Warp Zoned Presents
Video Game Canon- Angry Birds, Dragon Quest, FIFA Soccer, and Silent Hill are the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2026
- BAFTA Games Awards: All the Winners from 2003 to Today
- Clair Obscur Completes the Sweep by Winning “Best Game” at 2025-2026 BAFTA Games Awards
- Boss Fight Books to Get a New Look for Richard Moss’s “Age of Empires”
- GDC Awards: All the Winners from 1996 to Today
Warp Zoned Presents
- Video Game Research Library
- Spore: An oral history – Design Room (2026)
- We Pitched a Museum a 1993 Game Hint Line (And They Actually Said Yes) – Yarn Spinner (2026)
- The History Of The Word “Metroidvania” And How It Spread – A Critical Hit (2025)
- Creator of Hit Game Shovel Knight Is at a ‘Make or Break’ Moment – Bloomberg (2025)
- Shadow of the Colossus: An oral history – Design Room (2025)
Most Recent: PC
League of Legends: What to Expect From Season 4
League of Legends is the most popular video game in the world. According to a newly released infographic created by Twurdy, a League of Legends community, 32.5 million players log into Riot Games’ smash hit on a daily basis. That means that if every single World of Warcraft subscriber played Blizzard’s MMO in a single day when WoW was at its peak, League of Legends would still boast nearly three times the amount of players. In addition to its massive player base, League of Legends was recently the centerpiece of one of the largest eSports events in history: The Season 3 World Championships.
The Championship match was held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, the same building that hosts marquee events such as Lakers games and professional wrestling shows. If there was any question as to whether or not League of Legends could compete with such events in tickets sales, they were silenced almost immediately as the Season 3 World Championships sold out in 59 minutes. But Season 3 is coming to an end very soon, and Riot Games has been looking ahead to the next season, which starts tomorrow, November 12th. Over the past week, Riot Games employees (Rioters) have been posting numerous articles to Reddit about their plans for the new season to give players a glimpse of what’s in store. After playing League of Legends for two years with two accounts that are in Gold League, I’ve attempted to compile all the proposed changes for Season 4 along with my impressions on what these changes could potentially mean for the future of the game. (more…)
Posted in Features, PC, Top Story
Tagged League of Legends
New Releases: PS4, XCOM: Enemy Within, Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus, More
Part One of this year’s next-generation console extravaganza begins this week with the launch of PlayStation 4. If you haven’t already ordered one, Sony’s new machine may be hard to find, but peripherals like the PS4 Camera are plentiful. However, if you have the next-gen plunge, here’s what gaming opportunities you can expect to see on store shelves this week:
- Angry Birds Star Wars
- Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
- Battlefield 4
- Call of Duty: Ghosts
- FIFA 14
- Injustice: Gods Among Us – Ultimate Edition
- Just Dance 2014
- Killzone: Shadow Fall
- Knack
- Lego Marvel Super Heroes
- Madden NFL 25
- NBA 2K14
- Need Foe Speed: Rivals
- Skylanders Swap Force
If the next-generation of consoles is still a bit too expensive for you (or you’re waiting for the impending Xbox One launch), there’s also a few current-generation games to keep us busy this week. XCOM: Enemy Within, the expansion to last year’s massively well-received XCOM: Enemy Unknown, will be released for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360. And the possibly final voyage of Ratchet & Clank, Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus, will be released for the PS3. Finally, Mario & Sonic square off again in Mario & Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games on the Wii U.
There’s more new games where those came from and you can find a complete list of this week’s new releases after the break. (more…)
Posted in 3DS, DS, News, PC, PS3, PS4, Vita, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One
Tagged Mario & Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games, Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus, XCOM: Enemy Within
Blizzard announces World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor expansion
BlizzCon 2013 started today, and Blizzard has kicked off the massive event with a massive announcement. The MMORPG juggernaut’s fifth expansion, World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, will take players to the world of Draenor to battle alongside legendary Warcraft heroes. The expansion is set to take players back in time to face the likes of Grommash Hellscream, Blackhand, and Ner’zhul when they were at their most fearsome. More than just the setting, World of Warcraft‘s fifth expansion will, of course, come with all of the trappings of an expansion including new dungeons, raids, a new level cap, and much more. Perhaps the most interesting addition is that of the Garrison, which will be a personal base of operations for players to explore and expand throughout the expansion.
The level cap has come quite a way from the level 60 cap of vanilla WoW. And reaching the new level 100 from level 1 can be quite a daunting task, so Blizzard has added the option to instantly boost one character to level 90. The expansion will also add questing improvements designed to encourage exploration. This is presumably done to make the quests less linear. Another element to the expansion will be fully revamped player character models and animations for many of the older races, so that the vanilla races such as humans and orcs will be on par visually with the newer races from previous expansions.
