Torchlight Free on Arc

Torchlight Free

Arc Games is giving away Torchlight for free for a limited time. Torchlight 2 is also on sale for a limited time at 75% off.

Torchlight never really caught my eye when it first came out, but now that its free I’ll give it a try. Get your free copy while it lasts!

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WoW Patch 6.0.2 Today

The Warlords of Draenor pre-patch goes live today for WoW players and with it a lot of changes. Most of these are going to be beneficial quality of life changes but some big ones like major class changes and the “stat squish” will probably take some time adjusting to.

For a whole list of the changes check out the Battle.net post. If Battle.net is down (as it’s likely going to be until after maintenance) check the Google cache version.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the quality of life improvements.

  • Character models for races from the original game Dwarf, Gnome, Human, Night Elf, Orc, Tauren, Troll, Undead, and Draenei have been overhauled with an increase to fidelity and texture resolution; while retaining the core look and feel of the originals.
  • The quest log has been integrated into the world map to make it easier to know where to go and what to do.
  • Some quest items no longer take up space in the inventory and can be accessed through the Quest Tracker.
  • Items in the inventory now have a colored border around them to indicate their quality from Poor (grey) to Legendary (orange).
  • Tradeskill materials now stack up to 200 (up from 20).
  • Fun items accumulated through the course of travels now have a new home in the Toy Box. Eligible items can be learned by right- clicking on the item in the inventory. Once learned, the item is available account-wide and accessible to all characters on the account.
  • Want to complete the collection? Like the Mount and Pet Journal, items that haven’t been unlocked yet will show information on how the item can be obtained.
  • Bags can now be assigned to a specific item type (Equipment, Consumables, and Trade Goods). The bag will display a mini-icon showing what type of item it’s assigned to.
  • Added a “Clean up Bags” button to automatically sort items in the character’s inventory, moving all empty slots to one area, and automatically sorting items to the correct bag. There’s also the option to ignore a bag from cleanup.
  • A Reagent Bank tab has been added to the Bank providing storage for raw materials.
  • Characters can now craft using the materials stored in both their Reagent Bank and Bank from anywhere.
  • Characters can now purchase an additional tab for Void Storage. That’s an extra 80 spaces!

For a full list of changes and some more information on the stat-squish and new itemization features such as Bonus Armor and Multistrike (along with the removal of hit and expertise) check out the Bnet post (or the cached version)

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Microsoft Buys Minecraft for $2.5b

Microsoft Buys Minecraft

Wow… didn’t see this coming and thought the rumors of it were out in left field. It was announced today though on Mojang’s website that Microsoft has purchased all of Mojang (mainly Minecraft, but the Mojang name and stuff as well) for a whopping 2.5 billion dollars.

So the big question is – what does that mean? Well nothing right now. According to the announcement, the majority of the team will probably continue to work on the game as usual. Updates will continue as usual. They don’t know the distant direction Microsoft will want them to go in, but for now there’s not much likely to change. So that means we won’t be seeing microtransactions or a metro-interface in Minecraft any time soon *snicker*. Notch has said though that he’s leaving Mojang after the purchase is finalized. His letter sounds a lot like Curt Cobain’s letter about how he didn’t want to become some big name and be famous and just wanted to make music because he enjoyed making music – except with video games.

It will be an interesting thing to watch post-acquisition. It’s either going to go down in history as an example of how a huge company can buy an indie gaming studio and not ruin their games, or it’s going to be the biggest example of big companies buying out indie studios and ruining them and everything that they make that people enjoy from a small indie studio.

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