Deep Space Nine is almost the anti-Star Trek. Where the others were fervently optimistic, it was realistic. Its Captain lied and cheated and did back-room deals to get the job done. Its crew included a former terrorist, a genetic outlaw, a thief, and a lost member of the baddies with a tendency to forget his loyalties. It showed that the Federation had dirty-tricks divisions, that even Paradise isn’t perfect, and that there is no more horrible sight in the universe than a greedy Ferengi in drag.

Most importantly, it remains the only Star Trek series so far to really dig into the implications of the seemingly utopian Federation. What happens to those of us who aren’t perfect? What happens in the face of a threat that can’t be conveniently dealt with in an hour – or 42 minutes, including adverts? Sure, Babylon 5 covered much of the same ground, but much of the fascination of Deep Space Nine was seeing how Star Trek specifically fared in the ‘real world’ when the chips finally went down.

(It’s also the only series in history whose creators specifically released counterfeit merchandise, just to give collectors everywhere the pleasure of holding it up with a hiss of “It’s a FAAAAAAKE!” Or so I encourage you to believe, tell your friends, and add to respectable wikis everywhere.)

But what of the games? Surely they’re just as brilliant as the show? Yeah. About that…

'Station Log: Today I met the most boring person ever.' 'Hey, I'm RIGHT HERE!' 'I am aware of this.'

The problem with a series like Deep Space Nine is that, much like Babylon 5, it was one of the first mainstream shows to really do plot arcs and story development instead of being largely individual episodes written for syndication purposes. That makes it tough to slip a story that actually means anything into the mix – but worse, means that developers have no idea what the state of play is actually going to be like when the game comes out and thus what the players will be expecting.

Though it wasn’t ever likely to be this…

As a counter, in The Next Generation, you could be fairly sure what the status quo would be. There may be a few changes here and there, like Troi becoming a command officer or Worf’s backstory being revealed, but those are minor details. Picard would be giving speeches, Riker would smile smugly and Troi would still crash the bloody ship. The Next Generation was conveniently reliable like that.

Deep Space Nine on the other hand was anybody’s guess. The premise, of a small mining station that becomes a hub of importance with the discovery of a wormhole to the other side of the galaxy on its doorstep, soon went from ‘alien of the week’ stories to all out war. Every season was different, from the weak opener with episodes like Move Along Home and If Wishes Were Horses to the political upheavals of the second. As a specific example, it wasn’t until the third series that it was revealed that there was a hostile empire called the Dominion on the other side of the wormhole, and that idea itself wasn’t invented until almost a couple of years into the show. Even so, any attempt to use the wormhole to tell stories that didn’t factor this in was going to seem silly. And Deep Space Nine was anything but silly.

(Probably the worst ever case of this was for Farscape: The Game, which was atrocious anyway, but really suffered particularly from being set at the end of the first series and so focusing on stuff that hadn’t meant a damn thing to the show for literally years. Its plot can be summed up as ‘a mysterious forest appears on a planet and for some reason you care’. Only it was even duller than this sounds…)

Couple this with the fact that Deep Space Nine was an acquired taste that split Trek fandom with its attitude, and it’s not too surprising that there weren’t many games. In fact, there were exactly three on PC, all with a certain “What the hell do we do?” feel of desperation dripping from them. There was another in development, simply called “The Hunt”, but it got cancelled and only exists now in this preview. It doesn’t look very good, though, especially the bit where Science Officer Dax has an arse on her chin.

Ah, Ops. A little bigger than on the show. And with far more people called suCKmyCOLLECTIVE_89

There is one way to take a trip round Deep Space Nine though, in a form you may have missed – Star Trek Online. It’s free to play, and while I don’t particularly like the game itself, it is worth finishing the tutorial, closing the quest screen entirely, and heading into the Bajor system to check this bit out. You don’t need to level up or do any pre-requisites to board. Just fly there and dock.

Arriving, you’re first warned that some work has been done to the place – this is developer Cryptic’s way of saying “don’t expect perfection, fanboys!” – and the cast of the show aren’t around, but visually it’s pretty good. You can go shopping on the Promenade, and visit the upper level to check out the wormhole. You can head up to Ops, where you’ll probably see a random bunch of people jumping on the consoles like gibbering monkeys, and visit Sisko’s office to check out his baseball. Like the rest of the game, it’s all a little oversized, but the sentiment is there. You can also beam down to Bajor proper if you want, where a cute custom ground region awaits your crew, and one of the missions involves walking around on DS9′s hull. There’s even a whole episode of the in-game story devoted to a dropped thread from the show – a fleet of invading Jem’hadar ships eaten by the wormhole.

Not to be crass, but I'm not sure that's enough... ah... polygons for Leeta.

Probably the best handled individual bit though is Quark’s Bar. It looks decent by STO standards, and has a (almost) unique mini-game to play – Dabo, which is Bajoran for “Roulette With Boobs”. This specific game is run by a hologram of Deep Space Nine’s occasionally appearing Ms. Fanservice, Leeta, who mostly existed to demonstrate that deeply spiritual peoples can indeed invent breast implants, to provide any PG rated nudity that the rest of the cast wasn’t up for, and remind the world that hotties will occasionally turn down handsome, charming doctors in favour of dribbling orange trolls called Rom.

(To give her credit though, it worked out – not least because Rom eventually developed into a heroic figure who became the leader of his people. So, yeah. Way to go, Leeta, I guess…)

Ah, the Promenade. Two levels of shopping, but mostly geeking out.

What you won’t find in Star Trek: Online’s version of Quark’s Bar though are the Holosuites – which are much the same as The Next Generation’s holodecks, only with the understanding that no matter how enlightened they are, no people with a machine capable of creating any fantasy in the universe are going to just fight the Battle of the Alamo and pretend to be Victorian governesses and the like. The main cast never really indulged, but it was understood that not all of Quark’s customers were so restrained – one episode’s B story was entirely about an alien trying to get him to make a virtual love-doll of Kira, the station’s first officer, and a woman doomed to always be described using the dreadful word ‘feisty’.

Sadly, building a room capable of creating anything in the universe proved beyond Star Trek Online’s designers – the wusses – so forget about having a hot stardate, milking the franchise, cleaning out Jeffrey’s tubes, whacking off with Weyoun, penetrating the galactic barrier, implanting a Trill, turning O’Brien smiley, touching Q’s finger, worshipping the Celestial Temple, spooning like Cardassian voles, making first, second and third contact, using the Vulcan kegel pinch, riding a runabout, venturing into the pink wormhole, fondling your Tribbles, bumping Pakleds, making Odo splash on the floor, adopting the Emissary position, distributing some ketrasex-white, waltzing with Bashir, relocating some Space Seed, warping to fourth base, giving Bones double-duty, doing the Efram Cochran, promoting the bald Captain, digging into fresh gagh, being fingered by the hands of the Prophets, giving it the old Badda-Bing Badda-Bang, communing with a couple of Bajoran orbs, getting some glop-on-your-stick, engorging holosuite safeties, going to subspace with the Dominion, lapping the habitation ring, jerking the Kirk, docking at Deep Space Sixty-Nine, buggering a Borg, or setting phasers to spunk.

At least for now. Maybe in a future expansion pack…

Welcome to Derp Space Nine.

There are three official Deep Space Nine games. The third of them is the easiest described – it’s a really buggy, not very good strategy game called Dominion Wars with little of note to really say about it save that it exists and is deservedly forgotten. To fill some time, I shall hum a little. Dum de dee de dum.

The first proper attempt, Harbinger, was an adventure game designed to test the limits of human boredom. You play Envoy Nobody of the Planet Nobody Cares About, on the way back from Operation: Whatever. The trip is rudely interrupted by an attack by drones that even the Daleks would make pepper pot jokes about, and you end up crashing on an almost deserted Deep Space Nine.

Hello? Anyone there? Should I come back later? Like... in 2012?

What follows is one of the most sterile, tedious adventures ever, with a cast that look like they were digitised based on action figures rather than the actual actors, and the kind of voice-work that doesn’t quite feature Captain Sisko going “Station Log: This morning I woke up and decided to spend the day not giving a shit”, but really gets close at times. It does at least feature Avery Brooks as Sisko, along with the actors for Dax, Kira, Odo and Quark, but even their presence only helps so much in a plot with so much padding and so much excruciatingly tiresome technobabble delivered by a main character who sounds like he’d be more comfortable filing tax returns than saving Deep Space Nine.

To make matters even worse, the dialogue is endless, the drama non-existent, the animation hyper-limited, and instead of music, Harbinger opts for a constant ‘woomph woomph’ ambient thing that acts like white noise. They should use this game as a sleeping aid. For the dead.

I have a Borg teddy bear bought from the Star Trek Experience, and even I'm calling bullshit on that.

The closest Harbinger gets to being fun is in a B-Movie kind of way. One of the hardest puzzles in the entire game is walking round Operations, which uses a Myst style first-person control scheme with controls designed by Satan. Without a word of a lie, you can be trapped next to an open door because you can’t find the bit of the screen that turns you towards it, and actually navigating is toe-curlingly insane. The only reason to endure it is to realise that yes, you really do end up fighting a race called the “Tarragan” – the most dangerous herbs in the galaxy! (Sadly, they don’t have thyme travel.) It’s like every Christmas came at once and all you got was a mountain of coal!

Here’s your friendly neighbourhood Let’s Play. How long can you stick it out?

Yeah. I can’t outright say that nobody involved with this game cared even a little about it, but that’s very much the vibe you get from it. It completely wastes the show’s canon wherever possible, and the only reason to play it at the time was that it was at least a way of wandering around the station. Now, it’s so boring that if you used it as a frisbee, your dog would fall asleep instead of catching it.

Ah. Captain, it appears our universe is incompatible with modern graphics cards.

By contrast, the second game – The Fallen – hasn’t aged well, but was an extremely solid release. It was weighed down by having one of the worst names and box designs in spin-off history – just check out this awful thing – but was an acceptable Unreal powered shooter for 2000.

Story-wise, it takes place in the sixth season of the show (of seven) and features most of the cast. Avery Brooks didn’t show up, and was replaced by a Sisko apparently ordered to actively not do an Avery Brooks impression, while Colm Meaney (who played the station engineer O’Brien) was punished for his non-appearance by forever knowing he inflicted one of the worst Oirish accents ever on an unsuspecting world. Every line his replacement speaks ends on a silent ‘Faith and begorrah!’

Ah, so that's what happened to Leeta's polygons...

The main plot is fairly complex if you don’t know Deep Space Nine’s backstory up to this point, but I’ll try to sum it up quickly. Before Deep Space Nine was Deep Space Nine, it was a Cardassian mining station called Terok Nor, where the oppressed Bajoran people were forced to process ore to buy both food, and the essential little brushes required to get gunk out of their pesky nose-wrinkles. When the Cardassians finally withdrew, the Federation took over the station with a mind to helping the Bajorans recover from the brutal Occupation and sign-up – only to have a giant wormhole open up right next to the planet that instantly turned it into one of the galaxy’s most important tactical locations.

The wormhole turned out to be home to a race of mostly nice god-aliens called the Prophets – a bunch of swirly confusion balls who pretended not to know about linear time, but were pretty clearly just dicking with everyone. However, over time it turned out that there was another set of not-so-nice god aliens who had been banished from the wormhole for constantly dismissing everything. For this, they became known as the “Pah!” Wraiths, and condemned to labour forever on Bajoran high-streets as baristas in a chain of coffee shops called “Costa Mojan”. Or something like that. It’s been a while since I saw the show.

Tell Ensign Jones that next time he screws up, reporting it by singing 'Ops, I did it again' will result in his death.

Anyway, The Fallen is about them and their worshippers’ attempts to set them loose, and it’s your job to stop them. Mostly, this is done through standard third-person shooter methods – but not without a few quirks. For starters, you can choose to play as three different characters, Captain Sisko, first officer Kira, and token Klingon Worf – and each gets their own path through the game and style of playing. Sisko spends most of his time indulging in a mix of puzzle solving and shooting, Worf shoots everything and smashes them over the head for good measure, and Kira bounces comfortably between exploration and using the power of the Death Note to execute criminals. Something for everyone then!

As with STO, arguably the best bit is ambling around Deep Space Nine itself between missions – with a few of the actual characters like Quark and Garak and Morn in residence rather than a bunch of new people you don’t care about. There’s not a lot to do, but you can check out Quark’s, visit the Bajoran Shrine, and get around a hell of a lot more easily than in Harbinger. There’s even a few people there. Not many, but some! And some is always better than none, except in MMOs where people suck.

Here’s Not-Sisko in action for the actual game part though. Enjoy the awful acting, the inevitable third-person crab-walking, and those ‘beautiful’ early 3D environments from the era before people learned to program lightswitches and complicated geometry in the Unreal engine.

It’s tough to say that Deep Space Nine ‘deserved’ better. Even during its run, it was the show that nobody really expected to get an awesome game out of, and the attempts faded from memory incredibly quickly. Still, at least it got a couple. More than you can say for Babylon 5.

Next week, Star Trek Month concludes with… ugh… Voyager. Can the most insipid of shows without the word ‘Enterprise’ in the title lead to some of its most memorable games? Maybe. And while the high points are pretty well known already, it may not even need an elite force to make it so.

Oh yes. There is… another.

Meanwhile, GameFly has Torchlight for $3.75, Steam has 33% off Ubisoft games, and GOG is selling EA classics such as Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri for $2.99. See all of this week’s game deals inside!

STEAM

Ubisoft dominates Steam’s big weekend sale with 33% off all the Clancy and Creed you could want.

• 33% off Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 – $6.69
• 33% off Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter – $6.69
• 33% off Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon- $6.69
• 33% off Splinter Cell Conviction – $13.39
• 33% off Assassin’s Creed Revelations – $26.79
• 33% off Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood – $20.09
• 33% off Assassin’s Creed 2 – $13.39
• 33% off Prince of Persia – $13.39
• 33% off Driver San Francisco – $20.09
• 33% off Might & Magic Heroes VI – $33.49
• 33% off Might & Magic Heroes VI – $33.49
• 75% off Serious Sam Complete Pack – $21.75
• More Steam deals

Amazon’s picked up on the popularity of Day Z and has stripped 50% off ARMA 2: Combined Operations, which is all you need to play it. It’s also got good deals on Metro 2033 and Borderlands, and, as always, Tropico 4 is on sale. Maybe they should just change the list price?

