With the impending release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — Legendary Edition, which bundles all three downloadable content packs along with the original core game, GamesBeat thought this might be a good time to highlight some of our favorite PC mods.

If you like what you see or have some awesome mods of your own to suggest, leave a comment below and you’ll automatically be entered to win one of 10 golden Skyrim NES carts made exclusively for GamesBeat by 72pins. U.S. entries only. The winner will be randomly chosen on May 25, so make sure to check back then.

The lands of Skyrim are peppered with ancient Dwemer ruins overrun by aggressive mechanical enemies, but thanks to another mod by gg77, you can now add a little steampunk to your arsenal. The self-explanatory Summon Dwemer Mechanical Mounts and Followers mod changes Skyrim so you can call a Dwarven Horse, Spider, Centurion, or Sphere to your side.

Make sure to check the mod page for installation directions, known issues and compatibility conflicts, and so on.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Massively multiplayer online games have long suffered from a nauseating lack of originality, smothered in an endless monotony of grinding away on dire rabbits for experience points and completing a never-ending strings of cookie-cutter, carrot-on-a-stick fetch quests. That trend continues even to this day, as unimaginative clones promise a revolution while blatantly clamoring to be the next World of Warcraft. GamesBeat has sifted through dozens of current and upcoming MMO titles to see if any of them are actually worth a damn so that you don’t have to.

In the following pages, you’ll find the six most innovative and exciting MMOs available or coming soon as well as four more that look promising but that we haven’t had the chance to test out yet. You’ll notice that these MMOs mostly stray away from the typical fantasy settings as well as the mindless point-and-click combat that has dominated the scene for far too long.

Please feel free to share any standout MMOs of your own in the comments below or your thoughts on our picks. Not every game resonates the same way with every player, but we can’t denying that these handful of titles are at least pushing the genre in interesting new directions.

Blade & Soul

We listed Blade & Soul among last year’s most anticipated MMOs, and many months later, a Western release has yet to come. Still, the wait has only allowed the anticipation for this fantastical, highly stylistic martial arts epic to intensify.

Centered around famed Korean artist Hyung-Tae Kim’s beautiful visual design with gameplay inspired by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers, Blade & Soul really is positioning itself to stand out from its innumerable competition.

The game’s story arc has also seemingly received more attention than most MMOs, but we’ll have to judge that for ourselves at a later date. Either way, Blade & Soul is already one of the best-looking games in the world, period.

Guild Wars 2 publisher NCSoft is in the process of localizing Blade & Soul, but no release date or even beta details have been given at this time. For me, personally, Blade & Soul seems like it will be an excellent replacement for TERA, which featured equally beautiful graphics and similar action-based combat but became a little too grind-heavy around level 30. Now that TERA’s free-to-play, definitely check it out if you haven’t already.

Firefall

Firefall made last year’s list as well, and since then, Red 5 Studios (comprised of former Blizzard Entertainment staffers, among others) has pushed forward on the player-versus-environment (PvE) content, which is where my interests lie. Up until recently, Red 5 have been focusing heavily on making Firefall a serious contender in the e-sports arena with state-of-the-art shoutcasting, spectating tools, and its signature fast-paced player-versus-player (PvP) third- and first-person shooting.

With open beta set for July 9, the team is rapidly expanding the variety of content in the game to appeal to a broader range of playstyles. The battleframe system has also been reworked several times over to provide more meaningful options to both new and longtime players. As a solo player, I started off with the Engineer battleframe so I’d always at least have a soulless, merciless auto-turret to keep me company, but I quickly upgraded to the advanced Bastion battleframe, which allows me to have three instead of one autonomous killing machines at my side.

Also of note is all the effort Red 5 has put into its community and lore-building. From celebrity livestream events to an ongoing manga fleshing out the in-game story, Firefall extends far beyond the walls of MMO trappings. It really feels like a developer who’s gone “all in” on this project, so whether it succeeds or crashes and burns like the ill-fated CMS Arclight, at least you’ll know that the game was made by people who wanted to and not people who had to because their publisher wanted an MMO on its résumé.

For those who want in on the game before the open beta, Firefall has three tiers of founder packages available with immediate access, permanent experience bonuses, and additional in-game items and currency.

Warframe

When I first heard Digital Extremes was funding its own free-to-play online co-op space ninja game, I was immediately on board. The triple-A independent developer was behind the criminally underrated Dark Sector (a masterfully violent shooter whose proprietary engine rivaled the then-cutting edge Gears of War) and the more recent The Darkness II (as well as the Star Trek movie tie-in, which we’ll assume it did just to help fund Warframe.) So Digital Extremes has earned some trust, and it seems Warframe is the game it wanted to make all along, according to creative director Steven Sinclair in GamesBeat’s exclusive interview.

There’s a lot to like about this growing game and its increasingly varied content, but the crazy cinematic action definitely takes center stage. Unfortunately, no one can be told how awesome Warframe is. You have to see it for yourself:

The Warframe team also shared some of its favorite warframes to use in-game and its most memorable moments using them:

Rebecca Ford, Warframe community manager:

I’m going to have to go with Ember, the real Girl On Fire (take that, Katniss Everdeen!). I’m a sucker for fire-based things (Charmander, anyone?), and the execution of dominating fire attacks is my exact play style. My favorite moment with Ember would have to be when I hopped in a game mid-session, when a group of strangers were doing an infested mission. I spawned, grabbed one energy sphere, had my third power ready to go (Fire Blast), and jumped into a swarm of infested and unleashed. Havok and chaos ensued, and Ember was a hero!

Mitch Gladney, level designer:

The Warframe that I like the most is Excalibur. To me, this frame is the poster boy of the game, and I always play games as the title character. He also looks so cool; I often catch him looking at himself in reflective surfaces throughout the ships.

I’ve had a lot of memorable moments with Excalibur, but one instance stands out the most to me. I was playing with three other people, and we were holed up in a hallway with about two dozen Corpus Walkers and Crewmen advancing toward us. One of my squad members — we’ll call him Johnny — was always the bravest of us four, so without hesitation, he sprinted out into the firestorm. We all watched in horror as he was pummeled by bullets. He was lucky to survive, quickly ducking behind a data terminal for cover. Everyone froze up; we were all scared. The next seven seconds felt like eight seconds. I leaned out to scout the area and was shot multiple times. Johnny was still recovering, and the other two, Doris and Joshua, were cowering together, asking each other to give a note to their loved ones if they didn’t make it. I’d seen enough. I leapt from my cover and yelled, “I’m the hall monitor; show me your pass.” Nobody heard me because the gunfire was too loud and I may not have said it but rather just thought it … ah. I wish I had said it. Anyway, I performed my Slash Dash and obliterated a bunch of enemies. This brief break in their assault gave my squad the chance to come out from hiding and dispose of the rest of the Corpi. We don’t talk about that moment much these days — too many painful memories — but to this day, they still thank me. They don’t say anything, but I know they are grateful.

Steve Sinclair, creative director:

FROST! Because I go for the new and shiny. I love that [role-playing game] trope of freezing a dude and then shattering, like back in Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance … . Frost is just too damn cool (sorry, couldn’t resist).

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With the impending release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — Legendary Edition, which bundles all three downloadable content packs along with the original core game, GamesBeat thought this might be a good time to highlight some of our favorite PC mods.

If you like what you see or have some awesome mods of your own to suggest, leave a comment below and you’ll automatically be entered to win one of 10 golden Skyrim NES carts made exclusively for GamesBeat by 72pins. U.S. entries only. The winner will be randomly chosen on May 25, so make sure to check back then.

SiTWulf’s Razas de Noche mod adds two new playable races to Skyrim: skeletons and Draugr. The mod is still in beta, so it has plenty of bugs and compatibility issues with other mods. But if you’re just looking to spice up your vanilla game and bring your own brand of terror to the world of Skyrim, look no further.

Racial Skeletons

Prometheus’s Beast Skeletons mod adds race-appropriate skeletons for Argonians, Khajits, Orcs, and Elves. The new skeleton types have been added to lore-friendly areas (where previously there had only been human remains), and after completing a new quest, players can even conjure a skeleton thrall with the same race as their own.

Make sure to check the mod pages for installation directions, known issues and compatibility conflicts, and so on.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Warframe has been a long time coming. The ambitious, free-to-play cooperative action game is the dream project of independent developer Digital Extremes, the studio behind titles such as The Darkness II, several entries in the Unreal Tournament franchise, and 2008’s highly underrated Dark Sector.

It’s the latter game that Warframe is so heavily based upon — or more appropriately, Dark Sector was based on a sliver of the concept that would eventually become Warframe, as creative director Steve Sinclair explains below. Warframe entered open beta on March 21 and has exceeded over 1 million players, rapidly climbing the ranks of popular game-tracking and social networking site Raptr.

Warframe uses premium Kickstarter-esque “founders packages” along with sales of Platinum, the in-game currency, to help fund its ongoing development. Awhile back, GamesBeat spoke with Sinclair about the game’s storied past, its monetization efforts, and the future plans for this potentially “endless” endeavor.

GamesBeat: Can you tell how Warframe came about? I understand it goes as far back as Dark Sector?

Steven Sinclair: It’s a long story. Most of it is boring and filled with naivety and hubris. We dreamed big and started building a next-gen engine before the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 were announced. Crazy ideas, like Arthur C. Clarke had said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” We started building and getting people excited about the visuals and the graphics, but when we hit the road to get it published, we hit a wall. WWII shooters were what all the marketing departments wanted. Many publishers came close but ran us through the “comparables” matrix and decided that a hard sci-fi game wouldn’t sell enough.

So we shelved the sci-fi. We adapted the pitch and toned it down so the company could survive. We lost a bit of control. We lost a bit of mojo. But we were stubborn and held on to some of the ideas in a subtle way. We took the race Tenno and named Dark Sector’s hero after him. We took the technology of Warframe and made it the virus that gave him his power. Then we crunched through the years of what it actually, properly took to build a game engine and a game from scratch, which we had completely underestimated. Then we shipped it just as it was getting a life of its own — before it was perfect. Despite its flaws, I appreciate you calling it underrated: I am still very proud of what we accomplished. I loved the Glaive. I loved how the powers evolve. But it was a death march to get it out, and my story for it sucked.

Years go by, and we make more and more awesome stuff. The Darkness II was incredible, a fantastic story with a great noir style. The Demon Arms are endless fun. We have Star Trek very near to ship, and it’s amazing to see Kirk and Spock both in terms of personality and as contrasting play-styles. The stealth/action choices the team built have brought a systemic depth to the game that will surprise people.

Now we are faced with new projects and what the future of the company is and where the industry is going. James built this company on shareware and saw the growing free-to-play market as getting back to our roots. The model is very much getting back to making a game that ships directly to customers that we have more ownership over and [more] interaction with our gamers. So we looked around at what ideas we had and decided that the sci-fi Dark Sector concepts would be a way to hit the ground running. It was time to make the game we always wanted to and to do it on our terms. Time to finish what we started back 10 years ago.

GamesBeat: Digital Extremes is no stranger to triple-A titles developed for big-name publishers. What are the specific advantages and disadvantages of doing a game like Warframe on your own versus Star Trek, The Darkness, etc.

Sinclair: Disadvantages: budget. Do-or-die stakes of self-funding. You have to do your own marketing, customer support, infrastructure — a whole new learning curve. Sacrifice established brands — or not a sequel — distribution channels and retail expertise.

Advantages: creative control — glorious creative control! More — much more — than a pittance of the profits. A chance to take risks and think differently. You can actually have an open and honest discourse with players instead of being on-message and repeating talking points — this is my favorite one.

GamesBeat: What’s your estimated goal for having the launch version of Warframe “complete” and out of beta?

Sinclair: A game like Warframe is really different for us. It’s about building a community of invested players and keeping them interested over a long period of time. This implies terms like “finished” or “complete” are a death sentence. Our dream for Warframe is that it is never complete but constantly growing and evolving. Shedding the bad stuff and adding new possibilities.

I’m hoping that Season One of Warframe kicks off this year, but we still have to face the fire of open beta.

GamesBeat: How do you go about designing the Warframes and their abilities?

Sinclair: It happens organically, which is code for chaotically. Scott McGregor, our design lead, sits next to me and writes Lua and experiments until it gets cool. We play it and iterate on it until we think it fits, and then we ship it. We don’t pretend to put [in] thousands of hours of thought or testing like our players do. They are fantastic at showing us the problems, and we try to repay them with fixing, buffing, and nerfing until it fits with the whole.

That said, there is a general design goal that is always the same: differentiation. Our ultimate goal is that if you asked the question, “Which is the best Warframe?”, everyone would have differing opinions. That is a sign we are making them diverse enough, deep enough to master.

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With the impending release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — Legendary Edition, which bundles all three downloadable content packs along with the original core game, GamesBeat thought this might be a good time to highlight some of our favorite PC mods.

If you like what you see or have some awesome mods of your own to suggest, leave a comment below and you’ll automatically be entered to win one of 10 golden Skyrim NES carts made exclusively for GamesBeat by 72pins. U.S. entries only. The winner will be randomly chosen on May 25, so make sure to check back then.

Fans of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion will admire this cheeky nod to one of the first (and worst) pieces of downloadable content for a console game. Dartani’s Horse Armor mod replaces each major city’s buyable player horse with a unique armored option. Frost and Shadowmere also get custom armor (for those who have found them).

Additional mods recommended by the modder:

• Heroic Dwarven Armor Retexture
• Divine Aegis With A Custom Horse Armor by Sader 325
• Mstik Elven Armor With A Custom Horse Armor by Sader 325
• Better Horses
• Horses for followers
• Vicious Weapon Pack
• Plants+Herbs HD Retex

Make sure to check the mod page for installation directions, known issues and compatibility conflicts, and so on.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Earlier this week Adobe announced it was abandoning traditional boxed product in favor of Creative Cloud, Creative Suite’s digital and subscription-based equivalent. Although Adobe maintains that many customers have already made the transition to Creative Cloud and have no intention of looking back, the comments on the coverage across the web have been notably negative on the move.

VentureBeat sat down with Adobe Software Marketing Executive Scott Morris at the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles to discuss the reaction to the controversial announcement.

VentureBeat: In all of your time with Adobe, has there ever been a more divisive announcement than the one made this week about moving to the cloud?

Scott Morris: I don’t think I’ve ever had a time in my career, at Adobe or Macromedia or any other company I was at, where we’ve been going through as massive a change as what we’re going through at Adobe right now. The introduction of Creative Cloud last year was huge for Adobe, but even then, even though we had two very discrete and different offerings, both new and both available at the same time with the introduction of CS6 and Creative Cloud, it took a while for customers to really understand what Creative Cloud was about. We’ve done that now, but this is definitely a huge transitional moment for Adobe.

From a controversy perspective, we know that a lot of customers are ready for Creative Cloud, because they’ve moved there in really big numbers already. But we definitely know that not everyone is ready. It was 10 years ago, in 2003, that Adobe introduced the idea of Creative Suite. There were some similar reactions at the time, where a lot of customers were upset or frustrated or angry and didn’t understand what Adobe was doing. They thought this was just Adobe’s way to get more money out of them and things like that.

Then, what they saw over time was that the value they were actually getting from the Suite was high. They were spending less than if they were buying multiple individual products. The value we could give them by integrating the tools really tightly, where work flows between the apps, was significant. Now fast-forward to 2013, when pretty much everyone is on Creative Suite, or now Creative Cloud. We’re going through something like that. We’re going through a change that is at least as significant and probably more so, because we’re also pretty dramatically changing the whole model.

VentureBeat: Not only on VentureBeat, but also on TechCrunch and pretty much every site that I checked, for the announcement of Creative Cloud, there were hundreds and hundreds of comments of people complaining, with maybe literally one or two people who stuck their neck out to defend it. Did you feel the reaction to the Creative Cloud thing kind of overshadowed all of the features that were announced for CC? How does Adobe plan to work around that?

