The Witcher III!

Hello again people, Shaded Gaming is back after a brief (lol) pause from the gaming world, starting the return with an overview of The Witcher III, Wild Hunt!

To give a brief bit of background, the Witcher series are RPG's with a rather in-depth crafting and combat system implemented into them. If you haven't checked out the first two, we'd seriously recommend them both.

Originally the release date was projected for 24 February, 2015 yet now it's being pushed back to 19 May, 2015. Which sucks pretty bad for those of us highly anticipating the game, but like all good things... We must wait or be patient or some other kind of crap advice that I'm definitely not going to follow. Counting down the days over here.

A lot of notes and changes from the predecessors in the series are being rolled out, so we'll list the major ones here:

• This is projected to be Geralt's (Main Protagonist) final adventure.
• Unlike the Witcher II, the game will make jumping into the storyline a bit easier if you have not played the previous games. Not entirely certain how they'll do that considering that the story still follows the same character. I for one will be pissed if they pull the amnesia cliché.
• Reportedly the game world will be 35 times larger than the Witcher II.
• They're removing the Quicktime events from the game entirely (Thank God).
• A large emphasis has been put on an "open world" environment now. The previous games were still open-world somewhat, but you still felt a linear progression track.
• Claiming 100 hours of gameplay.

Minecraft: Patch 1.8 Details!!

Taking a break from the hard-hitting massive productions out there, we look to the indie Minecraft and it's upcoming full release (Minecraft has been in a beta version since 2009.)

Previously Mojang was charging 20 USD for Minecraft, however on the date of 11-11-11 (So tired of seeing that number on every release date!), the price will be bumped on up to 30 green. Those of you that've already spent your $20, you don't have to pay more for the upgraded version. If you're currently on the fence about buying Minecraft, we suggest doing it now before the price raises! Thankfully, a price change won't be the only thing affecting our blocky little worlds.

Thorough searching for confirmed changes to Minecraft has gotten us this list thus far:

• Bringing back the cobwebs! They'll be found in dungeons and in abandoned mine shafts.
• New types of dungeons! Notch has yet to say what makes these different from the standard dungeon room already implemented, but he has said different types will have different rewards.
• Mine shafts will now be randomly scattered in the world, -USUALLY- leading to dungeons.
• A new mob called the Endermen. They're a tall, lanky, dark figure that moves blocks around to create a sort of suspense when you see that things in your house aren't as they were when you left them. Endermen are peaceful until you look directly at them - meaning your screen can have them within eyesight, but once you put your cursor on them they will stop sifting blocks about and stare right at you. When you look away, they'll charge at you and likely beat the crap out of you.

• A new lighting system! This one's hard to explain so I'll just throw down a picture. What this picture won't show is the new light emitted from things like Redstone torches and Glowstone. Light emitters will emit a glow depending on what color they are. Redstone torches = light red hue, Glowstone = Strong yellow glow.

                                      

• An experience bar! Upon killing creatures you earn Experience Orbs, which can be used to buy items. No word has been told of your character actually being able to level up with experience, it just seems to be currency.
• Hunger is being added, although with the addition of food being able to be stacked (Thank God. I can stack chunks of cobblestone that are half as big as me into stacks of 64 but I can't stuff some bread together into a damn bag, what the hell?) your hunger will be easily managable.

• A new farming system. Little has been said about this, only that it'll feel a bit more 'realistic' than the previous setup.
• A major overhaul is being worked into the way Biomes are generated. Not only will there be a few new types, there will be rivers that continue for a few hundred blocks and several-biome wide oceans (also deeper down).
• Server owners will be able to modify the height caps of the maps. By default the world's ceiling will be the same, but the server can be modified so that you can build your sky-high dance club or whatever it is you do all the way up there.

• Bows will have a variable strength. Holding down the attack key longer makes the arrow shoot further/deal more damage.
• Critial hits will be able to be achieved through jumping while swinging with your sword (Mojang wants us to look like a bunch of idiots I guess) or randomly through the bow & arrow.
• A creative mode is being put in. In this mode you can fly freely, change the day/night cycle whenever you want and break blocks with one hit. If you're afraid of Endermen, this is for you.
• And finally, the biggest and most exciting change - NPC villages! These will be placed randomly in the world. If you're a fan of Minecraft mods, you'll have seen some of the NPC mods already out there. I'm unsure whether or not these new villagers will act as they do in the mods insofar as collecting their own resources and expanding their villages periodically. The only thing being said so far is that players can trade with NPCs (We're assuming this is where the experience orbs are being taken to for items). There will be different types of NPCs, i.e. Guardsmen, villagers, archers. It's assumed if you go up and punch one of them they'll probably hunt you down.
• Oh also giant mushrooms.

Diablo III: Stay a while, and listen!

