Category: Game

Arise from your slumber, Guardian Destiny will receive an infusion of new content with its version 2.2 update, which will be released April 12, developer Bungie announced today.
“As promised, it will have something for every type of Guardian," said Bungie. Here are some bullet points from the studio on what the April update will contain:

new PvE challenges
new and updated gear
new quest featuring the Blighted Chalice Strike
increased max Light and rewards
sandbox and Crucible updates

The Blighted Chalice strike appears to be an entirely new one — there isn’t currently a strike in Destiny with that name. The release of Destiny: The Taken King last September brought the game’s Light level cap from 34 to 40; the two smaller expansions before that, The Dark Below and House of Wolves, each raised the cap by two levels.
Just like the seasonal events Bungie has been running over the past few months, the new content in the April update will be available at no additional cost to owners of Destiny: The Taken King.
Bungie will provide further details on the April update in three Twitch livestreams, one every Wednesday at 11 a.m. PT for the next three weeks. The first, on March 23, will focus on "new things to do." The March 30 livestream will discuss "new things to earn." And the final session, set for April 6, will touch on sandbox and Crucible updates.
Destiny publisher Activision announced last month that it will release a full sequel to Destiny, but not until sometime in 2017. A "large new expansion" is scheduled to be released later this year. At the time, Bungie said its spring update to Destiny would deliver a "significant" Light level increase.

Meet Ser Danny Rand Marvel confirmed today that Game of Thrones’ Finn Jones would be joining Netflix’s Iron Fist as the main character.
Rumors first started circulating at the end of February that the actor, who played Loras Tyrell on Game of Thrones, had been cast as Daniel Rand. The character, better known by comic book fans as Iron Fist, is the fourth Marvel superhero to get his own show on Netflix.
Executive producer Scott Buck said in a press release that Rand is a complicated character and Jones approached the role in an “honest, and revelatory way." It was a sentiment echoed by Marvel’s head of TV, Joseph Loeb, who said that he blended "confidence with vulnerability, making him the perfect choice."
Iron Fist was first introduced to comic book readers in 1974 as a martial arts expert who could channel the chakra in his body into his fist, giving him one hell of a punch. Eventually, he shared a comic book with Luke Cage — Power Man and Iron Fist — where the two heroes launched the crimefighting agency, Heroes for Hire.
Iron Fist is the fourth series to launch as a part of Marvel and Netflix’s five series deal. Daredevil and Jessica Jones are currently available to stream, with Luke Cage premiering this November. The second season of Daredevil will be made available to stream in its entirety March 18 at 12:01 a.m. PT.