Morris: Yeah, that’s a great question. You’re the first person to ask me that, and also, since we’re doing this a [couple days in], you’ve had a chance to see those comments and that reaction, so you have kind of a unique perspective. We expected there to be some of the community reaction that you’re seeing. We’re introducing a huge change for our customers. There are a lot of them who are already on board. They’ve already moved to Creative Cloud. There’s a bunch more who we know are excited.

What I also saw was, there were very specific examples of people who’ve been complaining about the Creative Cloud model – customers of ours on very public forums, like on Creative COW. If you actually look at those, some of those same customers are saying, “All right. I like what I saw with CC so much, even though I’m hesitant about this, I just signed up.” We have a specific example of that with this one guy who was really, really upset on Creative COW the last couple of months, and then just yesterday, one of my colleagues showed me his tweet. He’s like, “I gave in. I signed up. I love what the CC apps have in them.” So I think there definitely was some of that negative community reaction from people just not being ready for this big of a change.

I don’t think it overshadowed all the goodness that we released. I’m sure, to a certain extent, it did. I’m sure there are customers who right now are so focused on the change that they’re not taking a good hard look at what the actual offering is. But that will come over time. It’s going to be part of people’s process for figuring out what they want to do moving forward. Some of them will just sit on CS6 for a while, some of them will move immediately to the cloud, and some of them are going to wait and see what happens and then take a deeper look. We hope that then they’re going to move, because we think it’s a pretty great release. But everyone has to be on their own path.

VentureBeat: Did Adobe look at something like Steam or any similar digital distribution service to reference what works and what doesn’t for Creative Cloud?

Morris: We’ve definitely looked at all the different models and the different examples of what other companies have done, peer companies. We looked a lot harder at what Autodesk does and what Microsoft has done and what some of our competitors or peer companies in the creative space have done. We also have a lot of people who have joined Adobe in the last two years who came from some of those companies and worked on those businesses, companies that transitioned from a traditional shrink-wrapped software business to a services-based business.

We brought that knowledge in-house to help us with the transition and we examined what other folks had done. What we’re doing is unique. I think even if you look at Microsoft, they offer their subscription offerings, but they also offer their perpetual… The subscription offering actually hasn’t been as successful. We decided that splitting ourselves like that actually didn’t make sense for us. Evaluating companies that had to do that, that had to manage the traditional shrink-wrapped software and the new model of services… That’s really tough to do. It was tough for us to do in the last year. That’s why we said that we’re just going to focus on one thing.

VentureBeat: I come from the games industry, where every year, especially at E3 — which is kind of like the Adobe Max for the entire games industry — a lot of CEOs and suits and businessmen get up and tell you what you’re supposed to be excited about for the holiday season and the coming fiscal year. It’s always extremely forced and usually extremely awkward as a quick search on YouTube can attest to.

Yet when I watched the keynote and the Sneaks from MAX, everyone from Adobe was very genuine and really enthusiastic about what they were talking about. Not only are these the people who make it and make decisions around it, but they’re also people that use it, which is not always true of other companies and industries. So with that said, when the entire company make such a dramatic shift in one direction, who is involved in that decision?

Morris: The business decision, in terms of the path that we chose forward, is made at a pretty senior level, but with input from people all throughout the company. But actually, having that change be socialized throughout the whole company and getting the whole company on board is a huge effort. Everyone takes part in that. So in terms of the decision, do you mean how we get the whole company aligned like that?

VentureBeat: Correct. Was there alignment, or was there just kind of like a memo handed down? “Hey, guys, by the way…”

Morris: [laughs] No, it actually didn’t work that way at all. We were very deliberate in terms of getting feedback from employees, from customers, from partners all over the last year and a half. Even before we launched Creative Cloud, we announced that it was coming. At Max, actually, a year and a half ago. So it’s been 18 months that we’ve been talking about Creative Cloud. We spent a lot of time getting feedback. We didn’t know, back then, that we were going to choose one path 18 months later and basically stop any further development on Creative Suite to only focus on Creative Cloud. It caught us by surprise in terms of… We knew Creative Cloud would be successful, but it was even more successful than we thought it would be.

And so you really see that, as an employee, without someone telling me what we’re going to be doing… For me, one of the reasons why it’s been so exciting working at Adobe is because customers who are moving to Creative Cloud really, really love it. They’re very vocal about how much they love it. So while this whole change is difficult for some, when you look at the enthusiasm that the people who have moved to it have… Just look at what they’re putting on social media, like ratings and reviews on our site, or things like Yelp reviews. We don’t control what people post. They can give us one star or five stars. Creative Cloud has a higher star rating than Photoshop, which is unheard of. Just by a little bit, but that’s unheard of. And you read what customers are saying about it.

I think that as a company, it’s been so thrilling over the last year to see that happen and have customers just love Adobe again. When the decision went down throughout the organization that we were only going to focus on this, I don’t think it surprised a lot of people. I think it was easy for the company to get on board, because it feels like a different place even internally now than it was a year and a half ago. It really does.

VentureBeat: Everyone from starving students all the way up to Disney animators use Adobe’s products. Recently, in the past year or so, crowdfunding has surged in popularity, especially on Kickstarter. You see a lot of creative projects popping up, whether it’s an indie film or a game or even an artbook or whatever. Because Adobe’s products do play such a large part in the projects that are being made through crowdfunding, do you have any initiatives that might be of interest to creative teams with really small budgets, such as a sponsorship program for particularly creative indies? For example, Epic Games will still license the Unreal Engine to smaller dev teams who can’t pay for the fees up front. The backend arrangement changes, but they don’t want to exclude anyone from being able to use their product.

Morris: You know, we actually don’t, because that’s a really interesting idea, especially with things like Kickstarter. In fact, someone who is a big influencer for Adobe in the video space just had a Kickstarter project funded on Sunday. He was telling me about it, and it really made me think. I have other friends who’ve put creative-related projects there. They wanted to get a documentary film made and stuff like that. I think that’s something interesting that Adobe probably should look at doing. We do have a program, a community involvement program, where we actually give free software, and in some cases funding, to community organizations or people who are doing really interesting projects, non-profit things. But we don’t really have anything formal beyond that. We don’t. That’s actually a really interesting idea.

With the impending release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — Legendary Edition, which bundles all three downloadable content packs along with the original core game, GamesBeat thought this might be a good time to highlight some of our favorite PC mods.

If you like what you see or have some awesome mods of your own to suggest, leave a comment below and you’ll automatically be entered to win one of 10 golden Skyrim NES carts made exclusively for GamesBeat by 72pins. U.S. entries only. The winner will be randomly chosen on May 25, so make sure to check back then.

Midas Magic by xilverbulet and Midas Magic Evolved by DaRealSlenderMan combined add over 130 new spells to Skyrim. They have plenty of devastating elemental spells, such as Mass Lightning Storm, Molten Spray, and Call Meteor Rain, but it’s the weird and unusual that really makes the Midas collection worth owning. Want to freeze time or summon an unlimited number of conjured followers? Done. Been running through the forest for several hours with no end in sight? Why not summon a player house and take a little nap?

If you’ve used these mods or plan to download them, let us know which spell’s your favorite in the comments!

Make sure to check the mod page for installation directions, known issues and compatibility conflicts, and so on.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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With the impending release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — Legendary Edition, which bundles all three downloadable content packs along with the original core game, GamesBeat thought this might be a good time to highlight some of our favorite PC mods.

If you like what you see or have some awesome mods of your own to suggest, leave a comment below and you’ll automatically be entered to win one of 10 golden Skyrim NES carts made exclusively for GamesBeat by 72pins. U.S. entries only. The winner will be randomly chosen on May 25, so make sure to check back then.

PC players probably felt the ridable horses in Skyrim were pretty tame compared to all of the crazy shit you can take for a spin in most massively multiplayer role-playing games. gg77’s Monster Mounts mod adds a massive 87 new ridable beasties, including sharks, dinosaurs, giant bunnies, and even humanoids such as Dragon Priests and Atronachs. Your new friends will even enter battle by your side as long as you dismount them first.

Make sure to check the mod page for installation directions, known issues and compatibility conflicts, and so on.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Between permanent invincibility in Call of Duty, scoring made-up words in Words with Friends, and using automated programs to farm rare enemies in World of WarCraft, cheating in online games has long been a plague on law-abiding players attempting to operate within the intent of a game’s design. Codemasters senior game designer Ross Gowing spoke with GamesBeat to discuss how his studio is working to deal with online cheaters in its upcoming racing title, Grid 2, which releases on May 28 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.

GamesBeat: Online racing has been especially marred by players who prefer to troll each other and turn what should be a match of skills instead into bumper cars. What are Codemasters’ feelings on that, and how is it being approached in Grid 2?

Ross Gowing: We’ve seen how much frustration this causes amongst players; and it was one of the first things we wanted to address in Grid 2’s multiplayer. We’re using an Impact Rating system which will determine whether a player races cleanly or causes pile-ups and then match them with other players who have the same ethos, hopefully leading to a much more enjoyable experience for everyone.

GamesBeat: What are some specific examples of players gaining an unfair advantage by going off track, and what sort of penalties do they get?

Gowing: By either cutting a corner or, in rare cases, sling-shotting via the run-off area outside a double corner to maintain speed — or gaining a position by going off track — are all ways that players could gain unfair advantages and are things we’re aiming to eliminate. We’re going this by using a system which calculates whether any advantage has been gained by those actions and then slowing the offender’s car down for an equivalent amount of time to compensate. If you go off track but don’t gain any time or position advantage, we let you carry on as if nothing has happened.

GamesBeat: Is cheating as much of a concern for single-player? Do you feel the game needs to be played as intended, or once the player pays their $60, it’s up to them how they want to enjoy the experience?

Gowing: All the career events have leaderboards, so we have to make sure that players aren’t cheating and ruining those for everyone else. Our corner-cutting system will be in full effect to ensure that, but single-player doesn’t have the Impact Rating system watching over it in the same way that multiplayer does.

GamesBeat: Quarantining confirmed cheaters has become a pretty common approach for triple-A online games. Is that something Codemasters is also doing now?

Gowing: People who cheat and grief will be matched against each other where possible rather than other players. This means they can get on with whatever it is they want to do but with other people who’ll be doing it right back at them.

GamesBeat: What sorts of checks and balances are in place to confirm cheaters while not punishing normal players?

Gowing: Our Impact Rating system identifies who is at fault for a collision and tallies it against the appropriate player. As a player accumulates marks against them over time, their rating bracket will change, and they will be matched against other players in the same bracket where possible.

GamesBeat: What happens when a cheater realizes they’ve been quarantined? Part of the effectiveness of this method is that they’re never the wiser. But when they do figure it out, is there a way for them to make it back to the normal player pool? Then what?

Gowing: We have made our rating system visible to everyone, with each player having a colored icon next to their name and their race rewards being adjusted slightly depending on their rating bracket. If a player has a negative rating and decides they want to do something about it, they can start to race cleanly, and over time they will see their rating improve to the point where they are once again able to join the normal player pool.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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With the impending release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — Legendary Edition, which bundles all three downloadable content packs along with the original core game, GamesBeat thought this might be a good time to highlight some of our favorite PC mods.

If you like what you see or have some awesome mods of your own to suggest, leave a comment below and you’ll automatically be entered to win one of 10 golden Skyrim NES carts made exclusively for GamesBeat by 72pins. U.S. entries only. The winner will be randomly chosen on May 25, so make sure to check back then.

Skyrim has dozens of graphical mods at this point, but only one turns Tamriel into a tropical paradise. For fans of Far Cry 3 or Dead Island, Soolie’s Tropical Skyrim mod replaces the vanilla settings with lush jungles, sandy beaches, bamboo forests, and volcanic areas. It also subs in different wild animals, so now you’ll encounter pandas instead of bears, tigers instead of sabre cats, seals instead of horkers, and so on.

Before

After

Additional mods recommended by the modder:

• SkyBirds
• Fantasy Music Overhaul
• Waves
• Tame The Beasts of Skyrim,
• Pride’s of Skyrim

Make sure to check the mod page for installation directions, known issues and compatibility conflicts, and so on.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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I find myself in the minority when it comes to Lost Planet 2. It had issues, especially at launch, and it had one hell of a learning curve, but once I got passed that I found myself constantly marveling at how incredibly deep the game was.

Lost Planet 3 is nothing like its predecessor. You still run around laying waste to an endless supply of alien bugs and occasionally hop in a mech to blow shit up, but the Michael Bay-does-anime-style approach has been stripped out in favor of a smaller and more personal story-driven shooter. To say that Lost Planet 3 is attempting to cater to a more mainstream Western audience would be an understatement. Capcom has even enlisted Spark Unlimited (Legendary, Turning Point: Fall of Liberty) to handle development duties.

The one thing I couldn’t shake during my entire hour-long single-player demo was that the playable lead, Jim Peyton, looks exactly like a young Nicolas Cage. To be more specific, he looks like if Cage’s character from Raising Arizona had a life-changing event, cleaned himself up a little, and became a space miner. With a beard.

After an extensive hands-on demo with both the single-player and multiplayer modes, GamesBeat sat down with Andrew Szymanski, the producer and project lead for Lost Planet 3 at Capcom. Szymanski has been with the company for three-and-a-half years and was responsible for hiring Spark Unlimited.

GamesBeat: The first question is obviously the most important, and that’s how much of an inspiration was Nicolas Cage on the main character?

Andrew Szymanski: Zero. [Laughs]

GamesBeat: Come on — you’re in a safe place. Really?

Szymanski: Well, all the main characters are in the game using a technique called performance capture. We actually scan a real actor and their features into the game. They provide the facial animation, the body animation, and the V/O all in one session. So the face that you see on Jim is actually an actor called Bill Watterson who actually plays Jim. That’s his face.

GamesBeat: Lost Planet 2 had a bit of a learning curve, but it also had a hardcore community. The people who stuck with it really enjoyed it as they uncovered all of the different layers that aren’t immediately noticeable. Also, there were a lot of very notable issues that the developer fixed relatively quickly, maybe a month or so after launch. But I felt like, at that time, after the mediocre reviews and bad word of mouth, the mainstream had kind of moved on and missed out on that.

So, going into Lost Planet 3, what were some of the lessons learned from Lost Planet 2 and specifically the way it launched?

Szymanski: We learned a lot of lessons. The first one was. … This is based on feedback from gamers, but also just personal preference from myself and also from Keiji Oguro, who’s the franchise creative director and made the first two games internally at Capcom and led the charge for LP3. In fact he’s at Spark in L.A. right now overseeing the last few months of development.

Basically, we went in and we said that LP2 was great as sort of a party shooter. If you got people all together online, you could enjoy all this great stuff in both the campaign mode and the dedicated multiplayer as well. But you didn’t have the grounding in the characters. You never knew who the character was. He was kind of a faceless guy. There was a story in a sense, but you didn’t really feel like a part of it because you kept jumping between different characters. So there’s amazing set pieces and everything, but you didn’t really feel grounded into the world.

We made a decision for the campaign specifically that we wanted to go in and have LP3 have a strong narrative with a strong character that you actually could feel that you were not only playing as, but you felt like you could root for him and experience the world through his eyes. You could experience the history of EDN III and how the colonization began and everything through the eyes of our character, Jim Peyton. I think that’s something that we’ve been pretty successful with in LP3. That was definitely one of the things, in terms of the overall game vision.

Obviously, there were a lot of minor things that we looked at in terms of specific game systems and things like that in order to improve on them. The biggest decision that we made when we went in and said we were going to make a sequel was, OK, which direction are we going to take this? Do we make it more of the same as LP2 or do we try and do something different? Obviously, we chose the latter.

GamesBeat: Speaking of Spark, with Legendary and Turning Point, they tried some interesting things, especially from a story standpoint, but those games also received a mediocre reception, at least critically. What was the thought behind having them take over one of Capcom’s premier franchises?

