PCG: Those hydras and architecture seem to indicate that we may be fighting on Wonder Woman’s Themiscyra. Is that where this screen is taken? If so, is it a whole new open-world zone, or just an Alert?

Jens Andersen, Creative Director: Yes, this is on Paradise Island, otherwise known as Themyscira. The situation is so dire they’re allowing men on the island to defend it, which is unheard of for the most part. The Gates of Tartarus have long been guarded by the Amazons. Suddenly they are taken by surprise as Brainiac emerges from the gates of Tartarus, having stolen the power he sought inside, and is now assaulting Themyscira from within with a surprise attack. It’s a bad situation and the Amazons are looking for help from just about anywhere to aid the, in stopping Brainaic’s Avator of Magic from escaping the Island.

PC Gamer: Braniac is fighting us directly? I always figured he was more of a “sit back and let minions take you out” sort of bad guy. What is it that finally pushes him to face us personally?

Andersen: As a comic-book cut scene explains in-game, this was actually Brainiac’s final push, but Future Lex Luthor knew it was coming—and he hid the truth from everyone, even his past self. So, as history has unfolded, it’s only now that we realize we’ve done little to divert Brainiac’s plans. Future Luthor wanted the confrontation to play out as it did in his timeline, so HE could seize victory from Brainiac at the last moment. Thankfully, Future Batman doesn’t break his promise that he will be “coming for Luthor,” and he shows up at the end to save our bacon… or does he? It’s a big cliffhanger to enjoy as we launch a new storyline surrounding these two mysterious iconics from an alternate future.

PCG: Braniac seems to be wielding some sort of demonic staff. Are those tentacles behind him coming from the staff, or is that his other arm doing something crazy?

Andersen: That’s the Avatar of Magic. Throughout the fight, he will go through many different phases thanks to the power he obtained in Tartarus—the Flame of Change. It allows him to create Chimeric minions and alter his own form as he sees fit. Those are the Horns of the Bull he has on in the screenshot, and it lets him do some powerful charges.

Never judge an universe-destroying maniac by his pants.

PCG: It also looks like we might have just fallen in through that hole in the dome above. Will the fight feature changing terrain like that?

Andersen: The hole above is not where the players enter from, they can however look down into it from behind a portcullis at the start of the raid. The whole map makes a big loop around itself and you often get glimpses of what’s coming next along with some fantastic vistas.

PCG: Braniac’s been the ultimate bad guy of the entire game up until this point, is it time for players to take him out for good? It almost feels too soon for us to be taking him down. Is this the final act in the story arc that started at launch?

Andersen: Well, never count a comic book character out [laughter]. But yes, this is Brainaic’s final push, but it will be an ongoing one as he tries to recover from the player’s resistance and future Luthor’s manipulation of everyone, including Brainiac. The presence of the new heroes and villains, our players, is what made us able to defeat Brainaic so soon in this timeline. The story will then move into a new phase, but Brainiac’s actions will always have a lasting effect on DC Universe Online as he gave birth to the exo-bytes which created many of the new heroes and villains our players created in the game.

PCG: Will defeating him affect the bottled buildings around the game world?

Andersen: Once Brainiac’s initial plans are thwarted in the raid, he is hamstrung, but not completely defeated. He will continue to try and regain control of the situation to continue his plan to assimilate the multiverse. Now the pressure is on for him to do that before Future Luthor takes his place. He’s relentless after all. So the bottles and the actions of the Union around them will always be something players can take part in—an epic battle to save the Earth.

PCG: Will another mega-villain rise up to threaten the world, or will it go back to a semi-normal state? If so, is the idea to rotate the game world through various crises over time, such as No Man’s Land Gotham? Roughly one year for every major crisis?

Andersen: We want to provide a many-colored tapestry for our players. Focusing on one storyline isn’t needed with the pace at which we release content. So players can look forward to the next chapter in this story, resolutions to some of our launch stories, as well as totally new things in the years to come.

Riverspring is the setting for the latest Game of Thrones trailer. It’s the home town of Red Priest, Alester Sarwyck, one of the RPG’s two playable characters. The other is Mors, a member of the hardened, reclusive order of the Black Watch. The threads of their separate stories are sure to tangle in a campaign that promises “a twisting plot filled with betrayal and violence.” A typical day in Westeros, then

Cyanide have taken the dark fantasy label a little too literally in the eight new screenshots they’ve released, but if you squint, you can make out some scowling warriors and the worn stone of Riverspring’s great halls. The release date is set for “early 2012.” Wait, that’s pretty much now! The RPG could bridge the gap until April 1, when the second series starts on HBO. You’ll find the screenshots below, but you’ll probably want to click on this first to set the mood.

