Gaming
Welcome to the Nexus: Admiral Alexei Stukov
Welcome to the Nexus Admiral Alexei Stukov. We’re glad to have you here. You and all of your parasites, pathogens, and viruses. You’re not what we expected. Anticipation was that you would be a specialist, spreading your infestation far and wide, commanding legions of undead Terran soldiers. But, here you are, a brand new support hero, treating your allies with pathogens and hindering your enemies with viruses.
Team compositions are going to alter around Stukov, changing the focus to an extremely active team. Not only will the characters drafted change, but so too will the way people play them. Adaptability is key when playing any type of massive online battle arena (or MOBA for short). A crowd control heavy team will lend itself to Stukov’s ability to silence in an area. Picture this: A root placed by Malfurion roots two enemy players, Stukov then places his Lurking Arm beneath them, he both silences their abilities and damages them. But wait, there’s more! At level thirteen, the talent “Virulent Reaction” allows him to root any victims caught in his area of effect. To activate the root he must detonate any pathogens and viruses currently applied using his Bio-Kill Switch ability. The capacity to channel Lurking Arm indefinitely makes the combination all the more deadly.
Imagine the vicious potential that characters like Jaina and Chen have. Both have abilities to slow the enemy. This means spending more time in Stukov’s silence for the hindered enemy. Not a good time. At least, not for his foes.
Crowd control is hardly the only utility that benefits Stukov though. Teams that are able to dive on the enemy team suit him just fine. These are known as pursuit compositions. The potential to spread both Healing Pathogen and Weighted Pustule while his team engages the enemy is fantastic. Heals spread to all nearby allies and mend them for 4.5 seconds. That is, unless Stukov chooses to detonate the pathogen before it’s heal over time has expired. To do this, he uses Bio-Kill Switch. With that he can remove the timed heal and increase all affected allies’ health greatly.
Not only can he aid his teammates, Stukov also has a skill that places a virus on his enemies. Weighted Pustule too can be detonated before time runs out. Bio-Kill Switch makes the virus slow (and potentially blind) all effected foes. A slowed enemy is a good enemy, especially for a pursuit team. An Illidan with Stukov’s heal applied to him and a target afflicted by a virus can dive to his heart’s content. Stukov allows a dive heavy squad to jump on the enemy’s back line without hesitation.
Now, while he has a great toolkit, he’s not without flaws. An out of place Stukov is a dead one. There are no ways to escape in his kit. Limited mobility makes him an easy target to displace. A well timed Stiches hook pretty much guarantees death for him. But a one on one fight will lean in his favor. His high sustainability and level 10 talents make him a force to be reckoned with.
The first level 10 skill is Massive Shove. This one lets Stukov push a single target out of place. His arm stretches and propels the enemy in a straight line until they hit a solid object. The impact stuns them while giving him 50 additional armor. The other talent, Flailing Swipe shifts any nearby hostiles out of place with three massive slaps. Both do a decent amount of damage and can be deadly tools in both team fights and solo combat.
Overall, Stukov is a top tier healer with great offensive capabilities. He’s adaptable and fits practically any team. A skilled player will know when to detonate his abilities, and when to let them tick. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for Heroes of the Storm and how the game will change around Stukov.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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