• 50% off ArmA 2: Combined Operations – $14.99
• 75% off Metro 2033 – $4.99
• 75% off Medal of Honor – $4.99
• 75% off Borderlands – $7.49
• 50% off Mount & Blade: Warband – $10.03
• 30% off Sid Meier’s Civilization V – $21.06
• 25% off Dungeon Siege 3 – $14.95
• 50% off Tropico 4 – $19.99
• 26% off Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 – $14.75
• 33% off Assassin’s Creed Revelations – $26.79
• 15% off Mass Effect 3 – $50.99
• More Amazon PC game downloads

GAMEFLY

If Diablo III isn’t your cup of tea, Torchlight is only $3.75 on Gamefly. If you don’t like tea at all, head elsewhere. You can probably find some coffee on Amazon or Steam. METAPHORS!

• 75% off Torchlight – $3.75

• 20% off The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – $39.99
• 50% off InMomentum – $4.99
• 78% off 2K Ultimate Bundle – $69.99
• 65% off Tropico 4: Modern Times – $6.99
• 50% off Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition – $19.99
• More GameStop deals

• 50% off Super Meat Boy – $7.47
• 80% off Deus Ex: Human Revolution – $5.99
• More deals from Green Man Gaming

This week’s themed GOG sale is a good one: 50% off classic EA worlds including Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, Dungeon Keeper, and Populous!

• 50% off Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri – $2.99
• 50% off Dungeon Keeper – $2.99
• 50% off Dungeon Keeper 2 – $2.99
• 50% off Populous – $2.99
• 50% off Populous 2: Trials of the Olympian Gods- $2.99
• 50% off SimCity 2000 Special Edition – $2.99

• 70% off Medal of Honor (2010) – $5.99
• 75% off Medal of Honor: Airborne – $2.49
• More offers from GamersGate

Know of any more game deals this weekend? Drop them in the comments!

The offer is open to any “fully-funded, complete and ready-to-publish games designed for digital download to PC platforms.” Brian Fargo, CEO of inXile, and Jane Jensen of Pinkerton Road Studio voiced support for EA’s offer in the press release.

“Crowd-funded projects are like the ‘people’s choice awards’ — a way for gaming fans to express what they want to buy and play,” said Jensen. “It’s great to see a big publisher like EA acknowledging that and opening up distribution opportunities for these games.”

PC Gamer: In the summer update, you’re allowing players to earn previously paid-only content, like civs, with Empire points. What motivated this change?

Steve Bauman, Design Lead: To be clear, Gas Powered Games isn’t in charge of the business side of the game, though as a partner of Microsoft, we are involved in the decision making process. They visit our offices a lot to talk about these kinds of things, and to drink our Mexi-Cokes. They will deny this, but they know it’s true.

As designers, we prefer to spend as little time thinking about business and monetization and all of those other exciting buzzwords to focus on new features and civs.

Eric Williamson, Systems Design Lead: But once the decision was made, we wanted to make sure we rewarded our most active players, because keeping them around is best for the game. A large player base is positive for the game in a number of ways: it results in more people to trade with, play PvP against, and strategize with. We’d rather have someone play and not spend any money than not play at all, and the old system didn’t really support that.

Brian Fricks, Design Lead: For me, the new model is just easier to understand. Earn or buy Empire Points. Spend Empire Points on what you want. Simple is good.

Soon you'll be able to earn cool stuff like the Premium Celt civilization without blowing all that cash you were going to spend on your real-life authentic druid garb.

PCG: Was the old system too restrictive?

EW: Yea, in the sense that the game really wasn’t free to play; it was more of a free to try. We probably turned off a lot of players who would’ve kept playing had they been given the option to earn a Premium Civilization. At some point you realize, “I’m going to have to pay if I want to get the maximum benefit of my civilization.” Now, the choice is up to you: play and earn it over time or pay and upgrade immediately. Our hope is that some of those people who left will come back and give the game a second try.

SB: I’m not sure it was overly restrictive. It was just… different, and as Eric said, it didn’t meet the expectation established by most other free-to-play games. Players expect to be able to earn for-pay items through play over time, with real-money being an option for those who want to speed up the process. Age Online was previously a DLC model with a free base game. The fact we had to explain it to players and the press was an immediate red flag.

PCG: What’s the development target for how many hours/missions a player should have to spend earning EP in game in order to buy a civilization?

EW: Right now it’s possible to earn a premium civilization in as short as two to three weeks of daily play, although this can vary depending on how many quests you do.

PCG: Will every mission in the game (including PvP, Skirmishes, Defense of Crete, repeatables) give EP, or only a few?

EW: Only a few. You’ll earn EP from playing specific campaign quests on your way from level 1-40. If you’re level 40, you can play PvP, Skirmish and Defense of Crete as a part of the Alliance Wars end-game. You won’t directly get EP from completing those quests, but you’ll receive EP rewards for participating in the Alliance Contests.

BF: And because you earn EP for leveling up, every quest does help you earn when you are starting a new civ or playing for the first time. Over time, this adds up.

Hop onto twitch.tv/pcgamer to watch me try and survive in the brutal-but-beautiful landscape of Chernarus. I plan to stream for about three hours, beginning at 3 PM Pacific, 5 PM Central, 6 PM Eastern, and 11 PM GMT.

If this were a fight, the introduction might sound something like this:

“In the left corner, armed with the weakest pistol in the game and a small pile of beans, weighing in at 400 hours-played of Arma 2: Evan!” [boo]

“And opposite him, in the tattered trunks: 500 zombies, and dozens of dangerous bandits!” [cheer]

The document even implied that senior figures in Activision asked members of staff to monitor Infinity Ward’s email exchanges as part of an ominously named “project Icebreaker” plan, a scheme outwardly set up to improve the fractious relationship between the publisher and Infinity Ward.

The West/Zampella vs. Activision trial is set to start on May 29. It’s going to be a massive case. Their dismissal in 2010 prompted a big exodus of developers and programmers from Infinity Ward. Since then, West and Zampella have set up another studio called Respawn Entertainment. In between lawyer meetings and court appearances they’re busy building a team and making a new game.

Players have discovered the rumoured Diablo 3 secret level only a few days after the game’s release. It’s called Whimsyshire, and it’s a playful poke in the ribs for anyone who accused the game of being too colourful back when its art style was originally unveiled. Whimsyshire is a neon-green children’s cartoon complete with rainbows and playful little happy clouds. Hooray!

The portal to Whimsyshire is a glowing rainbow crevasse that can be unlocked during Act 1 of the game, provided that you’ve collected the right ingredients from elsewhere. Enemies range from ponies to Cuddle Bears, but don’t be fooled: it’s equivalent to an Act 4 dungeon and it’ll turn your fresh character into a brightly-coloured smear without a second thought.

You can find a guide to opening Whimsyshire over at Diablowiki.net. Be warned, though: the steps cover all four acts, and contain spoilers. Whimsyshire isn’t going anywhere: come back when you’ve finished your first run through the campaign.

With a backing track that makes Firaxis studios feel a bit like that hotel from The Shining, lead programmer Casey O’Toole talks about the joys and difficulties of birthing a new XCOM game into the world. The combat will still be entirely turn based, but with some actions your soldiers will still exchange fire with the alien invaders between turns to keep the battlefield feeling lively. You can get a sense of what that’ll look like in this XCOM: Enemy Unknown trailer. Firaxis will be out on consoles and PC, but Firaxis have assured us that the PC will get a standalone tactical UI and be moddable.

See below for other highlights and links to our reviews.

• Excellent platformer Rayman Origins for £13.39/$20.09.
• Futuristic city-building sim Anno 2070 for £23.44/$33.49
• Driver: San Francisco for £13.39/$20.09.
• Assassin’s Creed: Revelations for £20.09/$26.79
• Might & Magic Heroes VI for £23.44/$33.49

 
Check out the Ubisoft publisher page for the full list. Anything catch your eye?

“I and my brother Ondrej were addicted to playing Carrier Command on our Atari ST” says Bohemia CEO Marek Španěl. “In fact, it was what inspired us to develop games ourselves.”

“It feels very, very cool” said Tom Francis of the game in his preview last year.

If you’ve been wrestling with error 37 in Diablo 3 this week and want to help a different company stress test their servers, there’s a Torchlight 2 test session happening this weekend. It could be a good opportunity to get in on the last leg of the beta if you haven’t received an invite yet. You can sign up for a chance of grabbing a slot on the Torchlight 2 site.

Before Diablo 3 arrived, Tom had the chance to jump into the beta and take some videos of Torchlight 2′s. The Embermage is above, but you might want to check out the Outlander, the Engineer and the Beserker as well. They look insanely powerful. It’s available to pre-purchase now on Steam for £14.99 / $19.99, and comes with a bonus copy of Torchlight 1, which was quite excellent.

“They have management, there’s the board of directors of the company, there’s Gabe Newell” she explains. “Those guys at the top of the company definitely have opinions on how things should be run.”

It’s a slightly different picture to the one described in the Valve Employee Handbook, which a few weeks ago gave us a rare glimpse into the workings of the famously private developer – but it’s doubtful that Swift’s claims will surprise many people.

Her statements moderate Valve’s own depiction of itself in a way that makes a lot of sense. “There are definitely people behind the scenes making decisions for the company” she says. “To me, that’s normal.”

What she says doesn’t necessarily contradict Gabe Newell’s recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, where he explained that Valve describe their employees as individual and group contributors rather than managers and employees. A flat system still provides room for people to exert influence, and it’s no surprise that this is apparently the case at Valve.

Swift is currently working on dimension-shifting first-person puzzler Quantum Conundrum at Airtight Games, and she stresses that she parted from Valve on good terms. “I still have a great relationship with those guys.”

Check out Tom’s Quantum Conundrum preview for more on Kim Swift’s next game.

Infinity Ward have released more footage of the new Face Off mode that’ll be added in content collection 2. Sadly, it doesn’t have Nic Cage and John Travolta swapping faces and trying to out-ham each other to death in tribute to John Woo’s 1997 flick, it’s a fast 1v1/2v2 mode set in a series of tight arenas.

It looks perfect for a bit of split screen on the consoles, but the more focused approach could also fix that feeling of constantly being caught with your pants down on those busier CoD maps. Content collection 2 will arrive imminently on the Xbox, but will arrive quite a bit late on PC. There’s not solid date just yet. The pack will also contain three multiplayer maps, two co-op spec ops maps and two new Face Off arenas.

The reserved list will be opened to the public sometime after launch day, so if you don’t claim your name early, it’ll be up for grabs. Also note that the list of reserved names will be generated before the Guild Wars 2 launch, so if you haven’t logged in this year, make sure you do it soon to ensure that your name isn’t left off. You wouldn’t want to be stuck with “Wizardex,” would you?

The full explanation of how name transfers will work is available in a post on the ArenaNet blog.

To run for Vanarch of a province (a small group of connected zones), a player must be Level 50, leader of a Level 3 guild with at least 20 members, and pay 3000 gold and 100 Catharnach awards (a currency for buying guild perks.) Registration will be open for one week (May 18-25 for the first cycle.) The following week, each player will have one vote to cast per province for the registered candidate of their choice. The three-week Vanarch term overlaps with the registration and election cycle, so aspiring career politicians will have one week off before having to prep for the next election.

If you’re lucky enough to be elected, some of your powers will include:

• The ability to tax all NPC vendor transactions, such as those shiny, shiny crystals, (minimum 1%) and spend the earned gold for the good of your realm… or just pocket it in true politician style.
• Disable open PvP on a zone-by-zone basis on PvP servers. (Players will still be able to flag for voluntary PvP.)
• Earn “Policy Points” when people praise your guild, which can be spent to open up specialty vendors and services normally restricted to capital cities (class trainers, auction house access, etc.)
• Broadcast propoganda across your entire realm via a special chat channel.

All of this could be yours! For three weeks, anyway.

The campaigning has already begun, with hub cities like Velika filled with cries of “Vote for (Insert Anime-inspired character name here)!” Ocean, a player on the Valley of the Titans PvP server, has been advertising his campaign on the official forums. He is running on a platform to turn off PvP in some of the game’s lower-level areas. “I, like many other guild leaders of TERA have friends and members who are a low level,” his manifesto states. “I believe it is unfair to the community in general to have level 60s roaming low level areas slaying new players, and thus I vow to protect the lowbies from such incidents.”

Some are not so happy with this idea, presenting an intriguing alternative. Forum poster Philosonaught suggests that, instead of turning off PvP, Vanarchs should raise the tax rate and use the extra coin to hire player PvP militias. Said civil servants would patrol their liege’s zones and attack anyone who tries to prey on low-level characters. This idea evokes many intriguing possibilities on how the political system could evolve beyond the game mechanics built for it.

What would you do if you were given reign over a nation in an MMO?

Epic haven’t released the demo video yet, but Wired describe plenty of new tech, including an advanced particle rendering systems and a lighting program that models the way light bounces around rooms entirely in real time, bypassing the typical level design techniques that “bake” light and shadow into the textures of a scene. The days of designers hand-placing individual light shafts in a scene may well be over.

Epic demonstrated the subtlety of the new lighting system by bowling a ball of light down a dark hallway, which surely looked more impressive than that time they Epic rolled a cube of meat around Gears of War 2 to demonstrate soft body physics. Unreal Engine 4 will also include a new version of the user friendly Kismet programming system, improved liquid simulation and better scene destruction tech.

Hopefully Epic will show the video soon, their last big tech demo, codenamed Samaritan, was pretty spectacular.

Since the post has been taken down I won’t go into too much details about the way Microsoft says it’s improved multiscreen use in Windows 8 – obviously something in there wasn’t right and I’ve no way of knowing what that is. There was, however, some useful stats about dual and triple screen use which led me to wonder: how many pcgamer.com readers use more than one monitor?

