Month: August 2022

Microsoft has confirmed the next wave of titles heading to Xbox Game Pass for console, PC and Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Ghost Recon Wildlands will join Game Pass on Cloud, console and PC today. On August 4, Shenzen I/O will come to PC. Also on August 4, Turbo Golf Racing will come to Cloud, console and PC where it will launch day one on Game Pass.

Two Point Campus will join the service on August 9 for PC, console and cloud where it will launch on day one.

Later in the month, Cooking Simulator will join Cloud, console and PC Game Pass on August 11, as will Expeditions: Rome. Offworld Trading Company comes to PC Game Pass, also on August 11.

Citizen Sleeper Episode One: Flux, a DLC episode for Citizen Sleeper, is available today. Also added to the service is the Sniper Elite 5L Landing Force Mission and Weapon Pack.

The following games will leave Game Pass on August 15:

• Boyfriend Dungeon (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Curse of the Dead Gods (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Library of Ruin (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Starmancer (Game Preview) (PC)
• Train Sim World 2 (Cloud, Console, and PC)

Microsoft confirmed last month that Xbox Games with Gold will no longer include Xbox 360 titles beginning in October 2022.

“We’re always looking at ways to evolve the Xbox experience based on community engagement, feedback and shifting company priorities,” a Microsoft spokesperson told VGC.

“We have reached the limit of our ability to bring new games to the catalog from the past due to licensing and technical constraints. We will continue to focus on providing Xbox One titles through the Games with Gold program.”

There is a limit to the seemingly ever-expanding League of Legends champion roster, with Riot Games devs already penciling in a time when they’ll stop designing new characters in an effort to avoid scaring new players away.

League stands alone in modern gaming with its monolithic roster.

Several long-running franchises do hold a candle to the MOBA, of course, including the Mortal Kombat—the Netherealm giant has 97 fighters⁠—and Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. with its cast of 80 characters.

Other character driven titles like apex legends (23 across the main game and its mobile spinoff) and Overwatch (32, with more on the way) struggle to keep up. riot’s shooter, VALORANThas a growing list of eighteen and League arch-rival dota 2 recently clocked over 123 with the arrival of Primal Beast in February.

Riot’s thirteen-year old franchise leader retains its throne via relatively regular character releases⁠—we’ve already had four this year.

Those good times will eventually end though, Riot says.

Final League champ is coming, Riot says

At least, that’s the discussion the Riot Games teams are already having, dev Matt “Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison told League Broken by Concept podcast.

Leung-Harrison (who was recently promoted to top boss in the balance team) admitted the League squad is already considering an “end” point where the roster will hit a big red stop sign. In all likelihood, the Australian dev said, that final release will come when Riot can no longer add intuitive characters.

“We’ve still got a lot of flex to go [there],” I added.

“There are a few things that make a lot of champions unsustainable. One is if champions are unintuitive. Let’s say I run into Thresh, he throws a hook, and it looks like a hook, but it just goes over somebody. You’d be like ‘what the hell is that?’

“If we make unintuitive champs, making more of them is an issue because it massively multiplies the number of things you need to understand to play the game.”

Gwen is Riot’s best example of ‘unintuitive’

One example Leung-Harrison pointed to was Gwen. In her case, the core of her kit was based around an ability that presented a “difficult visualization challenge.” New players often struggle to identify The Hallowed Seamstress’ moves.

Even worse, they are sometimes driven away from LOL by her abilities.

That is a huge “no-no” for the team. New League players already faced a steep learning curve around 160 plus characters: Riot doesn’t want to make that any harder.

When will Riot stop making League champions?

Luckily, the League roster max cap isn’t coming anytime soon.

In fact, the Riot development team is as eager as ever to design new characters for their title. The gurus firmly believe “part of League’s magic is its never-ending mastery curve.” It’s what keeps players coming back again and again.

According to lead League dev Ryan Mireles, “Once you’ve learned the game and all its many characters, the game can start to become less engaging. Every new champion we create adds new gameplay to learn, which is one of the reasons why we ensure all new champions have a unique playstyle.”

Nilah was the most recent addition to the game’s roster.

Next up are actually reworks⁠. Udyr is finally getting his kit and design tweaked to bring him into modern League and Aurelion Sol is getting a much-needed update.

Microsoft has launched two security services that aim to increase the intelligence capabilities of an organization’s security operations center (SOC) rather than solely protect devices.

Microsoft has launched Defender Threat Intelligence and Defender External Attack Surface Management (EASM) — two new products that merge technology Microsoft gained after acquiring security firm RiskIQ last July for $500 million.

There may appear to be some overlap between Microsoft’s existing services like its Azure-powered Sentinel security information and event management (SIEM) service and Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting, a managed threat hunting service, and its Defender Experts for XDR, a managed extended detection and response (XDR) service.

But Microsoft says these RiskIQ-based threat intel service offerings differ in that they provide customers with “direct access to real-time data” from Microsoft’s security signals. Microsoft chief Satya Nadella last week said the firm receives 43 trillion security signals each day.

Besides signals, Microsoft says its new threat intel service is based on intel merged between RiskIQ, Microsoft’s nation-state tracking team, Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC, pronounced ‘Mystic’), and the Microsoft 365 Defender security research team.

Rob Lefferts, corporate VP of Microsoft Modern Protection and SOC unit tells ZDNet the threat intel service is about “connecting SOCs with Microsoft’s own researchers from MSTIC”.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management is about “how do we make sure that you get to see the whole world the way that the attacker would,” says Lefferts.

“We’re gonna scan the internet and help you understand what do you present out on the public internet and what exposure does that mean for your company.”

The attack surface management service could be useful given data that attackers start scanning the internet for exposed vulnerable devices within 15 minutes of a major flaw’s public disclosure and generally continue scanning the internet for older flaws like last year’s nasty Exchange Server flaws, ProxyLogon and ProxyShell.

This service discovers a customer’s unknown and unmanaged resources that are visible and accessible from the internet – giving defenders the same view an attacker has when they select a target. Defender EASM helps customers discover unmanaged resources that could be potential entry points for an attacker.

Across MSTIC and Microsoft 365 Defender Research, Microsoft is tracking 250 different actors and ransomware families.

“We’re providing intelligence across all of them and bringing that into your security team — not just to learn the latest news… but also to explore it, so if I see an indicator, I might explore where that might live on the network and connect that to what I’m seeing in my company. It’s like a workbench for analysts inside a company,” says Lefferts.

Microsoft’s security business is growing at a rapid clip. It was worth $10 billion a year in 2021, and as of April had grown to become a $15 billion a year business. At its Q4 FY 2022 earnings update, Nadella said Microsoft’s “security revenue increased 40 percent” and that its security business now spans 50 categories, well beyond its Defender antivirus for Windows PCs.

Other recent acquisitions include IoT security firms CyberX and ReFirm Labs to boost their cybersecurity offerings.

Microsoft rebranded its Defender lineup in 2020 to bring Microsoft Threat Protection, Defender ATP, Azure Security Center, and others brought under the Microsoft Defender monicker. Microsoft Defender would become its XDR product, while Azure Sentinel became its SIEM line.

Lefferts says the two new Defender-branded services are standalone products.

“This is different to protecting endpoint. It’s about improving your security team, giving them new views and perspectives. If you think about a game of chess, if you turn it around and look at it from your opponent’s point of view, this is a tool that is designed to help analysts do that by giving them that different perspective,” he says.