No-deal Brexit would 'devastate' UK gaming industry, says report

A hard or no-deal Brexit threatens to cause serious harm to Britain's gaming industry, which contributes almost £2bn a year to the economy, a report says.

Because the industry works across borders and competes for highly skilled international talent with other high-growth areas such as AI research, it stands to suffer in the event of a harsh Brexit that leaves the nation disconnected from the European economy, the campaign group Games4EU argues.

"UK interactive entertainment will be harmed by a hard Brexit … and devastated in a no-deal Brexit," said the report's author, Jas Purewal, a digital entertainment lawyer. "This will make it harder to recruit talent into the UK and over the longer term may aid a brain drain of talent out of the UK and into the EU or elsewhere."

He said: "By removing certainty and many of the existing benefits of EU membership, it is feared that Brexit will hinder the UK industry's ambition to be the best in the world."

Livingstone argued that gaming's status as a British success story was under-appreciated, leading the sector to be left out of government thinking on industrial strategy.

"But nobody writes about the industry's success and what is needed to keep it best in class. The video games industry is a flagship for British creativity and a cornerstone of the creative industries. Young multinational, multicultural designers, artists and engineers thrive in British games studios.

"Hiring the best overseas talent does not displace British jobs, it helps protect them. Future growth and performance is dependent on the best talent in order to develop the best products. This in turn attracts the best projects and the most investment from all over the world. What's not to like?"

The Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, who signed the Tech For UK letter, said: "A good tech sector relies on an open and outward-facing business culture. But that's threatened by this Brexit deal, which pulls up the drawbridge and leaves us isolated.

"That's why some of the most exciting firms in the country are against the deal. We demand a final say on Brexit to secure the future of our industry."

In a poll of the industry taken just before article 50 was invoked in March 2017, 40% of UK games companies said they were considering relocating to the EU after Brexit, largely out of a need to address the expected skills shortage that would follow.

Why can't people stop playing Fortnite?

Almost every video game is designed to make you want to play it. Fortnite, though, is especially good at keeping people coming back, week after week, match after match. This "stickiness", as game designers call it, is not down to some revolutionary new game design factor. Instead, Fornite has improved and repackaged ideas, creating an effective evolutionary step rather than a leap.

While improving shooting skills and chasing a Victory Royale is satisfying, what keeps Fortnite players engaged second-to-second is loot, the items and weapons that can be found all around the map. The random nature of these item-drops, in quality and location, leads to what is known in psychology as a variable-ratio schedule. A weapon or item that could bestow a significant advantage might always be right around the corner. The hope of finding something desirable paired with occasional reward is exciting to humans: you've probably experienced this from shopping sales, or fishing.

Fortnite, however, is unlike most games in that the player's loot is lost at the end of every match. The game's designers don't need to stretch out the content by offering rewards at longer intervals. Instead, Fortnite players get the excitement of receiving a great weapon or item in every single match.


However, when a heuristic fails and the player's character dies, they experience cognitive dissonance between what they thought was going to happen and what actually happened. For a Fortnite player, this may be because they were hit by a sniper in what they thought was a secret hiding spot.

It is imperative to reconcile this disconnect. If you stop playing Fortnite after a failure, you're cutting the feedback cycle at cognitive dissonance, rather than the reward of heuristic strengthening. That makes quitting it hard to do.

These principles apply during every play session. But what keeps people coming back for weeks on end is another powerful human desire: to signal social status. Every Fortnite match has an audience of 100 players to impress. You can play or pay for "skins", visual customisations that apply to either a player's avatar or their weapon, making your character look like a samurai or turning your pickaxe into a balloon sculpture. Socially, skins work much in the same way as a Louis Vuitton handbag does at signalling success, because highly desirable skins require intensive play (and real-world money) to obtain.

