Gaming
You can now grab Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty for free
Starting today, players can pick up the award-winning Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty for the low, low price of free.
Players will get access to the first campaign, the ranked ladder and the highly popular co-op mode. All of the balance updates and co-op commanders from the latest release, Legacy of the Void, will also carry over.
“StarCraft II is one of the highest-rated PC games of all time, and we’re excited to give even more people around the world a chance to find out why it has inspired such a passionate global community,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “With the massive Wings of Liberty single-player campaign, endlessly replayable co-op mode, prestigious ranked ladder, comprehensive map-making tools, and more, StarCraft II now delivers the ultimate real-time strategy experience completely free.”
If you’re looking to experience the more recent story chapters included in the expansions Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void, you’ll need to buy these seperately. If you already own Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty (the base game) but haven’t bought Heart of the Swarm, you’ll be able to claim this for free by logging into Battle.net between now and December 8.
As an extra thank you to current Starcraft II players, you’ll recieve a unique Eidolon Ghost skin and three portraits commemorating founder status in the game.
Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty turned seven years old this year and apparently, a F2P model has been in the works for a while. It’s always been a popular esports title and Blizzard are hoping expanding the playerbase will help bring in some fresh blood.
Blizzard also described how they have a ‘catalog of content for people … if they came in from free-to-play’. According to the production director Tim Morten, Blizzard want to ‘stay away from secondary currencies, griding and other annoying monetization methods’. So yep, despite going free-to-play, Starcraft II won’t feature any extra currencies or microtransactions.
A new onboarding experience will also help new players find the game modes that make the most sense for them, whether you’re looking for a co-op experience or want to jump straight into the PVP ranked ladder.
Access to the ranked ladder will become available after earning 10 ‘first wins of the day’ in Unranked or after any purchase of expansion content. Co-op commanders also have a max level of 5 in the F2P model, with the exception of Raynor, Kerrigan and Artanis.
Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty is available today for Windows and Mac, fully localised in a range of languages. You can read our full Legacy of the Void review here.
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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