According to the disappeared post, 14.68% of desktop users have more than one screen connected to the their PCs, as do 4.36% of laptop owners. Logically, you’d think that would be the other way around – it seems far more sensible to use a second screen with a notebook when it’s stationary. But the post writer is probably correct when he assumes that the majority of second screens are used by office workers and people who’ve recently upgraded.

Compare that with the Steam Hardware Survey and there’s about 0.22% of users who might be using EyeFinity to fool their games into seeing several monitors as one, plus an undisclosed number of people explicitly running several screens at once. (I’ve asked Valve to confirm how the numbers split between single and multiple monitors – but last time I raised the same question they didn’t have the figures.)

Here’s a bit of guesswork – since the lowest percentage in the ‘Multiple monitors’ category is 0.02% and applies to some really bizarre resolutions like 2592×900, I’m going to assume that there’s between one and 10 people with a 1152×720 TV linked up to a 1440×900 monitor for running Steam games on. That gives us a total number of multiscreen users in the survey of between 5,000 and 50,000 people. It’s been estimated in the past that Hardware Survey results are based on 12% of the total Steam population. At it’s peak this week, that was 4.6million. At its lowest, 2.1million.

Even using the most generous figures I can think of (that 50,000 people use dual screens and the survey size is just 250,000 people) that gives less than 0.2% of total users who explicitly have two screens. Add that to the 0.22% presumed before, and I can’t see any way that more than a half of one percent of users in total have two or more monitors set up for gaming – and it seems more likely the ratio is much lower.

I’m happy to be proved wrong (and a head cold is messing up my maths brain) – but unless there are thousands of people with that 2592×900 monitor set-up I’m not sure how we could get close to one in ten for multiscreen use.

The significance of that is nothing to do with Microsoft and Windows 8, though. Right now, I’m in the middle of a big group test of graphics cards and trying to figure out whether or not it’s worth recommending the fastest ones because they can put out more than 1920×1080 pixels at speed. Looking at these figures, I don’t think I honestly can. So obviously the next step is to ask you.

Since I love polls and forms and stats and stuff, here’s a quick survey for you to fill in. It’s entirely voluntary and captures no personal data on our behalf, although it is hosted by Google Drive. I’ll be analysing the results before finishing off the group test.

Studio founder and former baseball star Curt Schilling held a private meeting with state officials earlier today to discuss the state of the company. Afterwards, officials responded by deciding to not decide anything for a short while. With taxpayer money on the line, the studio could face hard times ahead.

The board are planning to consult industry advisers to get a better picture of 38 Studio’s current status and take action later. “We’re making a good decision by not making a decision,” said board chairman/governor Lincoln Chafree.

38 Studios released their first game, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning earlier this year. It didn’t do badly, but it’s taken a long, long time to make. The studio’s aspirations to build an MMO could explain the problematic financial situation they seem to find themselves in. They’re famously expensive to make and maintain.

38 Studios execs haven’t commented on the failed loan payment but a beleaguered Curt Schilling said this to reporters after the hearing. “My priority right now is to get back to my company. My priority right now is to get back to my teammates.” Hopefully it’s just a blip and the studio can turn their fortunes around.

The statement admits that “despite very aggressive projections, our preparations for the launch of the game did not go far enough.” As a result, Blizzard have moved the launch of its real-money auction house “beyond our original estimated date of May 22,” though they don’t specify exactly when.
Blizzard also thanked the game’s enthusiastic fans, and believe they have addressed most of the core issues. They will continue to monitor the servers, which we can only assume are still rammed with enthusiastic clickers.

The post follows days of problems with the game’s servers, which are believed to have caused the game’s Metacritic user review average to drop to a meagre 3.6. Read on for all the info, direct from Blizzard. For more, read Tom’s Diablo 3 review as it happens, or check out our complete launch guide.

Diablo Players:

Blizzard Entertainment.

Users can manage their library of games remotely via the web or mobile, downloading pre-loads, new releases, or their latest purchases, as soon as they’re available. That means your new downloads can be installed and ready to play when you get home from work; an enticing prospect for bargain-hunting PC Gamers, or ones who like managing their gaming time efficiently.

For more instruction, visit Valve’s Steam support page.

The cheaper box comes with a Marcus Kincaid bobblehead, a map of pandora, a download code for the digital comic, an art book and some stickers. The ultra-box is modelled in the style of a red Borderlands loot chest (minus the randomised megaguns), and comes with a set of lithograph postcards, some Sir Hammerlock field notes, a “steel book case” and big ID chart that lists all of the creatures you’ll encounter in Pandora. Also, most importantly, there’s a cloth map. In case you’ve never held a cloth map, it is the best sort of map a map could hope to be.

Both editions also come with access to the premiere club, which is also available to everyone who pre-rders an ordinary edition of the game. That’ll give you access to a series of DLC downloads at launch and beyond, including a Gearbox Gun pack and access to the fifth Mechromancer class when it’s eventually added sometime after Borderlands 2′s release on September 18. Have a glance at our Borderlands 2 preview for more, or check out the Borderlands 2 site.

The document in question is a court filing that forms part of the imminent trial between Activision and the Modern Warfare creators. In it, former IT director Thomas Fenady claims that he was asked to “dig up dirt on Jason and Vince” in 2009 by George Rose, Activision’s chief legal officer at the time. During his deposition, Rose denied that this was the case.

Activision have subsequently attempted to exclude Fenady’s evidence, and the court filing in question argues on West and Zampella’s behalf that the motion should be rejected. The significance of Fenady’s testimony is that it suggests that Activision were moving against West and Zampella in 2009, earlier than previously suggested. If true, this assists West and Zampella’s case that they were let go “in bad faith”.

The hack was allegedly part of Activision’s cringe-inducingly named ‘Project Icebreaker’, an ongoing attempt to secure the relationship between Infinity Ward and the publisher. According to Giant Bomb, this was in part a positive effort to improve relations – to break the ice, as it were. At a certain point, however, the document claims that Activision’s focus shifted away from diplomacy towards – as Fenady reportedly put it in a Facebook message – “looking for excuses to dump [West and Zampella].”

Thomas Fenady also claims that Rose told him to disregard the legal implications of the hack. “Bobby [Kotick] will take care of you. This comes from Bobby directly … don’t worry about repercussions.” Fenady allegedly tried to enlist the help of third-parties to crack into Zampella and West’s computers and e-mail: Microsoft refused to help without a court order, and a private network security firm, InGuardians, “didn’t feel comfortable doing it”.

Activision recently paid out $42m in delayed bonuses to the ‘Infinity Ward Employee Group’ as part of a separate case. It was also suggested last week that Black Ops 2′s setting could violate the agreement between West and Zampella as laid out in Infinity Ward’s original Memorandum of Understanding.

ALL profits are divided between four charities, including Amnesty International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, act!onaid and Unicef. The minimum price for the pack fluctuates. If more buyers pay over the required minimum, the price will drop. Otherwise, it’ll rise gradually. Right now it’s set at a pleasantly low £2.57 and the total donations figure just ticked over the ten thousand mark. WELL DONE EVERYONE. The deal will close in 79 hours at the time of writing.

As a member of one of three new factions, Ascended must seize a certain number of these areas to win. “The match ends when a single team has claimed 40% of the control points or 5,000 players are killed” explain Trion on the Rift site, “once this happens a 10 minute timer will start, this is your chance to make a last grab for control.”

Dominion, the Oathsworn and Nightfall are the three factions in question. Their differences are philosophical, which means any Ascended can be a member of any team as long as they’re up for a fight. “Are you a Ram, guarding the flock under your iron grip? Do you protect your pride, your virtue gold as the Lion’s mane, keeping the helpless from harm? Or do you soar like a Raven into the twilight – cleansing all corruption in your wake across the universe, whatever the cost?” RAVEN FTW.

The three-way PvP is the latest in a long series of updates that Trion have been providing over the last year. The Infernal Dawn 1.8 patch is coming up next. That’ll add a new 20 man raid, instant adventures, improved ‘looking for group’ tools and fishing. Find out more in our look at the recent Infernal Dawn Rift developer roundtable.

Shields and epic PvP battles are the big themes of DC Universe Online’s next DLC Pack, The Last Laugh. This exclusive new video from the dev team shows off some of the new weapon type’s animations-in-progress and talks about their goals for Shields in the game. I talked with the game’s creative director, Jens Andersen, about the most iconic shield-bearers in DC comic books and exploded in happiness when I heard who we’ll be fighting alongside in the pack’s PvP arenas.

PC Gamer: The Shield weapon is a part of the huge PvP update, but is it designed for PvP primarily?

Jens Andersen: We always want to add something to the player package [powers, weapons, movement, etc.] when we release a new DLC. In The Last Laugh, we added Shield as a new weapon option. Even though the new DLC focuses on PvP, Shield can be used effectively anywhere in the game, just like the rest of the weapons.

PCG: In your opinion, who’s the coolest DC character to ever wield a shield?

JA: There are lots of characters that have hefted a shield in the DC universe. For example, Wonder Woman uses one in battle all the time, but typically she does so with a sword in her other hand. But this new weapon is different: it is all board and no sword.

The character that it was modeled after is named The Guardian. He was created by Jack Kirby in 1942, so he’s been around for a long time. The Guardian is a super soldier, with superior strength, speed, endurance and regeneration. He wields an indestructible shield and is a master of hand to hand combat. The coolest part of the character is that he is a clone, and when one version of The Guardian dies, it’s replaced by another clone. This process has been going on for decades.

I think people would really like the character if they checked him out and I hope we see more of him in the comics in the years to come.

No time to party, I've shields to throw!

PCG: What are one or two combos that the Shield has access to, and were they inspired by any particular comic book scenes?

JA: The combo tree for Shield is really cool. It’s kind of like Staff, but it takes the [combo] chains to a new level. Each basic attack can transition into a heavy attack, but rather than having that heavy attack end the combo chain, players can keep it going by jumping back into the light attack change. They can go back and forth until they reach the end of the attack chain.

For example, light attacks would be [left-clicks]: L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, etc. Heavy attacks would be [left-holds]: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, etc. So players could string the following combos: L1, H2, L3, L4, H5 or L1, L2, H3, L4, H5, L6. It’s a very versatile combo tree and players are going to love it. The attacks range from bashing opponents with the shield, striking with the open hand and even powerful kicks.

PCG: Getting into the PvP side of the update, a lot of the new PvP content seems to be based in the opposing side’s strongholds. Are these instanced Arenas, or are we actually invading the other faction’s police headquarters and night clubs in the open world?

JA: Players are not invading the public versions of the HQs and Safehouses. These are Arenas. Players will use the queuing system to enter the Arena with random players or a pre-made group if they like.

Cue the corny gong sound and tiny yellow birds fluttering overhead.

PCG: Did you consider opening up the Safehouses in the open world, and why did you ultimately decide not to?

JA: We didn’t want these to be public spaces for a few reasons. First, we want a balanced experience so the matchmaking system is important. Second, we wanted very specific game modes, rather than just a raid on the HQ where you may or may not run into resistance. In that scenario, you simply kill a particular NPC. By using this approach, we can make custom game modes tailored to the space and then expand on those in the future without messing up the previous versions. Third, there’s no way to get into the HQs without zoning—you can’t travel to them in the open world—so there were many complexities to queuing invaders into the space that didn’t add much [value] at this time so we didn’t pursue it.

PCG: Assaulting the Watchtower or Hall of Doom is a momentous feat. Will there be iconics showing up in the fight to help, like in the Arkham Asylum Legends map?

JA: Our goal with The Last Laugh was to bring the iconic characters to the forefront of PvP like never before. Legends PvP is getting a huge increase in the roster—oh yes, there are more!—and the new arenas will pull from a large roster of legendary heroes and villains to take part in the battle. Each team will have three iconic allies each match. Characters like Professor Zoom, Black Adam, Gorilla Grodd, Solomun Grundy, Cheetah, Superman, Shazam, Kilowog, Power Girl, Raven and many more will be making regular appearances. It’s an iconic slug fest, and the players are right in the middle.

Tom Purdue has been blogging about Wizard101 for several years and was just picked up by KingsIsle last week to manage their community, mostly consisting of kids, grandparents and parents who play the game together. He has three kids that he plays games with regularly.

PC Gamer: I very fondly remember playing Kings Quest IV with my dad and brother when I was growing up. We drew maps, we planned routes and had a great time together. I know you play videogames with your three kids as well. Obviously we like it, but do you think it’s actually important to play games with your children?

Tom Purdue: If you come from the philosophy that the computer has never been a very good babysitter and your children are far smarter than you give them credit for, you’ll fully understand why it’s important to play the same online games your kids do. There’s so much you can discover about your children by watching the choices they make, laughing at the same jokes on the screen and immersing yourself in something they find highly important. It gives you an opportunity to both learn from them and guide them in a way that’s fun. The ultimate hope of a gaming dad is that it’s no longer a game about pirates and swashbuckling, but it becomes a game about history, math, and social studies.

My father once bought me a game of Atari Pac-man and he played it all day while I was at school before he gave it to me. He wanted to beat me at my own game. I came home from school and was overjoyed. My dad and I played, and I smoked him on the first try. He never played a video game with me again. I wish games like Wizard101 and Pirate101 would have been around when I was a kid because I think they balance the playing field a bit. They aren’t about twitch accuracy and reflex speed. I wish I had more memories of my dad playing the games I liked with me.

Will you be my father?

PCG: So you’re about to go from managing three kids in a game to managing millions as the community manager at KingsIsle. Is the role of a community manager different in a family-focused online game?

TP: Yes, it’s highly important. I’m just starting out here in this job, but from my interactions with fans of Wizard101 through my blog, I can tell you that you’re talking to both grandma and her grandkids. All generations of players are equally important, but there are legal rules and company policies that govern our social interactions. I can tell you this though: as a really cool side benefit, you get to receive fridge-worthy fan art from kids all over the globe!

