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!
A new update has just been released for Team Fortress 2 with some interesting changes
Reworked the character loadout screens to support future features
Added the ability for players to permanently delete items from their inventory using the new Backpack menu. This does not reset achievements. Once an item has been deleted it can never be re-earned
Added the ability for players to reset their player stats using the Reset Stats button on the Stats menu. This does not reset achievements
Added a "player_teleported" game event that is sent when a player is teleported
Updated cp_junction_final to score per-capture instead of per-round. This fixes the map not working correctly with Tournament mode and the stopwatch
Scouts now drop the flag if they're carrying it when they start phasing
Good to see some extra options for stats in there. But the new backpack menu is all unknown territory still. Deleted items? What could these be?
Forum member Sliver has taken an early peek and found a 'headwear' section for each class. There is a variety such as a Sniper's hat + toothbelt, Engineer's miner helmet, Scout's batting helmet, or the Demoman's afro! See the full changelist here.
Quick update from Doug Lombardi himself, noting that xbox 360 owners will have the downloadable content on xbox Live from 2am PST or 8am GMT.
PC owners will receive the free update "later in the day" of 21st April (Today in Europe!). A quick reminder the DLC will provide 2 new versus campaigns to play, as well as the new game mode, Survival.
G4 Staff had their hands on with the new Left 4 Dead DLC "Survival Pack". They offer up around 35 minute of gameplay footage.
Survival mode takes all of the areas, 15 in all, from the original Left 4 Dead maps where you call the horde, like at the elevator in No Mercy and at the crane in Dead Air. There’s also the brand new lighthouse themed, “The Last Stand” with the apt tagline “it doesn’t end well”, because, despite being the level loaded with pills, explosives, ammo and health…well, good luck lasting long enough to use any of them. There’s no rescue in sight for Survival mode, just a never-ending flow of zombies and the crushing feeling of impending doom (or a tank beating you into the pavement). Apparently, the team at Valve hasn’t surpassed the 10 minute mark, and our fairly skilled crew topped out at a little over four minutes in Death Toll’s drains, earning a bronze and falling nearly three minutes short of a silver ranking. For comparison, my first lighthouse run relying solely on AI lasted a whopping two minutes and forty-one seconds. That’s longer than some of my attempts with human players, but don’t expect to set any records with the AI in tow.
The Resistance and Liberation team have been working hard after having taken on new faces to work with the original development team. Work is ongoing and they are looking to port the modification onto the Orange Box engine for the next release.
Recent progress by new and old developers alike has brought a renewed energy and sense of progress we hope to soon share with you all. Along with the new website design, we will also be updating the FAQ and News sections of the website
The team are looking for animators, modellers and texture artists to join the team, but in the time being, below is an example of their progress showing maps Lafiere, Carentan Causeway and Carentan. Keep up to date with the mod on the Resistance and Liberation website.
Again, we have been treated to another update on the L4D blog, this time outlining the complexities of Survival Mode, the new game play mode whereby survivors must compete against endless hoards of zombies. Survival mode will be released as a part of the free downloadable content for PC and xbox 360 on Tuesday 21st April.
Summarising the blog update, Kerry and Scott talk about making Survival Mode more than just a continuous crescendo event and making it feel like a distinctive separate game mode. Rounds will increase in difficulty over time, but just increasing zombie numbers doesn't reflect this. Pitching various events at times where they cross over controls the pacing, such as:
Mob spawn frequency
Special infected spawn frequency
Number of each type of special infected
Total number of special infected
Tank spawn frequency
Total number of tanks
Survival mode will also have 'lull' moments for teams to reload, relocate for ammo, heal or seek out new items. We won't be able to camp in these rooms as...
As ammo piles provide a unique infinite resupply for players, they tend to be in relatively less defensible positions in the Survival arenas. This means making an all important ammo run is rarely a safe proposition and requires good teamwork and planning.
Sounds like a good idea to make survival mode a real challenge. Check out the full post on the Left 4 Dead blog, including a graph showing increasing spawn frequency.
ACE Team have just released a new video of their upcoming game - Zeno Clash. This video shows some characters that you will meet on your journey throughout the game.
In this trailer we show some of the unusual characters that the player will encounter in our bizzare world. ‘The Corwid of the free’ are a group of insane people that live in the woods, where they will develop their obsessions and manias no matter how impractical or absurd these may be.
