The days of slowly getting off your horse to kill a wolf and then slowly climbing back on to get where you’re going in Skyrim are OVER. Fans asked for it in Oblivion, but it never happened. Then we thought Skyrim’s muscly chargers might be able to handle a bit of rider combat, but it hasn’t happened, until now. The Bethblog mention that mounted combat has been casually added in the latest beta patch. You can opt in and try it out right now by selecting Skyrim from the beta participation list on the accounts tab in your Steam settings menu.

The patch also fixes a few glitches with the recently added ranged and magic kill cams, another feature added in a post-launch patch. We expected a bunch of post-release bug fixes, but these bonus features are a pleasant surprise. Grab a glance at the beta patch notes here.

NEW FEATURES

• Mounted Combat – Skyrim now allows you to do melee and ranged combat while riding a horse

BUG FIXES

• General stability and memory optimizations
• General AI pathfinding optimizations and bug fixes
• Optimizations and crash fixes for data leaks
• Fixed rare crash with lighting
• Fixed crashes related to loading and saving games
• Fixed crash with summoned creatures/NPCs
• Fixed rare issue where saves would be corrupted
• Improved logic for when ranged kill cams are played
• Fixed issue with ranged kill cams while killing a dragon
• Fixed rare issue with certain ranged kill cams not playing properly
• Fixed issue with nirnroot lighting not properly cleaning up
• Fixed issue where bow damage was being calculated incorrectly
• Fixed rare problem with werewolf kill moves would not finish animating properly
• In “The Break of Dawn” fixed rare issue where Meridia’s Beacon would disappear from player’s inventory
• Fixed occasional issue where followers would disappear after player pays off a bounty after committing a crime
• Fixed issue where certain creatures and NPCs would fail to respawn properly
• Fixed rare issue with dialogue subtitles not displaying properly
• Fixed issue with water appearing blurry when loading a saved game after creating a save underwater

Less than two weeks from its launch, Blizzard’s Diablo III is already a financial success (despite the fact that they might not be totally clear on how to measure it).

Today, Blizzard had a celebratory champagne toast to honor the game’s successful launch. The above picture was tweeted by Blizzard’s Cory Stockton, and… good god, that is a lot of champagne. That’s like… one bottle of champagne for each time I had to click on Belial, Lord of Lies.

After the champagne was opened, I’m sure everyone involved conducted themselves like gentlemen and ladies, calmly sipping from their flutes while discussing weekend plans.

Or…

…Oh.

Many of the balance changes that Diablo 3 players have been noticing recently have been confirmed by a new set of patch notes outlining a couple of significant updates Blizzard have made over the course of the past week.

As suspected, the Monk, the Demon Hunter and the Wizard have had their most exploitative abilities squished. A number of other bugs have been fixed too, which means we will sadly no longer be able to dual wield double handed weapons, but on the plus side, trying to remove gems from an unsocketed item won’t cause the game to disconnect.

Grab the patch notes below, but be warned, after the line that says “spoilers ahoy” there be spoilers ahoy yaharr. Read more…

In spite of all the launch controversy, Diablo 3 has done astonishingly well. Blizzard announce that they’ve shifted 6.3 million copies, 3 and a half million of which were sold in the first day. The launch broke Amazon records for pre-orders and day one sales, and became Gamestop’s biggest PC game launch of all time. That number doesn’t include the entire Korean market, where apparently Diablo 3 has become the most played game in Korean Internet game rooms.

No wonder Blizzard’s servers took a beating when the game went live last week. Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime reiterated that the team “regret that our preparations were not enough to ensure everyone had a seamless experience” when logging on.

“I want to reaffirm our commitment to make sure the millions of Diablo III players out there have a great experience with the game moving forward, and I also want to thank them for their ongoing support.”

After lots of downtime and server maintenance, the developers have moved onto balancing patches. Earlier today the Monk, Wizard and Demon Hunter had skills tweaked by some quiet hotfixes, Blizzard say they’ll publish patch notes tomorrow.

Not one of the 7.7 million playing Diablo 3?