Once upon a time, PC gamers weren’t known for our affection for mainstream culture. It’s significant then that the Lead Producer Corey St John tells me the Sims Showtime was “totally inspired by performance reality shows” like X-Factor and Britain’s Got Talent.

In Showtime, you take an aspiring acrobat, magician, singer or DJ from small-time busking for change to their first paid gig and onto performing massive concerts in arenas (or as near as the Sims 3′s engine can produce to an arena.)

When these performing Sims take up their new career, they start out at a pretty lowly level – singers start as candygrams, complete with a bellhop outfit, whilst acrobats can start by juggling batons. Magicians, we presume begin by stealing a top hat and some rabbits.

As they level up their skills, they perform more reliably and get access to more difficult activities. Notably, compared to earlier Sims 3 careers, where your characters levelled up off-screen, these are very interactive and visual; you see the Magician putting the sword into the cabinet containing a volunteer Sim. Other sims can also take part, throwing cabbages or roses, heckling and praising.

To get the big gigs, your Sim has to somehow make contact with a venue owner and persuade them to let them have a try-out. Once this happens though, the game really ramps up. From here on in, players can start building their own custom stage sets, complete with themes, special effects, fireworks, light shows and so on.

The DJ career is notably different from the others. Aaron Conners, Lead Designer; “lots of DJs moonlight. We thought it would be really cool if you could be both a celebrity DJ and businessman or politician.” Hence DJs learn their trade by using a home DJ booth and training it as a skill, though like the other careers they can still perform at a huge venue eventually.

Possibly more important than the actual expansion is the way it expands The Sims 3 into social networking. Firstly, EA has introduced a new achievement system which provides the player with in-game rewards and badges. Then EA allows players to set their game up to tweet or put on Facebook these special moments. On top of that, there’s also an in-game social network, complete with walls and partially integrated with EA’s Origin download system, alongside a new system called SimPort. Sadly, automation is only restricted to achievements – we wish each Sim had its own wall so her or she could post banal updates about wetting themselves.

SimPort allows you to send your Sim off to another player’s world. The way the team described it, initially it’s intended to allow your Showtime Sims to go on tour in other towns. While out there, they may get rewards. Sadly, they can’t die or get pregnant on tour (too realistic), instead suffering a “near-death” experience. Or a near-pregnancy experience, I guess.

Of course, there’s all the usual stuff that expansions add as well; new outfits, new gadgets (including a pool table, jukebox, arcade machines and a mechanical bull), new venues, new lot types and a whole new town, Starlight Shores, that’s a cross between Los Angeles and San Francisco, complete with Simlish Hollywood sign.

Showtime has the same hook as trashy war films or gung-ho sci-fi, with you as the hero, the focus of attention, with thousands screaming your name. It may seem more grounded in our everyday world than those, but it’s a fantasy for many more people and equally unattainable.

You’ll find plenty more in our big preview in the latest issue of PC Gamer UK. Meanwhile, see samurai being blown apart and roasted in the new grabs below, which also feature some of Fall of the Samurai’s new Agents.

Before today I have never been able to imagine what it would be like for a man to uppercut a helicopter. Prototype 2 has shown me the light. The correct technique, according to new protagonist James Heller, is to jump onto the copter’s face, pull the nose down until the rotor blades are inches from the floor, wind up, and sock it on the chin. That will cause it to backflip twice and then explode in mid-air. Prototype 2 is going to be even more crazy and violent than the original.

Like Prototype, the sequel will let you climb, dash and glide around New York city. You’ll consume operatives of the evil Blackwatch corporation to steal their memories and identities. Your mission is to track down Alex Mercer, the shapeshifting anithero of the first game using the powers that turned him into a mutant killing machine.

Heller can shapeshift, too, but he’s a lot more flexible than his mortal enemy. Instead of being confined to a single mutation at a time, he can equip two and chain their effects into devastating combos. He can use enormous claws to mince through a squadron of Blackwatch soldiers, and then turn his arms into enormous hammers to finish with a horrible, crushing ground smash. Prototype 2 will be even bloodier than the original as well. Heller glides through his enemies. Limbs fly, bodies are cleaved in two and clouds of blood coat everything in the surrounding area. When he’s done, those left barely alive will try to crawl away from the scene on their stomachs, leaving trails of gore behind them.

Heller is familiar with concepts that were entirely alien to Mercer, like mercy. In the first game, once you’d picked up a victim you had two choices, eviscerate him and consume his remains or throw him into the horizon. In Prototype 2 you can put people down without harming them. Whether he’s manhandling men or war machines, Heller has more options.

