Mortal Kombat 11 To Receive Reward System Tweaks After Player Backlash
Mortal Kombat 11 only came out yesterday, but fans have already been left rather angry at some of the game’s features. Developer NeatherRealm Studios has announced that it will be working towards satisfying fan demands as a result.
As you may know if you already own a copy, both the Towers of Time and The Krypt game modes give out in-game currency which can be spent on various items – skins, profile icons, and such. A quick skim of sites like Reddit or Twitter tells you that fans believe the playing time needed to earn these rewards (some of which are necessary for harder levels) is far too high. Some players have gone as far as to say that the game has been “designed to get you to spend money” to obtain these items instead.
Likely in hopes of calming the storm, NeatherRealm Studios has addressed these feelings in a Kombat Kast stream, promising changes in the near future. Essentially, it appears that tweaks to the reward system and the items received can be performed directly at the studio, without the need for a full patch to be implemented.
This means that you won’t see an updated version number or necessarily be notified of the changes, but tweaks should hopefully appear as and when the team enables them.
Have you been playing the game? Have you noticed any harsh systems in play? Let us know in the comments below.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 04-25-2019, 02:15 AM - Forum: Windows
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Microsoft earnings press release available on Investor Relations website
REDMOND, Wash. — April 24, 2019 — Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday announced that fiscal year 2019 third-quarter financial results are available on its Investor Relations website.
As previously announced, the company will host a conference call at 2:30 p.m. Pacific Time. A live webcast of the call can be accessed on Microsoft’s Investor Relations website at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/.
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
For more information, financial analysts and investors only:
Investor Relations, Microsoft, (425) 706-4400
For more information, press only:
Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications, (425) 638-7777, rrt@we-worldwide.com
Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links were correct at time of publication, but may since have changed. Shareholder and financial information is available at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor.
With this newest Blazor release we’re pleased to announce that Blazor is now in official preview! Blazor is no longer experimental and we are committing to ship it as a supported web UI framework including support for running client-side in the browser on WebAssembly.
A little over a year ago we started the Blazor experimental project with the goal of building a client web UI framework based on .NET and WebAssembly. At the time Blazor was little more than a prototype and there were lots of open questions about the viability of running .NET in the browser. Since then we’ve shipped nine experimental Blazor releases addressing a variety of concerns including component model, data binding, event handling, routing, layouts, app size, hosting models, debugging, and tooling. We’re now at the point where we think Blazor is ready to take its next step.
Simplifying the naming and versioning
For a while, we’ve used the terminology Razor Components in some cases, and Blazor in other cases. This has proven to be confusing, so following a lot of community feedback, we’ve decided to drop the name ASP.NET Core Razor Components, and return to the name Server-side Blazor instead.
This emphasizes that Blazor is a single client app model with multiple hosting models:
Server-side Blazor runs on the server via SignalR
Client-side Blazor runs client-side on WebAssembly
… but either way, it’s the same programming model. The same Blazor components can be hosted in both environments.
Also, since Blazor is now part of .NET Core, the client-side Blazor package versions now align with the .NET Core 3.0 versions. For example, the version number of all the preview packages we are shipping today is 3.0.0-preview4-19216-03. We no longer use separate 0.x version numbers for client-side Blazor packages.
What will ship when
Server-side Blazor will ship as part of .NET Core 3.0. This was already announced last October.
Client-side Blazor won’t ship as part of the initial .NET Core 3.0 release, but we are now announcing it is committed to ship as part of a future .NET Core release (and hence is no longer an “experiment”).
With each preview release of .NET Core 3.0, we will continue to ship preview releases of both server and client-side Blazor.
Today’s preview release
New features in this preview release:
Templates updated to use the .razor file extension
You can find getting started instructions, docs, and tutorials for Blazor at our new Blazor home page at https://blazor.net.
Upgrade to the Blazor preview:
To upgrade your existing Blazor apps to the new Blazor preview first make sure you’ve installed the prerequisites listed above then follow these steps:
Update all Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.* package references to 3.0.0-preview4-19216-03.
Remove any package reference to Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.Server.
Remove any DotNetCliToolReference to Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Cli and replace with a package reference to Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.DevServer.
In client Blazor projects remove the <RunCommand>dotnet</RunCommand> and <RunArguments>blazor serve</RunArguments> properties.
In client Blazor projects add the <RazorLangVersion>3.0</RazorLangVersion> property.
