Destiny 2: New 3rd Sub Class!

Destiny 2: New 3rd Subclass!

Well it's been a minute since I last spoke with you video gaming community.  I come bearing good news about Destiny 2.   It has been confirmed that our Guardians will be getting a third subclass after all. 

Though none of these preview playthroughs I have discovered “artifacts” found in the wild, so far one for a Warlock and one for a Hunter, that point to the fact that you will be able to undertake a series of tasks to unlock what appears to be the third Taken King subclass. The Hunter one is void and has a symbol of an arrow, which implies it may be a rework of Nightstalker. The Warlock one is arc (can’t really make out the symbol), but it may be Stormcaller. And Titans may get their hammers back, though I haven’t seen a relic for that yet.

Another screenshot shows a mission called “Arc Light Stirring” where players are asked to “rekindle their lost abilities” by participating in public events. This is presumably a multi-stage side-quest to re-unlock these classes, which is a relief to the community who was confused how Destiny could end with three subclasses and Destiny 2 would only be giving players two, which were all that were shown off the in beta. We still don’t know if we will actually start with those two at the beginning, or if those were just granted for preview purposes. But if the central storyline of Destiny is about resparking your lost light, it would make sense that you may have to undertake some sort of mission like this for a variety of classes.

Bungie

Destiny 2

This also opens up the possibility of a fourth subclass if Destiny 2 is launching with three. Given that The Taken King added a third a year after launch for Destiny 1, it stands to reason that a fourth could arrive with similarly substantive DLC in 2018. That’s exciting, as we’ve run out of elements, so Bungie would have to get pretty creative.

I just wanted to say thank you for tuning in.  Also, can you do me a favor and watch my live stream from 7-10 PM CST every night at Twich.tv/jetrecords

Finally It's Football Season - Madden 17 New Features

I must admit, i'm one of those gamers that play madden wearing my Titan's jersey.  It sucks that when the playoffs start me and my local team are doing the same thing: on the couch watching someone else compete for a championship trophy, lol.  Titans suck but this year I feel we have a good chance at at least being 8-8.  

Well in the world of Madden 17, I can change reality and go to the superbowl with my under-rated team.  This time around EA sports have made some improves to make the game more challenging and goal oriented.  Here is what you can expect feature wise. 

Big Decisions

Big Decisions come to you with the right information at the right time. Do you start your star QB with that lingering injury, or go to your unproven back-up with a playoff spot on the line? In Madden NFL 17 on Xbox One and PlayStation®4, Big Decisions begin a new direction in your career mode experience changing the way you approach your gameplay strategy for every match up.

Big Decisions: Season Goal

The first big decision you’ll make as a coach or player in the regular season is to set your season goal.  As a coach, you can decide whether you are going to make the playoffs or shoot low with a 7-win season.  The choice you make has an impact since if you miss your season goal, you have a chance of getting fired, but the harder the goal then the higher the experience point gain will be.

Big Decisions: Injuries

Once doctors have medically cleared a player that was hurt earlier in the season, you can either play him with a lingering injury or sit him to heal to 100%.  If your player plays a game with a lingering injury, then he has a higher chance of becoming reinjured, which could completely wreck the rest of your season.  If you go with your back-up, he will earn extra XP that will help him with long-term development.

While in-game, you’ll see new presentation banners that highlight your injured players.  You will even see a “with and without” comparison banner showing how your team did the last few weeks with your back-up QB compared to your regular starter.

Big Decisions: Acquisitions

Picking up free agents and players on the trade block is easier than ever with the new Acquisitions menu.  You will be able to easily browse the available players by position and compare them to your current depth chart.  Improve your weakest positions quickly by using the position grades that are right at your fingertips.  Expect the commentators during the game to call out recently acquired players when they make big plays.

Big Decisions: Re-Signing

When your players are on the last year of their contract, you can now re-sign them using a more intuitive menu.  All the information you need to decide if you want to retain the player is available.  The more prominent players will be open to negotiations earlier in the season, with the lower rated players available to sign late in the season after they’ve had a chance to prove themselves on the field.  It’s up to you to decide how aggressive you want to be when offering a contract, but giving a contract that is too low carries the risk that they may reject your team and opt to test the free agent market instead.  As you persuade your players to re-sign, the commentary team will take notice and mention it during the game.

Big Decision: Spending XP

Your players progress through the season as they earn experience points (XP) from training and by completing weekly game goals, drive goals, fantasy goals, season goals, and career goals.  You will be able to easily spend this XP to upgrade ratings and traits at the end of each game.  Quickly see who earned the most XP on the defensive and offensive side.  When there are at least three key position specific ratings available to upgrade, the player will show up in the Recommended list where you will be able to easily choose which rating to upgrade.  