PCG: Kids can be a handful. Can you talk a bit about why you pursued this career so long?

TP: I didn’t start out wanting a job at KingsIsle, but it grew in that direction when I saw that there was an enormous amount of creativity and opportunity there. I love the people that love their games. They’re a genuinely fun bunch of people that tend to not take themselves too seriously while simultaneously taking their pastime of choice to new heights. If I can tap into an ounce of that magic, I think I’ll be a completely satisfied community manager.

Go on adventures together.

PCG: So why did you want to work at KingsIsle in particular?

TP: It’s funny because I’ve had a few long time readers of my blog ask me, “Why hasn’t KingsIsle scooped you up yet?” Working at KingsIsle was as natural a fit for me as playing Wizard101. The moment I started playing the game, I couldn’t stop myself from writing about it. I’m a father who loves to game alongside his kids, and Wizard101 solved so many of the issues I had with MMO gaming and kids in general.

To me personally, KingsIsle has always appeared to be a game company with a huge heart. They respect loyalty, they avoid crunch when they can and they’re both young at heart and wise at the same time. On top of that, they make games I can support and feel proud of. Seriously, I could gush about KingsIsle all day long.

PCG: Well, I won’t take up your whole day. Thanks for your time!

PC Gamer: Is it fair to say that The Order novel is about Deckard Cain getting the band back together, and finding the remnants of the Horadric Cell?

NK: That’s a pretty… That’s a different way of stating it, which I like a lot. That’s kind of cool. It’s a lot of things in one, really: there were a lot of different goals for this book, but from day one we were all focusing on making this Deckard Cain’s story. He’s an iconic character; everybody knows who he is and people love him. But nobody really knows who he is, what his story is. While he’s been a supporting character, he’s never had center stage.

So this was our chance to tell his story, or tell a story in his life, and through that illustrate who he is and create his background and history, which was a lot of fun. So yeah, I guess you could say he’s trying to get the band back together. He’s trying to find out whether he’s the last remaining member of the Horadrim or whether there are others. That’s the key, in his mind, to saving Sanctuary, which he believes strongly is about to be invaded yet again.

PCG: In past games, Cain’s just been a talking head. Is that lack of background helpful or hindering to start with an empty character like that?

NK: It was a lot of fun. And I’ll tell you why. Blizzard and Blizzard fans are so immersed, connected, so loyal, so rabid. To be able to contribute to a universe like this—to create something that’s going to endure and become a part of the lore—and on top of that in such an iconic character as Deckard Cain, it’s a thrill. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s a really neat thing for me to be able to sit there and say that I was part of that. What I hope to do is bring out the human side, to show people who he is as a person and why he does what he does. It’s humbling and it’s exciting too.

PCG: Working closely with the developers of a game you’re personally passionate about has to be exciting. Did your choices ever directly affect something that went into the game?

NK: I don’t think so. The game was pretty deep in development when I came on board to do the book. When I flew out [to Blizzard's studio] to have the first brainstorming meeting about this novel, they let me play the beta. I think, at the time, I was one of the first people beyond the developers that got that chance, and that was really cool. But it was developed and so there may be little bits and pieces here and there, but I think what happens more often is the other direction.

Blizzard obviously knew things about the game that informed the book. And what I was able to contribute is fleshing out and telling the background, the backdrop, the story of some of the things that happen in the game… Even if something that happens in the game was planned before I started writing, I was able to expand upon that and set the stage in a way that might never have been done otherwise.

PCG: As players jump into Diablo 3, will they recognize a lot of in-game characters from the book?

NK: Cain and Leah are central, of course. That’s really the thrust of it: most of the other characters, I don’t know if anybody will make an appearance.

PCG: You gave a little insight into how your process with Blizzard worked. Could you go into a bit more detail on that?

NK: Some readers may know that I wrote StarCraft: Ghost Spectres—my first novel in the Blizzard universe—last year. That came about when they read a sc-fi novella of mine called Prime. It’s one of my favorites from my own work. They read it and loved it, so they contacted my agent and said, “Hey, we like this guy, would he be interested in talking to us about writing something?” So we had a call, and we really hit it off. I loved their energy—they’re very exact, very demanding in a good way.

[For The Order] they had a rough story idea—an outline of what they’d like to do—and they gave that to me. I kicked it around, read a bunch of stuff, background materials, and really familiarized myself… We brainstormed some ideas, and I wrote a long, detailed outline of some of the things that we’d discussed, some ideas I had, some things they wanted to do. And then I went out and met with… the game team and creative team.

I played the beta [while I was there], really immersing myself in it for a day or two. A lot came out of that. I went home, revised the outline, continued to research. Overall I spent several months researching, reading everything I possibly could. I really wanted to get this right. So I read everything I could: their internal docs and everything that’s been published before. And then I started writing. We bounced things back and forth, we did some rewrites, and here we are.

PC: You started in horror and sci-fi, and you wrote that StarCraft novel last year. How is writing in Diablo different from writing in those other universes?

NK: Different and similar both. I think one of the reasons that we both felt I was a good fit for this book was because of my horror background. Blizzard really intentionally wanted to take this book in a darker direction. More horror, less sword-and-sorcery and fantasy stuff. They really wanted to ground this thing and make it really intense, really creepy. And I loved that idea too.

In that way, I didn’t alter my style very much, but it is an entirely new universe from the StarCraft universe, and very different from writing original work. Like I said before, I really wanted to get this right. The fans are so incredibly dedicated, just so immersed in Diablo. I really didn’t want to let those fans down… Diablo is a little less fleshed-out overall than their other IPs, and that actually offered me some more opportunity to expand on things on my own, offer ideas to Blizzard: things I thought would be neat. That was a lot of fun.

PCG: For someone reading this that needs a little convincing that this is actually a creepy book—that it does get really dark—what scene in the book would you use as an example?

NK: Ha, there’s a ton. Really, I’m biased, but this is one of my favorite works. It’s an epic story that is action-packed, and it is full of scenes of real horror. I think right off the bat, the opening chapter after the prologue, we’ve got Cain and a young paladin going down into the ruins of an old repository and encountering a demon. And this is not your sword-and-sorcery demon: this is a pretty intense, very dark possession, horror scene. Things don’t go well.

Beyond that, we’ve got scenes in Caldeum with Leah. And before Deckard Cain even comes, we have a situation where Leah is with Gillian and it’s… pretty, pretty hairy there. She’s clearly disturbed and in great danger. I think those scenes… I’ve had a number of people actually, reviewers and fans that have had a sneak peek, say that those early scenes in Caldeum were really scary. Genuinely scary. So those are just a few. A lot of stuff that happens toward the end of the novel is really climactic and epic. There are new monsters that I created that are really creepy and unique that I think people will enjoy.

Update: The livestream has ended and the prizes are being shipped out! Thanks for tuning in!

The PCG Action News team will be live on the scene in Diablo 3 in just 10 short minutes! Head on over to our livestream page to follow our exploits in the world of Sanctuary and join the chatroom. We have four of each Diablo-branded SteelSeries headsets, mice and mousepads. We’ll be giving away one every 15 minutes for 3 hours to a random person in the chatroom (U.S. residents only, sorry). So stay tuned for your chance to win!

Prize winners

Diablo III SteelSeries Headset

1. Olsenz
2. Wigler
3. Vancage
4. Tentaclemeow

Diablo III SteelSeries Mousepad

1. Feathersword
2. Mowanza
3. Fizzgig21
4. Arkile147

Diablo III SteelSeries Mouse

1. Perfectblaze
2. Stottt
3. Alderune
4. Exolance

“We see the community expanding primarily through positive word of mouth,” says Todd Harris, COO at Hi-Rez. “Since release we’ve already recognized seven players who have each individually referred over 500 new people to Tribes: Ascend. The game’s success allows us to give back to the community through free DLC updates, tournament events and expansion into new markets in coming months.”

Hi-Rez also mentioned that its MOBA game, Smite, is entering closed beta on May 31. Like Tribes, pre-ordering the game ($20) will grant beta access beginning on that date. Gods! Gods that fight.

Diablo 3 was released on Tuesday. I got to attend the launch and interview Blizzard developers, Julian Love and Leonard Boyarsky, about the secrets of their development process. It seems that Blizzard’s priority is in focussing on “the awesome” – a sentiment I endorse. Click up there to watch the devs spill the beans.

For more on Diablo 3, read Tom’s Diablo 3 review as it happens, or read the rest of our Diablo 3 news. There’s a lot of it about.

I remember how things used to be five years ago, roaming sunny beaches punching sheds to death. It was the best time. Now I’m forced to roam this broken city posing on logs, fighting aliens and taking pictures of myself. That way, maybe the people outside the dome will see, and finally understand. Being an invisible, super strong, super fast, well muscled, bro-tastic, robo-tastic supersoldier simply isn’t that awesome.

Apart from the parts where I get to shoot the bow. Those are pretty great.

The embattled retailer has confirmed that it is unable to fulfill its Diablo III pre-orders for Australian customers.

However, a white knight comes in the form of Blizzard which today revealed on its official Diablo III forum they will honour the pre-orders instead.

To take advantage of the offer, Australian GAME pre-order holders are required to purchase the game digitally from Blizzard, and then provide proof of purchase in the form of a receipt. Blizzard will then refund the money paid to GAME Australia.

The statement:

“Australian Game customers with a valid preorder/prepurchase receipt dated before May 15, 2012 can do the following:

“1. Purchase the digital version of Diablo III from http://www.diablo3.com now or anytime before May 21, 2012.

“2. Download and start playing when the servers go live!

“3. Submit your GAME Australia preorder/prepurchase receipt to us before June 30, 2012.

“4. Receive a credit from Blizzard, for the amount you paid in advance to GAME Australia for Diablo III. This credit will be applied to the payment method used for the digital purchase.”

Sad times. The UK arm of Game has also entered administration in the past few months.

As with those previous free weekend events, you won’t need to feed your credit card details to Bioware’s hungry Treasury Rancor (Bankor?) to get in, and you’ll be able to get to level 15 and participate in PvP and flashpoints. Full details on the Star Wars: The Old Republic site.

The Rebellion expansion for the splendid Sins of a Solar Empire is due out in a few weeks, but first there’s another beta phase to go first. As the above trailer mentions, it’s live now for pre-order customers on Steam, which will give fans an early look at Rebellion’s visual updates, new factions and Titan class battleships. It’s due out on June 12, find out more on the official Sins of a Solar Empire site and see those Titans tearing it up in deep space in these Rebellion screenshots.

Let me into The Secret World weekend beta!

If you’ve entered successfully, you should receive your code by email. To redeem your key, visit http://register.thesecretworld.com and either sign up for a new Funcom account using the key, or apply it to an existing account. You’ll then be able to download the client from your account page. See you in game!

It was, however, a hulking giant cube of metal which wouldn’t look out of place if a boatload of monkeys were running around it shaking their shinbones.

The latest version is half the size and, as a result, much more interesting.

Dubbed the Fortress FT-03 Mini, it’s essentially the same case shrunk down to 40cm high and 20cm wide, ready for miniITX motherboards.

Crafted from 2.5mm thick anodised aluminium and available in black or silver, apparently there’s room inside for graphics cards up to 10inches long (like the GeForce GTX 680). The PSU sits at the top of the case – cooling is designed around the principle that heat rises – and apparently there’s vents on all four faces as well as the base.

Admittedly, it is a little large for a miniITX system, and will only accept small form factor power supplies. All the same, it does make me regret the fact that I’ve just rebuilt my work machine in a microATX chassis.

The FT-03 Mini will be available from today, with an RRP of $150. There’s also a microATX model available.

Note: If you’re tired of Diablo III coverage, simply mentally replace any mention of it with “Torchlight II.”

Cyborg MMO 7

Price: $129.99 / £99.99 ■ Official site: Cyborg Gaming MMO 7

If you left one of Cyborg’s RAT series mice in a public place, someone would probably try to disarm it. Despite its alien appearance, however, the MMO 7 is super comfortable and uniquely adjustable. It’s also built like a tank, so unless you have armor piercing fingers, it should have no problem deflecting your furious clicks. Unlike the standard RAT 7, the MMO version features 13 programmable buttons which, in conjunction with two modifier switches, can be used to execute 78 unique commands. You probably won’t need 78 unique commands in Diablo III, but the option is there to customize your weapon however you please.

It’s expensive, but if you’ll settle for no less than top-of-the-line, the MMO 7 is it.

Cyborg RAT 9

Price: $149.99 / £119.99 ■ Official site: Cyborg Gaming RAT 9

Unlike the MMO 7, the wireless RAT 9 only features six programmable buttons, but it’s not as if that’s skimpy. In the office, I experienced occasional hiccups with the wireless connection, but we’re drowning in interference here. I didn’t have any troubles at home, and as one lithium-ion battery charges in the dock while the other is in use, the mouse can keep going indefinitely. With both batteries charged, it can outlast any gaming session that isn’t hazardous to your health.

If you prefer the security of a wired mouse, go with a RAT 7 or MMO 7. The freedom of wireless movement is nice if you’ve got limited desk space because of a ridiculous collection of wire-snagging coffee mugs that I really should clean up I guess.

SteelSeries Diablo III

Price: $69.99 / £69.99 ■ Official site: Steelseries Diablo III mouse

SteelSeries’ Diablo III branded mouse doesn’t just look nice on a SteelSeries Diablo III branded mouse pad — it’s a good piece of hardware, too. The manufacturer boasts 10 million clicks per switch, and though I don’t have time to test that claim (115 days at one click per second), the mouse is sturdy. I could test it if I wanted to, though, as the driver keeps track of your click count, which is a cute feature. More importantly, it’s comfortable and symmetrical, so lefties aren’t left out. That does mean, however, that the “seven ergonomically placed buttons” are really five ergonomically placed buttons, because you probably won’t be using your pinky to tap the two side buttons meant for use with the other hand.

For the price, you’d better be sure you love the glowing Diablo III logo (which can be customized to pulse, as if you’re holding the beating heart of evil itself in your palm), but the quality won’t disappoint.

