In the wake of a sexual harassment lawsuit, Blizzard has lost three top designers

On July 20, 2021, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) filed a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard for ten breaches of state labour laws. This came after a two-year inquiry by the DFEH into the company's labour policies. Activision Blizzard "discriminated against female workers in terms and circumstances of employment, including salary, assignment, promotion, termination, constructive dismissal, and retaliation," according to a DFEH report dated June 24, 2021. Following the lawsuit, Activision Blizzard has lost three top designers who worked on Diablo 4 and World of Warcraft.

A workplace hostile to women, stemming from a  toxic "frat house" culture.

 

Luis Barriga, the game director for Diablo 4, Jesse McCree, the lead designer for Diablo 4, and Jonathan LeCraft, the designer for World of Warcraft, are among them. The identities of the three developers have been deleted from Blizzard's internal directory and Slack, according to insiders. Another name included in the DFEH report includes a long time WoW developer, Alex Afrasiabi. Afrasiabi's sexual harassment history was so well-known that his BlizzCon hotel suite was dubbed the "Cosby Suite." It was said to be a booze-filled meeting spot where people, including Afrasiabi, would pose with an actual photo of Bill Cosby while smiling.

The firm could not provide an explanation for the new departures. However, two of the resignees, McCree and LeCraft were purportedly seen in photographs of the famed "Cosby Suite." This was the hotel room specifically cited in the DFEH lawsuit as the location where male workers allegedly harassed women at corporate functions.

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Seer From Apex Legends Gets Nerfed

After numerous players complained about Seer - the latest addition to the collection of agents in the game, Apex Legends decided to listen to all those complaints and nerf Seer with a new update.

The reason behind the nerf was basically, too many people complained about Seer and his abilities being too overpowering as compared to the rest of the agents. While his abilities looked good on paper, as soon as he was added in Season 10, people quickly realised that Seer had a bit of extra edge that no agent had and hence, Seer players were able to win more matches with higher kill counts. This, in a competitive game like Apex is an unfair advantage to everyone and hence, it should be dealt with.

Respawn, the developers of Apex took Twitter today to announce that they will be nerfing Seer in the coming update and lists all the Passive, Tactical and Ultimate abilities have been nerfed. You can read more here : 

 

Good morning! We just shipped a @playapex update that fixes a few bugs and introduces balance changes to Seer. See full details below: pic.twitter.com/9npkovEo5P

— Respawn (@Respawn) August 23, 2021

 

Seer’s passive ability - Heart Seeker now has a longer waiting time between sensor spikes, a reduced range and field of view. The Heart Seeker ability essentially allows Seer to see and hear the heart beats of all the nearby enemies. 

Seer’s tactical ability - Focus of Attention allows Seer to deploy drones which can damage and mark nearby enemies as well as reveal their location and remaining health. They will also interrupt any abilities that the enemies might be using too. Hence, with the new update, the detonation time of the drones has been increased and players marked with drones will no longer take damage or be flashed. Also, while using Focus of Attention, the player will move slower as compared to the usual.

Lastly, Seer’s ultimate ability - Exhibit allows Seer to make a dome of drones and any player within the dome will have their location revealed. After the new update, Seer players will have to wait a bit longer before using Exhibit as the cooldown time is increased from 90 seconds to 120 seconds.

All in all, these are more than welcome changes to the game and Seer too since nobody likes an unfair match where one character has the potential edge over the others.

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New map in Apex Legends Season 11

Respawn Entertainment’s famous BR title Apex Legends is going to have it’s 11th season update soon and the talks are that season 11 will also come with a new exclusive map called “Tropic Island”. Apex Legend’s most recent new map was released in season 7, as the fans might know, called “Olympus”. 

Youtube and data miner “Shrutgal” recently said in a video that he has found the reference to the new map in the game’s files previous year. Shrutgal has also leaked the new PvP mode called “Legacy” which was released in the season 9 of the game in May, 2021. 

There are references about new vehicles as well. There were new texture files of the most famous vehicle in Apex Legends, called “Trident” found in the game files as reported by another data miner, Garret. Trident was introduced in Season 7 and was added for the sole purpose of faster mobility across the map but if used correctly, could also be used to shakeup the game too. Anyways, these new vehicles, according to Garret, are called ‘Hover Vehicle Tropics’ and they are covered in mud. 

More about the new map, data miners have said that Tropic Island is supposed to be located on planet Gaea. On planet Gaea, Carthage spiders will be serving as a constant and persistent threat all across the map. That's not all, Shrutgal also reported that Respawn Entertainment has already started AI implementation on a large scale for Tropic Island. 