He actually understands stealth, for a start. Playing Alex Mercer in Prototype, infiltrating an enemy base would let you start a big fight from a better position. Heller will be able to do more with his disguises. His ‘awareness pulse’ vision mode will highlight in white enemies that can be killed without raising an alarm. This lets him stalk a target through a compound. When the time is right, he can quickly absorb his victim and calmly leave without upper-cutting anything.

If the quiet approach goes wrong, Prototype 2′s new hero has even more creative ways to break things. He can kick a helicopter in half. He can beat a tank to death with its own turret. He can tear the rocket launcher off the wing of a chopper and then use it to obliterate everything.

He also has more ways to counter his enemies. The infuriating rockets that would interrupt your flight in the first game can be returned to their owners using Heller’s new shield mutation. By pressing the counter button at just the right moment, he can super punch rockets and reverse their flight path.

“Is there any way that this man can be killed?” I thought as I watched him throw a soldier into a chopper’s blades. In the portion I saw, Heller was nigh on invincible, but there will be much more menacing foes to fight in New York’s nastier zones. Radical say that there will be huge bosses, and the new infected creatures will be much tougher to kill than weak, squishy humans. It wouldn’t surprise me if Blackwatch had some much bigger weaponry hidden in the green zone, but Radical are keeping that under wraps for now.

Seeing Heller lay waste to several blocks was reassuring. Prototype was a great power trip. The feeling of being able to cruise anywhere and crush anything was addictive, even though it meant playing an inhuman monster. Prototype 2 looks like it will give us more blood, more explosions, more power. If it can give us something to fight for, and let us play as a character that isn’t an amoral monster, then it could easily surpass the original.

It’s a hybrid system that lets players specialize, while limiting the usual problem of there being too few healers or tanks because most people want to be able to level and solo efficiently. As a result, the queue times in DCUO are much shorter than they are in many other MMOs. And with the Role-Optional Alerts SOE’s adding in the game’s next update, which use specialized buffs to make any combination of players an effective group, players should be able to form groups almost instantly.

Beating up baddies > waiting in queues.

When the tool puts together a group of players, it analyzes what key role(s) your group is missing, and grants the entire team a buff that helps shore up their weakness. Your group will still have to be organized however, as the buffs will only be effective when all four players are fighting together.

• If you don’t have a tank, everyone in the group receives a buff that reduces the damage they take. Not enough to make everyone tanks, but enough to make the incoming damage manageable for your healer.
• Oh no! You’re missing a healer too? Well, everyone in your group will receives a buff that triggers a “small amount” of regeneration whenever their health dips below a certain point. Tanks without a healer in the group will always be regenerating.
• And finally, if you’re missing a controller, your group will receive a buff that gives everyone “varying amounts” of power during combat

The game’s Duos—which plant two characters in a more challenging version of a solo instance—already function off of a similar desire to get people playing together, regardless of their character type, and have been a huge success by all accounts.

In the same update, SOE is also adding Novice Raids, alternate versions of all existing raids with lower gear and difficulty requirements. Their goal is to allow everyone to experience the story arcs told inside the Batcave, Kahndaq, and the Fortress of Solitude, and to let players start raiding much quicker after hitting the level cap, if they want to. Novice Raids will award the same quality of gear that existing raids do, but reward less of it per run.

March 23 is the release date for Total War: Shogun 2 – Fall of the Samurai, the enticing standalone expansion to Shogun 2.

Fall of the Samurai introduces six new factions to do battle for an expanded campaign map portraying ancient Japan on the verge of an age of transition. Western weaponry is being imported in greater numbers, and factions within Japan are seeking to use them to overthrow the ancient Shogunate using the muskets and massive cannons provided by imperial forces.

The expansion will add new tech trees, ground units, naval units and agents as well. You can find out more in our great big preview in the latest issue of PC Gamer UK, which you can order now online, or get digitally through Zinio or Apple Newsstand.

They also manage to raid the mulchy green invader remains, finding alien tech to send back to base. in XCOM, your scientists can dismantle alien tech to learn how it’s made, and incorporate that tech into new toys for your ground-assault teams. Here are nine screenshots from the fight.

The expansion will also add jumbo sized battlecraft called Titans. These monsters will be even bigger than capital ships and will be able to take on enemy fleets single-handedly. They’ll get to dissolve incoming pirate raids with new giant laser beams, prettified by a new lighting engine. See Titans and their pet lasers in action in these new screenshots.

Valve’s main goal with Dota 2, says producer Erik Johnson, was “to build a sequel to a game that 20-odd million people around the world are playing”.

That’s Defence of the Ancients, a free player-made map for Warcraft III. It set out the template for a strange genre of game that’s since inspired a series of massive commercial releases. League of Legends alone has over 11 million active players, more than World of Warcraft.