Szymanski: As you yourself said, I think that they have a history of having great ideas, but not necessarily having either the resources or maybe the support that they needed to follow through with them. One of the things that I really felt … I was the one who chose to go with Spark as the developer. When I went on site with them … I was very skeptical going in. I’m going to be honest with you. When I first went to visit them, I thought the same things that you’ve mentioned. I looked at the track record. I looked at the review scores for the games, and I’m like, can these guys bring the goods? But between some of the in-the-works stuff that they showed me, prototypes that they had for stuff that didn’t end up getting released, as well as some team arrangements that they had made in terms of trying to build on their past to change what needed to be changed in order to move forward. … That was a good indicator. And also just they pitched a concept … a lot of those things ended up in the final form of the game.

I’m thinking to myself, if we can take the drive and the creativity and the overall idea-based approach and great concepts that these guys have and try to marry that to some of Capcom’s best practices in terms of how to execute and how to provide them with the resources that they need, provide them with the time that they need, and support them to see that vision through to the end, then hopefully we can avoid some of their past experiences and deliver something that everybody is going to be proud of for Lost Planet 3.

GamesBeat: Capcom has historically had a very up-and-down history using Western developers. A big one was Grin on Bionic Commando. Then Slant Six last year with Raccoon City.What’s the internal thinking on using Western developers? And also, since Capcom is a Japanese company, how does the Japan branch feel about it? Do you get more resistance when you’re trying to pitch a Western company taking over?

Szymanski: For us, it’s always about looking at, what games do we want to put out there? What games do we want to have in our lineup? What do we focus on internally versus externally? I think it’s really cool that our internal developers are constantly trying to push the envelope with new IP. Even stuff that isn’t necessarily super-well-received critically, I think there’s been a lot of games that have come over the past year or two, like Asura’s Wrath and Dragon’s Dogma. Really ambitious new IP that’s kind of ballsy. In my opinion. That’s just my personal opinion.

So when you look at franchises and things that … OK, the Japanese internal development has already done a couple of installments, and now it’s like, if we want to keep this going, if our internal developers are looking at how they can branch out and do new IP, we have to keep these things going. Going to external developers, whether those external developers are in Japan or whether they’re in the West, in America, in the U.K., wherever, that’s one of the options on the plate. But every developer is different. We try to look at the strengths of every developer. We try to look at, particularly, how the relationship works.

This is something I’ve talked about before, but sometimes the “best” developers are the ones that are really skilled at, basically … you hand something over to them and say, “Go do this.” Some of the best-known developers out there are at their best when there’s no limitation placed on them whatsoever. But if you’re coming at it from Capcom’s point of view, particularly from the Japanese office, you want to explore new boundaries, but you also want to make sure that you’re keeping things intact from the series. And so we really want to find a developer relationship where they’re like, yes, we have our own ideas, we have our own concepts, we’re really passionate about what we want to do, but we’re open to conversations with the guys who made the first couple of games.

In the case of Lost Planet, you’ve got [franchise director Kenji] Oguro, who was the game director for LP1 and LP2. He’s gotta come onsite and say, this is what Lost Planet is. This is the stuff I care about that you can’t change. If you change this, it’s no longer Lost Planet. Here’s the stuff that I think we have a lot of wiggle room for. I wasn’t personally involved with DmC, but I’m sure that they had a similar conversation.

From our standpoint, we’re always kind of looking at who’s going to be a good, flexible partner that can bring a bunch of new blood and new ideas to it while not fighting us on the stuff we think is really important? How do we create a true collaboration where people feel like it’s a two-way street, instead of, hey, here’s a bunch of money, go make us a game.

GamesBeat: Spark’s history comes from first-person shooters. Now, when you’re piloting the rig, it’s in first-person. Was that something that they were excited to tap into, that expertise?

Szymanski: Yeah, I think so. The decision to make the rig in first-person was mainly one where we wanted to really have the scale of it come across. It’s the biggest vehicle or robot that we’ve ever had in the franchise. And so we really wanted to have this idea that, when you’re in the rig, you’re sort of overseeing and surveying the environment, so to speak. If you go back and look at the first two Lost Planet games, what you will notice is that you have the Vital Suits, which are anywhere from two to three times the size of the player character in terms of their height. But because they’re always in third-person, you’re not necessarily getting that sense of scale.

What happens is, you’ll have your third-person camera that’s floating a fixed distance behind the character. Then you jump in the Vital Suit, and even though it’s bigger, the camera pulls back, so the amount of space that the player character or the Vital Suit is taking up on screen doesn’t change. We felt that, in order to alleviate that, the only choice was to go into first-person, so you can literally say, hey, before this particular block of ice was about as big as the character. Now I’m looking down on it.

Another great example is the ice crab enemy, which you saw earlier and that we’ve shown in a lot of our trailers and things like that. On foot, that thing is big. It’s huge. Jim isn’t even big enough to be as tall as one of its claws. Then you get in the rig and you’re looking down on it and basically grabbing it and tearing it limb from limb. So that’s the kind of thing that we wanted to show – how powerful and how safe you feel when you’re in this thing, and contrasting that with how vulnerable Jim feels when he’s outside of it.

GamesBeat: How much, if any, did the recent Steel Battalion Kinect game play into that, whether it’s just U.I. or little things? How much did that impact or influence this?

Szymanski: I wouldn’t say there’s any sort of direct influence. They were working on that at the same time that we were working on this, so we had kind of a friendly thing where I looked at some of what they were doing and they looked at some of what we were doing. But I don’t think we directly influenced each other that much.

GamesBeat: How open-ended is Lost Planet 3? It seems intentionally a little bit more linear than Lost Planet 2. Can you revisit old areas? Is there a hub that then branches out to new areas?

Szymanski: If anything I’d say it’s much less linear than Lost Planet 2 because after you go from your initial base area, which you saw in the demo today… basically, as the game progresses — both through critical path missions and some of the side and optional missions – you’re constantly expanding the world. Then, as soon as you’ve entered an area for the first time, you can go back there at any time. You’re literally and thematically exploring the planet. You’re introducing new areas as you go along.

GamesBeat: Do you have a reason to go back?

Szymanski: Yes, yes. There are plenty of side missions that you can do that will send you back to areas that you’ve already been. There are collectibles, unlockables. There are also areas that you can’t get to until you have certain upgrades both for Jim and for the rig. A great example of this is the grappling hook. The section you played, which is the first 50 minutes of the game, he doesn’t have the grappling hook yet. Later on you get the grappling hook, and as you’re walking through a particular area, you might notice, hey, it looks like I can go up there but I can’t get there right now. Later on, when you get an upgrade or something, you can go back and find a secret area or a power-up.

GamesBeat: Is the grappling hook the only Metroidvania-type thing like that, or is there a series?

Szymanski: No, there’s a series. I don’t want to give them all away, but every major upgrade that you get to the rig also has some sort of gating mechanic built in to it. There’s the winch that we showed as far back as Gamescom, which is basically, you can shoot the claw out on a wire and grab on to things. That has a combat function. You can shoot it at small enemies and it just kills them outright. If you fire it at larger enemies you can grab on to them and pull them in. It also has a gating function. There are certain catch points in the environment where you can shoot the winch out and grab on to things and then you can use your zipline – which is another upgrade that Jim gets later on – to basically zip over to those areas. What you’re going to see as you’re playing through the game is a lot of icons that you can’t interact with right away. They’ll look like purple Xes. Then, when you get the appropriate upgrade, you’ll see the button for that. The winch is the left bumper on the 360. That indicates, hey, now you can use this.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Everyone’s waiting to see what Suda51 does next. Goichi Suda (a.k.a. Suda51) and his company Grasshopper Manufacturer have been behind some of the most absurd and original games in the past several years. Despite his seemingly niche style, many of Suda’s projects have received plenty of exposure, especially 2012’s Lollipop Chainsaw, an over-the-top zombie splatterfest starring a perky chainsaw-wielding cheerleader as its protagonist. Suda’s next project, Killer is Dead, is a third-person hack-n-slash that, spiritually and aesthetically, picks up where the cult classics Killer7 and No More Heroes left off.

GamesBeat recently had the rare opportunity to sit down with Suda (and his spectacular shoes) and talk about sequels, multiplayer, and more. All answers were through a translator.

GamesBeat: You’ve been really busy over the last several years producing numerous original digital and retail titles. That’s something that’s unfortunately not very common in this sequel- and franchise-happy industry. Why is original intellectual property [IP] important to you and what allows you to do what so many others can’t or won’t?

Goichi Suda: I think it’s simply — that’s just my cycle of creativeness. After I finish a project, I start on another concept. I put the concept sheet together and start talking to other people. It’s just how I work. I don’t really work on the IP that I created before. As a cycle, I create one thing, and then I move on to the next one.

GamesBeat: One of the reasons why constant original products are not very common is money is that new IPs are too risky in the eyes of major publishers like Capcom and Electronic Arts. Suda51 games would probably be a lot riskier for a big publisher to take on. On the business end, how are you able to keep your cycle going?

Suda: I’m not sure there’s a secret to it. My opinion is it’s just that we were lucky enough to get into this position where we get offers from the Japanese publishing side and also in Europe from studios and publishers. It’s just a unique situation that Grasshopper is in. Another thing is we really care about what our fans think about it. We want to make sure that fan base is satisfied. We’re always looking for what they’re looking for and trying to provide them with what they’re seeking.

GamesBeat: Mondo, the main character in Killer is Dead, is pretty well-covered in the press by now. Could you talk about the character of Vivienne (pictured above) a little bit more? What does she bring to the game?

Suda: Vivienne works at the same agency as Mondo. She’s his direct boss. And then Brian — he’s the chief of the agency. Then there’s also another character named Mika, who’s kind of a support staff for Mondo. In the game, you’ll be controlling Mondo and going through the stages, but you’ll see Vivian, Brian, and Mika come out and support him in various situations. It’s not a character that you’ll just see in the cutscenes. You’ll see her in gameplay as well.

GamesBeat: How do those support moves work? Is it maybe like a summon in Final Fantasy or something, where you can use them any time but maybe is a limited resource? Or is it at scripted events?

Suda: Sorry, but we can’t get into the details for that one right now. Let’s just say that they come in at the right time. [Laughs]

GamesBeat: Through several of your past games, you’ve focused on the sword-based gameplay. Do you have any interest in introducing multiplayer into a game? Not necessarily for Killer is Dead, but do you have aspirations of maybe doing an Anarchy Reigns type of game?

Suda: Multiplayer is something that I’ve been looking at and wanting to implement in my games for a long time — for a few years now. We weren’t able to do it for Killer is Dead, but as a gamer, when I play games, if there’s a multiplayer function, I’ll jump in there and try to have fun. It is something that we’ve wanted to try to provide to our fans for a while. We want to look into it in the future.

GamesBeat: Hideo Kojima recently stated that he felt that over the past 25 years, games haven’t really matured that much. That’s something that he’s always striving for, but he feels like he hasn’t really gotten there, and many other mainstream titles definitely haven’t helped push in that direction. What are your thoughts on that sentiment?

Suda: I sort of understand what he’s trying to say. I don’t have a clear vision, but I do feel that there’s something more we can advance to. We’re just not there yet.

GamesBeat: In your own games, is that something you aspire to accomplish?

Suda: Yes, there’s something I’m striving to do every time I create a game. It could be a new experience — just a new type of way to play. Just something new. I think one day, I or somebody else will come up with a brand new way of thinking about gaming, and I think that will be a total game changer in the industry. But every time I’m creating a new game, I’m reaching out and trying to grab something that’s new — that could give some kind of new experience to the users.

GamesBeat: What have you tried to bring that’s new to the hack-n-slash genre? Recently we had DmC, the Devil May Cry remake, and Devil May Cry has always been known for really solid hack-n-slash gameplay mixed with various guns. What do you try to bring when you do a game like Killer is Dead or No More Heroes?

Suda: For this title, I wanted to have different feel. It’s more like a season of a TV show. Each episode has a beginning and an end. Some of them are connected together, and overall, there’s an overarching story. But instead of past titles where everything happens over one night, I just wanted to have something more like daily life — that becomes a season and has a story within it.

GamesBeat: When you guys did the marketing for Lollipop Chainsaw, you actually hired Jessica Nigri, who is a famous cosplayer. And so, you had her representing the game at PAX and various events instead of hiring a booth babe, for example, which is kind of a controversial thing.

Booth babes have become this decisive topic in the industry over the past couple of years. But you and a few other companies have actually tried to hire people that do understand your games and can better represent them. Why is that important to you, and what was your experience working with Jessica like?

Suda: Not only in the U.S., but Jessica’s pretty popular in Japan as well. To have somebody that — she just has this aura that she’s a gamer, and she really enjoys playing games. I think that comes out of her — that she enjoys playing games. Having her made the promotion really effective, especially at PAX last year. The reaction that we got was overwhelming. She’s really easy and fun to work with. In the near future, I think that there will be more of these types of people who are actually gamers. I think we’ll see more of these people, and different companies will start utilizing them as well.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Welcome to GamesBeat’s BioShock Infinite guide. Instead of listing out its every facet for you, this spoiler-free guide will focus on the most useful weapons, Vigors, and Gear items.

Feel free to share your own combos and strategies in the comments below.

Above all else, the main thing that will help you dominate BioShock Infinite is looting. Loot everything! Desks, boxes, corpses, more boxes. You’ll get a decent amount of money this way but also lots of ammo, which can be just as valuable as money since you won’t need to buy any. Take the time to look around and do the side missions to find the secret areas or open the safes and treasure chests.

Vigors

Vigors are BioShock Infinite’s version of Plasmids. They require Salts to use, so I recommend upgrading your salt capacity to 10 before wasting any upgrades on your health or shields. Then you can spam Vigors like crazy, and thanks to the Blood to Salt gear (see below), your Salts will automatically replenish.

Note that Vigors (like the Murder of Crows) can harm allies. I’ve never actually killed Elizabeth and don’t know if you can, but if you happen to find yourself in the company of other NPCs and are constantly stunning them with Overkill or unintentionally dealing damage with your traps, they will definitely turn on you.

Possession
Possession is the most vital Vigor. No matter what your playstyle or difficulty level, you’ll want to use Possession early and often to take control of enemy turrets. These gun emplacements can cut you down quite easily, especially when you’re trying to fend off a dozen other attacks. Converting them not only means you won’t be attacked but that you’ll also have a powerful ally to help in the ensuing gun battle.

Note that Possession doesn’t last forever. Possessed humans will eventually kill themselves when the Vigor wears off, but turrets will return to their hostile state. Sometimes it’s best to take a turret out first by turning it against its own people, who will then eventually shoot it down for you.

Also, dropping a Possession trap will affect multiple human enemies, but since you can only ever possess a single target at a time, all but one of them will immediately kill themselves.

Devil’s Kiss
Devil’s Kiss is the first offensive Vigor you get, but it’s useful for pretty much the entire game. Some enemies are immune to fire attacks, but for the most part, you can lob Devil’s Kiss into crowds for notable amounts of damage.

Shock Jockey is a good alternative later on, but with the Overkill gear, it’s slightly redundant.

Murder of Crows
This is my favorite Vigor. Murder of Crows sends out a wave of crows to stun and damage enemies. The damage is small, and the stun starts off short, however, when after you have fully upgraded Murder of Crows, any enemies killed by the crows will become Murder of Crows traps. This means if you gun down five enemies who are currently being attacked by the crows, you’ll get five free crow landmines.

As you can imagine, this creates a very potent chain reaction where entire waves of enemies can get caught in the traps created by their fallen comrades while you use them as target practice.

Return to Sender
This Vigor creates and holds a shield that blocks incoming projectiles and then fire them back at your enemies. You can upgrade it to absorb ammunition, adding to your own.

On the harder difficulties, Return to Sender is vital for certain enemy encounters, especially motorized Patriots.

