Riot Games announced that its popular online strategy game League of Legends has hit a major milestone: more than 1.4 million players log on and play the game every day. The game currently sits at the 15 million registered players mark, with an average of ten games of League of Legends starting every second of every day. The first season of competitive play recently completed showing that the number of active players each month has grown to over four million.

"We are extremely proud and appreciative of the devoted League of Legends community which has grown substantially over the last year and a half," said Brandon Beck, CEO of Riot Games. "We’re committed to continuing to match their dedication with our relentless focus on ongoing enhancements to the player experience with great new features, content, and polish – and we have some very exciting surprises in store just around the corner."

According to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab has found a way to improve the performance of game-playing AI by enabling it to read the manual prior to play. According to RPS, the AI was able to improve its performance in Civ by reading the manual considerably. Here's an excerpt from MIT's web site:

"When the researchers augmented a machine-learning system so that it could use a player’s manual to guide the development of a game-playing strategy, its rate of victory jumped from 46 percent to 79 percent."

A 30 percent increase in performance is pretty impressive, as is the AI's ability to translate the written instructions in the manual into actual gameplay. You can read an exhaustive report on this little experiment at MIT.

A new interview with 2K President Christoph Hartmann over on MCV makes the top executive at the Take-Two label look a little foolish - not that it's MCV's fault. In that interview Hartmann degrades strategy games and Ray Charles among other things. His comments come about as part of a discussion on X-Com, the popular strategy games series that the company is reimagining as a strategy-themed shooter. Here's the first quote, about 90's strategy games:

"The ‘90s generation of gamers all love Xcom and we own the IP, so we thought OK, what do we do with it? Every studio we had wanted to do it and each one had its own spin on it. But the problem was that turn-based strategy games were no longer the hottest thing on planet Earth. But this is not just a commercial thing – strategy games are just not contemporary."

Ryan Winzen's Starcraft II mod, World of StarCraft, has been rebranded as "Starcraft Universe," and Blizzard apparently approves of the name change and the direction of the mod after lawyers for the company talked to Winzen at length.

The focus of the mod remains the same, though Winzen has said that many misunderstood the multiplayer aspect of it, calling it an "MMO." That confusion did not help Winzen win any affection with Blizzard. Thankfully, all of that - including the name of the mod - is now water under the bridge.

It has been interesting journey for Winzen, who in the process of defending his modification, gained the favor of Blizzard and got a job offer from Riot Games (makers of the DOTA-like online game League of Legends). Blizzard has even offered to fly Winzen out to its headquarters to meet the StarCraft II development team.

New research from the University of Illinois unearths a technique that can predict "with unprecedented accuracy" how well a subject can perform on complex tasks simply by analyzing a certain part of the brain. University of Illinois Beckman Institute director Art Kramer and colleagues have developed a way to predict how well study subjects would do on a strategic video game using established brain imaging techniques.

Using magnetic resonance imaging and multivoxel pattern analysis, researchers found differences in patterns of a "particular type of MRI signal, called T2, in the basal ganglia of study subjects." Analyzing these differences enabled researchers to predict between 55 - 68 percent of the differences in performance among 34 subjects who later learned to play a game developed by the university.

Stardock CEO Brad Wardell says that the company's strategy RPG Elemental: War of Magic will end up costing the company money in the long run. This will happen, the company says, despite the fact that the game managed to break even on pre-orders.

"Elemental made its money back on day one and has continued to be profitable to this point," Wardell told Gamasutra in an email. "However, based on our projections we anticipate by the end of second quarter 2011 that Elemental will end up losing money overall as our objective is to spend what is necessary to ensure that the game meets the expectations of our customers."

Wardell did not disclose how many units the game has sold to date or how much money the company made off initial sales. While the company will lose money on the game, Wardell sees it as an investment in its PC customer base, who were very dissatisfied with the launch of Elemental.

According to a report on Big Download, former Civilization V lead designer Jon Shafer and science fiction writer Dave Stern have joined Stardock to work on Elemental: War of Magic.

Shafer, who recently left Firaxis, will eventually oversee his own development team. For the time being though, he will be focusing on the continued development of Stardock's current flagship title Elemental - including the development of the two upcoming expansion packs.

Source: Big Download via Blue's News

German multi-touch display manufacturer Evolouce has been mucking about with Kinect and has managed to create a hack that allows PC gamers to play Ubisoft's RUSE the way it was meant to be played.

Using this hack, the user's right hand controls cursor movement, while the left hand acts as the left mouse button command for unit selection, giving orders, and more.

The video to the left shows it all off. Xbox 360 developers may want to pay close attention to how these developers use Kinect to make a real-time strategy game work with a special input device.. Perhaps this new application of the technology can be ported back to the 360 to make strategy games suck less on consoles?

Source: VG247 by way of RPS

According to data gathered by TorrentFreak earlier this month, StarCraft II is the most pirated game of 2010 - to date, anyways. StarCraft II: The Wings of Liberty has been downloaded more than 2.3 million times since the game released in July. According to TorrentFreak, the total number of data downloaded as it relates to StarCraft II is a staggering 15.77 Petabytes. This data is based on torrent downloads, and does not take into account downloads from other non-file-sharing sources.