Students and industry folks join forces in the name of romantic diversity “Are tentacles in games going to make people uncomfortable?"
A group of game design students, industry veterans and everyone in between had been sitting on the floor in the North Hall of the Moscone Center for nearly half an hour when Michelle Clough, a narrative designer and localization editor whose resume includes Death Note and Mass Effect 3, asked this question. They’d been talking about different sexual kinks, practices and relationships in gaming with total candor, addressing subjects like, well, tentacle porn — among myriad other sexual preferences and portrayals.
The impromptu roundtable assembled after being shut out of a packed Game Developers Conference 2016 panel hosted by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) on how to portray romance and sexuality in gaming. Clough served as co-moderator alongside writers Patrick Weekes and Sylvia Feketekuty of BioWare (both writers on the Dragon Age franchise), posing questions and fielding responses on subjects.
The moderators’ goal was to carve out ground rules for a possible special interest group that IGDA would sponsor to keep having these conversations. There’s a lot to talk about on the topic, they said — which the group proved to be true right away.
"Fuck men, more femmes"
Before discussing more fringe romantic relationships like the controversial tentacle-monster-meets-schoolgirl trope, students and designers had impassioned things to say about other brands of sexuality. These included Weekes, who discussed the impact that the pansexual Dragon Age: Inquisition character Iron Bull had on players and the writer himself.
"It raised some eyebrows in the studio," he said of including the beefy minotaur with a predilection for BDSM.
"There were a lot of developers outside of the studio who were not familiar with that lifestyle," Weekes explained, adding that some members of BioWare thought that the character’s taste for "consensual power exchange" might make people uncomfortable. But if anyone was uncomfortable, it was people at the studio, not the audience, Weekes said.
Based on the various requests made and debates had by participants of the provocative and fascinating discussion, this certainly seemed true. To the opening question of what gamers wanted to see more of in terms of how romance and sexuality are represented, a student shot her hand up in the air:
"I want to see femme-on-femme relationships," she answered. "Basically, ‘fuck men, more femmes’ — or don’t fuck men, more specifically."
Others said they’d like to see more relationships like that of Iron Bull’s or the bisexual Josephine, also from Inquisition, whose storyline Feketekuty designed. They also talked about diversity not just in sexual representations in games, but in the body types of these marginalized characters. Many expressed their desires to see queer characters of all shapes and sizes.
"some people are offended by women. Some people are offended by penises"
These discussions and suggestions were thoughtful and thought-provoking, but the moderators didn’t want to limit the conversation to the small group seated on the floor. The goal was to launch a special interest group dedicated to this subject. There, members could have these conversations in safe spaces with even more fans who have ideas of how games can continue to get more diverse in all manners, but especially in how they depict relationships.
The conversation had been powerful and refreshing up to the point that Clough asked how some might feel about a game including tentacle porn as a romantic option. But even the moderator recognized that there are some lifestyles that many just can’t get comfortable with — including herself.
To answer the question, though, the same student who called for more lesbians in games vouched for those who are interested in kinks on the fringe.
"Yes, some people are offended by schoolgirls and tentacles," she said. "But some people are offended by women. Some people are offended by penises."
Counterarguments like this were what made the discussion one of GDC’s hidden highlights. But although everyone there was comfortable talking about what some might consider taboo topics, the group conceded that the spectrum of kinks and sexual preferences doesn’t necessarily appeal to everyone. So how can games give people a heads-up about the relationships included within as they get more diverse — in order to reach out to fans of these kinks and warn those who are decidedly not interested?
how tagging content could help fans find the stories they’re looking for
Someone proposed a tagging system that could take cues from fan fiction sites like Archive of Our Own. These websites feature writing on a plethora of romantic relationships and characters, including stories based on characters from games.
These sites use tagging systems that detail the content readers will discover within. If a story features explicit content depicting two underage female leads in a sexual relationship, that will be noted appropriately. Games could include a similar system to benefit players, the group suggested.
Tagging content made sense to these fans of a wide array of sexual material — and, they said, they were likely not alone in thinking this. While the members of BioWare, whose games often let players have queer relationships as a standard option, didn’t have hard numbers on how many straight fans played as gay characters and vice versa, they said they’d heard from many people on how this content appeals to a broad set of players.
"Gay relationships don’t just appeal to gay people," Clough said. Talking openly about these relationships with wider groups of people — in safe, dedicated spaces — could only help make that more apparent.
While the floor of a busy convention center might not be what the group had in mind, it was certainly a great start.

How to fix an outdated leveling system Riot Games patches its ultra-popular MOBA, League of Legends, every couple of weeks. Usually the contents of those patches are pretty minor — containing minor nerfs or buffs to champions that are considered too weak or too strong with maybe a couple of new cosmetic skins.
Patch 6.5, however, which was released on March 9, contained a potential game-changer: Riot cut the amount of experience required to reach the maximum account level in half.
Why is this a big deal?
It’s not that leveling is now quick, it’s just that it’s less slow
League of Legends is an intimidating game to approach as a new player. It’s extremely complicated, highly competitive and, since there’s no single-player mode, you often have to learn to play in multiplayer matches where your mistakes will often impact the experience of other players. You can train against bots, but you’ll want to start playing against other human beings as quickly as possible to learn how the “real" game operates.
League has also historically had a brutal account progression system for new players. You needed to earn a total of 40,000 experience points to reach the level cap of 30 prior to this change. This isn’t just a talking point for players, as you have to be level 30 before you can even queue up for League’s competitive ranked mode.
You earn about 150 points for winning a blind-pick game that lasts 40 minutes, but only about two-thirds of that amount if you lose. That means leveling from level 1 to 30 took about 250 hours before this latest patch. Even after the new change, you could probably play Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 to 100 percent completion in the time it takes just to get to the competitive starting line in League. But that’s still half as long as it used to take. It’s not that leveling is now quick, it’s just that it’s less slow.