There is an interesting update on the Left 4 Dead blog, discussing how Valve came to the distinct green box art for L4D that we all recognise.
Jeremy Bennett, an artist working for Valve takes us through 5 previous revisions of the box art explaining why they did not work based on colour schemes, being too cluttered and characters being too dominant. Although not obvious initially, quite a bit of thought went into the finished product. Blog post link.
The penultimate box art was a right hand, which was eventually changed to a left hand to visually represent the full title, as said in the blog. When we posted the right handed box art in July 2008, Escape was ahead of us all!
E.Y.E is a new game scheduled for release in the not too distant future developed by Streum On Studio. The game is actually a hybrid of a first person shooter and a role playing game and is being developed on the Source engine.
The story takes place in a dark future that has seen unending wars between the Federation - a several worlds union, and the Metastreumonic Force - an ancient and mysterious power. The player, travelling through a solo campaign in which FPS and RPG merge into one set, must fight the coming back Metastreumonic Force, but also help the Federation to take control again.
E.Y.E will ship with a singleplayer, multiplayer and co-op mode, and it looks really promising. Check out the trailer below. The title will most likely be available on Steam later this year. Streum On Studio website.
Capcom's new game Flock has arrived onto Steam and is available for just £11.99/$14.99.
Flock sees you controlling a UFO with the mission of guiding a group of sheep to their destination in accross more than 50 levels. There is a 2-player co-op mode, realistic physics and a level editor. Check out the store page for more details.
The well known mod, No More Room in Hell fell off the map not long ago, after being in development for 5 years. However, a more solid core team have joined their ranks in order to bring the zombie apocolypse mod back to life. The mod is a total conversion based on the Half-life 2 Source engine and promises to bring lots of fun game modes, non-linear maps and an array of fun weapons.
The good news doesn't stop there. No More Room in Hell will be available for download as an open beta before Summer 2009 and L4DMods.com will follow the progress with a hawk's eye. The open beta will feature the mod's first gametype, called Survival Barricade which is a mixture of Left 4 Dead's Survival Mode and Call of Duty: World at War's pathetic excuse of a Zombie game mode. The Survival Barricade will have up to 8 players spread randomly in a map, they then have to find each other and see how long they can survive a never ending torrent of zombies hungry for brains and flesh while barricading the doors and windows of their shelter with whatever they can find around them
The team are also looking for animators and technical artists to aid development. You can get more information and updates every Sunday on the NMRiH website.
Valve just announced in a new post in Team Fortress 2 official blog, that the Sniper update is shaping up to be the largest Team Fortress 2 update with multiple new maps and a bunch of gameplay tweaks, and no it's not gonna include that pee jar it was an April Fool joke, get over it.
The next class pack will focus on the Sniper. It's actually shaping up to be the largest TF2 update yet, with multiple new maps and a bunch of gameplay tweaks. In addition, we've got another update in the works that should be done before the Sniper, and that one will include some new content for all classes.
They also revealed that there is an update that should be done before the Sniper update, and that one will include some new content for all classes.
The XBox 360 update is still being worked on, and if you're wondering what's taking so long...
The original version of TF2 in the Orange Box was very close to the XBox's memory limit, and all the additional TF2 content we've produced has pushed well beyond it. We've found a couple of nifty ways to get back a bunch of that memory, but it's turned out to be a lot of work, and that's what most of our time is being spent on. In the meantime, we're going to get a code update out to address the server cheating that's going on.
What kind of Unlockables do you think we will have?
In a recent post in the Left 4 Dead official blog, Valve revealed that Team-based Versus Matching is coming soon as a new feature for the matchmaking system.
Support for third-party campaigns is also coming along with the SDK.
To support the SDK, we are extending the matchmaking system to allow for third party campaigns. We will be adding extra features so players will be able to find dedicated servers running the campaigns they have installed. They will also be able to see friends playing third party campaigns, and be directed to download them as necessary. Another major feature we are planning to add to the matchmaking system at a future date is team-based Versus matching. This will allow two teams of four to locate each other and compete in a Versus match.
We are also revamping our player matching based on skill level. Currently the system tries to match people with the same skill level and best pings together. We will be revisiting this system to tweak it based on data we have collected.