Blizzard is in the process of making their first round of hotfixes for Diablo 3. Monks who rely on the Mantra of Healing with a Boon of Protection rune, prepare to be sad. A post spotted by Videogamer on the Diablo 3 forums from community manager Bashiok says that the skill has been severely nerfed. “We recommend discontinuing its use until the rune is replaced with a new rune and mechanic in a future patch.”

“The Boon of Protection rune was approximately ten times over its budget on the benefits it provided, and it was quite simply a mistake on our part to let the rune ship as it was,” he added. “We don’t intend to take these quick and drastic measures often, but considering the severity of the issue, we felt it important to correct it swiftly.”

A full list of hotfixes is due to be released today, but some players are claiming that the wizard’s force armour is weaker than it was and the duration of the Demon Hunter’s smoke screen has been culled.

“Class balance is an ongoing investigation, and by no means do we believe the game is now perfect,” said Bashiok in a follow up forum post. He also responded to player claims that melee classes were being entirely outclassed by their ranged allies on Diablo 3′s ultra-hard Inferno difficulty tier.

“The game is young, there were some skills that threw things out of whack, and we expect the landscape to settle out a bit more evenly. Or at least change again so we can continue to monitor the impact.

“Maybe we’re wrong, maybe there’s no current chance for monk or barbarian to compete with ranged, but our current suspicion is that’s incorrect and until we know for sure we’re not going to turn any dials.”

Diablo 3′s first week has been a quite a ride, what with all those disconnection problems and hacked accounts.

If you feel compelled to take Diablo III’s ominous melodies with you everywhere, its 23-track album in now available for $12/£11 on iTunes. It’ll make every walk to the store feel 10 times more perilous — or, just set the first track to loop to simulate the log in experience, and it’s like you’re playing Diablo III wherever you are!

Seriously though, the soundtrack was composed by Blizzard regulars Russell Brower, Derek Duke, Glenn Stafford, Joseph Lawrence, Neal Acree, and Edo Guidotti, as well as guitarist/composer Laurence Juber, and it’s one of my personal favorites so far this year (hanging out with Sword & Sworcery LP and Dustforce). Though they work in-game, however, many of the tracks are more ambient than what I’d generally listen to stand-alone.

In addition to the release of Diablo III’s tracks, a collection of ear nostalgia titled “The Music of Diablo 1996 – 2011″ is now available on iTunes for the same price. Though I think Diablo III’s music is great, you can’t beat the unsettling sounds of some of those original tracks, especially “Caves” and “Harem,” and, of course, the original Tristram theme.

The CS:GO beta is evolving. A post on the official Counter-Strike site yesterday announced the addition of more players to official maps. The update is one of the “most requested map features”, according to the devs, and arrives as part of a larger update that rebalances a bunch of weapons based on feedback and data gathered from the community. Burst fire has been smoothened out, bullet tracers are more visible and, most importantly, chickens have been “added to inferno”, which is a monstrous patch note if ever there was one. Here’s the full changelist, as it appears on Steam.

Gameplay:

• Updated weapons based on performance metrics:
• Slightly increased the damage for the fiveseven to keep it on par with other pistols.
• Lowered the max width of the recoil patterns for the MG’s to make them better for their price point.
• Lowered the spread on the Negev to be more in line with the m249.
• Improvements have been made to burst fire and tapping.
• Added player spawns to all maps to support up to 30 players.
• Player spawns are now randomly selected from a prioritized list of spawn locations in order to better support more players per map.
• Adjusted bot behavior to fix the “antline” looking behavior.
• Added support for server operators to specify tick rate with the –tickrate parameter.
• Physics simulation tick rate now set to be the same as the game tick interval.
• Bullet tracers have had improvements made to speed, visual effect, and frequency.
• Chickens added to Inferno

UI

• The Server Browser sorts Favorites and Lan tabs by ping rather than Tags.
• The radar will no longer display an ‘X’ for dying players when they are not within sight of the player or player’s teammate.
• Weapons with a burst mode will now show which state the gun is in on the ammo panel.
• Input device is now locked to whatever device launched the game session.
• Updated the Kevlar and Kevlar + Helmet buy menu images.
• Updated the Domination icons.

