Category: Game News

Steam Greenlight: Crowdsourcing the Next Big Game

Steam Greenlight

Steam is going to be rolling out something called Greenlight. Basically it’s a new system that enlists the help of gamers that use Steam to decide which games will be put up next on the Steam store for purchase. Developers will be able to post information, screenshots, and videos for their game and Steam users will vote which will be selected.

GOG.com (formerly Good Old Games) has a system in place called the Wishlist where you can vote on things you’d love to see on GOG. Currently Valve employees have to drudge through countless submissions to discern which games are worth allowing onto Steam and which aren’t. Some critically acclaimed games have even had trouble making it to Steam.

Greenlight is slated to launch at the end of August so get your mouse pointers ready and practice clicking some vote buttons!

Check out more info

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Minecraft 1.3 Update

Minecraft 1.3

Jeb has posted some news about the upcoming 1.3 patch on the Mojang Blog.

  • Smoother Multiplayer experience
  • Chat window easier editing and clickable links
  • Encrypted session packets
  • Single player is now basically a server running underneath your game so you can invite friends to play in your world.
  • Emerald ore
  • Emeralds can be used to trade with Villagers
  • Books can now be written to and read
  • You can now start a game with “Bonus Chest” to get you started quicker
  • Tripwire
  • New wooden stair colors
  • New half-slabs
  • Cocoa plants
  • Tweaked cauldrons
  • Broken boats drop boats
  • Signs are stackable and craft in stacks of 3
  • Experience now drops from ores that drop items
  • Shift clicking support to armor slots, brewing stands & enchantment tables
  • Loads and loads of bugfixes

We’ll be trying to wrap up the world we’re currently running and will be starting a new world for the server for 1.3 to take advantage of some of the new things like Cocoa plants, Emerald ores, etc.

One feature I was really hoping to see was the mod API being implemented but it looks like that won’t be making it’s debut until patch 1.4. Also you may notice a slight hit on performance for single-player mode as it’s essentially running a shell ontop of the server in the background. They have made some noticeable increases in performance for both single player and multiplayer so hopefully the single player server won’t cause too big of a hit. For a more complete list of changes to expect, check out this RedStoneHelper post over on Reddit.

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Diablo III Players Plummeting

Diablo III Decline

Taking a look at the Xfire statistics of games being played – it’s easy to see Diablo III’s steady decline in active players. While Xfire isn’t indicative of Diablo III’s gamer base, it does show a slice of very active PC gamers and the graph doesn’t look good.

Here are some opinions from this Reddit thread…

“I think the reason is this developement:

  1. You bought Diablo3, you played it solo or with friends for a few weeks or so.
  2. Depending on your or your group skills you beat it a few times and you reached hell or inferno.
  3. Now your gear is too bad to continue
  4. You checked the auction house or tried to farm some gear. You may have spend your gold on a few awesome items but you still need much more gear to beat inferno (or even hell depending on your personal skill).
  5. You now can buy a complete set of gear for much real money – more money than the D3 price. Many (including me) will never do that. Or you can try to farm the gear. Turning the game into a total mindless grind especially since 99% of the drops (that’s no exaggeration) are crap. That’s too boring for most people (including me).
  6. You quit playing D3

This is the story 2/3 of my friends and myself had with D3. It was fun until we ran into the you-need-extremly-rare-gear wall.”

And

“The loot is overblown, silly and antiquated. Non-magic loot is basically clutter an hour into the game and onwards, and it seems that every 20 minutes you are returning back to sell because your inventory is full. A completely outmoded concept.

The “hell” that they have conjured up in this game has absolutely zero terror. There is no psychological or creepy enemies, no pentagrams, no upside-down crucifixes, nothing but hordes and hordes of “monsters” and “beasts”. Really, really disappointing from a 2012 mature rated game.

It’s a tame, repetitive farming game.”

What do you think? Do you still play and enjoy it?

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