Also, Season 10 of Apex Legends called Emergence had launched earlier this month. With the new season also came a new updated World’s Edge map, Seer and our favourite, Rampage LMG. There had been complaints from players of the game about Seer’s Heart seeker ability, as it allows the Legend to see and listen to the heartbeats of nearby enemies, players told that it broke the action of the game & was a bit overpowered so Respawn gracefully rolled out a patch in season 10 re-configuring the abilities of Seer. 

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Microsoft To Bring xCloud To Its Consoles This Year

Microsoft will be bringing it’s game streaming service - xCloud to it’s consoles i.e. the Xbox Series X | S and the Xbox One later this year.

If you didn’t know already, xCloud is a game streaming service by Microsoft where users can stream the games they own instead of downloading the whole game and then playing it. This saves them both time and data. The way that the xCloud integration will work with the Xbox Series X | S and the Xbox One is that if you are subscribed to the Xbox Game Pass then you will have access to the xCloud. This will effectively let you try the game before you buy it.

According to Microsoft, the xCloud platform - on the launch day - will have an arsenal of over 100 games ready to be streamed and played from their servers. The more interesting thing here is that you will also be able to play multiplayer while streaming the game. Hence, if a game on your Xbox dashboard has a “cloud icon” then it is eligible to be played via xCloud. 

Microsoft’s xCloud will start to roll out to all the Xbox insiders this fall and will be coming to other users by Holiday 2021.

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Far Cry 6 Will Not Melt Your PC

Far Cry 6 is almost a month away with it’s worldwide release coming up on October 7th. Fortunately, you will not need a very powerful rig to get a decent experience of the game. The official system requirements have been released and they are such that almost all low-mid ranger rigs out there will get a decent run of the game.

The minimum requirements to run the game at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 at 30 FPS without ray tracing enabled are not too much. Your PC must be rocking either an AMD 3 1200 or Intel i5  - 4460 processor with Nvidia GTX 960 graphics card. The above rig will give you just about average performance with the game, but hey! At Least it will be playable and not a slideshow.

The requirements for the game were officially announced today by Ubisoft via Twitter.

 

Here is everything you'll need to know about the PC specs to best experience #FarCry6. Find more details here: https://t.co/Gktmmlf9qq pic.twitter.com/5B5s9sifG9

— Far Cry 6 (@FarCrygame) September 2, 2021

 

However if you want to play it at higher resolutions like at 1440p with 60FPS, you will need more current gen hardware. Your rig must be rocking an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X or Intel i7-9700 processor with AMD RX 5700XT or an Nvidia 2070 Super with 16 GB RAM. This still does not contain ray tracing.

If you want to go all out and play the game at Ultra settings you will need AT LEAST an AMD RX 6800 or an Nvidia RTX 3080 card in your system. Only then you will be able to take full advantage of what the game has to offer, at least graphically.

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Brendan PlayerUnknown Greene To Make A Massive Open World Survival Game

Brendan Greene has recently left the company that he created - PUBG Corp. and has moved on to starting a new game studio based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Back in 2019, Brendan shared a mysterious teaser for an upcoming project ‘Prologue’. He has revealed more about ‘Prologue’ and his future plans in a teaser video and an interview with EuroGamer.

Brendan recently tweeted about the game, sharing a brief glimpse of the game and his thoughts on it. He explained that “I've held this deep fascination with sandbox-style open-world games and the freedom they give their players but I always just wished they were a bit bigger, so that's our mission as a studio - we want to create realistic sandbox worlds on a scale that's seldom attempted.”

 

pic.twitter.com/dipZpUSeNY

— PLAYERUNKNOWN (@PLAYERUNKNOWN) September 3, 2021

 

In the 5 minutes long video, Greene basically says that he wants to create an open world game where all the game’s assets and textures are created by a neural network at run time i.e. whenever you press play. All of this ultimately brings us to Prologue. Greene had released a teaser trailer for it about a year ago but it did not gain much traction then.

Now, the game is being taken over by PlayerUnknown Productions - Greene’s new game studio and according to Greene, in the game, “There will be no guidance, no path for you to follow, just a world, a spot on the map to reach and the tools needed to get there.”

As of now, there is no official release date to Prologue as Greene says that it is a “first step on a multi-year journey towards creating what we hope will be rich and interactive open worlds” but we will get more details about the game soon.

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Game Approvals Said to Be Slowed by China to Enforce Tough New Rules

China is reportedly reviewing new games to ensure they meet stricter criteria for content and protection of children.

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