MLG Swarming With League of Legends

MLG has announced they will be adding League of Legends to the remainder of the 2012 Pro Circuit, beginning with the MLG Spring Championship in June. A mix of 8 invited teams and 12 online qualifiers will battle it out for a share of $40,000 in prize money and the adoration of gaming nerds around the world.

League of Legends is one of the most-watched eSports titles outside of Korea today, and was featured at two MLG Pro Circuit competitions in 2011. Since launching in October 2009, over 30 million players have downloaded the free-to-play MOBA style game with more than four million players arguing over who is the bigger noob daily.

Unlike DOTA 2, League of Legends combines the same depth of strategy as an eSports title with an approachable game dynamic that attracts casual players to spend hundreds of dollars a month on Astronaut skins for their favourite rodent champions.

In other news, something called Starcraft 2 will have a playable beta version of it’s Heart of the Swarm expansion at the MLG Spring Championship too. That might be good too.

Gabe Decrees DOTA 2 Will Be Free

While Valve is hard at work on the beta development phase of DOTA 2, gamers have been waitin’ and debatin’ on whether the game will have an up-front fee, or if it’ll be entirely free.

Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve, has confirmed that the game will be free ‘with a twist’ while speaking to the Seven Day Cooldown podcast:

“It’s going to be free-to-play — it’ll have some twists, but that’s the easiest way for people to think about it,” Newell said.

“We’re trying to figure out ways so that people who are more valuable to everybody else [are] recognized and accommodated. We all know people where if they’re playing we want to play, and there are other people where if they’re playing we would [rather] be on the other side of the planet.”

“It’s just a question of coming up with mechanisms that recognize and reward people who are doing things that are valuable to other groups of people.”

Gabe went on to explain that good behaviour could include anything from players who write useful guides or who volunteer their time to teach newer players. He said he couldn’t think of any existing free-to-play models that are the same as what Valve has in mind for DOTA 2, however I can.

League of Legends, a rival MOBA game, has a similar system of reward with it’s Summoners Code of Conduct and Tribunal. Players are encouraged to vote on breaches of this code in a Tribunal process that rewards them with in-game currency. Unfortunately the rewards are fairly minor, much less currency than one could earn by simply playing a game of LoL, which stops most players from participating in the Tribunal on a regular basis.

Riot has released statistics claiming the Tribunal is a resounding success, so hopefully if Valve plan to include more substantial rewards with DOTA 2‘s incentive system, it should be a successful model.

Source: Polygon

Grab Super MNC Free On Steam

Monday Night Combat is back – now with 100% more Super in front of it, 100% more free to play and 50% more chickens!

Super Monday Night Combat continues the proud MNC tradition of team-based, cartoon FPS MOBA gameplay and is supposed to be in the beta phase of development. However due to some unfortunate mishaps, the game is now freely available from Steam.

Developer Uber Entertainment explained the sudden release, which was a surprise to them too, via their forums:

We did a bunch of invites over the weekend and there was some wonkiness on how the messaging went out with lots of confusion which resulted in more silliness. We decided to just open it up. There will be an announcement about it on Steam soon.

Don’t question it, just grab a copy from Steam and start playing! While you’re waiting for the download, you can check out the gameplay intro video below:

Crysis 3 Announced For 2013

MAXIMUM SEQUEL ENGAGED

Picking up from the incredibly abrupt ending to Crysis 2, Prophet is heading back into New York City which is now completely overgrown with trees for some reason.

I’m not exactly sure on the time frame between Crysis 2 and 3, but unless Prophet retired from super-soldiering for a few years in-between games, I don’t know why everything suddenly looks all I Am Legend. Well, whatever. He’s rocking a sweet compound bow now, so I’ll ignore the foliage-based continuity errors for now.

EA’s announcement described the setting for Crysis 3 in a thoroughly less inane manner than I did:

Players take on the role of ‘Prophet’ as he returns to New York, only to discover that the city has been encased in a Nanodome created by the corrupt Cell Corporation. The New York City Liberty Dome is a veritable urban rainforest teeming with overgrown trees, dense swamplands and raging rivers. Within the Liberty Dome, seven distinct and treacherous environments become known as the Seven Wonders. This dangerous new world demands advanced weapons and tactics. Prophet will utilise a lethal composite bow, an enhanced Nanosuit and devastating alien tech to become the deadliest hunter on the planet.