Still, this is a big deal. Older champions routinely get updated visual models and revamps to modernize and improve their kits and gameplay, and new items are routinely introduced to the game. The main map, Summoner’s Rift, got a complete visual update in 2014 to modernize its visuals, and the start of the 2016 season brought with it a completely redesigned UI for champion selection and hero drafting. In the meantime, the path to level 30 has been largely unchanged for over six years.
Riot designer Greg Street has described the leveling process as "miserable," and, in a recent podcast, the game’s designers referred to the one to 30 experience as a vestigial part of the game. The new process doesn’t fundamentally change the outdated experience of leveling in League of Legends, but it makes that process a lot shorter, and that’s a step in the right direction.
Before we talk about what this will change, let’s talk about why people care.
How does your level affect your play?
In addition to the ranked mode being gated behind a requirement that players reach level 30 and own at least 16 champions, a couple of other important game systems in League of Legends interact with the player’s account level.
The first is the mastery system, which looks similar to a talent tree from old-school versions of World of Warcraft. Each level your account gains in League of Legends gives you a Mastery point, and you can allocate these points to give your champions advantages like slightly higher attack speed, a little bit of life-steal or a health boost.
There are three trees to choose from: Ferocity, Cunning and Resolve, which are essentially damage, utility and tankiness. At the bottom of each tree are the keystone masteries, which are massive bonuses you can first access at level 18.
For example, the Will of the Undying keystone mastery in the Resolve tree lets your attacks steal an amount of health equal to three percent of your max health every four seconds. If you’re top-laning against a character who has their keystone, and you don’t have this ability, you will always lose your lane unless the opposing player misplays very badly. This means level 18 represents a huge power spike, and getting matched against players who already have their keystones while you’re still leveling toward yours is extremely frustrating. Things like the Will of the Undying Mastery aren’t nice to have, they’re mandatory in competitive games.
Leveling also unlocks your rune slots. Runes are basically flat stat increases that you buy outside the game using a currency called Influence Points, or IP, which you earn as a reward for playing. Runes are a way to customize your characters a little bit and to specialize them for different roles.
For example, you can choose between using your yellow seals to augment your armor or your health, while your blue glyphs can increase your ability power, your cooldown reduction or your magic resistance. Runes also reward game knowledge; if you know whether allocating your runes to increase attack speed or attack damage is more advantageous for a particular kit you’ll have a slight edge over players who don’t know their champs as well. Or who haven’t bought as many kinds of runes.
These aren’t nice to have, they’re mandatory in competitive games
But until you have access to all your slots, runes just put you at a mathematical disadvantage to any player who has a full page, regardless of how the runes are allocated. You can’t use any tier three runes until level 20, which is another big power spike, and some of the slots on your rune page stay locked all the way to level 30. When you’re leveling up, particularly once you get above level 20, you’re going to start seeing a few level 30 players in most of your games, and the fact that they have a few more mastery points and rune slots gives them an edge that lets them bully lower-level opponents in the early game before snowballing that advantage into a runaway win. As you level, you’re likely to get pushed around by players who may not really be much better than you, but who have access to buffs that you don’t. A lot of smaller advantages in terms of abilities and buffs means that the playing field isn’t level, and you’re unlikely to win even if your play is slightly better. It’s just math.
How will this change impact the League community?
So now that we know why this is important, let’s talk a bit about what the change will do.
Expect to see more inexperienced players in ranked games
Riot announced that, in 2014, League had 27 million daily users and 67 million players each month. The game sees 7.5 million users concurrently at peak times. It’s not just a big game, it may arguably be the most popular game in the world.
However, only a fraction of that number participate in ranked games, and it’s very likely that a big part of the overall userbase is stuck somewhere on the sub-30 leveling curve. Thanks to this change, a lot of those folks will be hitting the level cap soon. New max-level players will only be half as experienced as previous ones due to the new leveling curve, and many players who might never have stuck with the game long enough to reach 30 might now hit the level cap and try out ranked.