Ebb and Flow on the Salish Sea

I used to have a sailboat large enough to sleep a few people comfortably for a week-long vacation, but I sold it a few years ago on the premise that it wasn’t convenient to have a 30-foot boat tugging at dock-lines in the November storms of coastal British Columbia, Canada, while we were off gallivanting in Eastern Europe. That is partially true, but, I have to admit that when I looked out my window on a Saturday morning and saw the waves of the Salish Sea start to crest with white foam, I’d start to sweat. Uh Oh – Arthur is going to want to go sailing…

Our Canadian home sits at the gateway to Desolation Sound. Captain Vancouver must have been having a really bad day when he named this paradise of warm waters, remote islands, and cozy, sheltered coves, because, it is the nemesis of desolate. Every summer, boats flock here from  California, Seattle, and Vancouver just to hang out for a few weeks of swimming, paddling, and anchorage-hopping. It’s just silly to live here, and not own something that floats. So, we compromised, sold the sailboat, and bought a little 18-foot (5.5 metre) powerboat dubbed "Rubato", which is a musical term that translates to something like "steal a little time". She is big enough to take us adventuring for a long weekend, and she tucks away nicely into the garage when we leave the continent.

But, as you can imagine, the safety of Desolation Sound is a little too easy for our Dutch mariner, and so, to keep everyone challenged, we make an annual journey 100 km's north to the Discovery Islands group.  Here, tides with a spread of 16 feet push the sea back and forth between narrow channels creating currents that can run to 27 km per hour with treacherous rapids, waterfalls, and whirlpools that suck open unexpectedly and disappear just as quickly. Not exactly my cup of tea. Why do I step out of my comfort zone for this? Friends, that’s why. Lovely friends who have been journeying to this area for over 40 years, and since we met them, each summer they invite us up to their cabin to share freshly caught crab over great conversation. Now, even in my books, that’s worth a few rapids. Enter the Tide and Current Tables of my Captain Mac lessons.

How Forza Horizon 4 raced to the heart of Britain

It's the little moments that get you. The golden autumn sun glinting from the windows of Cotswold cottages. Sheep running across the road in the Scottish Highlands. Skeletal oak trees lining starkly frozen meadows. It is very strange to play a modern big-budget video game and to be taken back to childhood memories, to places that feel somehow imprinted on the psyche. In this way, Forza Horizon 4, the latest open-world driving sim from Leamington Spa-based developer Playground Games, may be the most emotional racing game I've ever played.

Since the arrival of the first title in the series six years ago, each Horizon has featured a densely detailed, near photo-realistic reproduction of real-world geography. The first was in Colorado, the second was southern France and northern Italy, the third, Australia. The setup is always the same: players take part in a festival where they drive dozens of beautiful cars through a vast backdrop, getting involved in a range of races and challenges, but mostly just drinking in the exotic locales. This time, however, the team brought the game home. Forza Horizon 4 is set in an idealised Britain that, while not precisely based on real places (apart from a scaled version of Edinburgh), takes the geography, architecture, flora and fauna of each location and replicates them in gorgeous detail.

It's like a digital road trip, right down to our familiar road signs, and our pothole-scarred byways. But selecting Britain as a location wasn't an easy option for Playground. "My starting position was no, that's not something we should do," says creative director Ralph Fulton. "We all have these unconscious biases about where we live. You forget what's beyond your front door, you get blinded by the mundanity, by the things that annoy you. It's easy to develop a negative perception."

Inside The Culture Of Sexism At Riot Games

Throughout her three years at Riot Games, the company behind League of Legends, Lacy made it her mission to hire a woman into a leadership role. Lacy had heard plenty of excuses for why her female job candidates weren't Riot material.

Some were "ladder climbers". Others had "too much ego". Most weren't "gamer enough". A few were "too punchy", or didn't "challenge convention", a motto you can find in Riot's company manifesto and recruiting materials.

"Across the board, you'd have side-by-side similar backgrounds," said Lacy, which is not her real name, "but the leadership team would constantly ixnay any female candidate for leadership."

Hiring a woman into a leadership position proved impossible for Lacy, she said, and she left the company in part because of the sexism she'd personally experienced. She said her direct manager would ask her if it was hard working at Riot being so cute. Sometimes, she said, he'd imply that her position was a direct result of her appearance.

Every few months, she said, a male boss of hers would comment in public meetings about how her kids and husband must really miss her while she was at work.

One day, Lacy conducted an experiment: After an idea she really believed in fell flat during a meeting, she asked a male colleague to present the same idea to the same group of people days later.

He was sceptical, but she insisted that he give it a shot. "Lo and behold, the week after that, [he] went in, presented exactly as I did and the whole room was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is amazing.' [His] face turned beet red and he had tears in his eyes," said Lacy. "They just didn't respect women."