As is the norm these days, several pre-order packs will be available from select retailers and Origin offering players the chance to get their hands on early access multiplayer unlocks for guns, camouflage and exclusive dog tags. Normally I would say this is a cheap marketing tactic, but one of the packs includes early access to the compound bow in multiplayer.

Read on for several screenshots released with the announcement.

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Mass Effect 3′s Free Resurgence Pack

Bioware is still looking to mend any fences that may have been broken from the nerd-rage generated by the ending to Mass Effect 3 with the release of the free multiplayer Resurgence Pack released today.

The free download will add:

• 2 new maps

Firebase Hydra – an abandoned Quarian colony, and Firebase Condor – a Turian warzone outpost.

• 6 new characters

Asari Justicar Adept, Krogan Battlemaster Vanguard, Geth Infiltrator, Geth Engineer, Batarian Soldier, Batarian Sentinel.

• 3 new Weapons

Striker Assault Rifle, Kishock Harpoon Gun, Geth Plasma SMG

The DLC will be available from the Origin store, Xbox Live and the PSN store from today as a free download.

Borderlands 2 DLC Will Add Mechromancy

Gearbox has used the PAX East to announce that the first DLC pack for Borderlands 2 will be released soon after launch and will add a new playable class – the Mechromancer.

The Mechromancer is a female human/machine hybrid with a robot arm, spiky red hair and a giant robot buddy called D374-TP also known as Deathtrap.

The DLC will be free to those who pre-order Borderlands 2, or as paid DLC for anyone else but no price has been announced yet.

They also revealed that players will be able to customise their character with different costumes that drop as boss loot, and different heads. A unique character head will be available to those who played the original Borderlands.

7 Minutes of Borderlands 2 Gameplay

Breaking news: Borderlands 2 doesn’t actually contain any wubs, despite previous indications to the contrary.

However it will bring millions of guns, a series of epic boss fights and a new focus on fluid quest lines in a move away from the monotonous “fetch and return” quests of the first game.

VG24/7 has a whole 7 minutes of gameplay footage with commentary from Steve Gibson, Studio Vice President of Gearbox Software, as he explains the design decisions behind the key features of Borderlands 2.

September is too far away.

Orcs Must Die! 2 Announced With Co-Op

Over 3.4 billion orcs were heartlessly slaughtered in the first Orcs Must Die! game, but Robot Entertainment feel there’s still more work to be done in the field of orkish genocide.

Orcs Must Die! 2 introduces a new character, The Sorceress, along with the co-op mode that was sorely missing from the first game. There’ll also be a whole new campaign, new spells, enemies, traps and items to use in the ethnic cleansing of the ork population.

The game will be playable at the upcoming PAX East event, so we should see a lot of news and impressions popping up in the next week.

Check out the announcement trailer below.

Huge Dick Smith Games Sale Starts April 2

Get your wallets and/or credit cards ready, because Dick Smith Electronics is gearing up for the mother of all video games sales on Monday April 2nd.

The sale will be happening both online and in-store, while stocks last. I’m guessing the stocks won’t be lasting too long, because some of the deals are insane.

A 250GB Xbox Slim Console for $100? A silver 320GB PS3 console for $199? C&C Generals on PC for $1?

You better get in quick if you want to grab the good stuff. It’s actually legit too, despite being so close to April Fools Day.

Read on for the full list of items on sale.

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Mozilla’s BrowserQuest Is HTML5-tastic

Those sneaky folks at Mozilla have launched BrowserQuest, an old-school adventure game developed by Little Workshop and played entirely in your web browser.

“BrowserQuest is a tribute to classic video-games with a multiplayer twist,” Mozilla announced today. “You play as a young warrior driven by the thrill of adventure. No princess to save here, just a dangerous world filled with treasures to discover. And it’s all done in glorious HTML5 and JavaScript.”

“”When you start to play, your browser opens up a WebSocket connection to one of several load-balanced game servers,” Mozilla explains. “Each server hosts multiple world instances and handles the player synchronization and game logic within all instances. Because the server code is running on Node.js, both the server and client codebases share a small portion of the same JavaScript source code.”

The best part is, the whole game is open source and freely available from github. There’s nothing to stop anyone from running their own BrowserQuest server, which wouldn’t be a bad idea because the current ones are packed to capacity, or creating entirely new worlds and mods.

You can head over to the BrowserQuest site to play the game, but be a little patient because everyone’s fighting for a spot at the moment.