Gear

“Gear” in BioShock Infinite are four different types of items that you can equip to gain special perks.

Get any Gear item you want
Gear pickups change each time you reload a checkpoint. So if you get one you don’t want, reload the last checkpoint and try again. If you find an area with a really close checkpoint, it’s definitely worth it to take the time to get the Gear you actually want.

The Winning Strategy
Below I’ve highlighted some of the most useful Gear items, but the two most important ones are Blood to Salt and Overkill. Blood to Salt means you’ll (almost) never run out of Salt in the middle of a battle, which is invaluable. Trust me, you’ll see. And Overkill means that almost every enemy you kill will stun all nearby enemies for a short while. But then if you kill one of the stunned enemies, all the survivors will get stunned again. You can repeat this tactic endlessly. Combined with the Murder of Crows loop described above, most enemies will never stand a chance.

A few notes: Melee is only important early on. Once the enemies get heavier and use projectile weapons, you’ll want to fight from afar, especially on the higher difficulties. That makes any melee-related Gear items obsolete pretty quickly.

A few Gear items also really help you dominate while using Sky-Lines. If you’re having trouble with a section that uses Sky-Lines, consider switching over to these items temporarily. I wouldn’t recommending using them all the time, however, as Sky-Lines aren’t common enough to make it worth sacrificing all of the other great Gear.

Hat

• Rising Bloodlust: After each successful kill (up to five), weapon damage increases. It resets 10 seconds after last kill.
• Ammo Cap: When shooting, empty clips have a 40% chance of auto-filling without reload.
• Storm: Killing with Devil’s Kill, Shock Jockey, or Bucking Bronco causes effects to chain to nearby enemies.

Vest

• Blood to Salt: Enemies provide Salts upon death 40% of the time.
• Winter Shield: Jumping to or from Sky-Line grants brief invulnerability.

Pants

• Ghost Posse: Killing with a Vigor trap has a 50% chance to cause the enemy gun to become a ghostly ally for a few seconds.
• Spectral Sidekick: Dropping a weapon creates a ghostly ally for a few seconds.
• Head Master: Increases critical hit damage by 50%.
• Urgent Care: Decrease shield recharge delay by 1 second. Increase shield recharge rate by 2x.

Boots

• Overkill: Killing with excessive damage stuns nearby enemies.
• Nor’easter: Killing an enemy from a Sky-Line gives 50% chance of brief invulnerability.

Weapons

Weapons, more than anything else in the game, really come down to your own personal playstyle. You can only equip two at a time, but you’ll have ample opportunity throughout Infinite to try them all and see which you like the best. I found that almost all of them are adequately powerful even when not upgraded whatsoever (spend your money on Vigors!), and I used some combination of the Carbine, Shotgun, Sniper Rifle, and Volley Gun for most of the campaign. That last one is especially useful against heavy enemies and bosses, and it carries more ammo than the RPG.

1999 Mode

BioShock Infinite is an easy game, even on Hard. In fact, I’d recommend playing on Hard even if you’re even average at first-person shooters. That may be disappointing for a lot of fans hoping for a real challenge, so then you might be wondering about the highly touted 1999 Mode, which unlocks after finishing Infinite for the first time (or you use the Konami code at the main menu to start on 1999 right away).

Unfortunately, it’s essentially just a Very Hard mode, which in BioShock Infinite terms just means “moderately difficult sometimes.” The whole “having to pick a specialization” just means you don’t have as much resources to buy and upgrade everything, nor do you need to. With the go-to combination I mentioned above (Murder of Crows, Overkill, Blood to Salts, long-range weapon of choice), most enemy encounters are a breeze regardless of what difficulty you play them on. Use cover, go slow, and handle turrets first before running into a room full of enemies guns blazing.

One last thing, for any difficulty: Never resurrect! Dying and resurrecting costs money. Instead, just pause and reload the last checkpoint. It’s basically the same thing only you won’t be poor.

Mopping up Achievements

Although you’ll get a large number of Achievements just through natural play, don’t sweat if you missed any. After finishing the game, you can replay any chapter, which is perfect for going back and finding missed collectibles or getting the Achievements for X kills with a specific weapon/Vigor. Just remember not to buy any items from the Dollar Bill vendor during your 1999 playthrough.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Check out GamesBeat’s StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm review here.

Welcome to GamesBeat’s StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm guide. Below we’ll lay out all of the abilities Kerrigan can unlock as well as the mutations and evolutions that are eventually available to her swarm.

A quick note before we start: While you’ll probably collect plenty of achievements just through playing the campaign normally, don’t sweat missing any on your first run. After you’ve beaten it, you will unlock the Master Archives, where you can replay any mission on any difficulty with optimized abilities and units. It’s kind of like a New Game+. Kind of.

Since you can freely switch mutations and abilities between missions, I won’t really go into those much. But since evolution choices are permanent, I’ll give some quick insight into what I chose and how that worked out for me. Feel free to share your own thoughts and strategies in the comments below.

Mutations

Each Zerg unit has three different mutations. You can switch mutations anytime between missions. Sadly, you won’t really know what you need until you’re in the mission. Perhaps in the upcoming Legacy of the Void expansion, the Protoss will have some sort of intelligence-gathering capability that tells the player what to expect on the battlefield.

Zergling

• Adrenal Overload: +50% attack speed.
• Hardened Carapace: Gain an additional 10 HP.
• Metabolic Boost: +60% movement speed.

Baneling

• Corrosive Acid: Increase damage to primary target by 100%
• Regenerative Acid: Heals nearby friendly units and structures.
• Rupture: Increase splash damage area by 50%.

Roach

• Adaptive Plating: Gain +3 armor when life falls below 50%
• Hydriodic Bile: Gain +8 damage vs. light units.
• Tunneling Claws: Move at full speed when burrowed, and gain 100% life regen rate.

Hydralisk

• Ancillary Carapace: Gain +20 HP.
• Frenzy: Gain +50% attack speed for 15 seconds, with 30 second cool down.
• Grooved Spines: Gain +1 attack range.

Mutalisk

• Vicious Glave: Attacks deal increased damage and travel further, bouncing three more times for up to six targets.
• Rapid Regeneration: Regenerates 10 life per second while out of combat after a minimum of 5 seconds.
• Sundering Glave: Gains +9 damage vs. armored targets (an increase of 100%), but attacks no longer bounce to additional targets.

Swarm Host

• Burrow: Swarm Hosts can now burrow into the ground, preventing them from being seen by enemies without detection while still being able to spawn Locusts.
• Rapid Incubation: Locusts spawn 20% faster.
• Pressurized Glands: Locusts can attack both ground and air units.

Ultralisk

• Burrow Charge: Ultralisk burrows and charges toward a unit; when it erupts from the ground, all nearby enemy units are knocked back and stunned for 2 seconds.
• Tissue Assimilation: Gain life equal to 40% of all damage dealt from normal attacks.
• Pressurized Glands: Gains +20 splash damage (an increase of 400%), dealing equal damage to both primary and secondary targets now.

Evolutions

Through special Evolution Missions, you can eventually evolve each type of Zerg unit. Unlike mutations, however, an evolution choice is irreversible, meaning whatever evolution you don’t pick is permanently disabled. Note that while replaying the game via the Master Archives you can choose between evolutions as if they were mutations.

Zergling

1. Raptor Strains: Gains the ability to jump up and down cliffs, leap over obstacles and onto targets from range, and gains +2 damage (40% increase).
2. Swarm Strains: Spawn 3 Zerglings per egg, and their spawn speed near instant.

Cliffs don’t really play into the campaign that much, so there’s little need for the Raptorlings. However, combining the Swarm Strain evolution with Kerrigan’s Zergling Reconstitution ability means you can always have a massive Zerg army available on the cheap.

Baneling

• Splitter Strain: Banelings split into smaller Banelings upon detonation, each smaller Baneling does 5 damage.
• Hunter Strain: Banelings gain the ability to jump up and down cliffs as well as leap toward opponents.

The Splitters deal very little damage, and while it does add up, the Hunter Strain’s ability to close in on enemies more quickly means they’re less likely to get gunned down on the way to their target.

Roach

• Corpser Strain: Enemies damaged by the Roach will spawn two Roachlings if killed quickly.
• Vile Strain: Attacks slow enemy movement and attack speeds by 75% (20% for heroes).

The Roachlings are incredibly weak, so sacrificing them in order to slow enemies down to a crawl is not really a choice at all. The Vile Strain is extremely useful against powerful enemies, especially when you brought the wrong units to the fight.

Hydralisk

• Impaler Strain: Can morph into an Impaler, which attacks units from a distance while burrowed. Especially effective against armored units.
• Lurker Strain: Can morph into a Lurker, which attacks multiple enemies in a line while burrowed. Effective against light ground units.

By the time you can evolve the Hydralisk, light ground units aren’t much of a problem. However, using the Impaler, you can pretty much take out most enemy outposts or even bases by burrowing out of range and slowly working your way in, impaling all units and structures. They won’t even fight back since they can’t see you. Just be mindful of certain scout units and towers as they have detection capabilities.

Mutalisk

• Brood Lord Strain: Can morph into a Brood Lord, which besieges ground targets from long range with spawned Broodlings.
• Viper Strain: Can morph into a Viper, which can pull distant units close, slow enemy ground units and prevent them from attacking for several seconds, or drain life from allied units to restore its own energy. Also enables air-to-air combat.

The Brood Lords are very effective at overwhelming enemies and structures from a distance, but the Vipers have two extremely useful abilities. They can pull enemy units (like tanks in siege mode) off of cliffs or away from bases so that you can gang up on them, and they can poison an area, causing any units to slow down and stop attacking for 10 seconds. This was a hard choice, but I eventually went with Brood Lords just because they complement my Swarm Hosts.

Swarm Host

• Carrion Strain: Spawns flying Locusts that can attack ground targets. Flying Locusts are faster and deal 50% more damage than regular Locusts, but have 25% less life.
• Creeper Strain: Swarm Host generates creep while burrowed or rooted. Enables Deep Tunnel ability to quickly travel to any location with creep.

The Creeper Strain’s creep generation passive ability enables you to easily place creep anywhere rather than slowly trying to spread it with a Creep Tumor. While the flying Locusts from the Carrion Strain can defeat enemies more quickly, Deep Tunneling a giant group of Swarm Hosts to and from your base as needed becomes a lifesaver in the later levels. A common strategy I used was to send a bunch of Zerglings into a base to draw fire and then plant a Swarm Host in the middle of the base to generate creep. This allowed me to instantly warp dozens of Swarm Hosts from the safety of my own base to the target area and quickly overwhelm it.

Ultralisk

• Noxious Strain: Emits Noxious Cloud that deals 5 damage per second to nearby enemy ground units. Toxic Blast ability deals 20 damage to enemy ground units and structures.
• Torrasque Strain: When killed, enters a Chrysalis for a short period before resurrecting with full health. Rebirth cooldown is 60 seconds.

While the Noxious Strain definitely makes the Ultralisk even more destructive, you just can’t deny the value in resurrecting these units. They’re extremely expensive and take time to make, so having a dead one come back to life on the frontline is the obvious choice. Combine that with the Tissue Assimilation ability and Ultralisks last for a very long time.

Kerrigan

As Kerrigan gains levels, you unlock new ability tiers. Each tier has two abilities (with a third ability set being unlocked halfway through the campaign), and you can choose between them between missions. Note that leveling Kerrigan to 70 does not unlock any new abilities, only an achievement.

Click here to see the fully unlocked Ability screen at level 70 (mild spoilers).

Tier 1: Level 0

• Kinetic Blast: Kerrigan deals 300 damage to a target unit or structure from long range.
• Heroic Fortitude: Kerrigan gains +200 maximum life. Life regeneration rate increased by 100%.
• Leaping Strike: Kerrigan leaps to her target and deals 150 damage to it. Can be used without a target to travel quickly. Kerrigan also gains a passive +10 damage increase, but attack range is reduced by 3.

Tier 2: Level 0

• Crushing Grip: Enemies in target area are stunned for 3 seconds and take 30 damage over time.
• Chain Reaction: Kerrigan’s attacks deal normal damage to her target and then jump to additional nearby enemies. Deals 10 damage to up to four secondary targets.
• Psionic Shift: Kerrigan dashes through enemies dealing 50 damage to any in her path. Overall movement speed is also increased by 30%.

Tier 3: Level 10

• Zergling Reconstitution: Killed Zerglings respawn from your primary Hatchery at no cost. Respawns up to 10 Zerglings every 30 seconds until all Zerglings have returned to life.
• Improved Overlords: Overlords morph instantly and provide 50% more supply.
• Automated Extractors: Extractors automatically extract vespene gas without Drones.

Tier 4: Level 20

• Wild Mutation: Friendly Zerg units in the target area gain +200 maximum life and 100% increased attack speed for 10 seconds. Does not affect heroic units.
• Spawn Banelings: Kerrigan spawns six Banelings with timed life.
• Mend: Heals Kerrigan for 150 life and friendly biological units nearby for 50 life. An additional 50% of the amounted healed regenerates over 15 seconds.

Tier 5: Level 35

• Twin Drones: Drones morph in groups of two at no additional cost.
• Malignant Creep: Your units and structures gain increased life regeneration and 30% increased attack speed on creep. Creep Tumors spread creep faster and farther.
• Vespene Efficiency: Vespene gas harvesting efficiency increased by 25%.

Tier 6: Level – 50

• Infest Broodlings: Enemies damaged by Kerrigan become infested and spawn two Broodlings with timed life if killed quickly.
• Fury: Each attack temporarily increases Kerrigan’s attack speed by 15%. Can stack up to 75%.
• Ability Efficiency: Kerrigan’s abilities have their cooldown and energy cost reduced by 20%.

Tier 7: Level 60*

• Apocalypse: Deals 300 damage to enemy units and 700 damage to enemy structures in a large area.
• Spawn Leviathan: Summons a mighty flying Leviathan with timed life that deals massive damage to ground and air units and has energy-based abilities.
• Drop-Pods: Delivers 40 Primal Zerglings, 5 Primal Roaches, and 5 Primal Hydralisks with timed life to the battlefield.

*Note that all Tier 7 abilities cost 100 energy and start on a cooldown, meaning you have to wait 5 minutes to use them (or 4 minutes with Ability Efficiency).

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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For StarCraft II fans looking to play this week’s Heart of the Swarm expansion, you won’t need to undergo the 15GB installation process if you already have the main game, Wings of Liberty, on your computer.

From Blizzard: “Instead, start up the StarCraft II launcher and allow it to optimize your game files and download any pending updates.”

However, if you don’t have Wings of Liberty installed on your current device, the Heart of the Swarm physical disc includes both games. Just note that a Wings of Liberty game license is required to play the new expansion. Blizzard has also detailed patch optimization issues and patch troubleshooting to its customer support site.

I’m personally eager to continue Sarah Kerrigan’s story, but my installation off the disc is taking abnormally long. I just hope by the time I get online eager fans haven’t already exploded the servers a la Diablo III.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Though Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is as deep and fluid as any Platinum Games release, it doesn’t have much in the way of tips and tricks. Once you learn the Zandatsu move, which is very early on, you can essentially run through Revengeance easily, restoring your health and energy so you can perform another Zandatsu right away. It has a bit more to it than this, obviously, but when in doubt: Zandatsu.

However, I discovered a trick that anyone can use to purchase Raiden’s suit upgrades and unlock all of his special moves in the first stage.

You can do this at any location with a Holochip, but the one in the video below — from File R-01, the first stage after the prologue — has a Large (L) Holochip worth 5,000 BP. Simply grab the Holochip (you don’t even have to wait for the BP counter to catch up) and enter the Customization Menu. Now quit Customization and return to the game and you’ll be back at the start of your last checkpoint, permitting you to grab the Holochip again and again.