When playing as a coach, you will see a breakdown of all the XP you earned that week, too.  You can easily see if you have an upgrade available and quickly take action.

Big Decisions: Cutting Players

During the preseason, you will now be presented with a new menu layout where your coaches will recommend players to cut based on position depth and player skills.  This allows you to make key decisions about player retention quickly so you can progress through the preseason.

Big Decisions: Free Agent Bidding

While bidding for players in the off-season, you will now be able to easily see your depth chart at the various positions so you know who to bid on.  Additionally, you will get feedback on how the player views your contract so you can adjust it to have a better chance of landing him.  Top rated Free Agents will now regularly sign quickly so you can spend the later stages battling over the next tier of players.  This better emulates real-life, where the top free agents move off the board quickly.

Community Requests

On top of everything else we’ve added this year, you’ll see features in the game directly influenced by community wishlists including the addition of the score ticker, full player editing, practice squad and more.

Around The League Score Ticker

Be immersed in Sunday football, with the new Around The League Score Ticker.  While playing your game, you will see score updates occur from games around the league.  For example, if you’re playing a 1pm Sunday game, you will see score updates and stat lines for all the other 1pm games.  If you’re playing a Monday Primetime game, you’ll see final scores tick by for all the other league games.  If you’re playing in a Cloud league with your friends, their played games will be treated like every other game.  The ticker still gives you updates on goal progress when relevant, too.  There is a setting to show everything, just scores, goal updates, or nothing so you can customize it as you see fit.

Full Player Editing

As the commissioner in your league, you now have the ability to customize almost everything about all the players.  You will be able to adjust appearance, ratings, traits, and contract information for the entire league, letting you make tweaks as you see fit to alter players.  Do you want to add one more year to someone’s contract? Do you think Aaron Rodger’s deep passing accuracy needs to be higher? You can do all this and more with full player editing.  It is as simple as pulling up the Player Card for a player and selecting “Edit Player” to begin.  In a Cloud league, other members can keep an eye on the commissioner since each player edited will show up in the Transaction log.

Practice Squad

Each team now has a 10-man Practice Squad that they can control week-to-week.  It all starts in week 4 of the preseason.  Instead of cutting players, you can now easily move eligible players to the Practice Squad where they will develop as you train the various position groups during weekly training.  These Practice Squad players are available in Free Practice so you can test them out down on the field.  At any point during the season, you can pull up a player from the Practice Squad to your active roster or vice versa.  Only players with less than 2 full years of NFL experience are available to move to the Practice Squad so you won’t be able to stash your veterans on it.  The Practice Squad is the place to develop younger players into guys that can have an impact on your team during gameday.  Just like in the real-world, your Practice Squad players are free agents and can be poached by other teams for their active roster.

Dynamic Development Trait

Each player’s development trait is the biggest defining factor in how he develops.  Players with a Superstar trait will stay in the league longer and develop into the top tier talent, while players with the Slow trait will not make it in the league long.  You will now be able to see it quickly on the Player Card with prominent placement and a new icon.  

Since the development trait is such a key part to a player’s success, we want to make sure you can influence it.  In Madden NFL 17, if a late round draft pick has a breakout season and wins Offensive Rookie of the Year, he will most likely go up a development trait level.  Actually, any major season award and weekly award will have a chance of increasing it.  What goes up must come down.  Once a player fails to reach their season goals they have a chance of dropping down a development trait level.  This fluidity makes sure the league is an organic system that reflects player performance.

Regression Feedback

As a coach or owner, you need to have a pulse on your team’s development and you need to know exactly when your team regresses and now you will in Madden NFL 17.  Anytime a player on your team regresses during the season or at the end of the season, you will be prompted with a detailed report so you can calculate your next move.

Player Card Improvements

The Player Card has been bolstered with three key improvements.  The first is a way to quickly see all the attributes for a specific player and how they rank in the league based on overall rating.  The second is a view so you can see the progression history for the player.  This lets you see where all the XP came from and when ratings have been impacted whether through progression or regression.  Last but not least, the player card is now accessible from more areas so you will always be just a step or two from seeing the information you want.

Big Decisions and the Community Requests will keep you coming back for more Franchise.  Play this and more in Madden NFL 17 available August 23rd.

Elder Scrolls 6 Confirmed?

This week at DICE (where Fallout 4 won GOTY), Todd Howard spoke about three mystery projects Bethesda is working on that presumably don’t have to do with their most famous universes.

“We actually have three kind of longer term projects we’re doing that are all – we’ll talk about them at a future date – but they’re different than anything we’ve done before, while also being a Bethesda-style game….Big and crazy, but in many ways different than things we’ve done before. It’s an exciting time.”