Having spent more afternoons of our high-school career leveling our Sorceresses on Diablo II than we'd like to admit, you'd better bet we're squealing like little schoolgirls in anticipation for this newest game in the Diablo series.

The game itself will be extremely similar to its predecessors in that it's an overhead RPG in which you slash through literally tens of thousands of mobs with your super-duper cool spells. There will still be mini-bosses, but in a greater variety of types. In the original games, mini-bosses always came in one format: A big discolored mob with a few special abilities. Now, they'll interact with their environment more, summon creatures, split into 3 mobs as one of its abilities. These are just a few things Blizzard designers have released.

A few features that'll help break up the monotony of hours of making corpse piles:

1. Destructible terrain. If there's an overhang you can break it to make it fall on groups of mobs, if there's a flimsy looking wall you can bust through it and get access to a secret room. Little things like that give you more things to shoot at. As if the millions of mobs weren't enough!

2. Random events! Blizzard hasn't told us much of this feature yet, just things like wars between NPC factions in certain zones.

3. There will be added random zone features. For instance, if you remember in D2 and D1 the maps randomized (to an extent), so each time you played through the map it was slightly different. Word is (this part is just rumor, we can't find confirmation from Blizzard on this but it does sound friggin' awesome) that the terrain will change entirely through the D3 engine each time you travel through a zone, in a similar way that Minecraft generates biomes.

4. There will be improved PvP. If you've ever played WoW arenas, it'll be a similar setup to that. There will be a number of arena maps with preset teams of 2v2, 3v3, 5v5 and (rumored) 10v10s. There will be ranked seasons with awards being dished out to people who rank within certain percentile ranges. Much better than the previous "lol I'm hostile to you now I can come and kill you and take your gold while you're questing. I'll call you a noob even though I'm 20 levels above you!"

The classes in D3 seem pretty well-thought-out thus far. There is the Wizard (very similar to the Sorceress in D2), the Barbarian, the Demon Hunter (A ranged class with some of the trap abilities that the Assassin had in D2), the Witch Doctor (Can raise dead and curse similar to the Necromancer), and the Monk, who seems to have the most unique abilities out of them all. There are -some- similarities in the Assassin's martial arts tree from D2, but past that it seems pretty independent.

Sadly, Blizzard has yet to give us a release date. Even when they do I'm sure it'll get postponed another half a year or so. I do suggest that the readers to on Battle.net and sign your account up for the D3 beta for a chance to get in.

Unfortunately Deckard Goddamn Cain is still going to be around. I had hoped he'd die of cancer or diabetes or something. So every time you need to grab pots, every single time you need to get scrolls of identification or scrolls of town portal, every time you need to repair you get to be greeted with "STAY A WHILE!! AND LISTEN!!!"

Post stories about your Diablo adventures here! Characters, when you played, what you'd like to see in D3 or what you're excited about in the newest Diablo!

Mass Effect 3!!!

For those of you who haven't heard, watch this. I've taken the liberty of digging through all the ME3 trailers to find the best one. This (in our opinion) is the superior trailer, it gives you more of a hint of what the game'll be like in comparison to Mass Effect 1 & 2.

I know, I know, it's not a gameplay trailer. To little surprise, all the gameplay trailers for ME3 have had the living hell edited out of them by BioWare to make it more aesthetic. There really aren't any good quality videos that actually -show- you what playing the newest game in the Mass Effect series will be like, which - I won't lie - is severely disappointing.

Mass Effect 3 is reportedly taking place simply on Earth, primarily in London. This could be bad news, considering one of the coolest features of the originals was the ability to fly to other planets, mine them for resources and do side-jobs on them. Perhaps the galaxy-flying system will be replaced with being able to travel to different cities? Pure speculation though, as BioWare has only announced small parts of their game.

They have, however, given us this information: You'll be able to upload your character and his storyline from Mass Effect 2, there are many carry-over characters from both of the first two games (Now I regret sending Garrus on that suicide mission...), and that they're developing a number of new classes, ones that'll be more unique than in the previous games. Good to hear, considering in ME2 there were truly only 3 classes: Soldier, Engineer and Adept, and the other 3 were just hybrids between two of the first three. I felt cheated!

Mass Effect 3 is to be released on March 6, 2012. Very smart of BioWare to not release it on 11-11-11 like all these other big-hitting productions. Mass Effect will have nearly 4 months of safety for us all to play through Skyrim on every class multiple times over.

If you have any news you'd like to add to ME3's production, please post it!!! We're very interested to hear!

New Blizzard MMO - Titan

Blizzard decided they weren't raking in enough of our cash as it is, so about 4 years ago they decided to start drawing up another game!