These players aren’t likely to be top performers, and since League of Legends ranks players based on their standing within the overall distribution, a big surge of low-bronze quality players might push everybody else up a few tiers. So, if you’ve been trying to break into gold or platinum, and you haven’t quite made it in the past, this could be your year. The game is about to be flooded with, if you’ll forgive my vulgarity, fresh meat. Have fun slicing them up!
At the same time, if you’re a new player, you may not want to jump straight into ranked when you hit 30. League’s learning curve is very long and the skill cap is very high. Even after 100 hours, you’ve probably still got a lot of room to improve, and if you play ranked games too soon, you’re likely to get placed in a low division.
New players will hit 30 with less stuff
Although the amount of experience required to reach level 30 has been cut in half, the amount of IP you earn from playing remains the same. That means that players who level from 1 to 30 will reach max level with only half as much IP as they would have previously earned while leveling. This is an important distinction.
Roughly speaking, you earn about 120 IP per hour you spend playing League, and if the new 1-30 process takes about 125 hours, you’ll earn maybe 15,000 IP while leveling up, plus however many first-win-of-the-day bonuses you get while leveling — call that another 6,000.
Riot has been preparing to reduce the leveling curve for a while now, and one of the steps they took was halving the IP costs of many starter runes, which took effect in Sept. of 2015 . Runes are still pretty expensive though, even with the price cuts.
I added up the cost of filling two basic rune pages; one for attack damage characters and one for ability power characters. If you buy attack damage marks, attack damage quintessences and magic resist glyphs for your AD characters, and then buy ability power glyphs, ability power quints and magic penetration marks for your AP characters, and you use flat armor seals on both pages, you’ll spend 11,361 IP on runes.
Riot has been preparing to reduce the leveling curve for a while now
That’s not all the runes you’ll want. Some mages are better with cooldown reduction runes than with ability power, and some attack damage characters build attack speed. But even if you don’t buy any alternative runes for any of those slots, you still won’t have much IP left over to spend on champions.
That means we’re going to see a lot more max-level players with incomplete or suboptimal rune pages and very limited champion pools. Sometimes these guys are going to turn up on your team, and that’s going to be frustrating, but if you’re better than the players in your division, you’re likely to climb and this will make it a little easier to stay ahead of the curve if you stay out of ranked until you’ve got the runes you need.
More smurfing
A "smurf" account is an experienced player creating a new low-level account.
There are many reasons why somebody might do this. Some players might make smurf accounts to play with low-level friends. Others believe they’ve been trapped in "ELO hell" on the ranked ladder and hope they can get a higher placement if they get a fresh start on a new account. Finally, players whose accounts have previously been banned for toxic behavior or cheating often come back to the game and start over.
Reducing the barriers to getting back into ranked is likely to encourage more of this behavior. With experience boosts, which Riot sells in their store for real money, players can apply multipliers to their experience gains which could allow them to do 1-30 in a hard weekend of play.
That means that new players may have to contend with more of these guys on the way up, and that’s not a great thing. Banned players were banned for a reason, and playing against someone who seems to be at one skill level while actually playing at a much higher level can lead to frustrating games. Riot may not have many weapons for fighting this behavior, so it will likely be something we all to live with for now.
Less of a bad thing is a good thing
While the changes to League’s leveling system may create some minor snarls, reducing the game’s brutal leveling grind is an improvement that hugely outweighs any of those problems. League’s new player experience still leaves a lot to be desired but now, at least, players don’t have to spend hundreds of hours limping along with incomplete mastery trees and locked rune slots. This change will open the game up to more people in more ways, which is a very impressive step forward for a community that’s always looking for fresh meat new blood.
As a player who is working to improve at League of Legends, I wish there were modes that helped me practice certain key skills, like my efficiency at last-hitting minions, or my speed at farming the jungle.
However, I can’t think of a single complicated multiplayer game that does a good job of teaching newbies how to play. Mostly, they just throw you into the deep end and let you sink or swim. This makes sense, from a design perspective; resources are finite, and it seems inefficient to develop elaborate tutorials when most players will eventually figure this stuff out on their own, or learn it from YouTube videos.
Daniel Friedman is the Edgar award-nominated author of DON’T EVER GET OLD, DON’T EVER LOOK BACK and RIOT MOST UNCOUTH.  He lives in New York City.

