 Hello guys and welcome back. I'm Philip Magnus and I'm coming to you from the 24th dimension. No, not really. Sorry about that, I just lied but I'm here to talk to you about gaming news. And indeed, what is a better star than to talk about everyone's semi-favourite developer, Blizzard Entertainment. They have had a lot of their sleeve lately. First, they did update several of their older games in order for those to work better on modern operating systems. The work on Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3 has, if nothing else, certainly managed to persuade me that they care about their older properties. Despite your personal likes or dislikes when it comes to games helmed by Blizzard and there have been quite a few of them in the last couple of years, you can't deny them wanting, they managed to build memorable worlds. Take Overwatch for example, this game, a team-based shooter, is still going to have a fairly interesting world. How are they going to make sure to deliver on the world when, obviously, a team-based shooter has no place for story? In the lead-up to the game's release in May, we can expect animated shorts and six new comic book shorts. The first of them goes live this month and later in the year they'll be joined by a graphic novel titled Overwatch First Strike, which digs into the backstory of Soldier 76, Torbjorn, Reaper and Reinhardt, as they battle the robot uprising decades before the game. If you care to know who helms the comic books, well that would be Ludu Lullaby, who has previously worked on World of Warcraft the comic book, excellent illustrator, excellent art in that comic book, absolutely deserving of your time. The writing will be taken care of by Mickey Nelsen, who is Blizzard's lead writer in publishing and the story lead on Hearthstone. They have a solid team and I can't wait to see what they have in store for us with the comic books. As for the animated shorts, we know for a fact that one will be concentrated on Winston, there will be one on the weirdly accented tracer and one is to guess that many more will come as the game gets developed further on. But if you prefer MOBAs to the more traditional team-based shooters, perhaps you'd be fascinated to learn that Blizzard's MOBA, Dota-style game Heroes of the Storm, is getting 58 character in the face of the primal Zerg The Hacker. He's got an interesting kit and he will be the first Zerg Tank from the Starcraft universe introduced in the game. Faithful to his fellow Zergs, The Hacker will be unable to mount but quite proficient at making holes in the ground. He's got a number of interesting abilities in his kit. For an in-depth look, please click the link above, it will bring you to the now in development video by Blizzard Entertainment, which will hopefully show you a bit more. On to our next piece of news, we're going to talk about Valve. Do you remember last year they made a little experiment within the Skyrim Workshop? They allowed modification creators to chain to charge for content. The idea was overwhelmingly loaded by the community and soon after it was completely shut down. There were quite a number of verbal reasons. A lack of security in place to prevent fraudulent posts was the lead amongst and it quite hurt Valve's reputation at the time. They are however testing the losses once again with paid user generated content, but this time they are concentrating all their efforts on Dota 2 Reborn. This new interface, the Reborn interface made it much easier for content creators to share their latest creations and Valve itself aided in bringing some select items to the spotlight after let's just call it a very secretive curation method. With this latest move, they fully endorse and open the hand of friendship to a chosen number of content creators by allowing them to sell premium content featured in the form of custom game passes, marking this the first time since the Skyrim incident that modification creators can share their work for profit via a Valve distribution system. For those wondering what a custom game pass might actually mean, it is an in-game purchasable item that allows Dota 2 players access to select custom game content within Dota 2. The passes are valid for indeed no less than 30 days, but no more either. It is not a subscription since gamers can set the ability to auto renew the custom pass itself. It is very important to note here that all of the content creators that will be given this ability will be vetted very carefully by Valve in the hopes that no fraudulent activity will be once again enacted by malevolent entities in the communities of the game and in Dota 2 there are lots of those. Back when Valve originally announced their plans to do something like that with Skyrim, I actually was a lot more enthusiastic compared to most players simply because I saw a lot of promise and an ability for modders to turn this into an avenue thanks to which they could actually turn their hobbies and passions