Around 3 million legitimate copies of the game have been sold to date. Of course, those 2.3 million copies can't be used to play online, so that's something.

Source: Softpedia

Relic revealed via its blog that the party is over for Games for Windows and its upcoming Warhammer 40,000 titles. The general consensus among PC gamers is that GFW support in earlier Warhammer 40K games was more of a hindrance than a help when it came to playing multiplayer.

Nevertheless, the horror seems to be abating: the upcoming Dawn of War II: Retribution will only use Valve's Steamworks. THQ and developer Relic seem to prefer Steamworks because it provides Steam community features such as groups, achievements, and Steam chat. THQ said that, in addition to Steamworks support, it is working on new matchmaking and ranking built specifically for Retribution.

The bad news is that Relic has changed the game from a regular expansion to standalone, which means that Dawn of War II owners are stuck with Games for Windows. Here is more on the decision to make the game a standalone expansion:

On Episode 81 of Troy Goodfellow's popular strategy podcast, Three Moves Ahead, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell talks in-depth about the disastrous launch of Elemental: War of Magic. The podcast, which runs for about an hour, is dedicated entirely to Elemental's less than stellar launch, what went wrong internally at Stardock and what the future holds for the game.

The good news for those fans that are willing to give Stardock a chance to redeem themselves can expect a lot of changes including a global mana pool to rebalance the game, a more blatant tutorial that spells things out for new players, better general in-game documentation, and lots of game balancing.

You can check out Episode 81 here.

A Syrian developer is creating a game that it hopes will boost the image of Islam, reduce tensions with the West and encourage pride among young Muslims.

That's a pretty tall order for a computer game.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that Al-Quraysh, due for a September release, is being developed by Damascus-based Afkar Media. From the CSM's description, it sounds like the type of build-and-fight game that will be instantly familiar to Western fans of the historical strategy genre:

Al-Quraysh is a strategy game that tells the story of the first 100 years of Islam's history from the viewpoint of four different nations - Bedouins, Arabs, Persians, and Romans.

One can choose to command any of the armies of the four nations or lead the army of the main character, Khaled Ibn Waleed, a Muslim warrior who defeated the Roman and Persian empires and never lost a battle. Or one can play the role of the Bedouin sheikh, who must earn the respect of his tribe. The player has the task of building and protecting trade routes and water sources, building armies, conducting battles, and freeing slaves.

Akkar Media exec Radwan Kasmiya commented on the game:

Al-Quraysh is going to help people in the West better understand the people who are living in the East. We want to show that this civilization was a sort of practical and almost heavenly civilization...

I get very embarrassed by the way we [Muslims] are showing our civilization. There were rational laws that were governing Muslims at that time [on which the game is based]. This allowed this civilization to last for a long time and to accept the other civilizations that they came in touch with...

 

Most video games on the market are anti-Arab and anti-Islam. Arab gamers are playing games that attack their culture, their beliefs, and their way of life. The youth who are playing the foreign games are feeling guilt... But we also don't want to do [a game] about Arabs killing Westerners.

Via: Inside Arab Gaming

A strategy game which challenges players to create and manage a private prison empire has outraged some observers.

Of ValuSoft's Prison Tycoon 4: Supermax, the Criminal Justice blog writes:

[Building] a private prison? Who would want to spend free time building an elaborate cage, allowing gang wars, drugs and racial violence to fester in an attempt to earn more money? This is the fourth version of the game, so apparently someone is playing it.

I guess there's a video game version of nearly everything one can imagine. But the existence of this game... highlights the disturbing prevalence of prisons in our society. This game takes for granted that prisons are everywhere and that they are simply a tool for profit. That's a sad place to be.

The architecturally-oriented BldgBlog couches its dismay in sarcasm:

The description of Prison Tycoon 4: SuperMax... urges players to experiment in the architectural framing and administrative implementation of prison life.

 

"Build a profitable privately run prison from the ground up... Grow your facility to SuperMax capabilities, housing the most dangerous and diabolical criminals on earth – all for the bottom line."

 

Putting moral limits on our imaginations temporarily aside, perhaps we could even conceive of Prison Tycoon 5: Guantánamo Bay, or Prison Tycoon 6: Austrian Basement Edition. Prison Tycoon 7: Gulag. Prison Tycoon 8: Escape from Abu Ghraib...

Prison Photography takes a more blunt view:

Prison Tycoon is less gratuitous than Grand Theft Auto and the like. But I don’t know if this is any comfort. To manipulate a virtual prison population with “friendly interaction and fighting between inmates dependent upon mood and gang affiliation” and to rely on “guards [who] will subdue aggressive prisoners, medical staff to treat injuries, chaplains administer to prisoner’s spiritual needs and therapists talk to prisoners to lift their spirits” seems a bit too sinister and calculated for an evening of gaming...

Really, why does this game exist? I suppose it is just completing the loop - the gamer, as a God of Pixels, can create criminals in his other games and then manipulate them in this one.