Homefront dev explains the importance of dedicated servers

Following the wildly negative reaction to Modern Warfare 2's lack of dedicated servers on PC, one of the marketing bullet points for THQ's FPS Homefront has been its promise of suchdedicated servers -- not only on PC, but on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, as well. But how important are they?

"You have to think about your constraints when you're making a game," Homefront senior designer Brian Holinka, of developer Kaos Studios, explained to us at a recent press event for the game. "If we host a server on a console, all of a sudden, that console is both server and it's playing the game. That really lowers everything: player count, the number of vehicles, everything. Dedicated servers allow us to offload all that work and basically all the client has to worry about is running the game."

Through dedicated servers, Homefront will support a chaotic 16-versus-16 online mode, whereevery player can summon a vehicle at will. "It means everything is bigger -- there's more players, more vehicles, more targets, more airstrikes," Holinka hyped.

"It really helps us offload a lot of work," he reiterated about the servers, "and now our scope is a lot bigger." But can you really call a 32-player match "a lot," when a game like MAG has littered the virtual battlefield with 256 players? We asked Holinka why Kaos wasn't using the dedicated servers to expand the number of players per match even further, and he reminded us that "we had more in Frontlines," the studio's previous game. Apparently, the team tested out larger battles for Homefront, but "it just didn't work," Holinka said. "We just found it wasn't fun. It just plays better at 32."

"If you played a level with 50 or 60 people in there," the developer found, "every time you turn around, you'd get shot."

Via:Joystiq

Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit | Championships Competition

Think you know what fast is? Well, now's your chance to prove it as we've teamed up with EA and Criterion to adorn the ultimate Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit racing champion with a 46-inch 3DTV and a pair of 3D specs.

Step 1 - Enter the competition using the form on the next page.

Step 2 - Head over to East Gorge Canyon in Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and complete the race Vanishing Point using the vehicle of your choice.

Step 3 - Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit's Autolog will keep track of your best race times – make sure your in-game account settings have data sharing enabled. You'll need to make sure it's a personal best that you lay down in the challenge for the time to register.

Only the fastest 50% times of all registered entrants on Xbox 360, plus the fastest 50% on PlayStation 3 will qualify for Phase II. There's one 46-inch 3DTV for the fastest contender on Xbox 360 and one for the speediest demon on PlayStation 3!

Blizzard launches StarCraft 2 Master League, plans for Grandmaster League

Have you found competition in StarCraft 2's online multiplayer "Diamond League" to be unrewarding? Do you hang, effortlessly, from the very highest rungs of the tallest competition ladder? It's time for you to shed your burdensome chrysalis and ascend to your next challenge: the recently launched "Master League," which pits the top two percent of players from each region against one another for true StarCraft supremacy. If you're eligible for the new league, you won't have to do anything special to join; Blizzard automatically elevates top-two-percenters to the Master bracket.

Of course, the raw exclusivity of this new ladder will lose a bit of its luster when Blizzard launches the "Grandmaster League," which will only invite the top 200 players from each region to battle. There's no timetable for the release of this ladder, though we imagine it'll come well before the arrival of the Great-Grandmaster League, which forces the very best player on the planet to play against an evil clone of him or herself all day, every day, for twenty years. You get a T-shirt if you win that one, though, so it's totally

• Via: Big Download
• Source: Blizzard