into their living. I still hope that now they can do the same and hopefully with Valve's defenses in place it will be easier and better than the last time around. Of course only time can tell whether this latest venture by Valve is going to end in success or failure. We will see and I will certainly be watching. Now let us move on to more interesting topics, not that that one wasn't interesting enough. We're going to talk about Star Wars Battlefront. A lot of people didn't like Star Wars Battlefront or at least it's EA iteration. I was one of them. I thought that it was fun but at the end of the day not worth my time, not after several hours of play. There really was nothing deep and engaging to it but there once was a project, a very promising project, a very cancelled project in development at British studio Free Radical Design. The game was cancelled decades ago this year despite being nearly finished but it still is fondly remembered for all the footage that it originally showed. A lot of people are still fond of the videos that Free Radical Design released and so fans of the effort by the British studio at Russia-based Frontwire Studios are attempting to remake this version of Battlefront now retitled Galaxy Thermal. The project is live already on ModDB. The small developer is also asking via Reddit for anyone else with coding experience to get involved and to help with this interesting, albeit a bit later-the-party project. I completely understand their enthusiasm after all it has been 10 years since Free Radical Design showed us huge maps which boasted seamless ground to space battles, something completely amiss from DICE's new iteration. I for one am excited by the prospect and hope to see real, tangible progress soon enough. And of course I always hope that LucasArts won't show themselves to be awful people and send them a seized and desist order. But if you are happy enough with beautiful graphics and mediocre expectations of gameplay you may be happy to understand that Greedo Jabba's Palace and the new modes are coming to our current Star Wars Battlefront game, Goethe's AOVA and DICE. The new Outer Rim DLC also has a new mode named Extraction. This Extraction mode involves the terrorists, known as rebels, carrying shipments to a ship preparing for planetary evacuation. The mighty interplanetary peacekeeping organization called the Galactic Empire is striving to stop these evil, rebellious sons of guns from escaping with these valuable resources and using them to rain down further hell upon the glory of our glorious new empire. Sorry, I got excited there for a moment. Anyway, the DLC is going to introduce two new heroes, character heroes, one on the side of the rebels, one on the side of the empire. For some reason those two are Nien Namp, who you might remember from Episode 7 and Episode 6, not necessarily in that order, and Greedo, he who did not shoot first, I suppose. Why? Why those two? I have no idea. I mean, we've got like so many interesting characters, we've got Chewie, we've, well, I could honestly take a blast packed Grand Moth Tarkin rather than Greedo, but for some reason Greedo is what we get. I have no idea what they are thinking, but hey, it's EA, so they probably don't do a lot of that thinking process anyway. And now to XCOM related news. First, and more importantly, we've got a new XCOM 2 DLC. It is an accessory pack with over 100 new styles, decals and shoulder pads and pads in the like for your characters in XCOM 2, naturally. It will cost you 5 euro when you could get more interesting stuff for free from this team workshop. Of course, it's kind of worth it if you actually have the DLC pass. At least I hope so. We haven't actually seen or heard any news of XCOM 2's actual interesting story soldier based DLCs, which will be coming in the summer. If you are still curious enough to see what children's Anarchy's Children DLC contains, well, you can take a look at the link above in the right corner, which will lead you to a video I made specifically showcasing some, if not all, of the new accessories. It's not my greatest video ever, but it will do. More importantly, the original XCOM creator, Julian Golub, has announced a new turn-based tactical combat game. It is going to be called Phoenix Point, and we only have the following description. Turn-based tactical combat world-based strategy. It sounds like a new... although an official XCOM. Could it be? I hope so. I mean, he's the guy who created the original XCOM, certainly it will be good. The latest game he helmed was Chaos Reborn, which I have heard is a lot of fun, but I have never ever ever played it. I'd like to, though. Anyway, thank you for taking the time to watch this. It has been a lot of fun to talk about these latest few pieces of news, and I'm looking forward to having a lot more to talk about. If you enjoyed this, please like, share and subscribe. If not, sorry to waste your time. I hope I didn't. Until next time, bye!