Star Citizen rebalanced thrusters, hitpoints and weapons in its latest alpha release to the public test server, and the upcoming Star Marine FPS module showed its latest progress. Prompted by NASA’s recent flyby of Pluto, Elite: Dangerous compared its simulation to the real thing. Destiny revealed details of a huge balance patch that will change practically every weapon in the game and should make PvP more interesting. Path of Exile announced its new Emberwake race season, with over 120 race events and a series of in-game prizes to be won. And survival game RUST is in the news again with its plans to randomly assign a gender to each player in an upcoming patch.
League of Legends was forced to temporarily suspend ranked play this week when an instant recall exploit was discovered. Heroes of the Storm revealed the impressive winners of its recent ultiamte fanart competition and released its new immortal character Leoric, The Skeleton King. Valve revealed the prize pool split for Dota 2‘s upcoming tournament, The International, and got a US Senator involved to secure visas for two Russian players. SMITE revealed more details of next year’s world championship to be held in Atlanta and promised that $2 million in prize money will be spread across small tournaments throughout the season.
Read on for detailed breakdowns of the stories above and other news from the wider world of online gaming in this week’s Not So Massively, and don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed for weekly updates!
Star Citizen Alpha v1.1.5 released to the public test universe this week, introducing some big changes for the playable dogfighting portion of the game. Squadron Battle and Battle Royale maps have been increased to a limit of 16 players, the launcher has been overhauled, and Merlin and Scythe are now flyable. Players who weren’t happy with the game balance will be happy to hear that one-hit kills have been reduced with a 100% increase in all human player ship health, CS missile damage was nerfed, and ship thrusters have been rebalanced.
The latest progress report from the Star Marine team shows considerable progress. The animation team has nailed down its final workflow and is working its way through tons of transitional animations, but ladder animations are still becoming desynchronised in multiplayer. The game design team has been working on a game mode that simulates the combat we can expect from the Persistent Universe, and the level designers have been fixing areas of the game maps that cause framerate drops.
The big issues still preventing Star Marine’s release include ongoing problems with netcode, a bug with positional audio reporting in the new sound engine, and several animations and sound effects that still need to be completed. Check out the latest episode of Star Citizen‘s Bugsmashers show below for a little bit more insight into the kinds of crazy bugs that game developers have to deal with before release.
Developers also revealed the winners of two new Alienware laptops in last week’s boss kill event and delved into some of the fantastic things players have created for the game in a new Community Showcase article.
The three top prize winners of the Heroes of the Storm ultimate Fanart contest have now been revealed, and there are just two days left to enter the Movie, Talent, and Original Art competitions. This week also saw the release of previously announced Diablo character Leoric, the Skeleton King. We got our first hint of Leoric’s gameplay at E3 2015, including details of his unique ability to travel the map as a wraith after death rather than just waiting to respawn. We now know that each of Leoric’s main abilities can be used in both Skeleton and Wraith forms, with different effects in each.
Leoric can deal damage in an arc and slow enemies with Skeletal Swing and drain health from enemies to heal himself with Drain Hope. Skeleton Swing deals no damage while you’re in wraith form but still slows enemies, and Drain Hope no longer drains life but decreases your respawn timer. Leoric’s third ability is Wraith Walk, which lets him temporarily leave his body as an unkillable wraith and move with bonus speed to chase down an enemy. When the ability ends or is cancelled, Leoric’s skeleton teleports to the location of his wraith.
With NASA’s recent flyby of Pluto gripping the world, the latest Elite: Dangerous newsletter took the time out to compare Elite‘s simulation of Pluto with the real thing. The simulation correctly predicted that Pluto’s surface wouldn’t be as cratered as objects like the Earth’s moon, but got some of the details wrong. Aside from being a different colour, the real Pluto’s surface has significantly more texture than Elite’s version, plus some huge mountains.
Developers noted that simply replacing the texture with a new one based on the photos of Pluto isn’t feasible. The texture is the result of a complex simulation. and if the game will eventually let us get close to planets. then it’s going to need data from the simulation to construct the landscape. If NASA manages to put together a heightmap of the planet, however, developers could use that instead for a more true representation of the dwarf planet.
The full prize pool breakdown is looking good for Dota 2‘s upcoming record-breaking world championship tournament, The International. The total prize pool currently stands at almost $17 million US and rising, with over $6 million now set aside for the first place winners of the tournament. The prizes get incrementally smaller from there, with the second-place winner taking home an impressive $2.6 million, and third-place still winning over $2 million. The minimum prize for those who make it into the tournament or have been invited currently stands at around $50,846, so even the losers won’t go home empty-handed.
This year’s journey to The International was almost cut short for two professional players currently based in Russia. Natus Vincere’s Akbar “SoNNeikO” Butaev and Vega Squadron’s Andrew “Mag” Chipenko were both denied visas to enter the US for the purposes of competing in the tournament. Valve reportedly contacted US Senator Maria Cantwell on the players’ behalf to see if anything could be done to expedite matters. It emerged that their visa applications had been denied because the US consolate in Moscow was unfamiliar with The International. Butaev has since reported that his visa application has been accepted.
If you’ve been playing Destiny‘s Crucible PvP mode and are using any weapon other than Thorn, it turns out you’re a sucker. Players have been complaining for some time that everyone in Crucible uses Thorn, and Bungie confirmed that this week with a graph showing that over twice as many players use Thorn compared to the next most popular exotic weapon.
This is just one of the many balance issues that players have been complaining about, and Bungie has definitely taken notice. A comprehensive set of balance changes is on the way for practically every weapon type, including steeper damage falloff for auto rifles at long range and significant nerfs to the accuracy of hand cannons used at long range. The patch also tweaks pulse rifles, shotguns, fusion rifles, sniper rifles, scout rifles, and rocket launchers, and comes with some specific changes to exotic weapons such as Thorn.
You may remember RUST as the survival game that sparked controversy when it added different skin tones to the game but assigned them to players based on their Steam IDs rather than letting players customise their own characters. The game also resurfaced recently with the news that a players’ genital size and other attributes are similarly generated based on their steam ID.
While there are now skin tone and physical differences between characters in RUST, right now everyone is given a male persona. Developers recently said that they’re working on a female character model for the game, and this week we predictably found out that gender will also be randomly assigned based on your Steam ID. Some players worry that this may lead to in-game gender discrimination in the same way the race update did, while others think of it as a social experiment.
- Dungeon Defenders II‘s Loot & Survive patch is coming on July 28th.
- Online RTS Grey Goo released a new lore trailer based on cutscenes.
- Firefall discussed its upcoming Advanced Battleframe changes.
- Warframe launched a new photo contest.
Every week, Brendan Drain scours the net to bring you all the latest news from from the world of MOBAs, lobby-based games, and other online multiplayer games that aren’t quite MMOs in Not So Massively. If there’s anything you want to see covered here, post a comment or send mail to brendan@massivelyop.com to let him know!