Razer Naga

Price: $79.99 / £69.99 ■ Official site: Razer Naga

The Razer Naga is our resident MMO expert Josh Augustine’s favorite mouse. Do you want lots of buttons? Naga has lots of buttons — more than you’ll probably need. Your thumb’s domain is covered with a pad of 12 glowing, remappable buttons which default to Diablo III’s emotes. They’re easy to hit and the mouse is super comfortable overall, which is why it earned a 94% in our review (April 2010).

Logitech G500

Price: $69.99 / £59.99 ■ Official site: Logitech Gaming Mouse G500

Logitech’s G500 Gaming Mouse is a solid-feeling, super comfortable option for right-handers — no other mouse fits my palm quite as snugly, even the RAT 7. The three side buttons, however, don’t sit quite where my thumb naturally rests, and everything about the construction feels durable except for the scroll wheel, which wobbles more than I’d like. Still, its comfortable design makes it a good contender for extended clicking operations. I’d recommend the Razer or Steelseries mice above it, but if you already own a G500, it’ll do just fine.

Logitech G300

Price: $39.99 / £34.99 ■ Official site: Logitech Gaming Mouse G300

On a budget, the ambidextrous Logitech G300 is a fine weapon, but you may want to try one before buying. It’s small for my hand, and the side buttons are oddly placed on the top instead of the side, so you hit them with your primary clickin’ finger instead of your thumb. It’s not my favorite configuration, but those with smaller hands may love its compactness, and the placement of the extra buttons means that, unlike with the SteelSeries Diablo III mouse, you can easily hit all four extra buttons whether you’re using your right or left hand.

Razer DeathAdder

Price: $59.99 / £54.99 ■ Official site: Razer

The DeathAdder is a great mouse, but if you have the option, you’ll want more buttons for Diablo III. The same goes for many other good mice, such as SteelSeries’ Kinzu, which work well for shooters but don’t give you any extra control.

Logitech Trackman Marble

Price: $29.99 / £29.99 ■ Official site: Logitech Trackman Marble

Using a Trackman may result in self-inflicted wounds.

I spoke the mod’s creator, Dean “Rocket” Hall, over Skype. We chatted for an hour about player emotions, AI programming, Minecraft, and what features to expect next in Day Z—like dog companions. Hall joined Bohemia Interactive in January as a Game Designer on Arma 3.

For easy reading, I’ve specified below which topics are covered per page.

Page 1

Inspiration, difficulty, backpacks, the value of unbalanced gameplay, the Arma community

Page 2

Dean’s best story, optimization, adding a narrative to Day Z, direct chat

Page 3

New features, Day Z dog companions, increased sales of Arma 2, Day Z in Arma 3, Kickstarter

Dean Hall is the creator of Day Z. He does his own stunts.

PCG: When zombie games were emerging a few years ago, you’d see people daydreaming about a game like Day Z on forums and in comment threads: “What if Left 4 Dead had a barricading system?” or “What if Dead Island was 50 players instead of four?” I think I’m just amazed that Day Z exists; I feel like you’ve made a wonderful proof-of-concept or prototype for a game that wasn’t supposed to happen for several more years.

Dean “Rocket” Hall: I wasn’t sure it would have the broad appeal as a proof of concept. I just didn’t really get a lot from games. I really enjoyed games like Dead Island and Left 4 Dead. But it wasn’t giving me what I wanted. I wanted context. I wanted to feel moved, I wanted to be angry. I wanted to give up on the game in disgust only to come back to it in two days. Anything, you know? If I was going to be spending my time I wanted to feel some emotion out of it. And I think that was the important thing.

I didn’t really talk about mechanics, as in “I wish it had barricading,” or “I wish it had this.” I talked about it with my friends and said “what kind of situations do I want to put people in?” And, what decisions do I want them to make? The classic one is: I’ve only got so much room in my pack, am I going to take those beans, or am I going to take their ammunition? Because I need to eat, but I need to shoot zombies. So, all those little tensions in someone’s head, and then the funny thing is, people can be running around for an hour and have nothing happen. Yet their heart’s pumping, and the adrenaline’s going, because they just don’t know what’s going on.

Backpacks are actually an instance of really good design to me in Day Z, because they fold into other concepts pretty elegantly. You don’t need a separate mechanic for something like… well, think of it this way. I can pose as a rookie player by carrying around certain equipment, right? By picking up an ALICE Pack, I look a little bit more experienced, I’m a little bit more of a target, right?

Hall: Yup. Yeah, exactly.

That’s really interesting. There’s not some big indicator over someone’s head about their level, or something. The trade-off for having a bigger backpack is that it literally become a kind of target on your back. How do you restrain yourself from building a bunch of HUD to explain design like that?

Hall: I was actually very reluctant even about the HUD, but it’s very difficult to describe whether someone is hungry or whether they’re bleeding. I have quite a bizarre looking bleeding mechanic, but it gets the message across. But, it was like I didn’t even want to have that stuff on the HUD, but kind of need to have some of those elements.

Even for an experienced Arma player, Day Z can be brutal. I mean, I mostly play Day Z at night, and Arma is one of the only games that has this opaque, almost unplayably-dark night. Why do you think players are okay with enduring that? Why is the mod becoming popular in spite of its, like…malevolence?

Hall: When I play a game like Company of Heroes with my friends, we always ramp the difficulty up to expert, and we’ll get smashed for like ten times or whatever. I’ve always liked playing some bit of a challenge and I’m sure that’s what your attraction is with Arma as well. It’s the lack of balance that actually provides you with quite a compelling experience. So I made a deliberate decision with it to follow where Arma was going and just provide that context around it and just use Arma to generate emotions in people. In a way it almost becomes an “anti-game” because you’re not sitting there going “OK, well we’ve got this weapon that needs this balance” or “these people are starting in this way, we need to balance it for when they go into the cities.”

"...I can explain." If you kill players in Day Z, you'll appear as a bandit to everyone.

So is that freeing for you as a designer to be in a situation where you’re just focusing on creating player feelings, and not worrying about whether or not this gun is dealing more damage per second than another gun or if this zombie is a little too fast?

Hall: I think it’s exciting because you really do feel out of your comfort zone. But I also think it’s quite scary for designers, because you’re almost putting your heart on your sleeve, because you’re choosing a mechanic but you don’t often have a basis for how that mechanic works unless you say it is realistic or it’s authentic. So people will turn around and criticize that and say “it’s not balanced at all, it’s terrible, I hate it, I’m dying.” So it really does open you up for some strong criticism.

Sure.

Hall: I’ve found it freeing because it’s the sort of game that I want to play. When I play a game, I want to be moved. It’s like you read a good book or a good movie: you want to feel something. Or at least I do, I want to feel something compelling and real out of the experience. And I think that games, now more than any medium, now offer you the ability to actually create your own story rather than follow someone else’s.

But not everyone takes advantage of that. Modders do, though.

Hall: Yeah. Obviously, you know Bohemia supports all the modding communities that come out. I think that’s one of the fantastic things about the studio. And then there’s been just a huge response from the community as well, you know all the servers provided, there’s more email than we can read through. Even as I’m sitting here now I can see that email box ticking up with people offering me support, and very skilled people as well. People coming from inside the industry saying that they may be a bit jaded by things as well and they want to see this emergent gameplay style grow out as well. That was really surprising. The amount of people who want to get involved and play something with all the rubbish of the industry removed from it.

When you say “rubbish” what are you referring to?

Hall: I guess I’ve always been really passionate about this whole idea of creating persistent worlds, and real, true emergent gameplay. And letting the players come up with the stories. Storytelling is ancient, you know? Storytelling is almost the origin of our language—how people used to pass on information. So I think that we kind of have an innate ability to tell stories and I think somewhere along the way we kind of lost that, in terms of our media and we started manufacturing these stories. Day Z got promoted through people’s stories, people were posting them on forums and telling them to each other. The guys on 4Chan were creating these amazing stories and they have their own language that they use to tell these stories. You can compare them with NeoGAF or Facepunch, or any of the other forums. They each have their own unique language for telling their stories. It was just amazing to see these fascinating interactions, these amazing tensions happening with people, and real emotions.

We still have a couple weeks to wait before Max Payne 3 is spilling whiskey all over our keyboards, but while we’re busy fighting a demonic horde of server errors, analog stick soldiers are getting drunk on bullet time right now. Making us even more jealous, our friends over at GamesRadar have sliced together a video showcasing a couple of great throwback Easter eggs: Max Payne 1 and 2 skins, and a complete Captain Baseball Bat Boy cartoon. See the magic above.

I was lucky enough to attend the UK launch of Diablo 3 on London’s Oxford Street last night. And it was pretty damn exciting. I saw demons, Diablo fans, and an orderly queue stretching all the way to Hell (not really).

The queue was really long though.

For more on Diablo 3, read Tom’s Diablo 3 review as it happens or check out the rest of our Diablo 3 news.

Further claims include the ability to build thinner laptops with longer battery life than their Intel equivalents, and that the integrated Northern Isles GPU has three times the graphics performance of the Intel HD Graphics 3000 GPU in Sandy Bridge. Trinity’s launch was accompanied by a bold claim by the firm’s Sasa Marinkovic:

“I don’t want you too see Trinity as competing against Ivy Bridge, I want you to see how we’re leading.”

Bold indeed, but also hard to verify since review samples are somewhat scarce. AMD reckons the desktop chip will hit the stores by 3rd June, but laptops featuring Trinity won’t arrive until after the summer.

In the meantime, we’re left with a lot of specs to chew over. The CPU part of Trinity uses a core codenamed ‘Piledriver’, which is almost identical to the Bulldozer core of the FX desktop chips but with better clock for clock performance and lower power consumption. It features one or two of the dual execution core modules, which gives AMD calls dual or quad core processors (whether they are or not is a discussion for another day). It looks like the power efficiency claims are good, though: the highest specced A10-4600M runs at 3.2GHz and consumes just 35W at peak.

That’s 10W less than a four core Ivy Bridge CPU, although it’s worth pointing out that to date AMD’s quad cores have struggled to compete with Intel’s duals, which are also 35W chips.

What’s more interesting about Trinity, however, is the graphics half of the processor. Although these carry Radeon HD 7000 code numbers, they’re actually built around the older HD 6000 (Northern Islands) design – except for the video processing engine, which is from Southern Islands architecture and includes features like one touch motion stabilisation for video editing.

They’re a generation ahead of the Llano chips, though, and AMD reckons it’ll get 50% better gaming performance from Trinity. Compared to Ivy Bridge, it’s claiming framerates of up to one and a half times more in games at 1920×1080 resolutions. What this means, potentially, is reasonable gaming framerates on an integrated graphics chip – something hitherto unheard of.

There are even better performance enhancement claims when it comes to accelerating video and applications which draw on OpenCl for speeding up photo editing and the like.

Just like its predecessor, Trinity will also be able to combine its graphics processor output with that of a discrete chip from the lower echelons of the HD7000 series. In truth, this is the set-up I’m really keen to test as soon as possible. An A8-3870K Llano processor paired with a £50 HD6570 provides for playable framerates in a lot of games, so long as you don’t mind turning off a few image quality options. Asynchronous Crossfire with Trinity could be a perfect budget option for gamers.

Trinity does look like a promising chip. It’s unlikely to offer the same raw CPU performance as an equivalent from Intel, but the relative disappointment of HD Graphics 4000 in Ivy Bridge has left a gap around budget games rigs and low cost laptops where AMD could clean up. Llano-powered laptops have been the one sunny horizon for AMD lately, hitting their traditional strengths of being cheaper and faster than Intel equivalents. I want a games-ready ultrabook, and Trinity looks like the best shot at that yet.

Unfortunately until I actually see one in my hand it’s impossible to pass judgement, and this is a major problem for AMD. Just a few days ago its share price fell on rumours that Trinity would be late to launch. Now its official timetable puts laptops touting the chip several months away – which analysts won’t like at all. The official excuse is that the release dates don’t coincide with laptop manufacturers’ product refresh cycles. The =

PC Gamer’s Diablo III review

The latest Diablo III news

■ Why is Diablo 3 so satisfying to play? We ask Blizzard for their secrets
It seems that Blizzard’s priority is in focusing on “the awesome.”

■ Diablo 3 errors plague launch, are you struggling to connect?
Diablo 3 players have been battling error 37, error 75 and even the odd rare Error 3005 for the past day. It’s been a shaky launch.

■ Default is for suckers: How to unlock full skill tree customization in Diablo 3
Diablo 3 has a secret. It won’t tell you, but you don’t actually have to select one skill from each of the categories…

Choose your class wisely

■ What Diablo 3 classes are game developers playing as?
We asked Notch, Runic Games, Blizzard themselves, and others: what’re you rollin’?

■ Meet the classes of Diablo 3
If you’re still undecided on which of Diablo 3’s five classes you’re going to roll, check out these personal ads to help you pick which one fits your style.

Get the right hardware

■ The best mice for Diablo 3
A guide to selecting the sturdiest, most comfortable mouse for your late-night click sessions.

Catch up on the story

“First two hours couldn’t even log in, then couldn’t create a character for another 30 minutes,” says Xenite on our ongoing Diablo 3 review. “So… how long until Torchlight 2?” asks Yanahma.

You can keep up with Tom’s ongoing experiences with Diablo 3 in our ongoing Diablo 3 review. He’s already encountered some connection problems that deleted a chunk of dungeon progress, though his character and items remained intact. Which errors have you seen? Are you struggling to get in? What do you think of Diablo 3′s always online requirement?

Pop open the side of this magnificent mod and there’s a fully water cooled mini-ITX PC, with a Core i7 2600K CPU and a Radeon HD6870 inside. Which means it’s more than capable of playing SW:TOR, for example and far more interesting than almost anything else to have featured in the Star Wars canon lately.

It even has remote controlled ion cannons on the front.

There’s a detailed build diary over on Asphiax’s blog, and some more details on this MaximumPC forum post. There’s also a video diary here.

As a child, I could never quite understand the error of scale which only allowed for half a dozen stormtroopers to stand inside the belly of the giant mechanical beast. This is a far better use of space.

