Umbrella is one of the busiest publishers/developers on the App Store, and today they've set the release dates for two of their many upcoming mobile games they're planning on launching this year. The first is for a game called Tidy Robots which we originally were given a hands-on demo of back at GDC in March. The game is about a bunch of toys who come to life and have a big old party in the toy shop where they live while it's closed, but come morning time they've left an awful mess and must work to clean things up before the shop owner gets wise to what happened. That cute little premise and the colorful visuals in Tidy Robots are deceptive though, as the game is actually a series of logic puzzles that will test every ounce of your brain matter. Here's the official trailer.
Tidy Robots is set to release on September 21st on both iOS and Android and will come with 80 hand-crafted levels as well as brand new levels released weekly. It'll be "Completely FREE to play" but no word on if there will be any sort of full game unlock or ad-removal IAP. Coming quite a bit sooner than Tidy Robots is a game called Fast Track. This one comes from developer Nathan Malville who you may remember as the creator of Plicplic [Free], one of our favorite games of 2012, among several other mobile titles since. Fast Track is a straightforward avoidance game with sick visuals and a cool track-tilting effect that looks really neat in motion. As said this one is coming quite soon and will be available on August 17th so keep an eye out for it then and check out the launch trailer for Fast Track below.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’ future is looking very bright, with big features in the pipeline.
Some of those are coming as early as this week with the monthly patch, while others are still early in the works.
We’ve covered everything developer Bluehole announced so far, but there are so many of them we thought we’d round them all up in one page for easy access. And to make things even more interesting, Arekkz made a video of the top nine things coming soon to PUBG.
Without further ado, here’s what you can look forward to in the game’s future patches:
–The Mk14 EBR marksman rifle
This weapon is similar to the SKS, in that it’s a semi-automatic rifle. It also fires 7.62mm bullets, but unlike the SKS, it’s a crate-only weapon.
It’s also going to be more powerful than the SKS, but we’re not yet sure if that just means damage.
–The new rolling animation
Earlier today, PlayerUnknown gave everyone a sneak peek at a new set of animations for what could be a new rolling feature. It’s also possible this is what the character will automatically do when going prone after running or going prone after strafing.
Regardless, it looks very cool and it wouldn’t be outside the norm for PUBG when you consider the game’s Arma roots.
–Mantling, vaulting, and climbing animations
Right now, getting over obstacles, even as small as a picket fence, is a chore. If you’re not looking to go the long way around, you can always try your luck with jumping over them.
The result of these jumps are inconsistent, and depend a lot on your forward momentum. Soon, though, this will be a thing of the past when these new vaulting animations make it into the game. They were revealed a couple of times already, but it looks like implementing them is harder we imagined.
First-person servers do exactly as you imagine: locking your view to first-person only, and just removing the crosshairs. For this to work, the game needed to have an FOV slider, which is thankfully also out the same day.
At launch, first-person will be available in Solos and Duos, for North America and Europe. The rest of the world will get it afterwards.
–New cosmetic items in crates
We’re finally getting new skins and clothing items to chase after in PUBG, but not everyone is happy. These will be part of a new crate-and-key system that’s rolling out with the monthly patch.
Three crates have been announced so far, and only one of which requires a key to open. A key costs $2.50, but the rest are completely free. If you’re not too fused about the cost, you’ll be happy to know that clothing sets are seemed around the Battle Royale movie, which the game is inspired by.
Further down the round, new character customisation items will be available, such as tattoos and face paints. The goal is to let players customise their characters “to a T.”
–More options in custom games
Custom games offer a fresh set of rules that turn the game on its head. Custom severs can only be hosted by PUBG partners – typically streamers and big YouTubers, but anyone can join them depending in the game size.
The settings menu they have access to is still not that extensive, and it shows in game modes like zombies where friendly fire needd to be turned off for the zombies. This and many other options have been added to the custom server menu, but a lot of them do not work at the moment.
–New maps and weather effects
There are currently two announced maps being worked on. The first is smaller than the current one, and is set in a desert town. The other one is of a similar size to the main map, and takes place in the Adriatic Sea and features snow mountains.
We’ve obviously only seen teaser images of one map, but it’s not likely we’ll be seeing any of them in the game anytime soon. PlayerUnknown previously said maps is the thing that takes the most development time.
–A fully-featured 3D replay system
A replay system is one of the big features Bluehole is currently working on. This will manifest itself in two systems, one that tracks player movements during a match and gives you an idea of where you were in relation to other players.
The other is pretty big. A fully-fledged 3D replay system that allows you to rewatch the entire match from any perspective you want. This will be great in helping players identify their mistakes, but it’s also a good way to make videos.
Bluehole didn’t say when we should expect this to make it into the game, but it’ll likely take a while.
Castle Burn is an upcoming real-time competitive strategy game that hopes to offer a fun take on the Clash Royale formula. Castle Burn uses a card-based army system that allows you to discover new units and upgrade existing units, but also appears to add some wrinkles to the Clash Royale recipe with the ability to add new cards to your deck as you play and with buildings being more important to the overall economy. Castle Burn also has heroes you can deploy as you try to tilt the battle to your favor. It's hard to judge how close to Clash Royale the game will be, and it might be unfair to describe a game as a Clash Royale clone just because it uses the same map style. We'll have to play it and see.
Castle Burn will be soft launching for Android in the Philippines August 11 followed by an iOS soft launch in Thailand and Australia late August-early September. The developers hope to release the game Fall 2017. In the meantime, go find out more about the game in our Upcoming Games forum thread.
So it’s heartwarming to see its creator, Brendan Greene aka PlayerUnknown, have a positive stance towards others modding his game. Speaking to CNET, Greene said that he definitely wants to see mods for his game.
“I’ve said this before: I want to find the next PlayerUnknown,” Greene said. “I want to try to find someone who creates a game mode or a mod for my game that propels them to fame, and gets them to make their own game too.”
That said, enabling modding in PUBG isn’t as easy as it may seem. There’s a number of challenges that’ll need to be worked out first before this could happen, and piracy is chief among them.
“We want to [let people mod PUBG], but we have to do it carefully because we’re very protective of our server files,” Greene pointed out. PUBG does not currently allow users to host their own servers, meaning everything has to go through developer Bluehole.
“Allowing people to run their own dedicated servers would mean releasing the server files and that could lead to piracy.
“It’s something we want to do, but it might take us a bit of time to actually implement it, because we really have to figure out the best way to do it so the game still stays secure.”
If Bluehole plans to one day allow modding, it’ll open the doors for anyone with a game mode idea to implement and run it. Genres evolve over time, and who knows, maybe there’s a better version of the current setup we’ve yet to play.
If you're one of the many waiting for the final Telltale The Walking Dead [Free] season so you can wrap up a story that started many years ago, you might want to watch this brief video of Telltale developers talking more about the way they will develop the final season and how player decisions and feedback feed into the development of upcoming episodes. The developers admit that they develop the episodes while players are playing the season, which puts more pressure on the developers but also allows them to deliver the experiences players want. At the same time, it does make me wonder whose voice gets heard during this process.
There's also a short video that talks about how important Clementine has become to the franchise and how she started up as something to worry about and become a symbol of hope. They go into more about Clementine's development and evolution (which, of course, comes with spoilers), but it's a great video for those who like the character and can't wait to get to play her in the final season. We've seen parts of this video in the earlier Telltale announcement, but this time around we get a bit more context on the development side of the series.