Epic-sponsored GDC session compares virtual reality to film’s early days Game Developer Conference 2016 is in the grip of a virtual reality frenzy. Lines for speaking sessions this week snaked around the Moscone Center, with some talks relocated to much larger rooms.
You can see a few of the games being demonstrated in Polygon’s round-up. But what does this burst of developer enthusiasm mean for the fledgling form?
In “The Future of Virtual Reality: Luminary Panel Discussion" yesterday, hosted by Epic; execs from Lucasfilm, WEVR, Oculus and Baobab discussed some of the likely creative consequences of a technology that is only beginning to be understood.
"The beachhead of VR will be games," said Max Planck, technical founder of Oculus Story and a one-time Pixar technical director. "Gamers are willing to go through early adoption." He added that game-related design would have a profound effect on all kinds of VR-related entertainment experiences.
"It’s very quickly expanding to non-gaming experiences and audiences," added Neville Spiteri, CEO of WEVR. "We’re seeing game folks, video people and web people collaborating as well as musicians and writers. The response from the creative community has been amazing."
Rob Bredow, chief technical officer at LucasFilm said that he is looking to tell stories "that are best told, or can only be told, in this medium." He said that "we are still at a place where we can make things 50 times better. Ways of doing things better will be discovered even this year," he offered, adding that all creative people would benefit from those discoveries.
Eric Darnell, chief creative officer at Baobab as well as he director and screenwriter on the Madagascar movies, compared VR to the very early days of film, when film-makers often innovated by understanding and manipulating a new technology. "Artists got a hold of this new technology and found new ways to tell stories. In VR, we will see the same kind of progression."

How to fix an outdated leveling system Riot Games patches its ultra-popular MOBA, League of Legends, every couple of weeks. Usually the contents of those patches are pretty minor — containing minor nerfs or buffs to champions that are considered too weak or too strong with maybe a couple of new cosmetic skins.
Patch 6.5, however, which was released on March 9, contained a potential game-changer: Riot cut the amount of experience required to reach the maximum account level in half.
Why is this a big deal?
It’s not that leveling is now quick, it’s just that it’s less slow
League of Legends is an intimidating game to approach as a new player. It’s extremely complicated, highly competitive and, since there’s no single-player mode, you often have to learn to play in multiplayer matches where your mistakes will often impact the experience of other players. You can train against bots, but you’ll want to start playing against other human beings as quickly as possible to learn how the “real" game operates.
League has also historically had a brutal account progression system for new players. You needed to earn a total of 40,000 experience points to reach the level cap of 30 prior to this change. This isn’t just a talking point for players, as you have to be level 30 before you can even queue up for League’s competitive ranked mode.
You earn about 150 points for winning a blind-pick game that lasts 40 minutes, but only about two-thirds of that amount if you lose. That means leveling from level 1 to 30 took about 250 hours before this latest patch. Even after the new change, you could probably play Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 to 100 percent completion in the time it takes just to get to the competitive starting line in League. But that’s still half as long as it used to take. It’s not that leveling is now quick, it’s just that it’s less slow.