Dota 2 sticks to the template closely: two teams of up to five players each pick a hero, and control it from a top-down perspective. But there’s already a war going on, between computer-controlled soldiers called creeps. Players are far more powerful, so creeps mainly provide easy kills to boost their experience and gold.

Each hero picks and improves skills as they level up during the game, and spends money earned from their kills on magical equipment and potions. In other words, there’s a very short-term RPG unfolding on top of this RTS battle. And that progression is vital, because both team’s bases are protected by devastating static defence.

Valve’s art style is based around making hectic fights readable.

Early on, assault is impossible. As heroes level up over the course of a game – which is typically 30-45 minutes – they can start to make a dent in enemy defences by grouping up and taking down gun towers.

It’s slow for an action game, fast for an RPG, and more focused than an RTS. Valve call it an action RTS. “It pushes how well you can think about the state of a very complex system moment to moment,” says Erik. “How well you can make good decisions moment to moment.”

Playing it, it’s funny how similar the feel of Dota 2 is to Warcraft III. Valve are sticking closely to Defence of the Ancients, and DotA wasn’t even a mod: it just gave new names and values to the combat mechanics of Blizzard’s game. So while Dota 2 is gorgeously presented and visually crisp, normal attacks still involve two creatures standing next to each other playing swiping animations while health bars go down. It might be an action RTS, but it doesn’t feel like an action game in the way the fluid carnage of Diablo III does.

It’s a long, hard game of attrition and tactics. There’s always an enemy force ahead that you can’t handle, and it’s about biding your time, improving your character and defending your territory while you look for an opportunity to push. Killing an enemy hero is a huge win, so players often dance around each other amid the fray: eager to dish damage but skittish about getting trapped. Denying the enemy experience and gold is so important that some players kill their own creeps and defences before the enemy can, robbing them of the payoff.

Dota 2’s heroes are beautifully modelled, particularly the Tide Hunter (bottom).

What makes that complicated dance particularly interesting is the diversity of the heroes themselves. There are already more than sixty to choose from, and there’ll be many more before launch. Each has a small set of skills that define your role on the team. The arachnid Broodmother, for example, can spin huge webs on the battlefield that render her invisible and heal her. She can push steadily into enemy territory, making it harder for the enemy to hold and safer for her and the spiderlings she can hatch. The zombie Lifestealer, meanwhile, is a scrappy tank-killer: almost all of his skills involve chomping at enemies to restore his health while he drains theirs. His ultimate ability lets him burrow his whole body into any non-hero unit and eat them from the inside out – gaining all of their health and ambushing unsuspecting enemies.

The huge variety of playstyles and the complex systems they fit into earned DotA some fans at Valve. “A group of people in the office were playing DotA a lot,” says Erik, “and initially became a fan just of the game. And then we went through some update cycles as customers of IceFrog, and we became pretty big fans of his.”

IceFrog didn’t invent the genre, or even DotA. He took over maintaining the game from Steve Feak, who left to make League of Legends. But it was the happy feedback loop that he’d created with the DotA community that impressed Valve.

“In a lot of ways [it] kind of mimics the way we think about building audiences over time,” says Erik, “where you’re continuously delivering value to your customers, continuously changing the game, making it more interesting and adding content. So part of it is this lifeline to the developer that we’ve done over the years, with Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike.”

Heroes need to group up to push into enemy territory.

So they hired IceFrog to develop a sequel with a team at Valve. It’s a game completely unlike any other they’ve made: it’s their first fantasy game, their first strategy game, and their first RPG. But they’re not interested in diluting any of those things to make it appeal to a new audience – for now, at least, Valve are primarily interested in making something for the DotA community.

That doesn’t mean it’ll be the same game, of course. “Part of our job is figuring out how to recognise when consensus is reached within the community, and also recognise when it’s time for us to take risks,” says Erik. “It could be that it’s going to take some amount of time for the community to be comfortable with a particular change.”

Some of those changes won’t be to the game itself, Erik says. “There are a bunch of things outside the product that are very challenging for a DotA 1 player right now. Like how to get in and play a match with a bunch of your friends against similarly skilled opponents. That’s one of the problems that we’re going to solve.”

Dota 2 is intensely teamwork-heavy: if one player on your five-man team is well below your skill level, their deaths will give the other team a steady stream of experience and gold that can turn into a huge lead. So most DotA-type games have a reputation for being unwelcoming to new players. Jump into a random game, and your learning experience might be ruining a whole 40-minute game for up to nine other people.

SEGA explain the delay over on Edge, saying that the process of making a game about shooting aliens in the face is “a process of creativity and invention” that doesn’t “necessarily follow the structure of an assembly line.”

