breaking posts

It's been a while since a Magic: The Gathering-based game has been released for the PC but today Sony Online made the announcement that they will be working with Wizards of the Coast on Magic: The Gathering – Tactics, a turn-based strategy game that will be released for the PC in early 2010.

The game is being developed by Sony Online's Devner-based studio who have created a number of online collectible card games in the past. This new title will also use online collectable trading cards mixed with full 3D figures. Look for both single player and multiplayer options (including tournaments, achievements and a ranking system) along with regular content updates to the game after it launches.

Download HD Magic: The Gathering - Tactics Teaser Trailer (51 MB)

Gamers won't have to wait for much longer to finally head back to space, BioWare style. The developer has just announced that their sci-fi RPG sequel Mass Effect 2 will ship to stores on January 26 in the US. Europeans will have to wait a few extra days; the game shows up in that part of the world on January 29.

In addition to revealing the release date, BioWare and publisher Electronic Arts announced some special in-game items that will be available via pre-orders. GameStop will offer two items, the Terminus Armor (increases run speeds and personal shields) and the M-90 Blackstorm Heavy Weapon (fires off a local gravity well). You can see both items in the screenshot to the right. Other retailers will offer the Inferno Armor for pre-order offers.

[Via email press release]

While there's no word yet on if a demo for Dragon Age: Origins will be released, developer BioWare has just announced plans to release the game's character creator as a free separate PC application (sorry console gamers; no such thing for you) on October 13.

The character creator for the long awaited fantasy RPG will let PC gamers experiment with making characters from the game and allow them to save those characters on their hard drive. When the PC version of Dragon Age: Origins is released on November 2, players can import their characters into the game. You can also upload the image of said character to the upcoming social networking site for Dragon Age: Origins which should launch on the same day the character creator is released.

In related news a new sample from the upcoming novel Dragon Age: The Calling has been released on the game's official web site.

Even though the official release of Windows 7 is still three weeks away or so, the very first PC game with support for the OS's new DirectX11 3D graphics API is already out there right now. And believe it or not it's BattleForge, the free-to-play fantasy RTS game from Electronic Arts and its developer EA Phenomic.

The patch to enable DirectX11 support was in fact released last week to its users and according to BattleForge's official web site the patch will allow the game to "have a higher frame rate and new ways of creating graphical effects, such as shadows and lighting" on DirectX11 based PCs. Of course, most players of the game won't notice the difference at all. That's because the DirectX11 support requires both Windows 7 to be installed (Windows Vista will also support DirectX11 but that support has yet to be enabled) and a DirectX11-based video card be a part of the gaming rig. At the moment only two video graphics chips support DirectX11 and they both come from AMD. Graphics cards based on the company's ATI Radeon HD 5870 chip went on sale just last week and cards based on the the ATI Radeon HD 5850 goon sale today.

As promised, Valve has released their new (and free for PC owners) campaign for their hit zombie co-op shooter Left 4 Dead. The campaign, Crash Course, contains new campaign maps along with new Versus and Survival maps. 10 new Valve achievements have been added along with some matchmaking improvements. Valve has also decided to put the game on sale for 50 percent off its normal price for the next three days. That means you can buy the full version for a mere $14.99.

Valve has decided not to release any media from Crash Course before today so it should be interesting to see what the reaction is from players now that it is released. Valve has pledged to continue to support the game with new downloadable content even as it prepares to release its sequel, Left 4 Dead 2, in mid-November.

Update: Valve has also lowered the price of the Left 4 Dead Four Pack. You can now get four copies of the game (one for you and three for your buddles) for just $44.99 for the next three days.

Once upon a time a Half-Life mod maker named Minh "Gooseman" Le launched the first version of his multiplayer mod Counter-Strike. The team based gameplay was something totally different than the normal deathmatch or capture the flag modes and its popularity grew and grew until Counter-Strike became far more popular to play than Half-Life. Half-Life's creators Valve bought the Counter-Strike mod and turned it into a full fledged commercial title. Counter-Strike is still one of the most popular games to play online 10 years after the first mod release.

While Le worked with Valve for a while (which apparently included some time on a canceled Counter-Strike sequel) he eventually decided to leave Valve to work on a totally original game. IGN now has the first brief preview of that game with the somewhat ungainly title Tactical Intervention. While there are apparently similarities between Counter-Strike and the new game (both are team-based shooters) there are new elements such as AI civilans that react to events and can be taken hostage. Rounds are also faster than in Counter-Strike (around two minutes on average). The game is expected to go into beta testing "soon" with a released planned for the end of 2009.

Update: 4Gamer.net has some new (and watermark lacking) screenshots from the game that we have reproduced here

PC gamers in the US have already had a couple of game delays announced this week (Blur and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat) and now one of the major fall game released won't have the PC port come out alongside the consoles. Via their official Twitter site, Ubisoft has announced that the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 will now be released in the first quarter of 2010 (the console version's release dates are unaffected).

The announcement has the usual excuse for the delay, saying, "A bit more time for the dev team to deliver the best quality game to you." So now we can add the PC port to the list of games that are forming a huge log jam of titles set for a first quarter 2010 release (although its likely some of those games will get pushed back).

[Via Blue's News]

In a little over a month, you will be seeing a lot of this guy and his friends. Our sister site Joystiq, reporting from EA's pre-Tokyo Game Show press conference, announced that the multiplayer demo for Valve's co-op zombie shooter sequel Left 4 Dead 2, will be made available on October 27 for the PC (oh and that Xbox 360 console as well).

It's likely that people who pre-order the full game will get first access to the demo via Steam just like what happened with the first Left 4 Dead demo last year. It's also possible, again like last year, that the demo will shut down when the full version of Left 4 Dead 2 is released on November 17.

It's one of the longest running series in PC game history and now a new Settlers game has just been announced. The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom will once again be developed by the game's creators at Blue Byte Software and will ship to stores via publisher Ubisoft in the spring of 2010.

As you can see from the above screenshot, The Settlers 7 will use an all new graphics engine to show off the latest version of the strategy-sim series. Set in Europe during the early Renaissance period of history, players will learn to expand their fictional kingdom through military, science or trade routes. Look for both a single player campaign along with co-op and adversarial online features. Support for user created content will also be a part of The Settlers 7.

Some fans of Empire: Total War were a little miffed that developer The Creative Assembly and publisher Sega announced plans for an all new stand alone game, Napoleon: Total War, recently. They believed the game should be an expansion to Empire: Total War. Today, however, word has come down that there will in fact be a downloadable mini-expansion for Empire: Total War coming very soon.

The expansion is titled The Warpath Campaign and will be made available exclusively via the Steam download service. Look for five new playable American Indian factions that you can use in the new campaign (Iroquois, Huron, Plains, Pueblo and Cherokee) along a newly expanded North American map, new elite units, new agent types, new tribal technologies and more. The price for the mini-expansion will be $9.99. The Warpath Campaign will be released in late November.