Still, this is a big deal. Older champions routinely get updated visual models and revamps to modernize and improve their kits and gameplay, and new items are routinely introduced to the game. The main map, Summoner’s Rift, got a complete visual update in 2014 to modernize its visuals, and the start of the 2016 season brought with it a completely redesigned UI for champion selection and hero drafting. In the meantime, the path to level 30 has been largely unchanged for over six years.
Riot designer Greg Street has described the leveling process as "miserable," and, in a recent podcast, the game’s designers referred to the one to 30 experience as a vestigial part of the game. The new process doesn’t fundamentally change the outdated experience of leveling in League of Legends, but it makes that process a lot shorter, and that’s a step in the right direction.
Before we talk about what this will change, let’s talk about why people care.
How does your level affect your play?
In addition to the ranked mode being gated behind a requirement that players reach level 30 and own at least 16 champions, a couple of other important game systems in League of Legends interact with the player’s account level.
The first is the mastery system, which looks similar to a talent tree from old-school versions of World of Warcraft. Each level your account gains in League of Legends gives you a Mastery point, and you can allocate these points to give your champions advantages like slightly higher attack speed, a little bit of life-steal or a health boost.
There are three trees to choose from: Ferocity, Cunning and Resolve, which are essentially damage, utility and tankiness. At the bottom of each tree are the keystone masteries, which are massive bonuses you can first access at level 18.
For example, the Will of the Undying keystone mastery in the Resolve tree lets your attacks steal an amount of health equal to three percent of your max health every four seconds. If you’re top-laning against a character who has their keystone, and you don’t have this ability, you will always lose your lane unless the opposing player misplays very badly. This means level 18 represents a huge power spike, and getting matched against players who already have their keystones while you’re still leveling toward yours is extremely frustrating. Things like the Will of the Undying Mastery aren’t nice to have, they’re mandatory in competitive games.
Leveling also unlocks your rune slots. Runes are basically flat stat increases that you buy outside the game using a currency called Influence Points, or IP, which you earn as a reward for playing. Runes are a way to customize your characters a little bit and to specialize them for different roles.
For example, you can choose between using your yellow seals to augment your armor or your health, while your blue glyphs can increase your ability power, your cooldown reduction or your magic resistance. Runes also reward game knowledge; if you know whether allocating your runes to increase attack speed or attack damage is more advantageous for a particular kit you’ll have a slight edge over players who don’t know their champs as well. Or who haven’t bought as many kinds of runes.
These aren’t nice to have, they’re mandatory in competitive games
But until you have access to all your slots, runes just put you at a mathematical disadvantage to any player who has a full page, regardless of how the runes are allocated. You can’t use any tier three runes until level 20, which is another big power spike, and some of the slots on your rune page stay locked all the way to level 30. When you’re leveling up, particularly once you get above level 20, you’re going to start seeing a few level 30 players in most of your games, and the fact that they have a few more mastery points and rune slots gives them an edge that lets them bully lower-level opponents in the early game before snowballing that advantage into a runaway win. As you level, you’re likely to get pushed around by players who may not really be much better than you, but who have access to buffs that you don’t. A lot of smaller advantages in terms of abilities and buffs means that the playing field isn’t level, and you’re unlikely to win even if your play is slightly better. It’s just math.
How will this change impact the League community?
So now that we know why this is important, let’s talk a bit about what the change will do.
Expect to see more inexperienced players in ranked games
Riot announced that, in 2014, League had 27 million daily users and 67 million players each month. The game sees 7.5 million users concurrently at peak times. It’s not just a big game, it may arguably be the most popular game in the world.
However, only a fraction of that number participate in ranked games, and it’s very likely that a big part of the overall userbase is stuck somewhere on the sub-30 leveling curve. Thanks to this change, a lot of those folks will be hitting the level cap soon. New max-level players will only be half as experienced as previous ones due to the new leveling curve, and many players who might never have stuck with the game long enough to reach 30 might now hit the level cap and try out ranked.

