Month: October 2024

Blizzard’s reveal of Hearthstone’s Mercenaries mode in September 2021 was, as we put it not too delicately, “a masterclass in how not to announce a game.” Despite that inauspicious beginning, it actually turned out to have real potential: Hearthstone streamer and podcaster Ben “RidiculousHat” Goodman said that after a few days with it, “I feel the pull of the couch and just one more run.”

Unfortunately, it looks like his longer-term concerns about competition and economics were prophetic. Blizzard announced today that Mercenaries is getting one more big update in patch 25.4, after which there will be no further new content released.

The patch will add six new Mercenaries to the mode, described by Blizzard as “some of our most interesting Mercs yet,” which will push the total number of Mercenaries in the mode to more than 120. Mercenaries will also be able to have two different types following the update, like Human-Undead or Celestial-Beasts.

Many Mercenaries will also be getting factions indicators that will make it easier to tell how a Treasure or Ability will impact the party. The two factions in the game will be expanded to seven: Alliance and Horde will be…

Valorant, a competitive FPS that I’ve often criticized for being too conservative with character abilities, is cooking up something weird for its next agent. Iso, Valorant’s eleventh post-launch agent, is a Chinese mercenary who “reconfigures ambient energy into bulletproof protection.” Pretty useful skills for the aggressive pointman of the team, but pedestrian compared to his ultimate ability that is so strange it’s unlike anything I’ve seen in an FPS before.

Called Kill Contract, Iso can literally kidnap the nearest enemy and transport both of them to an “interdimensional arena” where the two duke it out until someone dies. It’s sorta like earning back a second life in Call of Duty: Warzone’s Gulag, except if your normal round of Valorant could be suddenly interrupted by some guy who wants you to 1v1 him on Rust.

Iso’s pocket dimension doesn’t look like Rust, sadly; it actually looks like a Star Trek Holodeck that just sorta gave up on rendering textures. The arena seems to be a flat piece of ground no matter where on the map you trigger it. There are walls hiding both players when you first arrive, presumably so you can’t just line up a headshot then shoot immedi…