Riot Games, founded in 2006, has become one of the biggest companies in gaming on the back of its sole release, League of Legends, which had 100 million monthly players in 2016. With 2500 employees across 20 offices, Riot is a powerhouse.

In 2013, Riot was named one of Business Insider's 25 best tech companies to work for. Two years later, it made $US1.6 billion ($2.2 billion) in revenue. Its Los Angeles campus is cushy in the way you'd expect a money-bloated tech company's offices to be. It's got a gym, a coffee shop, a cafeteria with free food, a LAN cafe. Employees often stay late to grind out competitive skill points in League of Legends with their Riot family and are communicating on Slack well into the night.

It’s Not Asians Who ‘Game the System’

Asians may be called the "model minority," but it doesn't seem like we're actually wanted in schools. We are implicitly accused of taking up too many spots in elite New York City high schools, so the mayor's new plan proposes to scrap the admissions exam in favor of less objective criteria. At the same time, we are fighting elite universities like Harvard in court over charges of unfair discrimination.

Negative Asian stereotypes do not garner us much sympathy though. We have unappealing personalities. We are only good at tests, and we are only good at those because we spend all our time studying. Perhaps, then, we don't really deserve our spots in the upper echelons of American education.

The misconception that Asians are somehow "gaming the system" is insulting and inaccurate. It's true that many Asians resort to extensive test prep to do as well as they do on admissions exams like the Specialized High School Admissions Test in New York City and the SAT for colleges. But it's dishonest to lump in poor Asian families who sacrifice to pay for test prep with rich people (of any race) who easily afford it. Forgoing vacations, refraining from buying amenities, and even scrimping on food to pay for test prep are not gaming the system.

They are sacrifices. Maybe these sacrifices are crazy or counterproductive; there are certainly arguments to be made against them. Regardless, these are valid choices that are open to people of any race and that have proven to be, on the whole, effective. The people who make these choices may be playing the game the hardest and taking most seriously the prize—which is more than just a seat in a great school and may be no less than the American Dream itself. But they are not gaming the system.

Of course, there are groups who really aren't playing by the rules: the disproportionately white legacy students who sneak their way onto the Harvard "Z-list," a deferred admissions pool for a small number of students each year; and the rich kids whose parents donate $2.5 million to the school before they apply, like Jared Kushner. It's obvious that people with power and money can game the system.

New World of Warcraft Classic Details Revealed

World of Warcraft Classic is coming; we may not know exactly when, but we are getting a better idea of some of the challenges and achievements of the developers trying to make it happen. In a "Dev Watercooler" blog post, Blizzard revealed more details about the prototyping of the game, and reassured excited fans that the re-creation would do the vanilla version of the game justice.

"The process of restoring the classic game is not straightforward, and it's important to us to take the time and effort to get it right--this includes poring over numerous game versions, data, and code; meticulously scrutinizing all the changes we've made over the years," Blizzard's dev team wrote.

"All the work we're doing will ultimately allow us to recreate an authentic classic experience on a platform that is much more optimized and stable, helping us avoid latency and stability issues. Additional improvements will include modern anti-cheat/botting detection, customer service and Battle.net integration, and similar conveniences that do not affect the core gameplay experience."

Blizzard shares that the initial WoW Classic prototype essentially rebuilt Patch 1.12: Drums of War from various archives and source code. This revealed some substantial problems: game crashes, issues with modern video cards, incompatibility with Blizzard's current login system, and more. The developers said they've built a second prototype, using the game's modern code with all its structural enhancements, which will allow them to build a 1.12 version of the game that is stable on modern machines and compatible with Blizzard's current infrastructure. You can read more about the developments in the full blog post.

Blizzard first announced World of Warcraft Classic at Blizzcon 2017, where it revealed the trailer above. GameSpot interviewed production director John Hight about the ambitious project, where he shared more details about how the game will work. "[Making World of Warcraft Classic] has been an ongoing internal debate. I'm sure that this has happened off and on throughout the years, right? But last year this reached a fever pitch, and we really had a lot of internal discussions because we want to make sure that we provide a great experience for our players," he said.

"I think our concern was gonna be our ability to execute Blizzard quality going back so many years. You don't want to ruin the experience. It has to be an authentic experience. But by the same token, people don't want some of the funky bugs that we had back then," he added.