Note that completing stages nets you around 3,000 to 5,000 BP depending on your rating, but by doing this, you can amass over a 100,000 BP in mere minutes. Then just buy all the upgrades and special abilities that you want. More moves and upgrades unlock throughout Revengeance, so make sure to get a fortune in BP before continuing if you don’t want to worry about not being able to afford something later.

I hope this helps some of you, and I personally didn’t feel like this took away from my enjoyment of Revengeance. Raiden’s supposed to be the ultimate badass cyborg anyway, right?

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Follow our PlayStation 4 coverage

99designs, the world’s largest crowdsourced graphic design marketplace, has opened up a cash-prize contest on the PlayStation 4 logo. Sony is expected to unveil the fourth generation PlayStation console at its exclusive press event in New York on Feb. 20 (which GamesBeat will be present at). Sony originally lifted the Spider-Man movie logo for the PlayStation 3, so there’s no doubt that 99design’s 200,000-plus registered designers can come up with some a little more creative.

The contest, launched earlier this week with a $500 grand prize for the top design, has already drawn roughly 1,000 submissions. GamesBeat sifted through each and every one of them to find our favorites –and a couple that are notable for just being batshit insane (but in a mostly good way). You can see those below.

However, the difference between “PS4″ and “PSY” (the Korean rapper behind Gangnam Style) are almost indistinguishable on some designs. That, and no one has taken into account that the next PlayStation may very well break from the numerical naming system used in past iterations, just as Apple did with the iPad and some expect Microsoft to do with the next Xbox.

To see all of the entries, you can head over to the contest page on 99designs.

Top image submitted by Arahull

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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“I enjoyed almost all of your questions,” Gearbox Software president Randy Pitchford says with a smile as we conclude our hour-long interview.

Those words from the outspoken Borderlands developer (who is apparently big on magic tricks) have left me wondering which question(s) didn’t go over so well. I always aim to take a tough but fair conversational approach, and Pitchford is particularly hard to read because, as he explains below, he’s almost always happy — to the point where he wonders if he’s “broken” and envies fellow developers who experience more dramatic emotional ups and downs during game development.

But Pitchford does have a lot to be happy about. Publisher 2K Games recently announced that Borderlands 2 has sold over six million copies worldwide, and Gearbox’s next title, Aliens: Colonial Marines, is now out. So I wanted to get Pitchford’s thoughts on a number of topics, most notably the state of triple-A game development and whether the role of publisher has become to help or hinder the creative teams.

GamesBeat: A discussion appeared on Twitter recently about whether the Borderlands 2 character of Tiny Tina was potentially racist. Someone asked lead writer Anthony Burch that if he felt it was inappropriate, would he go back and change his dialogue in the original game? Burch basically replied that it was technically impossible.

Randy Pitchford: You can, but the difficulty of that is –

GamesBeat: Maybe “improbable” is more like it? [Laughs]

Pitchford: And there are some people you’ll never be able to reach, because there’s physical media that’s in a box. It’s not connected to the Internet. There are people playing offline. We care about that guy. There’s nothing we could do there.

GamesBeat: My question is, if there was something larger — in any game, not just Borderlands — like an entire character that was instrumental to the story, do you think it’s worth a studio actually going back and changing it?

Pitchford: If you want to imagine infinite hypothetical scenarios, I bet we can. I’m a reasonably creative person. I’m sure you are, too. I bet we can imagine a scenario where everything should be on the table. I bet we can create a scenario where … “Who cares what is going on? Let’s change this!” Because the scenario we’ve created makes that the right decision. But we’re inventing a scenario. The reality is that it’s unlikely that we can create anything where some outside force would be so significant as to move that immovable object. Everything is on the table.

GamesBeat: I think Mass Effect 3 kind of proves that there are those scenarios, and gamers have — hopefully — started to feel that if they voice their opinions and band together intelligently, they may be able to make a difference.

Pitchford: I thought the Mass Effect 3 thing was really awesome and interesting. In one respect — I will confess, I didn’t finish Mass Effect 3, so I didn’t experience the ending myself. And I didn’t play the DLC. I’m not even sure if it came out yet. But I watched a bit of what was unfolding there. I thought, “Here’s a situation where, clearly, there’s a lot of love for this game. There’s a lot of love for this property, or else there would be no comments about it.

Here’s a situation where customers are saying, “I wanted something and I didn’t get it.” I think that’s a great position to be in if you’re a creator. Customers are saying, “I WANT SOMETHING FROM YOU AND YOU HAVEN’T GIVEN IT TO ME.” Well, fuck, that’s great! I can just give you something, and I already know you want it! Sweet! This is easy! I’ll just create that. Here, you can buy it. The hardest thing in the world is to try to imagine the thing that doesn’t exist yet that we can bet that customers will wish they had. If we can know in advance that they wish to have something, and all we have to do is manifest it, it makes it really easy to commit to manifesting it.

GamesBeat: It’s kind of like how dogs and cats can’t talk, so you never know when they’re sick or where it hurts. They can’t tell you how to fix them.

Pitchford: The fact that we’re increasingly in a world where creators and consumers of what we create can interact and entertain premises that we throw at one another, without necessarily accepting them — they can throw a premise out there and entertain what that would mean for a property or a brand or an experience or whatever. Customers and creators are doing this simultaneously. That’s really neat. The fact that, when we create something and put it into the world. It’s kind of not ours anymore. It becomes the world’s. The world’s position on what it is and what it should be almost becomes more important than whatever the creator imagined.

GamesBeat: Not everyone feels that way.

Pitchford: The old way, you couldn’t have that interaction. That’s why George Lucas happened. He grew up in a time when we didn’t have all these tools and these methods of interacting, but he created something we all passionately loved. It became ours. It was mine. Star Wars is mine, you know? But the creator feels that it’s his. We’re in this world now where because we’re having these interactions and we’re feeling that it works. It’s creating better results sometimes, when we’re interacting and we’re listening to each other. We’re offering stuff, and we’re hearing each other, and we’re letting that affect us. That creates better results than when we keep ourselves in the tunnel. The guy that stays in the tunnel gets punished for that.

GamesBeat: That perfectly segues into my question about the Borderlands 2’s level cap. I maxed out my Commando at 50 about halfway through my second playthrough.

Pitchford: You’re hardcore.

GamesBeat: That was before the game even came out. I didn’t sleep, I had a deadline! [Laughs]

Pitchford: Dude, that’s awesome. I like to hear that.

GamesBeat: And so I completed a quest right after that.

Pitchford: See, you did that before the game came out. Wow. That’s crazy. I don’t want to interrupt you, but I looked at it in December, and in December about 16.5 percent of all people who’ve ever played Borderlands 2 had a single character achieve level 50. I have some new questions from our data mining stuff that I’m going to get an answer to soon. The data is so much. We’re moving in this world where we have to start doing “big data” management. Sometimes we have so much data that to just answer a simple question, we have to dedicate a machine to processing the data and it doesn’t spit out an answer for days.

GamesBeat: Because there’s so much information?

Pitchford: There’s just so much data to parse. We’re collecting everything, but we’re not … it’s just stored as raw chunks of stuff. Google is fast because it can know exactly … it’s not fast because it can look at everything and find the right thing. It’s fast because it’s indexed itself and it knows exactly where to go for any given query. We have everything. We don’t know where the stuff is that we want. We have to look at everything and add up little bits along the way.

GamesBeat: Do you plan to make one of those infographics where it’s like 700 million Bullymongs run over … ?

Pitchford: That would be cool. Maybe we should. Would that be interesting?

GamesBeat: Of course! I love those. It’s good insight.

Pitchford: OK, cool. I’ll toss that up as something we should do. We’ve redone and re-architected the way we’re managing our data. We’re in a big data world, and we never anticipated that we would be. What we kind of did, but we didn’t architect for it, because our Shift stuff, which is the way that … it doesn’t matter which platform you play it on. There’s an interaction between us and the software. That’s a whole new infrastructure. Most people don’t have anything like that. Even the ones that do, they’re like in 1 or 1.5. This is our 1.0. Anyway, I totally derailed. You were going somewhere?

GamesBeat: Right, so I hit level 50, and I completed one quest after that. I got a ton of experience and it just bounced off, because if you hit the cap XP becomes useless. I was like, “Oh, my God. I don’t want to play anymore.” [Laughs] I felt like I’d be wasting my time or wasting that precious XP. I just stopped. I have the season pass, so I’ve downloaded everything, but I haven’t played any of it.

Pitchford: Experience drives toward leveling up. You want that to also be in the loop when you’re experiencing the new campaign content, so you’re holding off on the campaign content until you have that. That makes a lot of sense.

GamesBeat: Partially because I know it’s coming, but I don’t know when. It even says in the achievement, “Capped out … for now.”

Pitchford: Yeah, “for now,” right. That’s a good indicator. We did it in Borderlands one.

GamesBeat: Especially with my Commando, there’s all these skill tree combinations that I want to do that I just need a few more skill points to get to.

Pitchford: That’s by design. Some of those things start to become game-breaking. This has actually created a huge problem for us. We designed the skills really well this time, but we did, for better or for worse, make a lot of the decisions with the knowledge that there will be no more skill points available to put into any trees after you reach level 50. We knew the impossible configurations. Some of the design exploits that. Some of the impossible configurations, if they were possible, would break the game. Sometimes very literally. “Oh, that’s gonna blow memory. Your Xbox will crash.”

We, as customers and gamers ourselves, hear the fans. People want to level up more. It makes sense. We totally get it. We did it in Borderlands 1, so we have the precedent. And we’re gonna break our fucking game if we change the math. If we change it up, who knows what the balance will do? People don’t want to just level up. They also want the game to level up with them. If I’m level 55 and everybody else is level 50, it’s a walkover. I want to get level 55 gear if I’m level 55. I want to fight level 55 enemies. Then we have to make the whole game over again.

It becomes this really “Oh, shit, have we painted ourselves into a corner here?” Yes, the Achievement indicates that some of us, somewhere, wrote that Achievement and anticipated it, just as many customers do, because of the last game. But we’re now in this world where we’re confronting the reality of what it means to do that work, and it’s terrifying and challenging. It’s easy to imagine, when we’re playing the game, “We could just change the number, and everything would be fine.” No, dude, there’s a lot. This is the most fundamental thing about the game. It’s a big deal.

GamesBeat: Are you saying that you used the word “anticipated.” But you didn’t map it out much ahead of time?

Pitchford: No. When we finished Borderlands 2, everything that we imagined was in Borderlands 2. Once that was finished, OK, now what do we do? We had just started asking ourselves, “OK, do we want to level up some more?” All of us do. A lot of us have level 50s as well. It’s time to tackle that. We dug in, and we were like, “Oh, shit. This is really hard. This is going to take a lot of time. It’s going to be really expensive. Oh, my God.” And we’ve got all these other priorities and all these other things to do. So we’re in the middle of that. That’s the world we’re living in right now. We’re excited about the goal, both as gamers and as creators. But … I mean, I’m not gonna lie. It’s a big challenge. It’s a big undertaking. It’s not going to just turn on. It’s a thing we have to work ourselves through.

GamesBeat: How do you feel about–

Pitchford: By the way, I don’t know where the story ends, either. We’re in the middle of it. There might be things that aren’t going to work the same way. We might have to radically change the game. We have to think, “What’s more important? Do you we maintain these skills, or do we let people level up? What if we have to change skills?” We shipped the game with this shield that was totally broken.

GamesBeat: The Bee?

Pitchford: Yeah, the Bee. A player that’s spec’d right can just melt the hardest boss in the game solo in like four to five seconds. That’s obviously not by design, right? If you go in, and you can melt Terramorphous in five seconds because you’re using a Conference Call and a Bee shield and you’re spec’d with a Gunzerker for throughput, that’s clearly not any designer’s intent. That’s a bug. That’s the one nerf we’ve ever done, and we got so much rage.

GamesBeat: You nerfed Amp Shields in general, right?

Pitchford: It was a number of related things. The way we had divided up certain effects across weapons … . The shotgun, for example, we did the math wrong. Every single pellet was being affected instead of just the shot. Then, when we fixed it, we did the math wrong again. We did it wrong differently. It’s really complicated stuff, so I forgive us. [Laughter] The intent was beautiful. The intent and the commitment to improve was there. That’s really important. But I’m grateful. We were going fast, too. We do this thing, and we know people want it. It looks right, and it feels right, and we test it, and we deliver it. Then suddenly we’ve got 6 million beta testers. “Oh, we found something.” “Oh, shit, we didn’t see that.” We did a lot of testing, thousands of hours. But we didn’t notice that because the fans have done millions of hours in one day.

GamesBeat: I feel like a lot of people expected the DLC to raise the level cap. That was what they were waiting for, and then it would also help them get more out of the DLC and their season pass.

Pitchford: I think that’s a fair expectation because we did offer a level cap increase in Borderlands 1 in line with the third DLC.

GamesBeat: And then another one after that.

Pitchford: Actually, that one was just detached. We felt like we made a mistake when we attached the level cap increase to the DLC. The second level cap increase in Borderlands 1 was completely detached. You didn’t have to buy a DLC to get it. That was a different kind of mistake. We learned lessons from that step as well. We did fix the earlier mistake, but there are others.

GamesBeat: It’s a Jenga tower.

Pitchford: You try it differently. “Oh, there’s some things with that too.” So we learn. We don’t want to make … . We are taking risks, and we are in uncharted territory very often, especially with this game. It’s a wild game. We haven’t done it before. No one’s done this kind of game before. We will make big mistakes, and we’ll make them often. But I’ll be damned if we want to make the same mistake twice. Our approach on this one is to try not to repeat mistakes we’ve already been aware of, that we’ve already experienced.

At the same time, we don’t want to make new mistakes. They’re inevitable when you do things you haven’t done before. Sometimes you stumble when you push yourself harder and you’re trying to run faster or whatever. We forgive ourselves, pick ourselves up, and keep running. We don’t cry and stop running because we skinned our knee. We definitely do not want to repeat mistakes we made before. Sometimes we trap ourselves. We get painted into corners on things. It’s tricky. But we’re committed to it. But yeah, I think that’s a fair expectation, given Borderlands 1.

[In response to the controversy surrounding Pitchford’s above comments, he confirmed that a level cap increase for Borderlands 2 will be released “this year.”]

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Warning: The interview below includes sizable spoilers, so it’s recommended you have completed The Walking Dead: Season 1 game before reading.

Halfway through Season One of The Walking Dead by Telltale Games, I rage-quit. I didn’t want to be a part of the narrative anymore because I felt like what I had been promised as a player had been taken away. Control. Decision-making. The consequences of my own actions. I could see the man behind the curtain and that I was really playing his game, experiencing his story, not my own. I eventually went back and completed the final episodes, but begrudgingly so.

So with that in mind, I made sure to grab Dan Connors, the chief executive officer of developer Telltale Games, at the recent D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas to chat about a few specific moments in The Walking Dead, lessons learned by the developers, and whether we should expect to be playing as Clementine in Season Two.

Did I mention the spoilers?

GamesBeat: What did your involvement entail with The Walking Dead game?

Dan Connors: I’m part of the creative oversight. Generally, when decisions are required about what direction we should go, or if something isn’t working, or something should remain in the game, or we’re deciding how to solve certain problems … I’m usually consulted. I work with the team to get the right direction.

GamesBeat: Let’s start by talking about your play style for The Walking Dead. Do you try and walk on the moral high ground, or do you go a little bit darker?

Connors: I work on it, you know. I play it when it’s in development. So … I explore it all. I have to. Left to my own devices, I would probably try to do the right thing. I generally want to fit in with the group and have everybody feel like I’m cool with them. It’s funny, though. I told Clem her parents were dead. Every now and then I’ll go through, and I’ll see something. “When did they put that in? I wonder what that does.” It’ll be something like telling her her parents are dead. I’ll click it, and then she’ll start to cry. Did you do that?

GamesBeat: I tried to be realistic with her while still taking her current emotional state into account, so not until closer toward the end. But I was pretty sure she knew at that point even before she saw them.