These players aren’t likely to be top performers, and since League of Legends ranks players based on their standing within the overall distribution, a big surge of low-bronze quality players might push everybody else up a few tiers. So, if you’ve been trying to break into gold or platinum, and you haven’t quite made it in the past, this could be your year. The game is about to be flooded with, if you’ll forgive my vulgarity, fresh meat. Have fun slicing them up!
At the same time, if you’re a new player, you may not want to jump straight into ranked when you hit 30. League’s learning curve is very long and the skill cap is very high. Even after 100 hours, you’ve probably still got a lot of room to improve, and if you play ranked games too soon, you’re likely to get placed in a low division.
New players will hit 30 with less stuff
Although the amount of experience required to reach level 30 has been cut in half, the amount of IP you earn from playing remains the same. That means that players who level from 1 to 30 will reach max level with only half as much IP as they would have previously earned while leveling. This is an important distinction.
Roughly speaking, you earn about 120 IP per hour you spend playing League, and if the new 1-30 process takes about 125 hours, you’ll earn maybe 15,000 IP while leveling up, plus however many first-win-of-the-day bonuses you get while leveling — call that another 6,000.
Riot has been preparing to reduce the leveling curve for a while now, and one of the steps they took was halving the IP costs of many starter runes, which took effect in Sept. of 2015 . Runes are still pretty expensive though, even with the price cuts.
I added up the cost of filling two basic rune pages; one for attack damage characters and one for ability power characters. If you buy attack damage marks, attack damage quintessences and magic resist glyphs for your AD characters, and then buy ability power glyphs, ability power quints and magic penetration marks for your AP characters, and you use flat armor seals on both pages, you’ll spend 11,361 IP on runes.
Riot has been preparing to reduce the leveling curve for a while now
That’s not all the runes you’ll want. Some mages are better with cooldown reduction runes than with ability power, and some attack damage characters build attack speed. But even if you don’t buy any alternative runes for any of those slots, you still won’t have much IP left over to spend on champions.
That means we’re going to see a lot more max-level players with incomplete or suboptimal rune pages and very limited champion pools. Sometimes these guys are going to turn up on your team, and that’s going to be frustrating, but if you’re better than the players in your division, you’re likely to climb and this will make it a little easier to stay ahead of the curve if you stay out of ranked until you’ve got the runes you need.
More smurfing
A "smurf" account is an experienced player creating a new low-level account.
There are many reasons why somebody might do this. Some players might make smurf accounts to play with low-level friends. Others believe they’ve been trapped in "ELO hell" on the ranked ladder and hope they can get a higher placement if they get a fresh start on a new account. Finally, players whose accounts have previously been banned for toxic behavior or cheating often come back to the game and start over.
Reducing the barriers to getting back into ranked is likely to encourage more of this behavior. With experience boosts, which Riot sells in their store for real money, players can apply multipliers to their experience gains which could allow them to do 1-30 in a hard weekend of play.
That means that new players may have to contend with more of these guys on the way up, and that’s not a great thing. Banned players were banned for a reason, and playing against someone who seems to be at one skill level while actually playing at a much higher level can lead to frustrating games. Riot may not have many weapons for fighting this behavior, so it will likely be something we all to live with for now.
Less of a bad thing is a good thing
While the changes to League’s leveling system may create some minor snarls, reducing the game’s brutal leveling grind is an improvement that hugely outweighs any of those problems. League’s new player experience still leaves a lot to be desired but now, at least, players don’t have to spend hundreds of hours limping along with incomplete mastery trees and locked rune slots. This change will open the game up to more people in more ways, which is a very impressive step forward for a community that’s always looking for fresh meat new blood.
As a player who is working to improve at League of Legends, I wish there were modes that helped me practice certain key skills, like my efficiency at last-hitting minions, or my speed at farming the jungle.
However, I can’t think of a single complicated multiplayer game that does a good job of teaching newbies how to play. Mostly, they just throw you into the deep end and let you sink or swim. This makes sense, from a design perspective; resources are finite, and it seems inefficient to develop elaborate tutorials when most players will eventually figure this stuff out on their own, or learn it from YouTube videos.
Daniel Friedman is the Edgar award-nominated author of DON’T EVER GET OLD, DON’T EVER LOOK BACK and RIOT MOST UNCOUTH.  He lives in New York City.

“This has been a really weird year for me" "I never hoped to create anything that would be featured on the cover of the New York Times," said Amy Green, co-director and writer of That Dragon, Cancer.
"To get press like that, you have to do something innovative, truly groundbreaking and deep. And the truth is, we didn’t. My husband and I experienced the most common thing in the world: pain."
That Dragon, Cancer tells the story of a family — Green’s family — through a series of vignettes. It revolves around the illness of their real-life son Joel, who was diagnosed with cancer as a baby and died at the age of 5 in 2014. Green, in recounting her experience during GDC 2016’s Indie Soapbox panel, said she does not feel that the game accomplished something extraordinary. Instead, she said, it speaks to the power of video games as a medium.
"We didn’t do anything surprising," she said. "We took the hardest situation of our lives, our son’s terminal cancer diagnosis — the event that shook us to our core and threatened to destroy us altogether — and we tried to create something beautiful out of it."
To Green, the game would never have made headlines if people understood what video games could be.
"My husband and I experienced the most common thing in the world: pain"
"If writers really understood what was possible in a video game, we wouldn’t have to worry about a lack of diversity and voices in games," she said. "We wouldn’t have to worry that a non-technical person like me would be too intimidated by technical terms like player agency, because if great writers knew the potential of games, like you all know it, they would overcome any obstacle placed before them, technical or otherwise, to create in this medium.
"The fact that the world sees That Dragon, Cancer as novel just shows that outside of this room, outside of this conference of your peers, people still don’t understand the potential of video games."
Although Green resisted the idea of calling herself a game maker at first, defaulting to That Dragon, Cancer being " Ryan’s thing," she eventually embraced her presence in the space. It no longer mattered if she was a "technical" participant or not.
"I started to realize that my voice was essential to this medium … I had to carve a space for myself in this medium because the medium itself is compelling and innovative," Green said. "It takes the most common experience in the world and it makes it new and profoundly personal.
"My sweet, funny, cuddly son whose laughter had been silenced is still working his way into another person’s heart."