For those of you who haven't heard, Titan is a project that Blizzard has been developing in secrecy for quite some time now. The first hint that was given to the company's newest monolith of a game was back in 2007. Job listings for designers for a new project were listed on the Blizzard company website, leading gamers and community paparazzi to go on a hunt trying to figure out what those crazy guys at the Blizzard H.Q. were up to.

This seems to be a very serious project, as the Senior Designer team for World of Warcraft has been pulled and applied to Titan, and trust me, we can tell with how -well done- Cataclysm was. *End sarcasm*.

Jeffrey Kaplan (Also known a Tigole for you fellow extremists), when asked if the new Blizzard MMO was going to be science fiction, post-apocalyptic or historical, just laughed and said "all of those combined!" To add to the broad scope of the game's target audience, Blizzard said that Titan was to appeal to a "casual audience", leaving me to wonder if they intended WoW to appeal to the hardcore players? I'm sure all the EVE players out there are facepalming at speeds greater than light right now.

In any case, Blizzard has a history of making very solid games. Maybe not solid expansions, but the games themselves have always been of superior quality. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited for Titan as well.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 vs. Battlefield 3

 It's been a huge discussion lately and a war from the producers of both games. Which FPS will prevail? Last round it seems the CoD series beat out Battlefield with Black Ops selling nearly 15 times the copies of Battlefield Bad Company 2. However, things might be changing for our friends at Dice.





Dice reports that the number of pre-orders for their upcoming Battlefield game is nearly 10 times the number of pre-orders for BF:BC2, while Activision's investors are saying that their pre-order count isn't up-to-snuff with what Black Ops earned.

Personally I'm a pretty big fan of both games. They have very different styles of gameplay that can't really be compared with one-another. As an owner of both Black Ops and Bad Company 2, I feel that which one I play is entirely dependent on my mood. If I've only got a little time-frame and prefer to just shoot up a bunch of people, I'll easily choose CoD. But if I feel like really sinking some time into a mission, BF:BC2 is where it's at.

How about you guys? Leave a reply telling us which game you're excited about. What features of the game really pull you to it?

Battlefield 3: So stoked

If you haven't heard of, seen anything about or are a FPS player that's not as excited about BF:3's release as we are, take a minute to watch this video.

Personally I know we're getting a little tired of the "lol we won't release it until 11-11-11 because all the numbers in the date match up!", but I tell you once that date comes it'll be like nerd Christmas. Unfortunately, EA Games is adding its next game in the Battlefield series to that date. But hey - the longer the wait the sweeter the payout.

For those of you (like us) who simply have to get their top-of-the-line FPS action in by clawing your way to the beta, don't worry! I'll save you from another two months of misery. EA Games and Dice have announced that by pre-ordering the game, you get an early access to the BF:3 Beta. Now, when you'll actually be able to access that is a mystery, considering Alpha just closed a few weeks back. They've yet to tell and don't seem to be opening their mouths anytime soon. More depression. Patience is not common in us gamers!

Video games of choice.

This post is just to get some feedback from you guys. Reply and tell us what games you like to invest your hours into!

Minecraft: Share your junk.

Hello crafters. The rest of the Shaded Gaming team is giving me hell about this, but I'm sure there are some deep gamers who enjoy some Minecraft adventures from time-to-time.

Notch and his crew have gone into recession for quite a while. Their next patch isn't scheduled to be released until 11-11-11 unfortunately, and God knows that Skyrim will push that date back further considering Mojang will be far too busy getting owned by dragons to release any such patch. There have been hints that the upcoming patch will lay down an A.I. revamp for the enemies as well as new creatures that actually build small villages. I was excited for the Wolf release but they turned out to be anything but useless and very dangerous if you play Multiplayer with a group of friends. Here's to praying that this patch won't be such a grand dissapointment.

On a side note, if you've any screenshots of creations that you've created or griefed into oblivion, please share.

Obligatory: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Like most gamers who take their Bethesda RPGs entirely too seriously, I'm absolutely unable to remain in my seat any longer in anticipation for this game. Simply knowing that I have three more months of agony to go is killing me.

As with all good things, Bethesda stated that Skyrim won't be released until 11/11/11 last year. This gives us a month and 20 full days of Mountain Dew fueled days and nights to experience this game to its absolute fullest until the world ends when 2012 begins. Being a recovering addict from Oblivion myself, I'm somewhat dreading the arrival of this monolith of a game. My Argonian slept and ate more than I did, and you better believe he's better looking. Skyrim will absorb my gaming life in its entirety, my guild's raiding progression will come to an absolute halt as we all take our quarter-year Elder Scrolls break. Chaos and anarchy will ensue, the gaming internet as we know it will become derailed.

All-in-all, Bethesda had better not pull a Blizzard and decide to postpone the release date another half a year. I'd cry. Hard.