Connors: Yeah, I did it early. She just started tearing up. It was horrible. Usually … we always talk about this. We don’t get to experience it in the way that other people experience it because we know what’s going to happen all the time. It doesn’t unfold in front of us. We never really know how people feel about the game. But when we play through, it’s definitely a — I’ll usually try everything at least once. I’ve probably played each episode 30 or 40 times at different stages of development. I don’t really have a style.

GamesBeat: That’s fair enough. Let’s talk about Clementine, who’s become this iconic game character. She’s so well fleshed-out and relatable. What are some of the tricks that you’ve learned in that process? What are the golden rules in creating deep characters like her that you could share with other developers who are trying to build a more believable game world?

Connors: Honestly, I think building a believable 8-year-old girl — an enjoyable, believable 8-year-old girl that isn’t annoying or cloying — in any medium is an accomplishment. I think that on the one hand, [writer/director] Sean Vanaman’s handling of Clem as a character and his direction to people about how she should be represented was huge. He really owned it and crafted that character very well. That one in particular is — there’s no real simple thing to do. She needed to be tough but sensitive. She needed to be a little girl, but she needed to be more grown up. She couldn’t be annoying, but she needed to be cute. It really was a well-crafted series of dialogue.

And then, out of all of that, she needed to be able to go from — she needed to be able to respond to you being mean to her or to you being super-caring to her, and everywhere in the middle. There weren’t a lot of tricks with Clem. Were you at the J.J. Abrams thing this morning? Remember the scene they did with Bruce Willis and his wife [from Die Hard]? That moment, in my mind, is like the moment that you described. It’s just a strong character-building scene moment. Investing the time in giving her those moments where you can get to know her a little bit is really what made it happen.

GamesBeat: So in the game, you’re no longer a passenger like you are in the comic and TV show. You’re making the decisions about who lives or dies, even if you didn’t realize that’s what you were doing. You’re accountable. So there’s one moment that really jarred me out of that immersion, that illusion of control.

It’s in the third episode, where Carley dies. The reason why that really broke the entire experience for me and also why that was very upsetting is because, most of the time, when a character dies, there was either nothing you could do or you made a decision that led to that. When Carley died, I’m standing right there, and I can see Lilly is getting more and more agitated. She’s about to do something stupid. You can tell that moment is coming.

Connors: Yeah.

GamesBeat: And then it just happens. I knew it was coming, and it was like … .

Connors: Don’t kill Carley. Don’t kill Carley. [Laughs]

GamesBeat: Give me that moment. Even if it’s very short. You do have some where it’s these emergency quick-time events, where if you don’t press it immediately, something bad will happen. But the player doesn’t even get that. No matter what you do in the game, Carley’s going to die. So for me, I felt like that really kind of went against what even you guys were saying The Walking Dead was intended to do. In every episode, it says that this game is about the choices you make. They’ll determine the path you walk and have consequences. That was the one fairly important moment where you didn’t have a choice at all, even though some people probably saw it coming. So with that long-ass description, what are your thoughts, specifically, on that moment? What was the reaction? Am I alone on this?

Connors: [Laughs] We’ve got a reaction video from that. I think the strong thing is — we were able to create a character in Carley, and in some cases Doug, that people really connected with and were attached to. That made losing those characters in that scene feel horrible. But the way in which the player was … it was kind of unforeseen. The way it was thought about internally was, sometimes in this universe, there’s just nothing you can do. That’s just the way The Walking Dead universe is. Sometimes you’re just going to lose people, and you can’t do anything about it. We didn’t do it again. So I think there was resonance about the fact that it didn’t hit people in the right way after that.

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LAS VEGAS — Indie darling Journey destroyed its fellow nomines at the annual Design Innovate Communicate Entertain (D.I.C.E.) Summit winning Game of the Year to go along with seven other awards Thursday night at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino.

Source: Dean Takahashi

thatgamecompany accepting the 2013 DICE Awards GOTY.

Now in its 16th year and put on by the Academy of Interactive & Science, the awards ceremony wasn’t without a little controversy, as a series of montages glossed the announcements of a number of winners, preventing people from coming up to accept an award or give a speech. At one point, an apparently slightly intoxicated member of the Skylanders team rushed the stage to request his fellow montage winners be allowed to join him and thank their hard-working dev teams.

From the D.I.C.E. Award nominations press release: “Titles were played and evaluated by members of the Academy’s Peer Panels to determine final nominees. These panels, one for each award category, are comprised of the game industry’s most experienced and talented men and women who are experts in their chosen fields. All Academy members are eligible to vote for the winners in every category.”

Below you’ll find the full list of nominees, their corresponding publisher/developer, and the winner for each category (in bold). I found it a bit reductive of the Academy to merge the RPG and MMO genres into one category and that it didn’t consider many important releases, such as Xenoblade Chronicles.

Game of the Year

• Borderlands 2 (2k Games/Gearbox Software)
• Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft)
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2k Games/Firaxis Games)

Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction

• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• Dishonored (Bethesda Softworks/Arkane Studios)
• Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft)
• The Unfinished Swan (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Giant Sparrow)
• The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)

Outstanding Innovation in Gaming

• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• Nintendo Land (Nintendo of America Inc./Nintendo)
• Sound Shapes (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Queasy Games)
• The Unfinished Swan (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Giant Sparrow)
• The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)

Downloadable Game of the Year

• Fez (Microsoft Studios/Polytron Corporation)
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• Mark of the Ninja (Microsoft Studios/Klei Entertainment)
• The Unfinished Swan (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Giant Sparrow)
• The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)

Handheld Game of the Year

• Gravity Rush (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Japan Studio)
• Paper Mario Sticker Star (Nintendo of America Inc./Intelligent Systems)
• Resident Evil Revelations (Capcom USA/Capcom Co., Ltd.)
• Sound Shapes (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Queasy Games)
• Uncharted: Golden Abyss (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Sony Bend Studio)

Mobile Game of the Year

• Fairway Solitaire (Big Fish)
• Hero Academy (Robot Entertainment)
• Horn (Zynga Inc./Phosphor Games Studio)
• Rayman: Jungle Run (Ubisoft/Pastagames, Ubisoft Montpellier)

Web Based Game of the Year

• Bingo Bash (BitRhymes Inc.)
• Burrito Bison Revenge (Adult Swim/Juicy Beast Studio)
• CityVille 2 (Zynga)
• Sim City Social (Electronic Arts/Maxis, Playfish)
• Song Pop (FreshPlanet Inc.)

Action Game of the Year

• Borderlands 2 (2k Games/Gearbox Software)
• Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft)
• Halo 4 (Microsoft Studios/343 Industries)
• Hitman: Absolution (Square Enix, Inc./IO Interactive)
• Sleeping Dogs (Square Enix, Inc./United Front Games)

Adventure Game of the Year

• Assassin’s Creed III (Ubisoft)
• Darksiders II (THQ/Vigil Games)
• Dishonored (Bethesda Softworks/Arkane Studios)
• New Super Mario Bros. Wii U (Nintendo)
• The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)

Casual Game of the Year

• Fairway Solitaire (Big Fish)
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• Puzzle Craft (Electronic Arts/Ars Thanea)
• Rayman Jungle Run (Ubisoft/Pastagames, Ubisoft Montpellier)
• Sound Shapes (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Queasy Games)

Family Game of the Year

• Dance Central 3 (Microsoft Studios/Harmonix Music Systems)
• Just Dance 4 (Ubisoft/Ubisoft Paris, Ubisoft Reflections, Ubisoft Bucharest, Ubisoft Bune, Ubisoft Milan)
• Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes (Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment/ TT Games)
• Nintendo Land (Nintendo of America Inc./Nintendo)
• Skylanders Giants (Activision Publishing, Inc./Toys for Bob)

Fighting Game of the Year

• Persona 4 (Arena Atlus Co./Arc System Works)
• PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/SuperBot Entertainment, Inc.)
• Soulcalibur V (Namco/Project Soul)
• Street Fighter X Tekken (Capcom USA/Capcom Co., Ltd.)
• Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (Namco Bandai Games)

Racing Game of the Year

• Forza Horizon (Microsoft Studios/Turn 10 Studios Playground Games)
• LittleBigPlanet Karting (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/United Front Games)
• MotorStorm RC (Sony Computer Entertainment Europe/Evolution Studios)
• Need for Speed Most Wanted (Electronic Arts/Criterion Games)
• Trials: Evolution (Microsoft Studios/RedLynx Ltd.)

Role-Playing/Massively Multiplayer Game of the Year

• Diablo III (Blizzard Entertainment)
• Dust: An Elysian Tale (Microsoft Studios/Humble Hearts)
• Guild Wars 2 (NC Soft/ArenaNet)
• Mass Effect 3 (Electronic Arts/BioWare)
• Torchlight 2 (Runic Games)

Sports Game of the Year

• FIFA Soccer 13 (Electronic Arts/EA Canada)
• MLB The Show 2012 (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/San Diego Studios)
• NBA 2K13 (2K Sports/Visual Concepts)

Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year

• FTL (Subset Games)
• Minecraft 360 (Microsoft Studios Mojang/4J Studios)
• Orcs Must Die 2 (Robot Entertainment)
• Total War: SHOGUN 2- Fall of the Samurai (SEGA of America Inc./The Creative Assembly)
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2k Games/Firaxis Games)

Outstanding Achievement in Animation

• Assassin’s Creed III (Ubisoft)
• Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft)
• Hitman: Absolution (Square Enix, Inc./IO Interactive)
• Mark of the Ninja (Microsoft Studios/Klei Entertainment)
• Uncharted: Golden Abyss (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Sony Bend Studio)

Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction

• Borderlands 2 (2k Games/Gearbox Software)
• Dishonored (Bethesda Softworks/Arkane Studios)
• Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft)
• Halo 4 (Microsoft Studios/343 Industries)
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)

Outstanding Character Performance

• Borderlands 2: Tiny Tina (2k Games/Gearbox Software)
• Far Cry 3: Vaas Montenegro (Ubisoft)
• Halo 4: Cortana (Microsoft Studios/343 Industries)
• Mass Effect 3: Female Commander Shepard (Electronic Arts/BioWare)
• The Walking Dead: Lee Everett (Telltale Games)

Outstanding Achievement in Connectivity

• Call of Duty: Black Ops II (Activision/Treyarch)
• Halo 4 (Microsoft Studios/343 Industries)
• Nike+ Kinect Training (Microsoft Studios/Sumo Digital Lrd.)

Outstanding Achievement in Gameplay Engineering

• Dishonored (Bethesda Softworks/Arkane Studios)
• Gravity Rush (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Japan Studio)
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2k Games/Firaxis Games)

Outstanding Achievement in Online Gameplay

• Borderlands 2 (2k Games/Gearbox Software)
• Call of Duty: Black Ops II (Activision/Treyarch)
• Diablo III (Blizzard Entertainment)
• Halo 4 (Microsoft Studios/343 Industries)
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)

Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition

• Diablo III (Blizzard Entertainment)
• Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft)
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• Mass Effect 3 (Electronic Arts/BioWare)
• World Of Warcraft Mists Of Pandaria (Blizzard Entertainment)

Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design

• Assassin’s Creed III (Ubisoft/Ubisoft)
• Diablo III (Blizzard Entertainment/Blizzard Entertainment)
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• Medal of Honor: Warfighter (Electronic Arts/Danger Close Games)
• Syndicate (Electronic Arts/Starbreeze Studios)

Outstanding Achievement in Story

• Dishonored Bethesda Softworks Arkane Studios
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• Sleeping Dogs (Square Enix, Inc./United Front Games)
• Spec Ops: The Line (2k Games/YAGER Development GmbH)
• The Walking Dead (Telltale Games/Telltale Games)

Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering

• Call of Duty: Black Ops II (Activision/Treyarch)
• Halo 4 (Microsoft Studios/343 Industries)
• Hitman: Absolution (Square Enix, Inc./IO Interactive)
• Need for Speed Most Wanted (Electronic Arts/Criterion Games)
• Total War: SHOGUN 2- Fall of the Samurai (SEGA of America Inc./The Creative Assembly)

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Yesterday the Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) announced its new brand ambassador: the HipHopGamer, aka Gerard Williams. This struck some as questionable, given that Williams is notorious for his frequent use of derogatory language toward women and homosexuals, his open use of plagiarism, and for threatening journalists at press events with physical violence.

According to the ECA website, the association was “founded to give gamers a collective voice with which to communicate their concerns, address their issues and focus their advocacy efforts,” and it commonly lobbies the government to make or prevent changes to video game-affecting legislation.

“Williams’s active engagement with fans and critics alike will provide a springboard for discussion, a catalyst for action that the ECA can help support,” reads a press release from the organization.

Since the announcement was made, some commenters have taken issue with Williams’ behavior.

“Our industry desperately needs to show the general public that we are composed of mostly rational, reasonable, mature adults,” reads the highest-rated comment from the ECA Facebook. ”HipHopGamer/Gerard may well be a perfectly nice guy in person. However, the general public/press isn’t going to dig that deep or give the benefit of the doubt.

“They’re instead going to make note of his public usage of ‘rape,’ ‘faggot,’ his threats of violence, and his ‘what would they be like in bed?’ sections of his ‘Hot Girls in Gaming’ segments. Is this really the public face we want to put forth for an industry that struggles continually with the misconception that we’re all a bunch of offensive, immature deviants?”

Heather Ellertson, the ECA’s vice president of marketing, sent out the following message four hours after the announcement:

“Gerard approached us wanting to know what he could do to help the cause. He’s in the process of turning his life around, becoming more professional and inspirational to his friends and followers. It’s exceedingly rare that we have individuals approach the organization laying it all out there, offering to do whatever they can, and asking for nothing in return. While we weren’t aware of any of his perceived transgressions online, we choose to embrace his support, his efforts, and his selflessness. If we were all judged solely upon the negatives in our past, we would all be damned. We would like to give him the opportunity to be a voice for gamers and a positive role model for gaming.”

Pay special attention to that last sentence. Below is the second highest-rated comment on the ECA Facebook thread, which seems to perfectly echo the general sentiment on other sites that covered the news:

“So you’re saying you did little to no research on who your publicly facing brand advocate would be? Do you think any major company would hire a PR person without doing some preliminary research? This reaffirms my belief that the ECA is not an organization that accurately represents my interests as a member of the game industry.

“Being passionate and popular with your followers is great, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the best choice to be the publicly facing personality to represent your ‘brand’. A desire to change is also fantastic, but I maintain my stance that most of the nongaming public isn’t going to see or care about that. Instead, they’re going to look at what’s already out there and see someone who equates rape to love, and uses faggot as a derogatory slur. That’s not me as a gamer, and it certainly isn’t me as a member of the professional game industry.”

Williams with his signature WWE replica belt that he won at a press junket.

A few hours later, the ECA responded one final time:

“Thank you all for your input. It is being taken seriously. Gerard is not employed by the ECA nor is he the ‘voice’ of the Gamers we are fortunate to represent. He volunteered his services, and wanted to help spread awareness about the message the ECA, and it’s [sic] members are constantly speaking of.

“Anyone can become a brand ambassador for the ECA. We hope that some of you are interested in becoming one.”

It might be too early to say what the actual fallout from this, but several of the ECA’s Facebook commenters have noted that they intend to leave the organization.

Top image via Destructoid

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Update: Randy Pitchford has addressed the controversy and confusion created by the response to this interview on his personal Twitter:

@guggerbunk can you please tell them to calm the fuck down. Take-away: it’s hard and expensive, but we’re committed.

— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) February 9, 2013

@guggerbunk I’ll say: 100% chance of a level cap increase this year, but 50\50 on unforeseen consequences that some people will rage about.

— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) February 9, 2013

As part of a larger discussion with Gearbox Software president Randy Pitchford, I wanted to get the outspoken and enthusiastic developer’s thoughts on the Borderlands 2 level cap. The original Borderlands received two level cap increases, eventually raising the maximum character level from 50 to 69. But with Borderlands 2, even after three downloadable-content (DLC) expansions, the cap remains at 50, where it started.

Pitchford explains the approach the team is taking to increasing the Borderlands 2 level cap, as well as some very forthcoming and insightful challenges in what raising the cap means for both player and developer. As a bit of context, Pitchford mentioned that as of December, only an estimated 16 percent of Borderlands 2’s player base has obtained at least one level 50 character.

GamesBeat: So, after I hit level 50, I completed one more quest, and I got a bunch of [experience points], but it didn’t go anywhere because I was maxed already. And I thought, “Crap. I don’t want to play anymore!” [Laughs] And I’ve seen a lot of similar comments from people waiting to do the DLC because they’re already at level 50.

Randy Pitchford: You’re one of the guys who’s in this spot where you kind of want to wait until you have an opportunity to get the … . Experience drives toward leveling up. You want that to also be in the loop when you’re experiencing the new campaign content, so you’re holding off on the campaign content until you have that.

GamesBeat: It even says in the Achievement, “Capped out … for now.”

Pitchford: Yeah, for now, right. That’s a good indicator. We did it in Borderlands 1.

GamesBeat: Especially with my Commando, there’s all these skill tree combinations that I want to do that I just need a few more skill points to get to.

Pitchford: That’s by design. Some of those things start to become game-breaking. This has actually created a huge problem for us. We designed the skills really well this time, but we did, for better or for worse, make a lot of the decisions with the knowledge that there will be no more skill points available to put into any trees after you reach level 50. We knew the impossible configurations. Some of the design exploits that. Some of the impossible configurations, if they were possible, would break the game. Sometimes very literally. “Oh, that’s gonna blow memory. Your Xbox will crash.”

So now we’re in a world where … . We, as customers and gamers ourselves, hear the fans. People want to level up more. It makes sense. We totally get it. We did it in Borderlands 1, so we have the precedent. And we’re gonna break our fucking game if we change the math. If we change it up, who knows what the balance will do? People don’t want to just level up. They also want the game to level up with them. If I’m level 55 and everybody else is level 50, it’s a walkover. I want to get level 55 gear if I’m level 55. I want to fight level 55 enemies. Then we have to make the whole game over again.

It becomes this really … “oh, shit, have we painted ourselves into a corner here?” Yes, the Achievement indicates that some of us, somewhere, wrote that Achievement and anticipated it, just as many customers do, because of the last game. But we’re now in this world where we’re confronting the reality of what it means to do that work, and it’s terrifying and challenging. It’s easy to imagine, when we’re playing the game, “We could just change the number, and everything would be fine.” No, dude, there’s a lot … . This is the most fundamental thing about the game. It’s a big deal.

GamesBeat: Are you saying that … you used the word “anticipated.” But you didn’t map it out much ahead of time?

Pitchford: No. When we finished Borderlands 2, everything that we imagined was in Borderlands 2. Once that was finished, OK, now what do we do? We had just started asking ourselves, “OK, do we want to level up some more?” All of us do. A lot of us have level 50s as well. It’s time to tackle that. We dug in, and we were like, “Oh, shit. This is really hard. This is going to take a lot of time. It’s going to be really expensive. Oh, my God.” And we’ve got all these other priorities and all these other things to do. So we’re in the middle of that. That’s the world we’re living in right now. We’re excited about the goal, both as gamers and as creators. But … I mean, I’m not gonna lie. It’s a big challenge. It’s a big undertaking. It’s not going to just turn on. It’s a thing we have to work ourselves through.

GamesBeat: How do you feel about …

Pitchford: By the way, I don’t know where the story ends, either. We’re in the middle of it. There might be things that aren’t going to work the same way. We might have to radically change the game. We have to think, “What’s more important? Do you we maintain these skills, or do we let people level up? What if we have to change skills?” We shipped the game with this shield that was totally broken.

GamesBeat: The Bee?

Pitchford: Yeah, the Bee. A player that’s spec’d right can just melt the hardest boss in the game solo in like four to five seconds. That’s obviously not by design, right? If you go in, and you can melt Terramorphous in five seconds because you’re using a Conference Call and a Bee shield and you’re spec’d with a Gunzerker for throughput, that’s clearly not any designer’s intent. That’s a bug. That’s the one nerf we’ve ever done, and we got so much rage.

GamesBeat: You nerfed Amp Shields in general, right? 

Pitchford: It was a number of related things. The way we had divided up certain effects across weapons … . The shotgun, for example, we did the math wrong. Every single pellet was being affected instead of just the shot. Then, when we fixed it, we did the math wrong again. We did it wrong differently. It’s really complicated stuff, so I forgive us. [Laughter] The intent was beautiful. The intent and the commitment to improve was there. That’s really important. But I’m grateful. We were going fast, too. We do this thing, and we know people want it. It looks right, and it feels right, and we test it, and we deliver it. Then suddenly we’ve got 6 million beta testers. “Oh, we found something.” “Oh, shit, we didn’t see that.” We did a lot of testing, thousands of hours. But we didn’t notice that because the fans have done millions of hours in one day.

GamesBeat: I feel like a lot of people expected the DLC to raise the level cap. That was what they were waiting for, and then it would also help them get more out of the DLC and their season pass.

Pitchford: I think that’s a fair expectation because we did offer a level cap increase in Borderlands 1 in line with the third DLC.

GamesBeat: And then another one after that.

Pitchford: Yeah, we did another one that wasn’t … . Actually, that one was just detached. We felt like we made a mistake when we attached the level cap increase to the DLC. The second level cap increase in Borderlands 1 was completely detached. You didn’t have to buy a DLC to get it. That was a different kind of mistake. We learned lessons from that step as well. We did fix the earlier mistake, but there are others.

GamesBeat: It’s a Jenga tower.

Pitchford: You try it differently. “Oh, there’s some things with that too.” So we learn. We don’t want to make … . We are taking risks, and we are in uncharted territory very often, especially with this game. It’s a wild game. We haven’t done it before. No one’s done this kind of game before. We will make big mistakes, and we’ll make them often. But I’ll be damned if we want to make the same mistake twice. Our approach on this one is to try not to repeat mistakes we’ve already been aware of, that we’ve already experienced.

At the same time, we don’t want to make new mistakes. They’re inevitable when you do things you haven’t done before. Sometimes you stumble when you push yourself harder and you’re trying to run faster or whatever. We forgive ourselves, pick ourselves up, and keep running. We don’t cry and stop running because we skinned our knee. We definitely do not want to repeat mistakes we made before. Sometimes we trap ourselves. We get painted into corners on things. It’s tricky. But we’re committed to it. But yeah, I think that’s a fair expectation, given Borderlands 1.

Check back to read the full interview with Mr. Pitchford next week.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Tumblr can sometimes be its own universe of awful and awesome. Sometimes the two collide to create something so absurd it’s ingenious, and that’s the corner of the Tumbleverse that the Pokeymans Project inhabits.

The setup is simple: Artist Noelle Stevenson was homeschooled until 15 and was never allowed to partake in Nintendo’s cultural pocket-monster-catching phenomenon (or Harry Potter or anything else). So naturally, one day she decided to start drawing Pokémon based on their descriptions alone, and the Pokeymans Project was born.

You can see some of the user-submitted descriptions in the gallery below, along with the resulting imagery. I’m not sure even I could have guessed which Pokémon some of these descriptions are referring to … .

GamesBeat spoke with Stevenson about the reaction the Pokeymans Project has received. “I think because everyone on the Internet knows more about Pokémon than I do,” she says, “they think it’s really funny, and they get to feel superior toward someone who’s clueless. It was just kind of a fun thing I’d do every now and then until it made it to the front page of Reddit, and I was completely inundated with requests. My Tumblr inbox was swamped with nothing but page after page of descriptions of Pokemon, burying all my other messages, and when I closed my inbox, I got requests through emails, Disqus, and Twitter.”

Unfortunately, not all the feedback was in the same fun spirit as the Pokeymans Project. “Not only that,” says Stevenson, “[but] I was getting accusations of faking not knowing anything about Pokémon to get attention or cheating somehow by looking up the picture before I drew it. Some people were downright angry with me for not being familiar with Pokémon. Also, there was a fair serving of sexism where the attitude was like, ‘She doesn’t know Pokémon because she’s a girl,’ which is pretty absurd. It was kind of a shitshow for a couple of days there, but as soon as I started a separate blog for the Pokeymans Project, things calmed down again. Although I think my message box is still labelled ‘Don’t Send Me a Pokémon’ on my main blog.”

Stevenson says that no one at Nintendo has noticed her work (to the best of her knowledge) but that she’s sure there are “other Pokémon fan-artists who are much more deserving of Nintendo’s attention.” She also hasn’t really seen much of an impact on her other projects, stressing that the Pokeymans are not a good indication of her artistic skill. “It’s still just a fun thing that I do sometimes,” she says. “It has taught me the difference between a sickle and scythe, though!”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Many triple-A massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) seem to lean toward a more serious tone, with no shortage of scantily clad female elves running around and bashing things with epic axes twice their size on an epic quest to save the world from an epic evil. WildStar, the latest MMO from publisher NCsoft (Guild Wars 2) and developer Carbine Studios, is going for something a little different.

After a few hours of hands-on time at a recent WildStar preview event, GamesBeat sat down with lead narrative designer Chad Moore to discuss the game’s emphasis on humor and how the team tapped the spirit of Pixar when creating an epic universe for a broader audience.

“As a company, we talk a lot about personality,” says Moore. “It was important to us that WildStar had something different from almost any MMO or any MMO at all that’s been released up to this date. It doesn’t necessarily have to always be serious in order to be epic. We’re going to have epic moments in our game, and you’ll see those things. You’re going to experience those things. But just because your story is epic and your characters are epic, it doesn’t mean that they have to be dour and serious or what you would consider traditional characters from games that you’ve played before.”

“When we showed our original release trailer, there were people who likened that release trailer to a Pixar movie,” Moore continues. “We thought that was cool because when we talk about it at Carbine, we talk about Pixar movies or Disney movies. Those are the best examples, I think, where you can have a serious story that has emotional resonance, but the characters are funny. They’re humorous. Their interactions with each other are humorous, but it doesn’t take away from the coolness of the story or the overall experience of the movie. I always talk about The Incredibles as being one of my favorite movies ever even though a lot of people might look at that and consider it sort of funny or humorous or maybe for kids. I think, ultimately, those movies are not for kids. They’re for adults who do enjoy that sort of humor. We’re going to try to do the same thing in our game.

“Because that’s a company-wide philosophy, the art resonates with that. You’ll notice that right away. The content that we create — I don’t know if you played through a quest in there where you’re working for these little inventor guys. They’ve strapped this big mamoden full of explosives. A mamoden is this big rhinoceros-looking thing. They’re testing out their new weapons technology. You get to go and control this mamoden and go over to blow up some poachers. If you look at the mamoden itself, it’s kind of ridiculous. It’s this big rhinoceros and the explosives are oversized and it’s kind of humorous and funny. That’s a great example, I think. The little guys that give you the quest — they’re humorous in the way that they speak. The art itself is funny. The quest itself has that same humor, too. You’re killing these poachers that nobody’s happy with, and what the poachers are doing is serious, but the way that you’re dispatching them has a unique kind of WildStar feel. We just try to have that synergy between art and design and story all throughout the game.”

Meet one of the two factions in the game. What do you think? Is WildStar as funny as Carbine thinks it is?

WildStar currently has no release date set, but Carbine Studios plans to hit all the major game events this year to unveil more of the game.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Anything goes during a speedrun. The briefest runs often take advantage of exploits within the game mechanics, such as invincibility frames or shortcuts not intended by the developer. Whether it’s a 25-year-old Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) title or a current blockbuster game, a great speedrun is always a feat to behold, taking hundreds of hours and countless failed attempts to perfect. And now, you can watch the seemingly impossible as it happens.

The long-honored tradition of speedrunning involves playing a game to completion as quickly as possible. Speedrunners from all over the world compete against each other for the best times (and sometimes inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records). With the increasing popularity of livestreaming, speedruns have taken on a new life, and the stakes have been raised.

Jared Rea is the community manager at the popular livestreaming site Twitch.tv. Rea has held community-related positions at both Ngmoco and PlayStation, and before that, he worked as a game journalist for sites like 1UP, Joystiq, and The Escapist. He knows games, but more importantly, he knows gamers. He is one, first and foremost, but he also understands what appeals to whom and why. GamesBeat recently spoke with Rea about the rise of speedrunning and whether the gaming subculture can ever compete with the mainstream world of e-sports.

GamesBeat: Speedruns have enjoyed a very strong niche following for quite some time. What makes you think they’re more popular now than when they started popping up fairly regularly on YouTube years ago?

Jared Rea: The audience consuming speedrunning content these days is far larger and far more diverse than it’s ever been. On Twitch alone, their numbers have begun rivaling a lot of our e-sports-related channels that regularly top our directories. When it comes to the more popular speedrunners, their unique viewers per live session surpass popular YouTube recordings of speedruns that have been available for years. When they’re close to breaking a new record, you start seeing Reddit threads pop up, social media influencers chatting about it … it’s something that’s been a very long time coming, and it’s great to see more and more people come to appreciate the craft that’s being put on display.

Jared Rea

GamesBeat: Which titles have you noticed are particularly popular for speedruns on Twitch, and why do you think speedrunners and viewers gravitate towards those games or genres?

Rea: Classic Nintendo titles are definitely the most popular amongst the speedrunners on Twitch. Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Super Metroid … these are not only legendary games that a lot of gamers grew up on, but they’re also a lot of fun to both spectate and speedrun. Taking these three for example, they all have a lot of bizarre glitches to exploit, and when a game has more potential tricks for the speedrunner to show off, it creates a sense of tension and anticipation for the viewer — especially if the player already has a great run going. Will they risk their current performance to shave off even more time? And if they fail, how will they manage to recover? Is there a back-up plan? Watching a great speedrunner perform live is a lot like watching a high wire act in that at any moment, that rush of excitement can turn into complete disaster for both the player and viewer alike.

I often wonder — and maybe this is just the Sega fan inside of me — why are Nintendo-developed titles the most popular to speedrun? Nostalgia aside, I believe a lot of gamers find that Nintendo’s classic library simply stands the test of time better than most. Whether you love them or you hate them, there’s no denying that Nintendo’s first-party efforts are very mechanically sound even if these players have found cracks in their foundations. When I watch a player such as Trihex play Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, I’m not only amazed by his technicality but the gameplay mechanics behind the scenes. It’s a lot easier to devote hundreds of hours to perfecting a game when the game isn’t trying to fight you for control.

GamesBeat: When Freddie Vasquez’s 30-minute Dark Souls speedrun went live last year, some commenters felt it “didn’t count” since he used (non-tool-assisted) exploits to skip large chunks of the game. What do you think signifies an authentic speedrun?

In my opinion, so long as there’s not any kind of third-party hardware or software influencing the outcome, it’s authentic. What makes the speedrunning community on Twitch so great is that a lot of them run their games on the original hardware, and you can see this on their webcams. It really helps in creating that air of authenticity and dispels any doubts you may have while watching. It is one thing to watch a of CosmoWright performing the The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker floating death trick, but it’s entirely different to watch him live, manually mashing the button Track & Field style.

Tool-assisted speedruns are a double-edge sword for speedrunning. On one hand, they’re harmful to the community since they confuse newcomers and set unrealistic expectations [for] legitimate runs. On the other, they help expose weaknesses in the game that can be exploited. Lots of folks have seen the TAS of Super Mario 64 in five minutes thanks to a long jump bug, but if it weren’t for that, Siglemic wouldn’t have that trick in his arsenal to perform for real and without assistance.

GamesBeat: If some of our readers wanted to check out some speedrunning on Twitch for themselves, what channels would you direct them to?