Rename all _ViewImports.cshtml files to _Imports.razor.
Rename all remaining .cshtml files to .razor.
Rename components.webassembly.js to blazor.webassembly.js
Remove any use of the Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.Services namespace and replace with Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components as required.
Run dotnet clean on the solution to clear out old Razor declarations.
Blazor community page is now Awesome Blazor
As part of updating the Blazor site, we’ve decided to retire the Blazor community page and instead direct folks to the community driven Awesome Blazor site. Thank you Adrien Torris for maintaining this truly “awesome” list of Blazor resources!
Try out preview Blazor UI offerings from Telerik, DevExpress, and Syncfusion
Blazor benefits from an active and supportive community that has contributed all sorts of sample apps, components, and libraries to the Blazor ecosystem. Recently popular component vendors like Telerik, DevExpress, and Syncfusion have joined in the fun and shipped previews of Blazor UI components. We encourage you to give these Blazor UI offerings a try and let them know what you think.
Give feedback
We hope you enjoy this latest preview release of Blazor. As with previous releases, your feedback is important to us. If you run into issues or have questions while trying out Blazor, file issues on GitHub. You can also chat with us and the Blazor community on Gitter if you get stuck or to share how Blazor is working for you. After you’ve tried out Blazor for a while please let us know what you think by taking our in-product survey. Click the survey link shown on the app home page when running one of the Blazor project templates:
Slay the Spire is a masterpiece of game design whose only sin is that it is not currently available on a platform I can play on the bus. Instead, I have to wait until my lunch break to load it up on the company desktop and drag cards around with a mouse, of all things! How barbaric!
However, all hope is not lost. For if you are like me, desperately craving one more run up the spire, one more shot at building the perfect poison-multiplying deck, or one more chance to try to understand how to use the Defect’s crazy orbs, you need something to take the edge off when you can’t simply spend all day in front of a PC. Thus, here are the best games to play until Slay the Spire comes out on mobile. It’s methadone, but for cards and weird-looking monsters.
First, let’s go back in time. Even before Slay the Spire was the innovative Dream Quest, a game known equally well for it’s incredibly ugly graphics as its incredibly deep gameplay. Compared to Slay the Spire, Dream Quest is more focused on deck building. You get fewer cards in your hand, and can often simply play all of them rather than having to make tactical choices. Unlike Slay the Spire, enemies play with their own deck of cards and don’t broadcast their intentions each round.
Dream Quest is less about playing each battle cleverly and more about making sure your chosen abilities work together against the given opponents. As you advance in the game, you’ll learn what each enemy is capable of and which cards you can add to your deck to counter them. If you master it, you’ll feel like you broke the game when you finally down the Lord of Dream.
Its creator described Meteorfall as “Dream Quest meets Reigns,” and that’s about as accurate as anything I can say. Meteorfall makes a smart decision in adapting card-battle gameplay to mobile: rather than having a hand of cards, you draw one at a time and decide to play it or pass, with each choice having a different effect on your resources.
It’s like if Grindr was a way to decide which way you want to spank some Adventure Time characters. It’s perfect to play one-handed, and complex and addictive. If you can’t handle Dream Quest‘s janky interface and retina-throttling art, this is your best bet for a roguish deckbuilder on mobile. Small wonder it won our 2018 GOTY Award.
Night of the Full Moon takes another path to streamlining Dream Quest. Like Dream Quest, you have a small hand of cards and gradually build up your deck from basic attacks to much more complex card engines. Rather than having a map, you choose from three different encounters, including enemies as well as stores and other places to pick up new cards.
You’ve got several classes that offer completely different approaches. It’s almost as challenging as Dream Quest and also quite a lot nicer to look at, with a fun cartoon style. The translation can be a bit of a struggle, however.
Where Slay the Spire has entirely different sets of cards for each character, even as you acquire new ones in your journey up the spire, Card Crusade gives each character a different starting deck and lets you add cards from a generic pool. It makes the characters less distinct, but improves the flexibility of your approaches.
This is probably the best choice after you’ve already exhausted Dream Quest and are looking for more of almost-the-same, like buying a bag of Hydrox when the store is out of Oreos.
If what you’re looking for is really a clone of Slay the Spire and not just something in the same vein, your options are somewhat more limited. Pirates Outlaws is the clearest doppelganger. However, this copy also seems to sport a goatee, signalling it comes from the evil Mirror Universe of obnoxious in-app purchases and paywalls. It might be worth a try if Dream Quest and Meteorfall aren’t doing it for you.
