Culture Concept

Concept artist Kaz Aruga has been developing the look of some of Project Eternity's various cultures. So far, he's created concepts for people from the Dyrwood, the Vailian Republics, the Aedyr Empire, and the Valley of Ixamitl. We hope you like the range we've come up with. Let us know what you think!

Nukapedia talked with Erik Dellums who is best known for his role as "Three Dog". They talk about "That dog gone tweet", Fallout 3, and much more.