Rea: Your first stop should most definitely be Speed Runs Live. They’ve really been at the forefront of embracing Twitch as a platform to showcase their skills, and their stream directory, powered by the Twitch API, really reflects this. It’s a daily destination for a lot of us at Twitch HQ. As for specific speedrunners, Siglemic [Super Mario 64] and CosmoWright [The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Wind Waker] are the torchbearers and are great representatives for their community. I also really enjoy watching Trihex [Super Mario World 2 and Jet Set Radio], GoronGuy [The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask], dxtr [Ninja Gaiden and Batman], Funkdoc [Castlevania], pydoyks [co-op Secret of Mana] … and the list could go on and on.

GamesBeat: Speed Demos Archive has long been the gatekeeper for speedruns, both on their own site and YouTube. Do you feel like Twitch can coexist or even partner with them, or are you more of a competitor?

Rea: We’ve simply built the platform, and we’re extremely grateful that amazing communities such as Speed Demos Archive have chosen to go with us for their broadcasting needs. Their annual Awesome Games Done Quick event for 2013 was the biggest charity event we’ve hosted, raising over $450,000 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. That’s totally insane, and we were really proud to feature that event. We’re not here to compete with content creators; we’re the platform, and we’re here to provide them with the tools they need to both create and continue their success.

GamesBeat: Despite the popularity of the occasional mind-blowing speedruns, the subculture doesn’t seem to have gone as mainstream as, say, e-sports have. Do you expect that to change in the coming years, and why?

Rea: This is an interesting situation because, while I’m very bullish on the continued growth of speedrun channels and its presence on Twitch, I don’t see it breaking through the mainstream, per se. You’re not going to see Siglemic on a can of Dr. Pepper, and you’re not going to see people buying tickets to watch speedruns on the big stage. And that’s not really the point, either.

Speedrunning has gained popularity not because it’s some sort of grand spectacle that’s easily marketed — because it’s not. It’s come into this incredible growth because it’s a very intimate, genuine gaming experience. It’s compelling because you’re gaining an incredible amount of insight as to what it takes to become the best in the world at specific games. It humanizes inhuman talents, and by tuning in, you get to watch their success, their failures, and their discoveries so that when they finally do achieve that miracle run, there’s a genuine emotional impact that comes along with it. It’s something you can’t get from a recording, and it’s what makes it so addictive and so inspiring.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Welcome to GamesBeat’s list of notable releases for 2013. With both Microsoft and Sony (at least) set to unveil the next generation of gaming hardware in time for the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), who knows what we’ll be playing by the end of the year. For now, the GamesBeat editors and writers pooled together their thoughts on known and notable releases of 2013 as well as our predictions on whether they’ll be worth a damn.

Not all games are notable simply because they’re expected to be good, however, and we’re not pulling any punches with our opinions just because a game’s not out yet. The way we see it, you can speak up early, or you can complain after spending $60.

Check back soon for a separate feature for all the big massively multiplayer online titles coming out this year.

What games of 2013 are you looking forward to (or worried about)?

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Welcome to GamesBeat’s Dead Space 3 game guide. I’ll try to keep my not-so-subtle “Electronic Arts turned this amazing horror franchise into an over-the-top co-op action shooter turd with microtransactions” rants to a minimum while delivering the following tips, tricks, and exploits. Let’s begin!

Table of contents

1. Intro to crafting
2. The best weapons
3. DLC weapons
4. Mode unlocks
5. Collectible unlocks
6. Easy Hardcore mode
7. Find Peng
8. Unlimited items glitch

Intro to Dead Space 3’s weapon crafting

Dead Space 3 is less survival-horror and more dungeon-loot crawl, which coincides with an all-new weapon crafting system. You’ll need resources, which are found on dead enemies, in containers and loot chests, and scattered around levels to craft weapons (and upgrade your suit).

Weapons can have up to two engines attached (so two guns in one), and then the type of tip you combine with that tool will determine its effect. For instance, a Pneumatic Torch engine will become a flamethrower with a Default Tip, and a Cryogenic Torch with a Precision Tip. Likewise, you can turn a Military Engine into one of several assault rifle, sniper, or shotgun variations.

Then you can add circuits to increase or decrease a weapon’s stats (damage, reload speed, clip size, firing rate). The type of frame you built your gun on will determine how many circuits are available (up to eight max). And finally, each gun has two attachment slots. Attachment modules add all types of unique effects to the gun, including elemental damage, increased ammo, automatic reloads, and more.

Resources and microtransactions

As you might have heard, Dead Space 3 features microtransactions because, obviously, all of the console gamers who played the first two games want to spend more money on top of their $60 retail purchases. The microtransactions revolve around earning resources for weapon crafting. You can buy a basic resource pack ($1), Ultra pack ($2), or Epic pack ($3). You’ll need to buy at least a few packs to really make a dent in any major weapon or suit purchases.

However, you can also use a scavenger bot to go out and find resources for you. You won’t get one of these bots until several hours into the game, and they’re only useful if you search for a specific area in each level to deploy them. By the end of the game, though, you’ll be swimming in resources if you’ve been using your bot(s) properly and regularly. They’ll also start bringing back Ration Seals, which you can use to purchase downloadable-content resource packs instead of paying real money.

Note: The Epic and Ultra DLC pack information seems to be switched in-game. So if you buy an Epic pack, you’re really getting an Ultra pack’s contents (a loss of a dollar). And the Ration Seals listed for the Ultra pack are twice the price of the Epic pack, but when you purchase an Epic pack with Ration Seals, you receive an Ultra pack instead. This is confirmed by a second party as of February 4, 2013.

Developer blueprints

In the blueprints section of the workbench, you’ll find a long list of developer-made weapons that you can purchase. These are all very resource-intensive, so you probably won’t be able to afford them until you can already make your own weapons. That said, they do come with some hard-to-find pieces, such as 3/3 circuits and other enhanced modules or weapon tips. So you may want to try buying some and breaking them down for parts.

The best weapons

Dead Space’s combat was originally built on the idea that Isaac was an engineer, not a soldier. So his engineering tools had to make due in the place of assault rifles and rockets and the usual space marine arsenal. It also fit well with the game’s enemies, the Necromorphs, who were best dismembered, rather than having a million bullets pumped into them until they ceased to come at you, bro.

Well, not anymore. Isaac’s signature Plasma Cutter is no longer his go-to weapon, as it is woefully underpowered next to some of the new guns you can craft in Dead Space 3. This sequel also adds a number of human and humanoid enemies to the mix, meaning dismemberment is no longer an integral part of gameplay.

Shotguns and grenade launchers

For short-range encounters in Dead Space 3 (of which you’ll have many), there is nothing better than a souped-up shotgun. Even at midrange, it can liquify most enemies with a single shot, or at the very least knock them back and remove their legs, allowing you to fire off a second fatal shot. The shotgun will also hit multiple enemies, so it’s good for small crowd control. As a general rule in Dead Space 3, you’ll want to crank up damage and rate of fire via circuit upgrades, but that’s especially true in building a beastly shotgun.

Next up, you’ll want to build a grenade launcher as soon as you can access the Survey Charge tool. For the most part, a single grenade will annihilate anything it hits, with the added effect of serious splash damage. However, that splash damage also applies to you, so make sure to equip a Safe Guard attachment to nullify any friendly fire. Then you’re free to run around and fire grenades point-blank without gibbing yourself. The only downside to explosive weapons is the limited clip, but since damage output is already high, you can focus on building up the clip (or possibly reload speed) via circuits.

Javelin and Ripper

If you’re looking for another solid set of weapons to diversify your gear, a Javelin and Ripper are second only to shotguns and grenade launchers. You’ll need to put a lot of emphasis on increasing their damage to make them worthwhile, especially against tougher enemies that become commonplace on harder difficulties or halfway through the game.

The Javelin can snipe enemies from afar, with the high probability of dismembering them and impaling them to a wall. Rate of fire can be vital with a Javelin as it may take a few shots to kill your target. For the Ripper, you’ll want to stick with the Default Tip so that the saw blades suspend in the air a few feet in front of you. Any enemies who come into range will get ground up. This is a little more risky than just blowing everything to shit, but it’s still fun and effective for the brave.

Stasis Coating module

Although there are lots of fun elemental attachments, you’ll want to have at least one weapon equipped with a Stasis attachment. This way, all of your shots will slow or freeze enemies down, allowing you to kill them before they reach you or prevent you from getting cornered.

That said, you may want to equip your saw weapon with the Electrocution module for the “Electric Lawnmower” Achievement (kill 30 enemies using an electrified Ripper blade) and any weapon with the Acid Bath mod for the Dropping Acid Achievement (dissolve 50 enemies with acid). Note that some enemies will die before being counted as “dissolved,” so you’ll probably have to kill more than 50 with that weapon.

DLC weapons

You can unlock a number of unique weapons before even starting up the game (by having a Dead Space 2 save file, preorders, etc.). These aren’t really anything special, except for the Evangelizer.

Purchases of the Dead Space 3 Limited Edition come with both the Evangelizer and Negotiator. The Evangelizer is a unique Carbine/shotgun hybrid. You’ll want to swap out the Carbine eventually, but the Evangelizer Shotgun tip is the best in the game, giving you an immediate advantage across all of your playthroughs. These weapons also include an Elite Heavy Frame, with all eight circuit slots open (something you wouldn’t normally see until the very end of the game if at all).

If you have a Dead Space 2 save file, you’ll also get the Planet Cracker, but despite its epic name, this is just a slightly more powerful plasma cutter. It’s immediately obsolete.

The RIG

Although there is a pretty large collection of “suits” to unlock in Dead Space 3, they are all aesthetic only. You can upgrade your RIG’s features at a suit kiosk, but the suit you decide to wear has no impact on gameplay whatsoever. I’m partial to the Witness suit (Limited Edition) and Hostile Environment Suit (complete all optional missions), personally.

Continue on to page two for more, including unlockables, special modes, secret Achievement locations, and glitches/exploits.

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Gearbox Software’s Borderlands 2 has seen a plethora of impressive cosplay, but what about cosplay combined with a haunting cover of the opening track? Thanks to indie band Rexon, we can all scratch that off the list as well.

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford shared the link out from his personal Twitter account today. In the video, Rexon frontwoman Kelly Jean appears as Lilith, a Siren character from the Borderlands series (Maya gets no love!), and performs a cover of The Heavy’s “Short Change Hero,” the song that plays over the opening cinematic in Borderlands 2. It’s pretty damn good:

The band also shared their Xbox 360 gamertags in the YouTube video’s description for anyone looking to help Kelly get her level 32 Commando to 50 in time for the next DLC. Though something tells me Rexon’s going to be a little bit busier than usual once this hits the front page of Reddit. …

Top image via Rexon’s Facebook page

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Spider-Man 3 director Sam Raimi is out, and Source Code director Duncan Jones is in, according to an Hollywood Reporter exclusive that an official Blizzard Entertainment forum post confirmed.

Blizzard may know how to create blockbuster, genre-defining games (perhaps you’ve heard of World of Warcraft?), but it hasn’t fared so well with its first foray onto the silver screen. I suppose “foray” suggests that they actually did something, but the announced Warcraft movie has been stuck in development limbo since 2006, when The Dark Knight studio Legendary Pictures first picked up the rights for a live-action adaptation.

In 2009, Sam Raimi was officially announced as the director, with a budget suggested in the $200M range. But he left the production in 2012 due to “other projects” and probably because no one likes him after the trainwreck that was Spider-Man 3.

Now it looks like David Bowie’s son (Jones) is taking things over. Jones is known for his work on the sci-fi indie flick Moon starring Sam Rockwell, filmed for around $1M, and the 2011 sci-fi thriller Source Code starring Jake Gyllenhaal, made for a reported $35M.

The Warcraft movie, should it ever see the light of day (remember the big live-action Halo film Hollywood was supposed to do?), will share producers with The Dark Knight Rises and Man of Steel, among others.

Top image: Blizzard Entertainment’s only sneak peek into the Warcraft film.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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For better or for worse, Scarlet Blade (known as Queen’s Blade Online in Korea),  an upcoming massively multiplayer role-playing game from Aeria Games, is definitely using its unique aspects to attract a specific kind of attention. I originally clicked through the newly opened official site to check out some hot robot-on-robot action (itself not very common in Western MMOs), but what I found was something … else.

For starters, the profile page for each of the character classes reads like a dating site profile. Here’s an excerpt from the “Whipper” bio:

About me:

How does that even make sense?

I’m a sexy, classy princess.

You, on the other hand, are a SLAVE.

You will worship me, dream about me, and most of all, do anything to please me. You are a pig. Lower than the lowest whale dung. I am your goddess. You are my plaything. That means that I will punish you. And you will like it.

Obviously, I’m not looking for a normal relationship. I’m looking for someone I can toy with and break. Why do I think I carry around this whip? Oh, right, it’s for “killing Naraks.” But it’s also very fun to, you know, show you who’s boss.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let me know if you’re interested.

Likes

• Dominating
• Flaying Naraks
• Submissive men who know their place
• Obedience
• Knitting

Dislikes

• Getting attitude
• Backchat
• Unflayed Naraks
• Men who refuse to be put in their place
• Ill-fitting clothing

In case you’re wondering, the profiles for the Punisher, Defender, and Shadow Walker classes (all female) are roughly the same, with plenty of phallic and suggestive imagery. The censored-for-America Sentinel assures you that she’s really 18, while the Medic‘s favorite song is “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jespen. I guess that song’s still popular by the time mankind has invented giant mechs and space-age weaponry. Why not, right?

Below: Scarlet Blade promotional images:

Going back to Scarlet Blade’s mixed messaging, the press release issued by Aeria Games describes classes in a far more straight-faced manner:

• The stalwart Defender, wielding a massive sword with ease to stand between her allies and certain death.
• The noble Medic, charged with keeping her fellow Arkana’s hearts beating on the battlefield.
• The deadly Punisher, a cool and efficient killing machine with unrivaled long-range firepower.
• The stealthy Shadow Walker, who loves to get up close and feel the spray of her enemies’ blood on her razor-sharp claws.

The backstory also comes off like an excerpt from a Gears of War novel rather than an episode of High School of the Dead (which the character bios are so obviously inspired by):

The Narak struck without warning. They opened a gateway from god knows where, and the invasion began shortly after. No attempts at communication have been accepted. No terms were offered.

For the first few days, all I could think about was how the movies got it wrong. Earth was finally under attack, and there was no crack squad of commandos there to save the day. There was no hive mind to destroy. No mothership to blow up. It turns out wars aren’t won by One Man With Nothing Left To Lose. They’re won by armies. And the Narak have an army like we’ve never seen.

As of today, every nation on earth has united to face the alien threat. Each military has been armed with the best its government has to offer. Carriers, guided missiles, assault drones ? they might as well have been bows and arrows. The Narak’s monsters are unstoppable, and their weapons tear through our defenses like they aren’t even there. There are too many dead to bury.

My annoyance (and this is something I can talk more about once I’m allowed to share my thoughts on an upcoming MMO by NCSoft) is that the developer, or more seemingly in this case, the Western publisher, is attempting to juggle two personas for the same game in an attempt to either appeal to a broader audience or to hide the true identity of its game. Scarlet Blade is ridiculous and filled to the brim will skimpy outfits and adolescent male fantasies, but then — oh, wait — we want you to take the story seriously. Look how epic everything is! Save the universe from total annihilation! But please, do it in this thong.

I’m not going to argue the ethics of this type of content one way or another (right now, anyway), I’m just going to suggest that MMO developers grow some balls and just go for it. THIS is what our game is, and we’re not afraid to shout it from the rooftops. We’re not going to pretend our game isn’t 99 percent fan service. That’s what I admire about Tera. It was like, “Most of our characters are basically strippers and they fight giant-ass monsters. So what? It’s awesome. You’ll love it.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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