BlizzCon attendees are currently able to play the expansion on the show floor, though there’s no official word on when the expansion will be released. But BlizzCon will continue through tomorrow, so there will surely be plenty of new announcements regarding Blizzard’s future projects.
Posted in News, PC
Tagged World of Warcraft
New Diablo III: Reaper of Souls trailer shows off the expansion’s many features
BlizzCon opens today in Anaheim, California and to get you in the right mood, Blizzard has released a new trailer for Diablo III: Reaper of Souls highlighting the expansion’s many new features:
- Collect Bounties in “Adventure Mode.”
- Battle a seemingly unending wave of enemies emerging from “Nephalem Rifts.”
- Organize your friends in “Clans and Groups.”
- Visit a new Artisan, “The Mystic,” to enchant and transmorgrify your gear.
- And become even more of a Paragon with the “Updated Paragon System.”
Diablo III: Reaper of Souls will be available sometime next year for the PC and PS4.
Posted in News, PC, PS4
Tagged Diablo III
Infinity Ward’s Mark Rubin “won’t rule out” Call of Duty IN SPACE
While they were riding high off the success of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in 2010, Activision filed a trademark application for Call of Duty: Space Warfare. The publisher let the trademark lapse last year, but with the genie out of the bottle, fans and the press have been asking about a sci-fi-tinged Call of Duty ever since.
Infinity Ward’s Mark Rubin had to field another of these queries while speaking to the Metro newspaper about the recent launch of Call of Duty: Ghosts. The question is especially relevant now as Ghosts featured several missions on a space station high above the Earth. While it looks like Call of Duty: Space Warfare isn’t happening right now, Rubin wouldn’t rule it out completely:
Metro: The space levels got me thinking about all the rumours that you or Treyarch were going to do a space marine type game and this really convinced me it would work. You could play it straight, it doesn’t need to be Warhammer or have aliens even. But you could have levels with different gravity, different weapons and it would still be perfectly grounded in realism. Perhaps ironically, more so than the current games.
Rubin: Yeah. It makes sense. I wouldn’t count it out. Everything’s on the table. When we start a new game every possibility’s on the table. If we think that it’d be cool to have a battle over Jupiter, sure. Why not?
The rest of the interview is definitely worth a look as Metro’s David Jenkins spends his time hammering Rubin with more questions about “Call of Duty IN SPACE” and about the perceived graphical differences between the PS4 and Xbox One. Rubin doesn’t say anything about that, but it’s a fun read all the same.
Activision shipped $1 billion worth of copies of CoD: Ghosts to stores
It’s another billion dollar day for the video game industry… sort of.
Activision has announced they shipped more than $1 billion worth of copies of Call of Duty: Ghosts to retail outlets across the world for the game’s launch yesterday. The $1 billion figure doesn’t include download revenues from Ghosts, which also launched on Steam, the PSN, and the Xbox Live Store yesterday. It’s unknown how many of those copies have been sold to fans (or even how many copies “$1 billion” represents), but I’m going to guess that both numbers can be rounded up to “a lot.”
The literal pile of money that Activision is sitting on right now will only grow in the next few weeks as CEO Bobby Kotick reported that Ghosts is GameStop’s “most pre-reserved next gen title.”
Not known for his humility, Kotick also told reporters, “The [Call of Duty] franchise has never been more popular.”
Infinity Ward offers up another look at CoD: Ghosts’ Extinction Mode
Call of Duty: Ghosts is available in stores today (for the PC, PS3, Wii U, and Xbox 360) and, as one last appetizer before the main course, Infinity Ward has released a new trailer for Extinction Mode dubbed “First Contact.” Watch as a squad of soldiers defends Earth against a slimy alien menace and then they… become an appetizer for the aliens. Whoops. Maybe the aliens can ask Kang and Kodos for some culinary tips.
The developers at Infinity Ward also sat down with GameSpot to deliver an extended look at Extinction Mode, which you can view after the break. And don’t forget, Call of Duty: Ghosts will be available for the PS4 and Xbox One later this month. (more…)
The AAA Game: Where It’s Been, Where It’s Going, and Did It Kill the Mid-Tier Game?
An edited and updated version of this article is now available at Video Game Canon.
With a new generation of consoles almost upon us, there is the worry that the spiraling budgets and massive teams required to create AAA games is hurting the industry. But for all the hand-wringing about how the AAA game is detrimental to mid-size developers, no one can seem to agree on what exactly a AAA game is or when the AAA designation was even first used. In attempting to solve this etymological mystery, I found that the AAA designation shares much in common with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s obscenity test from a 1964 case: “I know it when I see it.” But I also found out that “Will the AAA game survive?” is probably the wrong question to ask. (more…)