(Via Technobob)

The lighting system has been a big point of interest for Treyarch in Black Ops 2, and the team have the added constraint of trying to ensure that the game will run on consoles at 60 frames per second.

“Engines, each time they get touched, they change. The creators alter them; they don’t modify what they don’t need to, and then they alter what they need to. You can’t make a competitive product if you’re not upgrading that engine along the way,” he added.

Black Ops 2 will be set in a future full of X-Ray sniper rifles. Find out more in our Black Ops 2 preview.

In Fifa 12 a player of any skill level will instantly trap the most challenging long ball without any apparent effort. Fifa 13 will look at the speed and angle of the ball and take the player’s skill level into account when simulating the touch. If it’s too tough, the player might fluff it. The ball could hop up few feet as he tries to control it, or spring a couple of feet away from his boot. It’s a subtle effect, but that moment of mis-control is all a marker needs to jump in and take possession.

This will introduce some nervousness in defence. Centre backs dealing with long through balls will have to decide whether they’re going to try and control it with an eager attacker on their heels, or boot the rock into row N. Going forward, there will be an element of risk/reward to every ambitious ball. EA showed videos of the new system in action at a recent presentation, which made Fifa 12′s moments of perfect control seem miraculous and entirely unrealistic. I still had a slight worry. Later, I asked line producer Nick Channon whether the added element of chance could prove more frustrating than fun.

“We’ll need to make sure that the game is unpredictable, but it’s predictably unpredictable,” he said. “We’re not making a random game here. You’re not going to randomly lose control of the ball. Ultimately it’s about making the game more realistic.”

Channon also confirmed that the PC version of Fifa 13 WILL be the same as console versions this year, continuing a trend started by Fifa 12.

That means we’ll also be getting the new close control system too. Previously, players would face the direction the ball was travelling in, now they can open up their body and move the ball laterally. This will let them juke past attackers more easily and allow for moments of skill without relying on the trick stick.

Graphically, based on the short clips shown at the presentation, Fifa 13 won’t be making a big step forward this year, but EA sports are steadily adding to Fifa’s already excellent animation system. New step overs, stumbles, free kicks, goal line clearances and more will all help players move more realistically on the pitch. The player impact engine added last year has been beefed up as well. Defenders will be able to block attackers off the ball and the battle for possession will be scrappier at close quarters.

The free kick system has also been expanded. Attackers can now trigger crossover runs, fake-outs and lay-offs designed to encourage a twitchy wall to jump early. On the defensive side, more players can be added to the wall, and players in the wall can charge the kick spot with the press of a button. They can also shuffle forward slightly to close the distance between them and the ball. If they do this too much, the referee will start showing cards. The new system should provide some entertaining cat and mouse contests in multiplayer.

Fifa 12 bravely slowed down the pace of the game and introduced a more ponderous but realistic defensive system. As a result, there’s a lot more space on the pitch than there were in previous Fifa games. Fifa 12′s attackers were never especially good at exploiting this extra room but EA Sports have been working on the AI. Players will constantly be analysing the players around them and guessing who’s most likely to receive the ball next. They’ll shift position slightly to support team mates nearby who they think might get the ball in a moment’s time and make more sensible runs as a result.

As with many of Fifa 13′s updates, it’s a subtle move gently usher the sim closer to the real sport. None of the systems the developers showed look as though they’ll move the series forward as much as 12 did, but it’s clear that EA are determined to keep building on their impressive tech to create an even more accurate simulation of the sport. If that means the occasional missed pass and some elbowing in the box, so be it. The real test will come when we get our hands on some controllers and see how it all feels.

I’ve just finished the game, and you can read my spoiler-free thoughts on Acts Three and Four here. Act Two is here, or you can start from the beginning below.

Act One

2 hours in

I’m playing Wizard, and I’ve just finished the first big story quest, which was as far as the beta went. Before I delve into the unknown, here’s what’s struck me so far:

• Combat: still incredibly satisfying. Frost Beam! I get Frost Beam almost immediately! This was a high level skill in the beta, one I never earned, and it’s as frosty and beamy as I could have hoped. With this, I will stop the world.
• The new skill system is bizarre. Even as someone who played the beta 10 times, I find the mess of different windows, menus and categories bewildering at times. They’ve tried to make it simpler for new players by telling you which slots you should put certain skills in, but they’ve done it in a way that makes it hard to get an overview of what you have access to. You can turn off this restriction, but it still presents your skills as if they’re in these mutually exclusive categories.
• Case in point: how do I, er, attack with my weapon? I could do it at level 1, but now that both my slots have skills in them, I have no ‘attack’ ability to put anywhere. If you’re using Magic Missile, it’s not too much of a problem: that does 110% weapon damage and costs no energy. But if I’m using Charged Bolt and Frost Nova, neither of those skills can hit something far away. I have a bow in my hand and no way to fire it.
• Good news, I’ve found a way! Bad news: you have to turn of the skill category restrictions, then put a skill you already have equipped into the wrong category for it, and the old slot will default to ‘attack’. But you can’t use it yet, because skills have to cool down after you change them around. And now your other skill is in the wrong slot. Yaay!
• In practical terms, I realise I won’t often need my weapon with all these powerful, no-cost skills to choose from. But it really does underline how much less interesting loot has become in Diablo 3. For my Wizard, weapons are literally just numbers. A battleaxe that does 12 damage is identical to a bow that does 12 damage. Later, the Wizard gets a skill called Magic Weapon – maybe that’ll help.
• The first runestone you get as a Wizard is the most unexciting runestone. It adds a percentage damage to Magic Missile, the skill that’s already almost identical to firing a wand.
• The third runestone you get is phenomenally cool. It makes enemies killed with Charged Bolt explode with an electric blast, killing more enemies with charged bolt. This means chewing through a mob with it sometimes triggers this spectacular crackling chain-reaction that fries them all. I also love how slotting a runestone subtly changes the sound effect for the skill, so my charged bolt has this portentous little pre-crackle before it fires now.
• Whoa, actual difficulty! I whined a lot about how easy the beta was, even for an opening chapter. Final game has teeth. I ran into a boss mob of Wretched Mothers: a whole crowd of ultra-fast hags who vomit zombies onto the ground, spawning a horrific tide of undead it was genuinely tough to plough through. At this level none of my skills penetrate enemies, so it was like an advancing wall of dead flesh I had to smash through with my Frost Beam to get to the horrible things spawning it all.
• Charged Bolt stops working. Frost Nova stops working. The zombie I’m fighting keeps groaning and flailing his arms at me, but nothing happens. We’re both impotent. I run around and nudge some other zombies, also moaning but also unable to strike. My first disconnect!
   
  I alt+tab out to check my net connection, and it’s working fine. When I get back in, the game’s quit to the main menu with an error saying there’s been an error – it has a number but no specifics. When I try to get back in, it throws up another error that says to make sure all of my party is ready. I’m playing single player. In a few minutes I’m able to log back in and play again. I’ve lost all my progress through the current zone and the world has reset and repopulated with monsters, but my character, items and quest status are intact.
   
  There’s a lot to say about the fact that this can happen even in single player, but I’ll keep it brief: this is utter bullshit.

3 hours in

• God, it’s nice to be in an area I haven’t played through ten times already. As you stray further from Tristram, the environments get much prettier too: I’m in autumnal orange fields, mossy green temples and burning red villages now.
• The monsters are cooler here too: huge trees come to life and start punching me, huge four-legged beasts scrape the earth with their hooves before ramming me violently, and bleating mobs of goatmen make meaty Frost Beam fodder. Yes, I’m still using Frost Beam.
• For the sake of experiment, I decide to do the thing I suspect will make the game less fun: go on the auction house, find the highest damage weapon I can use at my level, and buy it. As I suspected, the best weapon anyone has found for a character of my level does nearly twice the damage of the best thing I’ve found, and it’s cheaply available. The buyout is 6,000 gold – I’ve found 8,000 just lying on the ground, I haven’t even sold anything yet. It’s an axe, and it’s called the… er… you know, I’m just going to take a screenshot of what it’s called.
   
  
   
  I don’t think that means what they think it means.
• My new, um, gash, makes a big difference in combat, but since I’ve just entered a tougher area, it doesn’t render the game trivially easy. But it does do what I feared: it renders all other items irrelevant. An hour after buying it, nothing I’ve found even comes close in damage – nor does anything the Blacksmith can craft for me. Buying from the auction house basically bypasses the game’s loot system. I don’t recommend it.
• I’m not generally playing a Diablo game for the plot, but it’s worth noting that it’s hilarious this time. Sample exposition: “Of course! Just as the dead rose around the [X], the [Y] drove the goat men to madness!” That explains it!
   
  Their endless attempts to justify why you need the umpteenth McGuffin rely on such obtuse logic that the only storytelling device they can think of is to have Deckard Cain say, “I believe ARBITRARY ITEM will MAGICALLY SOLVE our CURRENT PREDICAMENT. I will not state why! Expect the process to consist of a small swirl of yellow light and me saying ‘Of course!’ or ‘It is as I suspected!’ a lot.”
• I have found some Knuckles of the Angels. That doesn’t really give me a lot of faith in their suitability for punching people in the face.

6 hours in

• It’s getting tougher, and it makes a big difference. It adds a degree of strategy to the combat that I never really got from the beta: suddenly I care about where a health globe dropped, and I’m planning when to grab it. Not yet: I’m low on health, but my Diamond Skin ability is about to recharge, which gives me a moment of invulnerability. My health potion’s ready too, but that’s a longer cooldown and I don’t want to waste it until I have to. That kind of stuff.
• An elite mob of those ramming beasts pummels me. I’ve used Diamond Skin, the health globes are all gone, and my potions aren’t ready yet. I run. They follow. I keep running, and they keep following. Eventually I find a house in the middle of the field and hide inside. A merchant lives there, so we casually trade while I wait for everything to recharge, then I charge back out.
   
  I die. First death!
• Relatedly, I’m really enjoying my character now. I’ve ignored the game’s category rules and taken two defensive spells: Diamond Skin and Frost Nova. And I’ve got a runestone for Frost Nova that changes everything: Shatter. It means if I kill someone while they’re frozen, they have a good chance to trigger another Frost Nova, freezing everything all over again.
• My tactic is this: Frost Nova, then Electrocute three times, then Wave of Force. Three Electrocutes is as many as I can get in and still have time to cast Wave of Force before the Frost Nova wears off. And Wave of Force is the quickest way to do 200% damage to everything around me. Which in turn is the quickest way to kill something while it’s still Frost Nova’d, which is the best way to guarantee at least one thing will trigger a repeat nova.
   
  When it works, it’s incredible: huge crowds of cultists become icy statues, then pop one by one, re-freezing each other before they can thaw.
• New area: soft grass, old stone, and- ooh, is that THE rainbow? It’s the rainbow! The rainbow shown in an early video that made a bunch of hardcore Diablo fans dismiss the third game as “WoW gayness” for not being dark enough. Unfortunately, physics.

• It finally happened: I found a weapon better than the one I bought on the auction house. That’s just over an hour of playtime that the, er, Evoker’s Gash outclassed all found, buyable and craftable loot. I equipped my new icy dagger, and promptly put the Gash back on the auction house. Friends in the EU server: purchase now to avoid disappointment! Only 6,000 gold buyout! “Categorically makes the game worse!” – PC Gamer.com

• I’m still using Frost Beam.

• If this quest is to find your head, lady, I swear to god…

• Act Two! More tomorrow.

Act One mini-review

The start of act one is slow, and over-familiar to anyone who played the beta, so the oddities of Diablo 3′s skill and loot systems really stood out. But it picks up: you start to unlock enough skills to experiment with really specialised builds, the environments get more diverse and artistically cool, and every new monster type adds something interesting to the combat. By the end of it, you’re ploughing through these huge hordes of cultists and unspeakable freaks of flesh and bone, and it starts to feel properly hellish.

Diablo 3′s greatest achievement, so far, is making you feel spectacularly powerful while still giving you dangerous things to fight.

Act Two

• It’s desert! I’m so excited! Traveling from the rainy moors to the bright sands in Diablo 2 is one of my favourite gaming memories: that tingling sense of a whole new country to explore. You totally get that here.
• God, it’s gorgeous. The craggy rocks seem almost like a new art style, and cut sharp lines in the soft-focus sands. The town is on a high rock overlooking a vast city, and the view is spectacular. Another zone is all moonlit pools and weird vegetation.
• The enemies here are new, scary and tough. Lots of them have nasty ways of getting a hit in before I can react, which means my Frost Nova is no longer the reliable defense it once was. Some can create walls of rock, leading to cool situations like this:

• Levelling up is still fast, and I get an embarrassment of new slots, skills and runestones each time now. I enjoy the steady trickle of new things to try, but I have to say, not much works better than what I’ve already been using for a few hours.
• Explosive Blast, in particular, seems almost completely redundant. After a 1.5 second delay, it deals 205% damage to everything around me. Wave of Force does that instantly, and also stuns people and knocks them back. It costs slightly more mana, but since both are on cooldowns, you’ll regenerate it long before you can use it again. Maybe it gets more interesting when I unlock some runestones for it.
• In the plot, someone is confident they won’t be betrayed by the lord of lies. Pleasing me enormously, my character points it out: “He’s the lord of LIES!”
• In general, too, the story is more fun in Act Two. It’s still 90% arbitrary lore guff, but the city and desert are full of interesting characters and places that make it more interesting.
• Some of the ‘events’ you stumble on randomly in the world are fantastic fun, and I’m encountering those on a regular basis now. They’ll often be a frantic holdout against a massive tide of enemies, or a small group of insanely powerful champion monsters with weird special abilities. Some of them are nods to Diablo 1 and 2 characters. I find myself scouring whole zones, not to grind my character up, just to see what I find.
• Much of the voice acting is hammy to the point of hilarity, but I really like my character’s performance, the female Wizard. She’s not a conventional game protagonist: she’s not constantly asking everyone for help and information, and she’s not attempting some action-movie travesty of ‘laconic’. Instead, she’s an asshole.
   