“We don’t want to sacrifice the creative process just for the sake of following a blue print.” they add. “We prefer to have the creative discovery shape that blue print because our goal is to make a great game, and we are prioritizing this goal over the previously targeted date.”

Colonial Marines was originally slated for 2008, but then Gearbox got sidetracked by other projects, including Duke Nukem Forever. We’ve waited this long, so a few more months is probably no big deal. If Colonial Marines can capture the comeraderie and hyper-macho posing with Smart Guns that made Aliens famous, it should be worth the wait.

All the soldiers in Crytek’s free to play multiplayer shooter, Warface, make this face at all times, even in victory. Sadly they’re all facing away from the camera in the three new screenshots over on RPS, doing soldiery things like shooting mechs from the cover of a shattered tree stump. One chap is firing and sliding simultaneously, one of Crysis 2′s most common manoeuvres.

Warface will have class-based competitive multiplayer, co-op missions and a “constantly updated extensive PVE universe.” It’s built with CryEngine 3 as well, so it’ll be Maximum Pretty. See for yourself in these carefully posed shots.

Before we get into the specific details of the expansion, let’s focus on how players will get there.

The first update related to the Fall expansion is tentatively scheduled for this spring, and will return players to the footsteps of the fellowship by sending them to the Great River region. This area—south of Lothlorien and north of Fangorn—is the region that the fellowship traveled through before they were separated. The biggest new feature in this update will be the ability to summon Skirmish Soldiers (currently trapped inside the skirmish instances you run) in the general landscape. That’s right, your trusty companion in those countless skirmishes will no longer be relegated to helping you wipe the floor with Sauron’s minnions where only a few can bear witness, but will be free to help defend you as you travel all of Middle-Earth. While the exact mechanics aren’t finalized yet, Paiz said that players shouldn’t expect any major overhauls to combat mechanics of the soldier system.

I asked Paiz if my soldier would ever be able to join me in an instance if we’re running one man short, and she stated that it’s being looked at, but that she can’t say anything definite at this point.

It's okay, horsey. There are updates for you in this expansion too. Let the skirmish soldiers have their couple paragraphs.

As Turbine moves players through this Lone-lands-sized region, getting ever closer to Rohan, they’ll still release the usual near-monthly patches with quality-of-life fixes, bug fixes, and possibly a new festival as well. Paiz was light on details about the festival, but I’m excited to see what the next one will bring.

At some point in the Fall, the wait will be over, and Riders of Rohan will arrive like a thundering herd. The expansion will include the largest region LOTRO’s ever seen. Rohan is a vast kingdom, allowing players to level to the new cap of 85 while exploring its expansive terrain. And this massive zone will only cover the East plains of Rohan, so you’ll have to wait for the next expansion to visit the legendary Helm’s Deep–which is located near the Western border of the region.

Be careful where you talk. Horses are notoriously bad at keeping secrets.

While a new, huge region is cool and all, what really made me excited about the expansion was that it will introduce of mounted combat to the game. The generically named War Steed will become player’s newest ally in the fight again Sauron. These trusty companions will level with the players, and have upgradable armor to tweak their appearances and performance. This sounds like a great idea in theory, but I’m slightly worried that this might follow the path of Legendary Weapons, and become more headache and hassle for players to deal with than its worth.

Fighting on horseback will open up a whole new type of combat and leveling experience, Paiz explained to me. There will still be some traditional questing areas in the new zone, such as Amon Hen (where Boromir died and the fellowship split), but Paiz told me that the plains of Rohan will feature roving band of enemies that players will engage more fluidly. When you first spot the clouds of dust in the distance, you’ll have to decide if you want to flee the incoming riders and run away, or charge into the battle on your War Steed, clashing with the enemy. This sounds like it could be an interesting twist on the traditional MMO quest grind setup, and I’m anxious to see how it’s implemented.

Shall we dismount for combat? Neigh!

I pressed Paiz hard to answer my two most-burning questions, but when I heard her saddening answers, I kind of wish I hadn’t asked.

Do we have any chance of seeing the Battle of Helms Deep in this expansion? Negative.

Will Ent Session Play ever be a reality? Laughter that wasn’t very reassuring.

Swallowing my crushing disapointment, I tried to bolster my excitement for mounted combat with the stirring quote from J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic:
“Arise! Arise, Riders of Theoden! Spears shall be shaken, shields shall be splintered! A sword day… a red day… ere the sun rises!”

I ran out of my spawn area on League of Legends’ Dominion map and made a move for the nearest capture-point, which an enemy Sona was stealing from us. I was confident I could take the flimsy healer and reclaim our home point, but before I can get in range, a burst of flames erupts around me and burning-man Brand bursts from the bushes. He’s now pacing side-to-side between me and Sona, tossing out flames if I get close, but stubbornly refusing to let me drag him off point, where I could safely kill him.