The first PC adventure in the Zero Escape series Zero Time Dilemma, the third game in Chunsoft’s Zero Escape series, will launch on Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita June 28 before heading to Steam later this year, making it the first game in the visual novel series to hit PC. Publisher Aksys Games revealed the news during a press event at this year’s Game Developers Conference alongside a new trailer.
Aksys said it will announce a release date for the Steam launch later this year. Windows PC ports of the previous installments in the series, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue’s Last Reward, are not currently in the works, however.
As seen in the trailer —€” and previously detailed —€” the game will include a more cinematic mode of storytelling. As opposed to the text-driven scenes of the previous games, Zero Time Dilemma will have fully animated cutscenes.
That aside, Zero Time Dilemma features much of the gameplay that will be familiar to fans, as well as wrap up the existing storyline, according to Aksys. All of the secrets of the mysterious puzzle game will be revealed when it arrives worldwide — with Japanese and English audio options included — in June.
For a deeper look at the game, check out our screenshot gallery below. We also spoke with its director, Kotaro Uchikoshi, during Game Developers Conference 2016; keep an eye out for our interview later this week.

You’ll have room to move, which is great news! Sony has release many details about the $399 Playstation VR during the 2016 Game Developer’s Conference, but one of the most interesting aspects of the hardware is just how large the tracking area becomes with the required $60 PlayStation 4 camera.

This slide from the company’s GDC presentation yesterday, seem above, shows how much room you have to move while wearing the PlayStation VR headset.
“It’s very important to clearly define the play space the player is going to be playing in … we want to make sure that your play area is kind of a sacred space, because you’re going to be flailing around, jumping, having fun," Chris Norden, senior staff engineer at Sony said during the talk. "And the developer should have complete freedom to choose how they want to define the play space. So if you want to have a smaller area, if you want to be seated, if you want to be standing, if you want to have people move around that’s great."
You’ll be given a visual indicator and warning when you begin to get close to the boundaries of your virtual space, as shown in the slide below:

So the PlayStation VR isn’t just a seated or standing experience; you’ll have some room to move. "We want to have the freedom to do what they want to do, and we have games that explore the entire range of that," Norden continued.
So you’ll be able to stand to use the PlayStation VR, and move around in an area that’s roughly 1.9 by 2.4 meters, or 5.7 by 7.2 feet. That’s plenty of space to take a few steps in any direction and would allow most, if not all, Vive developers to port their experiences to the PlayStation VR. At least in terms of movement space required.
For reference, my current Vive Pre testing space is three by three meters, shown below:

That space is larger than the tracking area of the PlayStation VR, but it’s rare that I use most of that space during actual play. Many games also offer options for smaller spaces or standing options; developers are already thinking ahead about supporting players without the space for "true" room-scale VR or platforms like PlayStation VR that offer smaller tracking spaces.
This is all good news for VR enthusiasts. While the PlayStation 4 may not be able to match the power of high-end gaming PCs running Vive or Rift games, the tracking area is plenty large enough to match the requirements of almost all existing Vive titles.

Vive and Rift launch title is about underwater exploration This new trailer for Vive and Rift launch title Time Machine takes viewers into an ancient underwater world of aquatic dinosaurs.
Players are on a scientific mission to go back in time and investigate long-extinct creatures in order to fend off a modern disaster. During a Game Developers Conference 2016 demo, players are asked to inspect the eye of an enormous predator, without being eaten.
Currently available on Steam Early Access for Oculus Rift DK2 for $19.99, the full game launches next month on Rift and Vive, with a PlayStation VR launch planned later this year.