Between “big and crazy” and “Bethesda-style game,” that implies a large, open world RPG, given that it’s Bethesda’s specialty, though if these are all new IPs, that is a pretty significant revelation from the developer.

Bethesda has published non-Fallout/Elder Scrolls titles in the past, of course. Most recently that would be Wolfenstein, Dishonored and the upcoming DOOM, but in terms of games that Bethesda Game Studios has made directly, that’s Fallout and Elder Scrolls all the way. From Howard’s comments, it really does seem like they’re talking about games they’re making themselves, rather than publishing another developer’s work.

When asked could one of the new titles be a new Elder Scrolls or Elder Scrolls VI, Todd Howard stated, “I think it’s still possible that one of those projects will be an Elder Scrolls game, actually. Just because they’re doing something different doesn’t mean that’s not a reference to doing a very different type of ES game rather than something totally new. I feel like the language is sort of vague and could mean a lot of things, though I may be wrong.”

Well, that's not a No, lol.  

Harriet Tubman Wins Vote to be on $20 bill

Via cbsnews:

Women on 20s, a group that has been campaigning to replace Jackson with a woman has chosen Harriet Tubman, the 19th century abolitionist who escaped slavery and led other slaves to freedom via the ‘Underground Railroad.’

The group tallied more than 600,000 online votes over the last few months, narrowing a long list to 4 finalists: Tubman, the late first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, whose act of defiance sparked the Montgomery bus boycotts of the 60s, and Wilma Mankiller, the first female chief of the Cherokee nation. Tubman was announced the winner Tuesday.

Women on 20s now plans to petition the White House. Their goal is to have a new twenty dollar bill in circulation by the year 2020 — the 100th anniversary of a woman’s right to vote.

“Our paper bills are like pocket monuments to great figures in our history,” said Executive Director Susan Ades Stone in a statement e-mailed to the Washington Post. “Our work won’t be done until we’re holding a Harriet $20 bill in our hands in time for the centennial of women’s suffrage in 2020.”

As for whether the White House will be on board, U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios told Fortune Magazine last April, “We’re engaging in a collaborative process to move the discussion forward.” She said Treasury Secretary Jack Lewis oversees currency design.

7 Days to Die: Alpha 13 News!

Happy 2 years anniversary to the game 7 Days to Die.  There is a debate on if the fun pimps will continue the trend and make an Alpha 12.5 patch or jump straight to Alpha 13.0. From what I'm reading on the developers website, I would say that we shouldn't hold our breathe for the 12.5.  I'm thinking that 13.0 is the project developers are focusing their attention on. I got a lot of credit and subscribers last time for predicting the release date and info for 7 Days to Die Alpha 12.4 patch.  Here is the news I found out about Alpha 13.0.

Developers are working on a tool which lets us see a map view of a random gen world very quickly. This will be invaluable for us to fine tune roads, poi distributions, biome placements, rivers, lakes everything.

There will be a proper eye shader that uses unity 5′s reflection probe. This means the eyes are a mirror to the world and you can see reflections in them now. I noticed the torch light was behind the player instead of on the torch. It's fixed so that you can see the torch light moving around in the iris of the character. Also, the shadows of the torch to hard instead of soft, and it seems to fix the weird glitchy shadows that were on stuff near torches.

Here are some more improvements to the characters. The neck and hand seams are fixed, they’ve added more polys to the shoulders, and re-rigged the armpit area to deform much nicer getting rid of that pinching effect it had.

You can see how much better characters are going to look using UMA2, which takes advantage of Unity 5′s physically based lighting system on our characters. It’s also a lot easier to import new clothing and hairs, and here is the new dreadlocks style.

They plan on rounding out shoulders and making a lot more character improvements yet, and have a whole new leather armor design in the works, something a lot less star wars. It should look great when worn over the top of clothing and a coat over the top of the armor. They plan for an open coat design so you can wear dusters, parkas etc over the top of your armor and clothing, yet you will see if they have armor on because the front of the coat will be open or unbuttoned/zipped.

The new zombies not only look better and have mocap, when you hit their head they might move in a way you can’t even predict, making the next shot harder to do. They actually are root motion driven, meaning their feet are planted to the ground and the animation is what moves them instead of a static moving object at a set speed with its feet moving. Now when you hit something and they fly back with force, it’s real force driven movement, not the other way around. It’s a bigger impact than I thought it would be.

The hordes will even scale, so a level one guy who joins a server on day 798 who gets the horde isn’t completely hosed, and the guys who have been there since day one and have a group of level 50 players aren’t yawning at the underwhelming horde coming to get them, or a horde that didn’t come at all who went after someone else. 

Other new additions expected for Alpha 13.0 are a zombie named Darlene, and an update to the harvesting system. It seems like there will be less vacuuming stuff up and notification when your inventory changes, when crafting items are finished, etc.