Now, Brand running interference on a point in Dominion isn’t that unusual—but this Brand is a bot, and he’s ruining my day, courtesy of the improved AI and bot rosters being added to League of Legends in the next few weeks.

I’ll get into the details in just a second, but first, a word of warning: Brand Bot is the new Annie Bot. That guy was everywhere during my four matches against the improved AI last week at Riot’s headquarters, and he burninates all the peoples without hesitation.

Brand, being a jerk. Just like usual.

On top of being added to Dominion, the other most exciting change for LoLers who play co-op regularly (and Riot says that most users play at least one co-op-vs-AI game a week), is the influx of 26 new champions added to the AI’s roster. Existing bots have all been retained, with revamped AI to make them play smarter. But these new-and-improved bots aren’t meant to be drastically more challenging: Producer on the project, Mark Norris, told me that the developers’ goal was to keep the difficulty level of the two AI settings, Beginner and Intermediate, about the same in combat.

Instead, the improvements to the existing AI focus on improving their behavior near towers to nullify players’ cheesy tactics and on making better big-picture strategic decisions. For example, when bots ace the player team, they’ll know to press their advantage and push a lane while the players wait to revive. And when I over-extended myself on top-lane, the bots triangulated on me from the jungle on every side, alternating their CC on me to keep me stunned from full health to death. Current bots tend to all spam their CC at once, resulting in wasted attacks.

The devs told me that Cassiopeia is one of the most brutal bots on Dominion.

The biggest change to bot AI is their ability to use skill-shots: spells that require precision targeting that often relies on predicting a players’ movement. None of the old bots had the ability to use skill shots effectively, which is why Riot chose champions without them the first time around. But no longer! Karthus, Cassiopeia, and Morgana and the rest of the skill-shot crew are all welcome on the bot roster now—and they’re really strong at predictive aiming, if my time spent getting blasted by Brand and Graves is any indication. On top of that, they’ll even dodge incoming skill shots you send their way, much like a Noxian Agent Smith.

They’re also better at using items, and can now use items with active abilities like Zhonya’s Hourglass, which can make them invulnerable for a couple seconds. Norris told me that Fiddlesticks in particular loves to use it to run right up to you and melt your face with impunity.

To balance out this newfound power and keep the bots from being too strong at current skill levels, the devs have baked in a chance for the AI to “make a mistake” and target the wrong area or juke the wrong way with skill shots. This’ll happen much more often with Beginner bots, which are tailored for brand-new players to go up against.

In addition, bots are still unable to jungle or counter-jungle effectively, and while they’ll check brush to see if you’re hiding there, they do so by running face-first into it. During my games, I was still able to pretty easily ditch bots by ducking into brush. Sr. Game Engineer Thomas James confirmed that they’re definitely smarter about knowing that you still exist when you go into brush, but admitted that “they have a very short attention span” when it comes to remembering you’re in there. All things considered, my team of 5 experienced LoLers had no real problems beating the AI two times each on both Dominion and Summoners Rift.

I have yet to take a screenshot of Renekton that doesn't make him look ridiculous.

That said, the developers’ work on improving the bots has only just begun, and we can expect to see more frequent updates going forward. Norris explained to me that the programming structure they’ve built the new AI onto allows them to share AI logic across all the champions where it makes sense, which makes it significantly easier for them to make fixes to things like tower-awareness or even to add new champions. I don’t think we should expect a new bot being added every week, but it certainly sounds like the developers are eager to release updates and new bots more frequently.

On top of that, the developers are certainly capable of creating some more difficult challenges for us—even if they aren’t including them in this update. Norris told me of one instance where a Tristana bot double-Rocket Jumped (the ability resets when she gets a kill, and it reset while she was in mid-air and she used it again) her way to quad-killing four-fifths of the entire dev team. The devs playing argued over whether that was even possible in the existing rules, but upon further FRAPS review, it definitely was. Fortunately for our win:loss ratio against bots, the developers decided that they didn’t want the bots performing at quite that level and restricted Tristana Bot from performing any such feats of godliness when this update hits.

Comp stomps for quick daily IP rewards just got quicker!

Norris wasn’t able to to give a firm release date on the AI update yet, but told me that players can expect it to come in a patch in the very near future. A full list of the bots that will be available is included below.

All 14 existing bots that have improved AI:
Annie, Ashe, Cho’Gath , Miss Fortune , Nunu , Renekton , Ryze , Shen , Soraka , Taric , Trundle , Warwick , Malphite , and Sivir.

