Category: Games

The final LawBreakers open beta runs this weekend

Cliff Bleszinski’s Boss Key Productions held an open beta for its upcoming law-of-gravity-breaking online FPS LawBreakers last month, and it seemed to go pretty well: Laws were broken, people were shot, and a good time was had by all. Unfortunately, it was a time-limited beta that came to an end on July 5. But the good news for those of you who missed it (or who would just like to give it another shot) is that one more open beta is set to begin on Friday.

The final beta will feature a number of changes from the previous event, including balance tweaks and new features based on player feedback. Players will be able to unlock and equip any launch-day “Stash Drop” content including skins, stickers, and profile pics, have a look at the launch-week-exclusive Wraith and Assassin’s Kinetic Blades weapons, try out matchmaking improvements, and play with Twitch features including account linking and broadcasting.

The final beta will begin at 7 am PT/10 am ET on July 28, and is scheduled to come to an end at the same time on July 31. To avoid wasting any of those precious hours on downloading the game, it’s available for pre-load now on Steam, so you can make with the violence as soon as the flag drops. It’ll also be helpful for PC players in North America who will be automatically entered into the “Early Bird Beta Contest” for a replica Aerator rifle or 1080Ti graphics card if they play at least three matches within the first four hours of the beta launch.

Boss Key also released a new trailer looking into the role played by Battle Medic class that you can check out below. (Short version: he’s not a guy you’d want as your family doctor.) LawBreakers is set for release on August 8, and will go for $30/£25/€30, or a little bit more the Deadzo Deluxe Edition. And since you’ve got a little time before the beta begins, you should probably make sure your drivers are in order, too.

Posted on

PUBG next monthly update pushed to August 3, in-game skin system not due till launch

As teased by Brendan Greene earlier this month, PUBG’s latest monthly update promises first-person servers, an FOV slider for first-person view and a new rifle. As a result of “complications with a [recent] client crash bug”, these features won’t be implemented till August 3 (which could mean next month sees two monthly updates), however in-game skins designed to “further customize your character” won’t launch this side of Early Access.

“We would like to provide more content as well as test the basic crate and key system we want to implement in the final version of the game,” so reads a Steam Community update post. As such, on August 3, Thursday of next week, Bluehole will launch three new crates.

The developer continues: “All three crates will contain items inspired by the Battle Royale movie, some of which you may have seen in our older artworks. The first and second crates, named the Wanderer Crate and the Survivor Crate, will be free to open. Each of these crates will include one set of the themed clothing, on top of other cosmetic items. The third crate named the Gamescom Invitational Crate will have the most diverse pool of themed clothing.”

Speaking to that last point, a group of the “best Battlegrounds content creators” are set to be called up to run daily events at this year’s Gamescom conference in Cologne. The Gamescom PUBG Invitational marks the game’s first ever offline event of this kind that will see attendees compete in daily qualifiers.

As for how this relates to the aforementioned crate and key testing, Bluehole adds: “We have implemented a very basic key and crate system for this test. You can use your Battle Points (BP) to buy the crate on the Rewards page. While the Wanderer Crate and the Survivor Crate will be free to open, the Gamescom Invitational Crate can be opened with a key which you can buy for $2.50 each.

“Proceeds from the sale of the keys to open the Gamescom Invitational Crate will be used: to provide funds needed to organize the event, to provide a prize pool for the invitational winners, to support a selection of charities.”

Bluehole notes that once Gamescom wraps up on August 27, the Invitational Crate will no longer be available.

The following teaser images are dubbed “movie inspired cosmetic items”:

Posted on

Hackers hijacked PCs using Source Engine kill animation exploit

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Team Fortress 2, Portal 2 and other Source Engine games were all affected by a particularly nasty exploit until recently. Basically, by uploading custom assets into a custom map, hackers could use them to trigger a “buffer overflow vulnerability” which resulted in the victim PC being open to remote code execution.

In other words, merely shooting at an enemy could cause your machine to be remotely hijacked. The exploit was identified by One Up Security (via Motherboard) who notified Valve.

“Valve’s Source SDK contained a buffer overflow vulnerability which allowed remote code execution on clients and servers,” OUP’s statement reads. “The vulnerability was exploited by fragging a player, which caused a specially crafted ragdoll model to be loaded.

Multiple Source games were updated during the month of June 2017 to fix the vulnerability. Titles included CS:GO, TF2, Hl2:DM, Portal 2, and L4D2. We thank Valve for being very responsive and taking care of vulnerabilites swiftly. Valve patched and released updates for their more popular titles within a day.”

For a demonstration of how it worked, this very short video tells you all you need to know. Death has never been so scary.

Posted on