News Picks/Weekly Round-up from Auryn Cox @Ciaran’s Customs

Bungie to shut down its Halo stats archive

Bungie has announced that it will be closing its Halo archive in February.

That means that players stats and screenshots from the developers halo games will be gone forever.

The archive, Halo.Bungie.net remained online even after Bungie left the franchise to work on Destiny, but now a decade later it will be shut down on February 9, 2021 as bungie explained in their weekly blog post.

Player stats, files, and screenshots from Halo 2, Halo 3, ODST, and Reach are currently stored on the website, although those archives have not been updated in almost nine years.

The archive was essentially an online time capsule for nostalgic gamers to look back on fond memories.

As someone who played a lot of Halo reach back in the day it certainly seems like the end of an era.

Valve has more games in Development says Gabe Newell

During an interview with New Zealand’s 1News, Gabe Newell announced that Valve are working on new games.

Newell, who is the co-founder and president of Valve has been staying in New Zealand during the coronavirus pandemic after taking a family vacation there after the release of Half-life Alyx.

"We definitely have games in development that we're going to be announcing — it's fun to ship games," he said after being asked about future games coming from valve.

Newell said that Half-life Alyx has ‘created a lot of momentum inside the company’ to get back to creating single player games.

Over the years Valve has had numerous games in development which never ended up releasing so it will be interesting to see if any of the games currently in development will.

European Commission fines valve and 5 publishers €7.8 million over Geo-Blocking Steam games

The European Commission fined Valve and five games publishers €7.8m for geo-blocking PC games.

The five game publishers fined were, Bandai Namco (fined €340,000), Capcom (€396,000), Focus Home (€2.8 million), Koch Media (€977,000) and ZeniMax (€1.6 million).

The Commission said the fines were reduced by between 10% and 15% owing to cooperation from the companies, with the exception of Valve(fined €1.6 million) which it said chose not to cooperate.

However a Valve spokesperson told Eurogamer “"During the seven-year investigation, Valve cooperated extensively with the European Commission ("EC"), providing evidence and information as requested.”

Valve also stated that they disagree with the commissions findings and plan to appeal the decision.

Geoblocking is technology that restricts access to Internet content based upon the user's geographical location.

The European commission believes that the companies restricted cross-border sales of certain PC games on the basis of the geographical location of users within the European Economic Area (EEA), violating EU antitrust rules.

Everspace 2 Launches on Steam early Access

Everspace 2, the Space shooter from Rockfish Games launched this week on Steam in early access form.

It has been described as a fast-paced, single-player space shooter with deep exploration, tons of loot, and modern RPG elements.

Although the game is in early access it has been described as being very polished, if only incomplete.

Unlike its predecessor which was had rouge-like elements Everspace 2 has taken a more handcrafted approach.

The early access launch game has full English voice acting for the first 12 hours of the story campaign and several side missions that take place in the first two-star systems of the final game. Rockfish said this is good for at least 25 hours of gameplay.

Rockfish also said it'll keep Everspace 2 in early access over the course of the next 12 to 18 months, so expect a launch proper at some point in 2022.

Issues with Nvidia 461.09 Driver

Users have been complaining of issues with their Invidia graphics cards after updating to the latest version of their graphics card driver (461.09).

Users have reported drops in gaming performance as well as crashes and screen flickering/flashing.

According to Eteknix, Nvidia has moved the issue into their ‘known’ category meaning that it should be corrected in the next update which is expected around early February. Eteknix recommends that the best way to avoid any of the issues from the driver update is to not install or update to it.

Nvidia is yet to officially confirm the faults.

About the Author

Auryn is a student journalist and an avid gamer. He enjoys strategy games as well as all the new releases from 10 years ago. He also has a few hours on Overwatch.

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