This one is basically a reduced version of Slay the Spire, with an almost identical gameplay loop and the twist of playing two heroes at a time. It’s quite a bit easier, however, and the cards aren’t quite as interesting. Worth a try after you’ve exhausted the rest.
Card Quest
If you love the card-battling dungeon-crawling of Slay the Spire but could take or leave the deckbuilding, Card Quest is the game you are looking for. It requires extremely careful, tactical use of your character’s deck, but doesn’t let you modify that deck card-by-card on the fly. Instead, sets of cards are tied to equipment you can acquire, and your deck shuffles these pre-set groups together.
If developing card synergies and managing your deck is your least favorite part of Slay the Spire, give this one a try. It keeps the roguelike challenge and even makes the battles deadlier to keep the focus on moment-to-moment tactical use of your cards.
Close, but no cigar
There are other card-based dungeon-crawlers or card battlers that are great fun, but not really substitutes for Slay the Spire.
Solitairica and Card Crawl are really solitaire games where you are playing against a deck, not trying to build one.
One Deck Dungeon deals out the dungeon from, you got it, one deck, and involves a lot more luck than Slay the Spire fans would like.
The highly popular and quirky idle game that you want to actively keep playing. Explore, craft, gather & manage resources, find secrets and build your base out of nothing. Buy land to explore and expand!
Gang Beasts is a silly local multiplayer party game with doughy ragdoll physics and horrific environmental hazards. In the current pre-alpha players can grab, push, pull, punch, and throw their friends from wrestling rings, speeding trucks, and suspended platforms.
Final Fantasy X tells the story of a star blitzball player, Tidus, who journeys with a young and beautiful summoner named Yuna on her quest to save the world of Spira. Then return in Final Fantasy X-2, join Yuna along with her companions Rikku and Paine on a quest around the world.
GB Studio offers a free Game Boy-inspired way to create 2D games
Right around the 30th anniversary of the release of Nintendo’s iconic handheld, game developer Chris Maltby has released a free tool to create Game Boy-inspired games.
The project is a visual game builder called GB Studio and launched as a free download last week. It’s a project born from a Game Boy-inspired game jam, and one that aims to offer a way for anyone to build playable, 2D adventure games with no programming knowledge what-so-ever.
The tool is a little limited in what it offers and is designed to create top-down 2D JRPG-styled adventure games. Because of that, however, GB Studio is accessible to those with any level of game development experience.
Any project created with the visual game builder can be exported as an HTML5 file, which allows it to be played in a browser or uploaded to sites like itch.io, or a ROM that can then be played through a Game Boy editor or on the actual hardware itself via a flash cart.
More information, including documentation, a download link, and GitHub page, can be found on the GB Studio website.
Creating the Xbox Adaptive Controller required the Microsoft Devices team to reexamine their own practices and ultimately challenge their biases and assumptions to embrace more inclusive design.
In this talk from GDC 2019, Bryce Johnson (Inclusive Lead, Microsoft Devices) and Erin Muston-Firsch (Occupational Therapist, Craig Hospital) discuss the process of designing the Xbox Adaptive Controller and how doing so required them to rethink how they designed and engineered controllers altogether.
The talk offers game developers advice on how to apply those same principles to their own projects, like how to recognize when a design excludes people with limited mobility and how to design control schemes and input with accessibility in mind.
In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.
Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is Coming Soon to an Xbox One Near You
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, a third-person, single-player action-adventure game by Respawn Entertainment and EA, will give you the chance to follow the journey of a former Padawan named Cal Kestis in the wake of Order 66, giving fans a brand-new story in the Star Wars universe that explore the galaxy during the dark times of the Empire.
After losing everything — his Order, his friends, his Republic — Cal survives by hiding who he is and living a solitary life, but that can only protect him for so long from the Empire’s Jedi-hunting Inquisitors.
Racing across distant worlds, exploring the ruins of a long-lost civilization, and fighting the Empire at every turn, Star Wars fans will experience what it’s like to be a Jedi on the run. To survive, you’ll need to master your Force abilities and learn new ones that will help you keep the Imperial forces at bay while working with a team of unlikely allies, including your droid companion BD-1.
We’ll have more to share about Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order throughout the year here on Xbox Wire.
