Ubisoft touted the power of Far Cry 5’s Arcade mode, namely the map-editing tools that allowed players to create all kinds of different scenarios. Heck, you could even have assets from famous Ubisoft franchises like Watch Dogs, Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag and much more. One player Izoolee went even further – he created de_dust2, the famous Counter-Strike map in Far Cry 5.

Check out a match being played on the same below courtesy of Widdz on YouTube. Granted, the actual map doesn’t have any objective play or bomb defusal but the same alleys, sightlines and ability to choose weapons from the beginning of each round is still intact. That’s very impressive, especially considering that it took one day to create the map.

To try out the map for yourself, head here. Login with your Ubisoft account and hit Favourite to save the map on PC. What other maps will Far Cry 5 players come up with? Stay tuned in the coming weeks to find out. In the meantime, check out our official review here.

One thing to be said for most of Valve’s games, at least the more popular ones, is simply how prolific they are. Games like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Half Life 2, Portal, Left 4 Dead, DOTA 2… this is all stuff that pretty much any PC gamer worth their salt owns already, you know?

But if, somehow, you don’t already have Valve’s games- if, for example, maybe you are just getting into PC gaming, maybe you never dabbled in Steam, maybe you just didn’t care to get their games until now- then this new deal, which offers 24 of Valve’s games for $25, will come off as great value for you.

The full bundle includes:

• Counter-Strike
• Counter-Strike: Condition Zero
• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
• Counter-Strike: Source
• Day of Defeat
• Day of Defeat: Source
• Deathmatch Classic
• Half-Life
• Half-Life: Blue Shift
• Half-Life: Opposing Force
• Half-Life Deathmatch: Source
• Half-Life: Source
• Half-Life 2
• Half-Life 2: Deathmatch
• Half-Life 2: Episode One
• Half-Life 2: Episode Two
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
• Left 4 Dead
• Left 4 Dead 2
• Portal
• Portal 2
• Ricochet
• Team Fortress Classic
• Team Fortress 2

Okay, so technically, a lot of those aren’t exactly individual games, but still, this is a hell of a deal, and I wouldn’t pass it up if it were me. If you are one of those few odd Steam users out of over a 100 million who haven’t jumped aboard the Valve gravy train, do so now.

Counter-Strike creator and former Valve Software developer Minh Le confirmed in a Twitch interview that he had seen concept art and images for something that “could be in the Half-Life universe” and said that it was indeed related to Half Life 3. Then again, according to Le, Half Life 3’s development is “old news by now”.

“I think it’s kind of public knowledge that people know that it is being worked on, so if I was to say ‘yeah, I’ve seen some images’ like some concept art of it that wouldn’t be big news.

“I guess I could say that I did see something that could be in the Half-Life universe. I mean it wouldn’t surprise anyone if I said yeah they’re working on it. To go out on a limb, I would say I did see some Half-Life 3 concept art.”

As for the “new Left 4 Dead”, Le revealed that, “It wouldn’t be any news if I said ‘yes, I saw it’ and it looks great. I was really excited when I saw that, like ‘wow, this looks great’.”

Regardless, this doesn’t mean we’ll be seeing either game any time soon. Keep believing though and let us know what you think in the comments.

(Source)

Counter Strike co-creator Minh Le says that the first person shooters of the modern day have grown unimaginative and aren’t as fun anymore, and admits that while he tried addressing this issue with his recent free to play title Tactical Intervention, the game fell short of his own expectations of it.

“I don’t think FPSes are as exciting as they used to be,” Le told Gamasutra. “I tried to contribute to fixing this, but I don’t think… Tactical Intervention has not succeeded in terms of addressing some of the problems. There’s some stuff in TI that I really enjoy playing, but other stuff like the hostage mode, it didn’t really pan out as well as I’d hoped.”

Le suggests that the FPS market has become over-saturated and that developers have now run out of fresh ideas, himself included.

“I think FPS games have gotten to the point where there’s not much more you can add to it,” he said. “Battlefield has really pushed it, and there’s not a whole lot more you can do to it.”