How To Get Into World Of Warcraft In 2018

It’s been nearly 14 years since Blizzard launched the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game. You’ve had plenty of time to get your affairs in order before finally taking the plunge into Azeroth. Don’t worry, the World of Warcraft hasn’t passed you by. You just might need a little help getting started. We got you.
                                                       

Why Play Now?
Before we get into the tips, let’s answer the important question: Should you play World of Warcraft in 2018? Of course you should. This article would be a huge waste of everyone’s time otherwise. Why? For one, it’s a game with over 13 years of content to explore. It’s a hero’s journey that takes players from the starting zones of Azeroth to epic battles on far-off planets. They grow from fledgling adventurers performing odd jobs for random NPCs into legendary heroes of the realm performing odd jobs for random NPCs. It’s a world rich with lore, flush with quests and filled with interesting people, both real and artificial.

But Why World Of Warcraft?
It’s got character. It’s got charm. Counting the Warcraft series of real-time strategy games, it’s got an ongoing narrative backed by more than two decades of lore. Though Final Fantasy XIV puts on a great show, World of Warcraft is the most story-rich MMORPG going.

And it’s easy. For some that might not be a selling point, but if you’re looking for a stress-free MMO that doesn’t require a lot of its players (at least not at lower levels), then World of Warcraft is perfect.

Buying The Game
Don’t buy the game. At least not yet. World of Warcraft offers a free trial that allows new players to experience the game up to level 20 (of 110). There are limitations to a trial account—you can’t chat in most public channels, form adventuring parties (you can still join them) or earn more than 10 gold. But it’s still enough to get a feel for the game, the races, the professions and general atmosphere. If you don’t like playing the demo, you can stop. You tried. Maybe World of Warcraft is not for you.

World of Warcraft cultist ritual is teasing some future content

World of Warcraft has had its share of strange Easter eggs over the years. However, as of a few months ago, stranger things have started to happen on the Broken Shore, one of Legion’s end game zones. A group of cultists is counting down to something, possibly the loss of our artifact weapons.
                                                 

Players who you make their way toward the center of the Broken Shore will come across a small band of Xorothian Cultists, worshipers of the gigantic demon army, the Burning Legion, who come from the planet Xoroth. These four strange NPCs are channeling a spell called Fel Channeling. NPCs channeling a random spell isn’t completely out of the ordinary. However, the time remaining on their ritual is.

If you look closely, the Cultists have another 517 hours of channeling before they finish their cast. (This screenshot was taken earlier this week.) That means in about three weeks, Fel Channeling will be finished. Will this actually do anything? Probably not, if history is any indication. However, it may signal the coming of a small patch.

Players have been speculating in the comment section of WoWhead since the site first reported this new channel. While there are plenty of suggestions as to what this countdown could be signaling, the most obvious event would be the quest that causes players to lose their artifact weapon.

The all-powerful, historic weapons introduced in Legion will not be coming along for the next expansion. Thanks to some datamining, we know the scenario where something happens to our weapons, rendering them useless by the time Battle for Azeroth comes around this fall.

Leveling In World Of Warcraft Is Fun Again

Before this week’s 7.3.5 update hit, leveling a freshly-made character in World of Warcraft as an experienced player was little more than a chore to do before getting to the good high-level stuff. With the introduction of level-scaling and changes to experience point requirements and monster health, leveling up is now a more enjoyable experience.
                                               

Prior to update 7.3.5 it was far too easy to level up a new character. The experience needed to advance from one level to the next was too low, resulting in players out-leveling the story quests in each zone, moving on before getting the full experience. With low monster health and high player power (especially when players were outfitted in ridiculously powerful heirloom gear), creatures dropped like flies. Combined with easy experience gained by joining parties in the dungeon finder, the first 60 levels in the game flew by.

That’s no longer the case. I started a level one gnome warrior named Jerboa on Tuesday afternoon. With the hours I’ve put in since, she should easily be at least level 40 by now. But there she is, level 22 and loving it.

A good part of the reason it’s taking me so long is the new level-scaling system. Now that zones and their quests scale with the players level, I’m spending more time questing and less time hopping into random dungeons. And with the experience point requirements to level increased for levels 1 to 60, the random dungeons aren’t nearly the level-fests they once were, making questing a much more attractive prospect.

Another fun effect of level-scaling is that every enemy aggros now. No longer will gaining a few more experience levels render lower level creatures in a zone near-passive. There are no lower level creatures.