SPOTLIGHT
- NEW SITE!Welcome to our newly designed
website created by our very own Yorick.
There's been a big reshuffle and lots of
new content added so check it all out!
The team behind the total conversion Off Limits have released a very fresh new website, featuring some very impressive new gameplay videos as well as a call for playtesters. They've also posted an update on their progress, including the addition of a talented sound designer to their team and some information on how the level development is going.
Hope you enjoy it and I hope you get a slight feel of the game play and its cool features, it’s great fun so far (can’t stress that enough :p ). We can always use more dedicated playtesters as well, so if you are interested in giving feedback and helping us test the mod on Sunday’s 8pm (gmt +1) please register on our forum and PM Keats, he’ll set you up!
To see the new gameplay video and more information about Off Limits, check out their website.
A day many of us have looked forward to is here, Decadence mod is now available for download. 'Decadence has been in development for over one and a half years by a small group of University students, and the time has finally come to unveil the mod for the rest of the community'
It's been a very
interesting experience to develop Decadence, and we're really proud of the end result. We hope you all will enjoy it as much as we did developing it! From everyone in the Decadence Development Team: Thank you for the support and patience! So, what are you waiting for? Go download Decadence, we'll see you in-game!
This is a mod we've been keeping track of for a long time and looks really good fun, I suggest everyone downloads this and tries it out. Decadence can be downloaded here on the Decadence website.
Ubisoft have jumped on the sales bandwagon and each day this week, 1 Ubisoft game will be available for a special discounted price for just 24 hours. Publisher page. I will update this post throughout the week:
In the run up to the release of Zeno Clash, ACE team have produced a small webcomic using their unique art style for fans of the title. Many of you will have pre-ordered the game available in April and this comic reflects the style the game is faithful to. Zeno Clash was recently nominated in the IGF awards for an award in '‘Excellence in Visual Art’, for which the webcomics were produced. Enjoy. Zeno Clash media | Zeno Clash on Steam.
The blog update outlines a few changes being made to Left 4 Dead, and that xbox 360 owners will fortunately be getting all updates to the game alongside the DLC which will be available on April 21st. Matching making will be seeing updates soon too:
With the upcoming release of the SDK, and the community servers already available on the PC, matchmaking is one place where the two platforms will diverge. A future blog post will detail our roadmap for PC matchmaking.
The full blog post can be found here. Also highlighted in the blog is the mention of "the update will contain a...very large, gameplay adjustment....changing to the melee mechanic in Versus", which has now been released tonight. A big change!
Introduced fatigue to the melee attack in versus mode. You will see a HUD display when your melee swing is cooling down
Boomer vomit will now pass through common infected
Addressed some surround sound detection issues
Fixed a rare crash when exiting Left4Dead on Windows Vista
Fixed a case where the complete all expert campaigns achievement was not being rewarded
We shall see how this changes Versus mode, since the smoker tongue improvement and the tank multiple target punch addition. I spoke to Chet tonight about these incremental changes to a large gameplay problem...
This isn't the last update, but we want to change things in a way that people can evaluate the change, if we change 50 things at once, we will get zero worthwhile feedback. This is also how we test internally, small changes at a time and then group them so we can understand their impact
A new set of advanced features delivered in Steamworks, headlining the new feature set is the Custom Executable Generation (CEG) technology, What is CEG you say? look below.
CEG is a customer friendly approach to anti-piracy, CEG makes unique copies of games for each user allowing them to access the application on multiple machines without install limits and without having to install root kits on their PC.
The new features also include support for in-game downloadable content (DLC) and matchmaking. The in-game DLC support allows developers to deliver new content as they choose (paid or free) from inside the game itself, allowing users to make immediate purchases and experience the new content in the same game session. The Steamworks matchmaking now includes the robust lobby system shipped and tested in Left 4 Dead.
Steamworks is a complete suite of publishing and development tools that are available free of charge to developers and publishers worldwide.
CVG is reporting that the first piece of Left 4 Dead DLC, the Survival Pack may be coming out on April 21st for the PC. CVG reveals that Microsoft has confirmed the pack for a April 21st release on the 360. Valve have previously said that the DLC will be released on the 360 and PC at the same time, so April 21st seems a safe bet.
This weekend you can buy the Oddworld series games 75% off standard prices.
Selected by the fickle finger of fate, Abe™, floor-waxer first class for RuptureFarms, was catapulted into a life of adventure when he overheard plans by his boss, Molluck the Glukkon™, to turn Abe and his fellow Mudokons into Tasty Treats as part of a last-ditch effort to rescue Molluck's failing meat-packing empire.
You can visit the Oddworld series store page here.
Until Sunday, March 29th there is a sale on all independent games on Steam. Discounts vary from 10% up to 33% on top-rated games. Games features include the highly rated Trials 2 Second Edition, World of Goo and Darwinia. This is a great chance for you to get your hands on these lovely independent games, so head over to the Indie Games Sales page to check it all out.
The upcoming title Zeno Clash by ACE team is scheduled to be released on 21st of April, however if you pre-purchase now you will be able to purchase the title for a 50% discount which lasts till Friday, March 20th at 8 pm GMT. Steam Store.
For those who aren't familiar with Zeno Clash, it is ACE Team's debut title combining action/fighting set in a punk fantasy world. The game blends first person action with up close and brutal combat made popular in third person console classics. The game uses the Source Engine. You can see our previous articles on ZC here and here.
Who knows what is in the box, and this may be nothing but an amazing video has popped up on youtube using Half-life sound effects as well as many other Combine / Citadel like references (and LOST music). See the video below, but if you want to join the internet investigation it starts with the What's in the box? website, and this picture has been found.
Looks like most other viral websites, kotaku has done further snooping behind the scenes but no one really knows yet. Even if it isn't much interesting, the video below is superbly done.
Just like Valve currently operate with all their titles, Valve games are able to be updated and bolt on extra content as downloadable content ships. Many other games available on Steam that are not developed by Valve can ship updates easily but adding new content is more difficult. This update means that in-game DLC allows developers and publishers to use their own games as a platform for selling additional content to gamers.
DLC can now be added to any game on Steam, regardless of whether it was originally purchased via Steam, at retail, or via other digital outlets. It is also a feature of Steamworks, the suite of free tools and services available to game developers and publishers. The first game to take advantage of this new in-game DLC capability is The Maw, by Twisted Pixel Games, which now has two new expansions available.
More titles sure to follow in the near future. Steam News.
You can save 66% off Red Orchestra for this weekend only on Steam. This means you can pick it up for just £2.99/$4.99/€4.99 which is an absolute bargain for this amazing mutliplayer shooter which now features 44 new Steam Achievements and a new map called "Fallen Heroes".
Quite exciting news from the blog update shows the work Valve are doing on distinguishing 'good' and 'bad' servers from the server list.
After kicking around some proposals, we came up with a simple system built around the theory that player time on a server is a useful metric for how happy the player is with that server. It's game rules agnostic, and we can measure it on our steam backend entirely from steam client data, so servers can't interfere with it. We already had this data for all the TF2 servers in the world, allowing us to try several different scoring formulas out before settling on this simple one that successfully identified good & bad servers:
New servers start with a score of 0 points
Each time a player connects to a server, it loses 15 points
For each minute the player stays on the server, it earns 1 point (up to a max of 45 points per player)
Using this system, Valve can quantify the success of servers, showing a badly stacked server with players regularly leaving a poor rating. It sounds like a system which could be really good at showing the best established community servers which are well maintained with regular admin present. See the full blog post here.