“To be honest, I think the FPS genre is just so saturated, and CS:GO has really just made it difficult for FPS games to compete in this market,” Le continued. “”CS:GO has done a great job of making the experience so polished. It’s got everything you’d really want from an FPS game. The whole presentation and everything is so… it’s just really difficult for us to really draw a crowd away from these guys.”

Later on, Le also went on to say that Tactical Intervention is no longer financially sustainable, given how little people play the game.

Do you agree with Le? Has the FPS genre become too saturated? Tell us in your comments.

While Riot Games’ League of Legends is free to play, it’s one of the most popular games played the world over. According to a new report from SuperData, League of Legends managed to generate $624 million in revenue for 2013.

Interestingly, it was only the second overall grossing free to play title for the year, with Korea’s CrossFire taking top honours. It generated $957 million in 2013. Other notable mentions include Dungeon Fighter Online ($426 million), World of Tanks ($372 million) and Maplestory ($326 million).

World of Warcraft has yet to drop its subscription model and subsequently garnered $213 million amid falling subscriber numbers in the year. Despite going free to play, Star Wars: The Old Republic only garnered $139 million in revenue. As for Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike, they ranked ninth and tenth with $139 million and $121 million earned respectively in 2013.

What are your thoughts on the most successful free to play titles of last year? Let us know in the comments below.

Nonetheless, it’s interesting to note the evolution of gaming’s future; how things looked back then and just how the future has changed our notions on it’s nature, whether we noticed it or not.

Free-to-Play

Then: A little more than a decade ago, there were freeware games. Designed to be available at no cost or optional fee, such games survived…well, it’s hard to say exactly how they survived. This was during the dotcom bubble of the early 21st century, and when it burst, causing several freeware game portals to shut shop, a lot of the distribution went with them.

More part of an underground movement than alternative development, freeware games looked to offer more than your typical gaming experience.

Now: A nifty freeware game released in 2001 featured first person shooting on hoverboards. In 2012, Hi-Rez Studios used this concept to create the successful Tribes: Ascend, a shooter that was totally free but who’s premium features could be unlocked quicker with a one-time payment. It’s not necessarily known when the flood-gates opened but free gaming is now about catering to the maximum audience possible, marketing a highly successful brand but converting it to fit free-to-play purposes.

Ubisoft has outlined how important F2P is for their burgeoning overseas markets, while EA transformed Command & Conquer: Generals 2 into an F2P property known simply as Command & Conquer. Freeware games still exist, as can be noticed with the number of titles available for mobiles, but free-to-play looks to mirror it while still turning a profit and capitalising on existing brands.

Indie Gaming

Then: Freeware was only a part of the underground game development scene, which comprised of mods, fan maps, mutators, new character models, hacks and oh-so much more. Quality arcade shooters could be had online, dungeon crawlers born from Nethack were common place – but distribution and commercial success? That was reserved for a few chosen souls. id Software started small, developing several properties including a Mario knockoff that was eventually rejected by Nintendo, before revolutionising first person shooters.

Minh “Gooseman” Le developed the insanely popular Counter-Strike mod for Half-Life and was picked up by Valve (along with several other modders) after it recorded higher numbers than Unreal Tournament and Quake 3: Arena combined. But for every success story, there were plenty of people left in the dark, tweaking their works continuously, in hopes of getting “noticed”. It became less about creating a cool game, and more about filling a portfolio, creating mods and models in hopes of landing a plush job with the big boys. The number of Counter-Strike clones and alternative mods is testament to this, though a good number of modders did it because it was fun.

Now: Steam. XBox Live Arcade. Mobile gaming. Free-to-play. Kickstarter. Which avenue would you prefer? Would you like to create an old-school action platformer, all by yourself, like Dust: An Elysian Tail? Do you want to create a crazy, icky, demented rogue dungeon crawler? Do you want to just give people a worthy distraction, catering to simpler conventions within a puzzle game interface like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope? Do you want to just get the best possible blockbuster out there, and have your audience pay only when they want to like Tribes: Ascend?