  In the first town in the game, she calls the mayor an imbecile. She insults almost everyone she meets, and when the Scoundrel companion flirts with her, her putdowns are merciless. Her young, preppy voice gives all that a weirdly endearing character. So every time some new evil makes an echo-voiced threat, her response isn’t to vow to protect this world. It’s some effortlessly confident variation on: “I’m going to end you now.” Which makes it all the more gratifying when she does.

Act Two, Part Two

• This whole chunk of the game is beautiful, exotic, fresh and exciting. Every new zone has a distinct look, and all of them are gorgeous in their own way – even the wastelands are pretty, strewn with the curving bones of giant things long dried out.
• I clicked on a bloated corpse. It burst and noxious gas came out. I don’t know what I was expecting.
• The monster design is a constant joy: vultures that circle untouchably overhead until you’re busy fighting something else; snakemen that vanish as they slither towards you, so you’re never quite sure when the fight is over; and weird flying things that spawn slow-moving but unstoppable streams of flying insects towards you, forcing a change of position.
• I clicked on another bloated corpse. Eels came out.
• Every level up triggers a craze of experimentation – ooh, can I use this new skill with that old one I shelved, and make a boss killer build? Can I take all the skills that have cooldowns, and the passive one that reduces cooldowns? The answer’s always yes, but I never quite find a radically different build that works better than my nova-heavy Frost Beam one.
• You know, I think I’m going to stop clicking on bloated corpses.
• A common problem in RPGs is that a player wants the sturdiest helmet for protection, but doesn’t like to obscure the face of their character. Diablo 3′s solution is great: one of the dyes you can colour your armour with is an invisibility dye, so you can choose any pieces to visually eliminate. I’m now wearing an invisible magic fez.
• I’m playing with other journos now, Christian Donlan and Oli Welsh. It is conspicuous that all three of us have chosen to play women. Chris’s ladybarbarian is a storm of rage and fire: the earth shakes, hammers slam, everything sets alight and then it’s all gone. Oli’s demon huntress is a backflipping blur, pausing only to spit glowing streams of rapid-fire arrows that cut through mobs.

• For my part, I’ve finally settled on somewhat new build. Teleport lets me zap right into the center of a mob before I take any ranged damage. Frost Nova is still my opening move, but now I use Arcane Orb, with an Obliteration rune, to pound the frozen mob with intense splash damage. That tends to trigger a few more Frost Nova’s, and when I’m out of energy, I shoot Charged Bolts into the survivors while I recover. If I get in trouble, Diamond Skin makes me invincible and is free, and if I can wait until my energy’s recharged to use it, it reduces the cost of expensive skills like Arcane Orb while it’s active. That means one final onslaught: five or six glowing balls of death that detonate bosses and minions alike. By then, of course, Frost Nova and Teleport have recharged.
• This really, really works. It feels almost entirely skill-based: if I actually pull each stage of it off, there’s almost no limit to how much I can kill. And I find I’m almost role-playing my arrogant, power-hungry Wizard. Her defining trait is absurd overconfidence, and I catch myself intentionally wandering off from my allies to take on a megamob solo. Enemies are tougher in co-op, by a lot, so I do occasionally die trying. But when it works… I worry a bit about how much I like it.
• I usually hate boss fights, but Diablo 3′s manage to be tough without being dull: they’re not just pools of hitpoints, most of the challenge is about moving fast enough to stay alive while you deal your damage.
• No specifics, but we got wiped out during one boss fight. Before attempting it again, we each tweaked our builds, loadouts and tactics, then chewed through its first few phases in seconds. In the first try, Chris and I died first, and Oli managed to save us before we all got wiped out. This time, Chris and Oli went down almost simultaneously. Diamond Skin saved me: I was able to make myself invincible just before starting the revive process, so I brought them both back and we threw everything we had. It was spectacular.
• I’m not going to say anything about what happens at the end of Act Two, but I would like to make a special comment on the end of Act Two: holy shit, the end of Act Two!

Act Three

• Wow. I won’t spoil it, but it is DRAMATIC. Here’s an Act One shot instead.
• I’ve never really seen a top-down game do cinematic events like this – it’s as spectacular and ridiculous as a set-piece driven action game like Modern Warfare, but… it’s Diablo. It’s really rather exciting.
• Diablo 2 had the odd environment where the level area was a platform of some kind, and you could see a sheer drop or background beneath it. Diablo 3 absolutely goes to town with these. Every time you can see what’s beneath your feet, it’s something jaw-dropping, unique, and beautifully done. It gives your first run-through a fantastic sense of discovery.
• Earlier, I said the enemies were getting hellish. Seems that was just a taster. In Act 3, they start vicious and get worse fast, and some of them are outright gross. Some go beyond what you’d normally call enemies, so vast that you initially assume they’re an untouchable part of the scenery.
• All that jibes well with your character’s increasingly ridiculous power. Progression is repeating alternation between “New skill! New runes! Man, if I mix THIS with THIS, what can possibly stop me!” Followed by “Oh right, that.”
• The game gets MEAN. If you haven’t invested heavily in Vitality, a lot of boss mobs can kill you in one hit. And since the monsters are diverse, you’re often fighting things you’ve never seen before, or variations on them with abilities you’ve never faced. Most of the times I died, I didn’t know I was in danger until it was all over, or I was already hitting my potion or invulnerability power but couldn’t see why it wasn’t working. It’s not unfair, exactly, but it’s hard to avoid. I wouldn’t suggest playing a Hardcore character (who can’t respawn) until you’ve played the whole game through at least once.
• That said, the really tough bits are much better in multiplayer. The ability to revive each other gives you a bit of a safety net when something unexpected kills one of you in an instant. There’s not much of a penalty if you fail: a player can respawn at the last checkpoint and teleport to his friends almost instantly. But it’s still fun to try to survive without that crutch.
• The plot is getting a lot more entertaining. It’s still driven by random magical logic, but actual things are happening now. Almost every character gets some major development, and even if you don’t care about them (I don’t), it’s fun to see.

In the last leg of Act 3, I hit level 30. That’s not the level cap, but it’s the point at which you’ve unlocked every active skill. All that’s left to earn are passive perks and runes for your active ones.

Every class gets something special at 30, and the Wizard’s is… pretty goddamn special. You can transform into an Archon, a hovering energy being that can pound things to oblivion in melee, cut through them with a devastating beam at range, and send everything near you flying with a powerful nova.

It’s wildly overpowered – almost nothing is a threat. But the time limit makes it work. You only get fifteen seconds, but that’s extended by one second per kill. Activate it in a normal fight, and it’ll soon run out and you have to wait 2 minutes before using it again. But activate it in the middle of a massive onslaught, and you’ll be racking up dozens of kills a second. That lets you build up a huge duration, which in turn lets you make it to the next big fight before it wears off.

The mechanic gives you a genuine bloodthirst – you don’t care about loot, you don’t care about danger, you don’t care about your friends. All that matters is how soon you can get to something fresh to kill, and how many of them you can kill at once. It’s the embodiment of the Wizard’s arrogance, ambition and power. It matches both your character’s personality and your own playstyle, which is all about hungering for bigger and bigger mobs to chew through. And it’s really, really fun to use. A perfect finish to a fantastic class.

Act Four

• Again, I won’t say anything about what’s in it. Act Four is short, beautiful, and intense. But until the final boss, it’s not terribly hard. The enemies continue to get more huge and more horrible with every quest, but by this point my character is just unstoppable. Rather than a desperate last stand, it felt like a victory lap. I solved Wizarding, guys! Now I get to show off.
• I’m finally using a properly different build. I’ve kept Frost Nova and Diamond Skin, but I finally shelve Frost Beam. My main attack is now a Chaos Nexus Disintegrate: it cuts through everything with a powerful main laser, and the rune causes weaker beams to zap everything else around me as I fire. It lets me do what I naturally want to as a self-important Wizard: ignore the imp stabbing me in the thigh and focus my power on the longest line of most powerful enemies I can melt. And I’ve specced my passive skills to give me so much Arcane Power that I no longer need any Power-free skills. I leave out the whole ‘primary’ skill set, which feels like finally taking the training wheels off.
• Until the boss. The boss is hard. Maybe too hard. It’s mostly an endurance test: how many different ways does your character have to protect or heal herself? If it’s less than four, you will die. If it’s four, you will die most of the time. If it’s five, or you’re playing co-op, you’ll probably be fine.
• What was fun about it was having to re-spec. I quit in frustration after one death that felt unfair, and found myself constantly re-strategising in my break. Could I use Archon mode as a defensive measure? Do I actually need Frost Nova for this? Disintegrate’s been disintegreat, but is it actually the most power-efficient skill I have for a single target?
• I came back and completely reworked my character, gearing everything towards survivability and power-efficient single-target damage. And the centrepiece of it all, which eventually won me the fight: Frost Beam.
• Which I now notice is actually called ‘Ray of Frost’.

Final Thoughts

 
That was ridiculously good. The opening chapters of the game give you no clue about the sheer wealth of incredible things you’re going to see, hideous things you’re going to find, and dazzling things you’re going to do. It’s one long love-letter to power, a set of the most ridiculous abilities Blizzard could think of, and the biggest possible army of monsters to obliterate with them.

Loot is ruined. Permanent choices are gone. Stats are effectively reduced to damage and health. But what you get instead is something Diablo has never given you before: an experimental playground for mixing and testing a vast wealth of powers. It’s a magical murder lab, perfect for the tweaker, the hacker, and the optimiser in you. And on an immediate level, it just feels endlessly satisfying to play.

I’m starting again now, on Nightmare mode, from the beginning that I’ve played through 13 times. And I can’t stop. I’m in love with the character I built, and dizzy at the thought of trying out the other four.

That’s what I’m doing next, along with a bit more Nightmare Mode, and experimenting with the seedy world of the auction house. When I’m done, I’ll write up my final verdict in a more considered review.

One part of this write up will carry over, though: having to be online to play a single player game is utter bullshit.
 

About The Utter Bullshit

 
In three days of fairly heavy play, Blizzard’s servers booted me off twice, and I experienced unplayable levels of lag three times. It’s worth noting that I had the luxury of playing throughout the day – I may have hit more problems if I’d only played at peak times. Anecdotally, it sounds like the US servers had a lot more login problems than the EU ones I was playing on.

Even if Blizzard’s servers had performed perfectly, it’s still bullshit. I’m almost always downloading something on my connection, and doing that makes Diablo 3 unplayable. And yet it’s a fantastic single player game – in fact, it feels like it was built for single player. It’s much more story-driven than any previous Diablo game, and its systems for handling those scenes in multiplayer just suck – if one person skips some in-game dialogue, it’s skipped for everyone – no vote, no warning, and in most cases no way to get it back. (With cut-scenes and events, there’s a warning but no way to vote.)

The decision not to include an offline mode was an incredibly damaging mistake.

Thanks to everyone already sharing their experiences in the comments – keep them coming. Particularly interested in whether you’re hitting any lag or connection issues, since that may be different for each of us.

A few such items are mentioned, including a “one-of-a-kind Premium knife and black dog tag.” New soldier camo patterns, weapon camos and “personalization options.” The reveal is apparently set for June 4, on the eve of E3.

This arrives a few days after news that Call of Duty’s Elite subscription service has two million paid subscribers (thanks, Joystiq). Earlier this year, in an earnings call, EA CEO John Ricitiello held up Activision’s Elite service as an example of “best in class performance.” It would make sense for them to try and emulate Elite’s success in Battlefield 3, but there’s no info on whether or Premium will be a subscription service or not.

EA and DICE haven’t commented on the Battlefieldo blow out, so it’s all rumour for now, but earlier this year a Battlefield 3 patch gave players the option of paying £30 to unlock all of its items, so a subscription service certainly isn’t unthinkable. Would you subscribe to Battlefield Premium?

Update: The original announcement post has moved; we’ve updated the link to the current post on LoL’s official forums.

A year and a half ago, we revealed Riot’s first images of their new art style in our magazine and on the site. Since then, Riot has decided to roll out graphic updates gradually over time instead of in one sweeping revamp. Several champions have seen updates to their visuals so far and this latest update brings the big changes to the Summoner’s Rift map–by far the most popular map in the game.

All four screenshots released by Riot so far are below–what do you think?

The ground, tower and nexus all look more crisp.

Look at that fancy new flag sign!

Baron's animations will be more gross than ever.

Aww, here you go, little buddy. Take all my gold.

CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz Quad-Core Processor ($169.99 @ Microcenter)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus 76.8 CFM Sleeve Bearing ($19.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: ASRock Z77 Extreme4 ATX LGA1155 Motherboard ($147.86 @ Newegg)

Memory: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($46.99 @ NCIX US)
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5″ 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($89.99 @ Newegg)
Optical Drive: Samsung SN-208BB DVD/CD Writer ($28.98 @ Newegg)

Video Card: Asus Radeon HD 7750 1GB Video Card ($109.99 @ Amazon)
Case: BitFenix Outlaw ATX Mid Tower Case ($46.80 @ NCIX US)
Power Supply: Antec 500W ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply ($49.99 @ Amazon)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (64-bit) ($99.99 @ Newegg)

Price summary

GPU: $110 — Radeon HD 7750
CPU: $170 — Intel Core i5 2500K
Mobo: $148 – ASRock Z77 Extreme4 ATX
RAM: $47 – Corsair Vengeance 8GB
HDD: $90 – Seagate Barracuda 1TB
DVD: $29 – Samsung SN-208BB
Cooler: $20 – Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus
PSU: $50 – Antec 500W ATX12V
Case: $47 – BitFenix Outlaw ATX Mid Tower
OS: $100 – Windows 7 Home Premium

Total: $810.57

(Price includes estimated domestic shipping in North America and discounts when available.)

Upgrade options

Got some extra cash and looking to boost the system’s performance? Here are your best upgrade options. They are listed in the order that will get you the biggest improvement for your investment. (It’s no surprise that upgrading your GPU is the best move).