Audio

• Footsteps update position more often by shifting position determination to client side entity tracking.
• Tuned ambient sounds in most maps

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug with individual pistol round-based achievements. They can only be earned in Classic game mode now.
• Fix for changing video settings while in game sometimes causing a deadlock.
• Added a popup message triggered when a player attempts to initiate a vote on a server with voting disable.
• Fixed bug where player’s nav area would be reported as being on the floor below them causing the radar location to be displayed incorrectly.
• Fixed several UI related crash issues.
• Third party map and _SE map names no longer display in the scoreboard with the #SFUI_MAP_ localization token.

A document made public as part of the ongoing Activision/Infinity Ward legal proceedings has revealed that Bungie – the studio behind the Halo games – is due to release some of its upcoming games on PC.

According to Bungie’s contract with Activision, the studio is due to release four games in the ‘Destiny’ series between 2013 and 2019, with a DLC series running until 2020. Destiny is described as a ‘massively multiplayer-style sci-fantasy action-shooter’.

The first game, due in 2013, is planned for release on Xbox 360 and ‘Xbox 720′ – or whatever Microsoft decide to call their next console – with PS3 to potentially follow in 2014. What’s interesting from our perspective is that the second game is due to arrive on PC. This suggests that Destiny isn’t an MMO in the traditional sense. While the various iterations in the franchise could conceivably be expansion packs for one persistent game, the shift in platform suggests a series of full games instead.

The MMO aspect of the game is described as ‘client-based mission structures with persisent elements’. That suggests co-op play with online ranking or character progression rather than one big online world, but we won’t know for sure until the game is formally revealed.

The contract is an interesting document. It’s rare that we see a developer’s relationship with a publisher laid bare, and it’s even less common to know what to expect from a studio almost a decade in advance.

A few particular stipulations stand out. Bungie are mandated to provide Activision with ‘a list of all hidden content and so-called “easter eggs”‘ prior to the certification of each game. Bungie are well known for burying all sorts of secrets in their games, from jokes to hidden ciphers – hopefully full disclosure won’t prevent them from having fun.

Bungie are also promised a bonus of $2.5m if the first Destiny game receives an average review score of 90. According to the LA Times report, The attorney for ex-Infinity Ward bosses West and Zampella has argued that the bonuses granted to studios like Bungie are greater than the ones his clients agreed to, and that their relatively smaller take entitled them to greater control over their franchise. West and Zampella’s damages claim for unfair dismissal has now grown to $1bn.

You can read the document in full over at the LA Times.

Dave Oshry, a writer at Gameranx tweeted that the first Diablo III-related death has occurred. It’s sad that we have come to see this as a common phenomenon. It is as if we all expected there to be deaths associated with the game.

32-year old Russell Shirley was found dead in his home over the weekend by his landlord and coworker. He suffered a heart attack after a three-day binge on Diablo III.

The blog post Oshry linked us to indicates that Shirley lived a sedentary lifestyle, and while his place of employment offered free gym membership, he was hard pressed to use it.

I suppose it goes without saying that everyone should monitor their playtime, and take time out for physical activity. Personally, I get my daily physical activity through the sport of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu; there are tons of other options, though. Try and channel that competitive spirit you have fostered through gaming into self-improvement once in a blue moon and the results might be more attractive than you thought.

Our hearts, thoughts, and controllers are with Russell Shirley. We here at 2dayblog ask that you treat games as anything else, and only use them in moderation.

SOURCE via GameRanx

The day has finally arrived. Porsche cars have returned to the Forza Motorsport series on XBox 360 with the availability today of the Porsche Expansion Pack for Forza Motorsport 4. Pony up 1600 Microsoft Points ($19.99 in real world money) and you’ll get 30 new cars, 20 new events, 10 new achievements and a Porsche-only Rivals Mode. Developer Turn 10 says that seven of the cars (scroll down for a full list) are all-new to the Forza series, which brings the game’s fourth installment – including all of the vehicles released via downloadable content – to a grand total of 625 cars.

We know what you’re thinking. Twenty bones is a lot to drop on a single chunk of downloadable content when you’ve already paid $60 for the game itself and another $30 for the Season Pass, the latter of which has already filled your virtual garage with dozens and dozens of extra cars to drive. That’s all true, and no one would blame you for passing on this Porsche DLC, especially considering that Porsches were included with the price of the game in Forza 1, 2 and 3. Read more…