Don’t get us wrong. Indie game development is still incredibly hellacious and coming up with an awesome concept is tougher than ever. But with Steam Greenlight and The Summer of Arcade, there’s certainly no lack of platforms for one’s awesome ideas. Mods like Black Mesa still exist, but they’re fewer and farther in between, having been replaced by DLC.

Sequels

Then: Talk to any game developer from the 90’s and they will tell you how hard it is to make a sequel. It’s not simply about giving gamers more of what they want, but expanding on the property as well. Try something new and you risk alienating fans. Stick to the same thing, and you miss out on adding to your user base.

But sequels didn’t just come about as flukes – oftentimes, only the most successful games received sequels. Which made sense: If it made you a ton of money last time, why not do it again? Then again, most sequels took years to release, and were at the behest of fans and critics alike. Do you think Bioware would have green lit it’s greatest RPG of all time, Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, if the first game had flopped? Unlikely.

Now: Thanks to the blockbuster-ization of gaming, we now have yearly sequels for well known AAA properties like Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty. Even the bigger games like Uncharted, Killzone, Halo and Splinter Cell have at least two years between each successive title.

It’s not so much about new ideas or innovating – oftentimes, you can create some new textures, a few minor gameplay additions and a new story with the same mission types without making any drastic changes. And whether you expand your base is unimportant, since your job is to cater to the millions currently lusting for your product.

Spin-offs are also more common, thanks to the dominance of hand-held markets. Don’t even get us started on the deluge of Pokemon titles since the success of the initial run on the Gameboy. The vaunted Final Fantasy is now a shell of it’s former self, thanks to a single designer’s obsession with a virtual woman.

Metal Gear Solid seems to be the only franchise still taken seriously, and why not? Every new addition, be it portable or console, has received an inordinate amount of fine-tuning and polish from Hideo Kojima. Even if MGS: Ground Zeroes releases in late 2013, that’s still more 5 years after MGS4: Guns of the Patriots. In that time, Kojima Productions has crafted an entirely new engine, and if early footage is any indicating, Ground Zeroes will play significantly less like earlier titles while still embodying the spirit of the franchise.

That does it for the first part of this feature. Join us next time for part 2, as we look at the ever-evolving nature of gaming’s future. Sound off in the comments below about how different things are now, from when you envisioned the future all those years ago.

(Title image property of Pyxelated from Deviantart)

Counter Strike: GO

Take a look at the video below.

Background music from: http://www.snoozmusic.tk/

These include:

• 100+ achievements
• New lifetime player stats and summary screens
• New match player stats and summary screens
• New end of round display with MVP and interesting fact about a player
• Updated scoreboard with new icons, visual style, MVP stars, and avatar pictures
• New cinematic death camera
• New domination and revenge system
• Added avatar icons to voice chat, scoreboard, and end of round display
• Many source engine update

It at first seems like just another CSS however… looking further into it show a large set of upgrades
such as TF2 Style kill-cams Player-stats Weapon-stats even motion blur and the TF2 domination system!
Also bundled with this upgrade are 100+ new achievements!

Sadly it’s a limited beta and all of the current places have been taken. If you are one of the lucky few to get the game, feel free to contact me via our official steam group for a match at http://steamcommunity.com/groups/Gaming-Bolt

For the official PR see below:

COUNTER-STRIKE: SOURCE UPDATE NOW IN BETA

Available immediately, Valve has launched an extensive update to Counter-Strike: Source, now in beta.

The update includes a host of new features and functionality developed in collaboration with Hidden Path Studios. These include 144 new achievements, a new domination and revenge system, player stats, and more.

This beta will run for a limited time, and once complete, the update will be deployed to all Counter-Strike: Source owners for free via Steam.

For more information, please visit www.steamgames.com.

“Magnitude has never been involved with games containing any kind of street violence. We had one game involving soldiers in military combat but it had a rating of 18-plus and was a team game. We stopped involvement with that game some months ago.”