Good morning all you wonderful, wonderful people. Yes, we’re trying to better you up. Happy brains are tasty brains.
A report by LazyGamer – citing “numerous industry sources” – suggests that the South African branch of EA will be shut down. While this may be directly related to EA’s decision internationally to cut its workforce by 10% to “to ‘reduce operating expenses” and “expand operating margins”, we do find it a little odd considering the scale of the operation in SA. We have reached out too to the EA SA branch and await confirmation of this report. We do wonder however if maybe the local manufacture of PC titles might not be the actual operation being closed down. We’ll keep you updated once we have confirmation.
Sticking with EA related news. Battlefield 3 and the Battlelog servers were hit with an external attack yesterday. The official Battlefield twitter account tweeted: “The current BF3 and Battelog outages are a result of activity that appears to be aimed at overwhelming our game servers.” Guess some disgruntled Call of Duty players didn’t like the fact that the Battlefield 3 Premium service went past 3.5 million subscribers…
The “connection issues” have meant that the planned double XP due to start today and run until 13 May has now been postponed to a “later date”.
A number of domains have been registered by Lucasfilm which appear to hint at upcoming Star Wars projects. Among the domains spotted by Fusible are: starwarsrebels.com, starwarsalliance.com and wookiehunters.com, among others. [via CVG]
The recently announced Wolfenstein: The New Order will not feature any multiplayer. According to MachineGames say the reason for this is that the studio does not want to taint the legacy of the Wolfenstein series. Makes no sense really, as Wolfenstein has almost always shipped with mulitplayer. [via GameSpot]
The first screens from PS4 exclusive inFamous: Second Son have hit the internet. You can check them out here.
What’s new for the EU PlayStation Store? Plenty. Check here for the PS Store list.
Meanwhile, over on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace, you can pick up the Arcade game Doritos Crash Course 2 for… FREE! Yes, it will cost you absolutely nothing.
Sony has sent out invites (ours is in the post…) for a Gran Turismo event which may reveal GT 6 while celebrating 15 years of the series. The series’ creator Kazunori Yamauchi will be on hand to discuss the future of the series. [via CVG]
Lobo has arrived for Injustice: Gods Among Us. Season pass holders will be able to access him, along with three more characters for the price of three. The pass is priced at 1200MSP on Xbox 360 and £11.99 on PS3.
Techland has released a teaser video (with gameplay!) for their upcoming co-op first person slasher called Hellraid. The game will arrive on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 this year.
Sony Santa Monica is seeking a Level Designer and Senior Combat Designer for an unannounced project which appears to be open-world. The combat designer specifically requires experience with “character and boss designs from concept to implementation” and experience designing vehicle combat is considered “a plus”. Let the speculation commence. [via Gamasutra]
Avalanche Studios founder Chrisofer Sundberg has said that Nintendo are too difficult to communicate with and that the studio’s Wii U dev kits are “collecting dust”. The small Wii U install base is to blame for this. [via NeoGAF]
A PS Vita system update has been released. Update 2.12 improves software stability “during use of some features”. [via Twitter]
A new patch for Diablo 3 has been released. Patch number 1.0.8 is live, and enhances co-op, as well as numerous other tweaks and bug fixes. For details, head here. However, it would appear that the patch has forced Blizzard to take the real money auction house offline following the discovery of a gold duplicating bug… Oops.
John Carpenter has expressed an interest to make a Dead Space film. In fact he said that he “would love to make Dead Space, I’ll tell you that right now.” [via CVG]
Let’s end with some South African eSports news. Do you remember COD4? No, neither do we, and we’re old. But, if you do, and you play it on PC, Wage has announced – in partnership with the CodZA community and Roccat – the Call of Duty 4 Community Cup. Registrations open 10 May and the tournament runs from 13 May to 19 May. Get all the details you need here. [via MyGaming]