The 26 bots being added:
Amumu, Brand, Caitlyn, Cassiopeia , Fiddlesticks, Galio, Garen, Graves, Irelia, Jax, Karthus, Kayle, Kog’Maw, Leona, Lux, Malzahar, Morgana, Rammus, Shyvana, Sona, Swain, Tristana, Udyr, Wukong, Xin Zhao, and Zilean.

Most of the shots are the dark brooding sort that you’d expect from a series with Resi’s survival horror roots, but it’ll almost certainly contain lots of action, a la Resident Evil 5, so let’s kick things off with an explosion. BOOM!

If Wargaming.net can make World of Warplanes as addictive and accessible as World of Tanks, we may slightly doomed. The new trailer above gives us an idea of the number of customisation options that each plane will have, even if there’s no actual in-game footage just yet.

A batch of new screenshots have been released, though, showing a selection of planes in action. They’ll come in three classes, single engine light jets, heavy fighters and strafing aircraft designed to dominate ground forces. Check them out below. You can find out more on the World of Warplanes site.

The other map will be called Liberation, and is set in a militarised Central Park, full of long sight lines perfect for snipers. If there’s one thing everybody loves most about Call of Duty, it’s snipers. “Always be aware of nearby sightlines to avoid becoming fodder for the enemy,” reads the fact sheet. Alternatively, just go sniper and own the map yourself. Screenshots ho!

Maybe Take-Two are taking the time to polish Max Payne 3′s multiplayer mode, new territory for a series that’s so far been entirely obsessed with the life and times of its gurning protagonist. The third Max Payne looks like it’ll try to merge the shadowy film noir stylings of the first two games with the sun-baked slums of Brazil, and will be bringing some of Rockstar’s impressive animation technology to Max’s graceful dives. See some of that animation in action in this Max Payne 3 trailer. Check out our Max Payne 3 preview for more information on Max’s latest adventure.

The new Jagged Alliance game, Back in Action is due to arrive on February 10 in Europe, and February 14 in the US. A new Jagged Alliance: Back in Action trailer has appeared as well.The new Jagged Alliance will show all of your orders unfolding at once, a la Frozen Synapse, a slightly snappier version of the traditional turn-based model which would have your soldiers taking their turns individually while the rest of the battlefield remains locked in stasis.

The idea of taking orderly turns in the midst of a frenzied battle has always been a slightly strange concept, but it can be deeply satisfying to overrun an enemy base with a series of meticulously planned attach routes and perfectly executed military manoeuvres. Jagged Alliance: Back in Action adopts an odd, semi-real time approach to combat. You can issue orders at any time during a real-time encounter whenever the action is paused. Find out more in our Jagged Alliance: Back in Action preview. Hopefully it’ll can tickle the lizard-like strategy gaming bits of our brains when it’s released next month.

You might think twice about ogling that hot new Smuggler alt running around in the skimpy Leia slave girl outfit when you know that she’s the daughter of a terrible Sith Lord with a bad temper.

Amatangelo describes the system this way: “It essentially allows you to, instead of just having a bunch of alts that have no relation to each other, you can actually create a family tree where your alts can be related to your main character, either as, you know, a sibling, a son, a father, a family friend, or a husband and wife. You can actually choose the relationship your characters will have with each other.”

He went on to tease that the system will also give you perks for customizing new characters and making the leveling up process easier, without giving any specifics. We still have been unable to confirm if the Legacy system will prevent you from accidentally kissing your own sister.

It’s easy to forget that the world of Star Wars is filled with dirty, scary places–it’s not all Gungan cities and Ewok campfires. BioWare’s tapping into this darker side of Star Wars in the first Flashpoint added to The Old Republic after its launch, in the big Rise of the Rakghouls update coming on January 17th. It looks spooky, frantic, and – most importantly – will feature a full story with group choices and consequences, much like the game’s first two Flashpoints: Black Talon and Esseles.

A mad scientist has been working on developing a new strand of the rakghoul virus–which players will remember has already turned everyone on Taris into crazed, bloodthirsty beasts. And like all mad scientists, he’s been quite liberal in his test-subject policy and his strand has caused another planet to be overrun with the virus. In this new level-50 Flashpoint, your four-person group must descend to the run-down wasteland of the ruined city planet and take out the scientist and all the people-turned-rakghouls that get in your way.

Being turned into a mindless killing machine does not excuse poor parking skils.

When the city world plummeted, so did the infrastructure–meaning there’s no electricity and most of the world is dark. Players will have to find flashlight probes, one at a time, that cast a cone of light in front of them to help them make their way through the ruined corridors. It’s not all spooks and ghouls, though–you’ll have the opportunity to lay the smack down on plenty of baddies. Lead Flashpoint, Operation and PvP Designer Gabe Amatangelo walked us through some of the Flashpoint’s boss fights, including the first one, which has players backed up against a wall as waves of Rakghoul swarm in on them. One player can jump on a turret to mow down the attackers, while others set explosives and shoot whatever they brought with ‘em to keep the hordes at bay.