Video Card: MSI Radeon HD 7850 2GB Video Card ($259.99 @ NCIX US)
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 3TB 3.5″ 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($159.99 @ NCIX US)
Hard Drive #2: OCZ Agility 3 120GB 2.5″ Solid State Disk ($99.99 @ Newegg) – Pair with the above for maximum speed and storage

Power Supply: Antec 650W ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply ($101.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Case: NZXT Phantom 410 (White) ATX Mid Tower Case ($99.99 @ Amazon)

CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor ($354.48 @ eCost)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 16GB (4 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($93.99 @ NCIX US)

Price summary

GPU: $260 — Radeon HD 7850 2GB
CPU: $354 — Intel Core i7-3770K 3.5GHz
Mobo: $148 – ASRock Z77 Extreme4 ATX
RAM: $94 – Corsair Vengeance 16GB
SSD: $100 – OCZ Agility 3 120GB
HDD: $160 – Seagate Barracuda 3TB
DVD: $29 – Samsung SN-208BB
Cooler: $20 – Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus
PSU: $102 – Antec 650W ATX12V
Case: $100 – NZXT Phantom 410 ATX Mid Tower
OS: $100 – Windows 7 Home Premium

Total with all upgrades: $1467.24

Okay, I’m journalistically obligated to burst your bubbles and say that the balloon-launched capsule only made it into the stratosphere, which isn’t technically “space” proper. But if you have any doubt as to the awesomeness of this feat, check out the video below.

In addition to the camera that provided the footage above, the pod carried the names of all main EVE characters active as of December 31st, 2011. What’s more, those crazy Icelanders want to attempt this again, using a scale model Rifter (one of EVE’s lower-end frigates and a craft very near and dear to my Minmatar heart). “We just can’t think of any reason not to do it, so we have decided to go for it one more time,” boasts the project’s blog. “We made it into the stratosphere last time around but we are sure we can get it even higher!”

Conspiracy theories that Goonswarm members had plannned to throw thousands of tiny spaceship figurines into the sky to destroy the capsule if it did indeed reach space are already rampant in the PCG office.

“Offering Steam Wallet codes at GamesStop extends more options and convenience to gamers around the world” said Valve’s Director of Business Development Jason Holtman.

No word yet on whether Steam Wallet cards are coming to the UK. In either case, the move suggests that the relationship between Steam and traditional retail is warming, or at the very least that brick and mortar stores are learning that they can’t ignore the digital distribution juggernaut. It was only a few years ago that shops in the UK asked publishers to stop using Steam in their games.

Are you interested in getting your Steam funds from a traditional shop, readers?

Anyway, it’s doing very well. It’s in closed beta over here but the shooter seems to have taken Russia by storm. GamesIndustry International mention that it currently has ONE MILLION subscribers over there. 28,000 players were seen playing at the same time, which is apparently a Russian record. The early Warface trailers look pretty smart, and the addition of a good mech always go a long way. Early indications suggest this might be one to keep an eye on. You can sign up for the closed beta on the Warface site.

An RPG with guns suggests a more current setting, which would be different to anything CD Projekt have done before. Moving into production on two games at the same time is also a new move for them, but they do already have their graphics engine, which they built in-house to power The Witcher 2. What would you like to see them do next?

The first content collection for Modern Warfare 3 has just recently landed on PC, adding new multiplayer maps and a couple of spec ops missions. The second pack will do the same, but also introduce a new 1 vs 1/2 vs 2 mode called Face Off. According to the trailer above, the first two Face Off maps will be released for free to give everyone a taste of how it plays. Two more will then be added in the full content pack later. All of the dates refer to the Xbox version, however. The last DLC pack took more than a month to reach the PC. Expect similar delays again for content pack 2.

The Tomb Raider reboot will have Lara fighting for survival on a mysterious island. If anything, the delay will give the wildlife a few months of respite before she charges in and starts wanging arrows everywhere. Find out more about Lara’s new adventure in our Tomb Raider preview and get a closer look in these Tomb Raider screenshots.

Torchlight 2: it’s a bit like Diablo 3 only it’s $20, has an offline mode, and it’s out a few months later. It’s also incredibly good. I’ve been playing the beta, and I wanna show you what each of the classes feel like to play and explain a bit about why they’re cool. This is the Outlander. Here are the Embermage, the Engineer and the the Berserker.

Torchlight 2: it’s a bit like Diablo 3 only it’s $20, has an offline mode, and it’s out a few months later. It’s also incredibly good. I’ve been playing the beta, and I wanna show you what each of the classes feel like to play and explain a bit about why they’re cool. This is the Embermage. Here are the Engineer and the the Berserker.

As we play each of the classes, we’ll update their guides with new builds and improved versions of existing builds. Check back often, and let us know what builds you’re using in the comments!

5/16: Updated builds for Demon Hunter’s Explosives Expert, Monk’s Balanced Healer and Witch Doctor’s Zombie King
5/17: Updated builds for Witch Doctor’s Plaguebringer and Wizard’s Glass Cannon

Barbarian build: The Punter

See the build: Barbarian Punter

Half the fun of playing a Barbarian is watching bodies fly in every direction as you smash your way through the herd. This build maximizes the simple joy of ragdoll physics by giving you every opportunity to proc knockback effects. Your primary skill Bash has a 20% chance to send people packing while generating Fury to unleash your three major corpse-tossers: Seismic Slam, Ground Stomp and Earthquake–all runed to boost the potency of their aoe knockbacks. Furious Charge and Threatening Shout ensure you stay alive to keep kicking the undead to the curb. The passives Brawler, Juggernaut and Unforgiving stops your compulsive need to punt people from hurting your damage output.

Preferred stats: Lightning damage(procs on knockback), Knockback Chance, Strength, Weapon Damage

Barbarian build: The Immortal Tank

See the build: Barbarian Immortal Tank

Some of us don’t want to die. There’s no shame in that–you’re brave simply for stepping outside your home to battle the hoards of undead. I dare anyone to call you a sissy when you’re on the front lines, entering a Frenzy and bloodletting everything in sight with Rend (both of which heal you, don't worry!). Revenge let’s you turn incoming damage into an aoe attack with massive health regen. If things get hairy, a correctly runed Ignore Pain can turn most any bad situation around, coupled with a War Cry if your allies are in trouble as well. But a good tank always has a backup plan for his backup plan, so keep Wrath of the Berserker in your back pocket for those truly desperate situations. Protective passives like Pound of Flesh, Inspiring Presence and Superstition will help keep you hacking and slashing unfettered.

Preferred stats: Armor, Vitality, Elemental Resistance, Strength

Demon Hunter build: The Explosives Expert

See the build: Demon Hunter Explosives Expert - Updated 5/16

Bad guys go boom with this explosives-heavy build for the Demon Hunter. Cluster Grenades is your free skill, so chuck those little bouncing bombs like crazy and follow ‘em up with endless rockets from Rapid Fire and Cluster Arrow. One rune swap adds homing rockets to your Sentry turret, which’ll guard your back while raining down fire. Bola Shot and Spike Trap give you two more volatile chunks of metal to hurl around. (Bonus: the Sticky Trap rune on Spike Trap lets you slam the explosives right onto the enemy’s chest and watch his death rain pain on everyone around him.) The passives are absolutely essential to this build: Ballistics, Grenadier and Custom Engineering add a massive damage boost to all those rockets.

Preferred stats: Dexterity, Weapon Damage, Vitality, Armor

Demon Hunter build: The Untouchable

See the build: Demon Hunter Untouchable

The Demon Hunter isn’t really a touchy-feely kinda gal—in fact, she’d rather you just never get close to her at all. This build plays right into her nomad, loner image, letting you kite bad guys like a pro—if you’ve got the skill. Entangling Shot in your primary slot lets you tie up four enemies every second, Elemental Arrow with the Frost rune slows down larger packs, and Strafe lets you unleash hell while still running at full speed. Use the ridiculously low-cost Vault to keep your distance as the pack closes in on you, and if one of the devils catches you off guard, Evasive Fire lets you blast ‘em up close and backflip away (+2 for style points). If you manage to screw all of that up—or are facing Sonic the hedgehog zombies—Smoke Screen lets your reset the battle by vanishing. Cull The Weak, Tactical Advantage and Steady Aim are perfect passives, helping you stay out of harm’s reach while boosting damage on hindered foes.

Preferred stats: Movement Speed, Dexterity, Weapon Damage, CC reduction

Monk build: The Tornado of Death

See the build: Monk Tornado of Death

Turn your Monk into an unstoppable wave of pain who jumps into the middle of groups to kick-punch everything around him. Every skill in this build hits multiple targets. Soften them up with broad Crippling Wave kicks, and follow it up with a fierce Lashing Tail Kick to cut ‘em down and knockback any left standing. Mantra of Conviction rewards you for fighting in the middle of the enemy pack, and Seven-Sided Strike let’s you show them that superior numbers won’t help them. If you bit off more than you can chew, Serenity’ll absorb damage and reflect attacks back at the hellspawn. Best of all, Sweeping Wind turns your metaphorical tornado of pain into a very literal one, creating lightning tornadoes when you score critical hits—very likely with so many aoe attacks. The passives, Chant of Resonance, The Guardian’s Path and Combination Strike, give equal boosts to your defense and attack.

Preferred stats: Critical Chance, Dodge, Armor, Vitality, Dexterity

Monk build: The Balanced Healer

See the build: Monk Balanced Healer - Updated 5/16

This is as close as Diablo III gets to a full support character, but you still have to punch people to build up the Spirit needed to fuel those refreshing glowy lights. This isn’t a viable solo build, but because it’s so easy to hop into friends’ games, you could easily progress as a healer. Fists of Thunder is the perfect primary skill because it regenerates Spirit faster than the others. Inner Sanctuary and Serenity are solid preventative measures to keep your friends out of harm’s way, and Breath of Heaven and Cyclone Strike will help you refill those health bars when preventative measures aren’t enough. Mantra of Healing’s heal-over-time is brought to set-it-and-forget-it status thanks to the Chant of Resonance passive that triples its duration to 10 minutes. The best part is that every one of those support skills will hit all allies within range—so everyone’s safe. Lastly, Exalted Soul and Transcendence passives boost your Spirit efficiency to let you hang in there on those long boss fights.

Preferred stats: Attack Speed, Spirit Regeneration, Max Spirit

Witch Doctor build: The Plaguebringer

See the build: Witch Doctor Plaguebringer - Updated 5/17

The ten plagues of Egypt got nothin’ on this build. Sure, you’ve got the standard plague stuff with Plague of Toads, and flesh-eating Locust Swarms, but the real key is poison stacking with the right runes. Your frogs and locusts are both poisonous, and Acid Cloud lets you rain less animated liquid death on the enemy. Zombie Charger brings old-school leprosy back with the right rune, and Fetish Army summons the final plague of death. And while that’s enough to drive most civilizations to madness, Mass Confusion will completely shatter any particularly stalwart minds, forcing them to kill each other for you. The Bad Medicine passive is paramount, as it causes your plentiful poison damage to cripple enemy attacks, while Fetish Sycophants and Spiritual Attunement are just small perks to keep things moving quickly.

Preferred stats: Intelligence, Weapon Damage, Maximum Mana

Witch Doctor build: The Zombie King

See the build: Witch Doctor Zombie King - Updated 5/16

There’s something especially satisfying about watching minions do your dirty work while you sit back and cackle maniacally—especially when your minions are zombies. There are so many things you can do with zombies in Diablo 3: you can drop them from the sky (runed Grasp of the Dead), stack them on top of each other and push the undead tower over (Wall of Zombies), bursting from the ground (Zombie Charger runed to make them BEAR ZOMBIES), or stomping all over the place (Gargantuan). Most of them only stop by for brief encounters, but you can always count on your trusty Zombie Dogs to chomp through bad guys. A few passives play into this style perfectly: Fierce Loyalty, Jungle Fortitude and Zombie Handler increase the number of zombies you can control, add your Thorn and Health Regen stats to them and reduce the damage they take. When you run low on corpses, just toss out jars of creepy Corpse Spiders to regen mana.

Preferred stats: Intelligence, Weapon Damage, Thorns

Wizard build: The Glass Cannon

See the build: Wizard Glass Cannon - Updated 5/17

A primal urge within all of us wants to see big numbers flash on the screen when we attack, and this build lets you get the biggest digits of any class in Diablo 3. Core skills get a bonus effect on crit: your primary, Electrocute, and Storm Armor lash out lightning attacks, and Meteor‘s molten fire boils over when it crits. The Critical Mass passive reduces the cooldown on your spells by 1 second every time you crit, and Arcane Dynamo lets you boost your next attack by 75% to achieve truly absurd single-hit numbers to brag about to your buddies. The other abilities center on making sure you crit as often as possible, with Disintegrate, Frost Nova and Explosive Blast all hitting multiple targets with some absurdly high weapon percentages–each with its own chance to be crit. With all these perks tossed in, an explosion from Volatile blast is doing 800% weapon damage before crit and with no gear stats calculated in (that’s 1,200% or higher on a crit)!

Preferred stats: Critical Chance, Critical Hit Damage, Weapon Damage, Intelligence

Wizard build: The Battle Mage

See the build: Wizard Battle Mage

Not every Wizard is squishy, but the battle mage is one of the most coveted archetypes that rarely makes it way into games because, frankly, it’s usually way overpowered. The first step is to give your Wizard a melee weapon: Spectral Blade takes it one step further by making your primary attack a massive, magical sword that heals you when it crits. Next, you’ve got to bolster your defenses so you can stand on the front lines without crumbling like wet tissue paper. Diamond Skin, Ice Armor, Archon and the passive skills Galvanizing Ward and Blur turn you into a veritable tank with insane armor and a ton of sweet spells. The last thing you need to complete your battle mage toolkit is a couple devastating aoes to unleash when things get hairy. Arcane Torrent and Energy Twister can both be runed into the perfect tools, and the Unstable Anomaly passive gives you a boost right when you need it most.

Preferred stats: Armor, Intelligence, Vitality, Elemental Resistance

]]>