Team Fortress 2 - EPIC Updates Coming!

If you thought the Pyro update was exhausting, wait till the Heavy update gets here. Not only will you get 3 new weapons and 35 new achievements but also a NEW gameplay mode with 5 maps, a NEW Payload map and a custom community map. All we can say is Hell yeah!

We’ve been a little quiet for the last week as we’ve put the finishing touches on the Heavy update. We thought the Pyro pack was the biggest we’d be doing for a while, due to the large changes to the Pyro, but the Heavy update has turned out to be even bigger. In addition to the three unlockable weapons and thirty-five achievements for the Heavy, we’ve got a new game mode with five new arenas for it, a new Payload map focusing on more open spaces than Goldrush, and another popular community-made map. Throughout the rest of the week we’ll be giving you the details on all this, and if all goes well, you’ll have your hands on it shortly afterwards.

The community-made map included in the Heavy update is cp_steel, by Jamie ‘Fishbus’ Manson. After the Pyro update we received a lot of email telling us how wrong we were in our choices, and cp_steel was an easy next choice due to the way it dominated the suggestions. If you’re firing up your email right now to tell us that we never get anything right, please include suggestions of what map(s) we should be looking at next.

Make sure to check out the Heavy Update site as well.

Burnout: Paradise - 3 New Screenshots

Criterion Games has released 3 new screenshots for Burnout: Paradise. One screenshot also compares the in-game image quality with SSAO turned ON and OFF:

We’re just implementing Ambient Occlusion (AO).

If you’re not familiar with this term, it’s an effect that uses soft shadows to add extra depth. Enclosed spaces naturally receive less light than open spaces and look darker – that helps us to see how close objects are to each other.

Some games already use AO but most rely on artists to build this into the environment. For Burnout this would be a nightmare, because we like to smash things up and move them around a lot! For this reason, we’ve implemented a dynamic AO system that affects fast-moving and destructible objects!

Screenshots after the jump.

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