You can turn off the flashlight probes if you're feeling brave, but I'll keep my nightlight, thank you.

The Flashpoint has the usual 3 regular bosses, with another bonus boss that can be unlocked by completing side objectives. At the end of the Flashpoint, players will uncover who was behind the research, which Amatangelo tells us will open up the story arc for a follow-up Flashpoint, which will come in a later expansion. While Kaon Under Siege doesn’t extend players’ class quests, each class will have unique dialog options to chime in with during the course of the Flashpoint.

Amatangelo estimates that anyone level 47 or higher should be able to easily get through the Flashpoint on normal difficulty. After your team takes it down in normal mode, you can jump straight into Hard Mode, which is designed for coordinated groups of level 50 characters with full sets of blue-quality gear and a few epic items.

In addition to the new Flashpoint, the patch will also smooth out the difficulty bumps and bugs in all Flashpoints currently in the game.

The Guardian mention that the show’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are writing the game, and have forwarded oodles of artwork and style guides from the TV series onto Obsidian. That explains why the screens are so authentic. Combat will be turn based, with your party lining up on the left and an array of enemies on the right. Soda pop and coffee can be used to buff your team, who will be made up of the shows most famous stars.

It’s due out sometime this year. The screens below show plenty of combat, and an instance in which Butters attacks a hippy with a massive hammer.

Although the 380 wasn’t available, I did get my grubby little mitts on the 780. It’s covered in a tastefully black paint scheme with minor burgundy highlights, and it’s got a six and a half foot cable for power and audio. While you can plug the USB cord in and get your ears filled with machinegun fire and Metalocalypse music immediately, you’ll have to install the drivers (using the included CD or through Plantronic’s website) to get the authentic 7.1, THX-rated Dolby surround sound.

The 380s lack 7.1, but come in at 30 bucks cheaper.

Delivering the 7.1 virtual audio are a pair of 40mm speaker drivers, each with a frequency response of 20Hz to 20kHz. Since the headset doesn’t use a complex, multi-driver setup, the entire unit is light and comfy on top of your noggin, due to the lack of weight extra speakers would normally carry. Volume is controlled through a plastic rocker dial on the bottom of the left earcup (just below where the microphone squelch rests). The mic itself is of the bendy, rubberized variety, and pokes out to about the length of two index fingers. The earpads are covered in a soft, cloth cushioning, as is the headband padding.

For the accident-prone, Plantronics also includes a one-year limited warranty. As to what’s specifically covered under that warranty, well—pretty much everything. “If your headset ever breaks in a way you think it shouldn’t have,” says Product Manager Lars Ahntholz, “just give our tech department a call and we’ll see what we can do.” Ahntholz maintains that if Plantronics boasts that their headsets have “Superhero-strength cords and joints,” the user deserves confidence that if they accidentally run over the USB connector with a chair and break it, they’ll be covered.

Behold the GameCom 780. Mmmm...metal hinges.

The international release is still to be determined for both headsets, however. Ahntholz did hint that the rest of the world should see them both about a month after initial launch in the states. Keep your eyes lasered to PC Gamer for an upcoming review!

Scraps take place in small arenas, presumably lifted from the singleplayer game. They have the clean lines and futurecrates of the previous games’ environs, but if the blue-tinged city wing I fought in was anything to go by, lack the main game’s interesting RPG clutter. My battleground was built entirely for combat, and decked out with a convenient abundance of three foot walls.

Goodness gracious great balls of plasma.

I found sticking to these made my life a lot easier. Mass Effect isn’t built for quick reactions: not-Shepard’s turning circle is as ponderous as Shepard’s, and the guns you’ll be using are more gentle hose than precision tool. The exception is the heavy sniper rifle still as boomingly lethal as ever. For the first five waves of the eleven wave cycle, I hid behind an idle spaceship and squeezed off echoing headshots at targets chasing my allies. Only after wave six was I flushed from my hidey-hole, as my foes got bigger and gooier.

Then I was forced to fall back on my secondary powers. I played one session as a bog-standard soldier, his two abilities a concussive shot that knocked enemies backwards, and a shield boost to help out under fire. The other classes had less in the way of weaponry, but infinitely more enjoyable powers.

Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer isn’t as satisfying as its violent peers. More interesting is the ‘galaxy at war’ system. Embark on a multiplayer session and you’ll level up your character. You can then choose to send him off to join the fight against the Reapers on the main game’s galaxy map. Players who had otherwise completed 95% of the actions necessary for a ‘perfect’ ending may well find them bumping that 95 up to a nice round 100. But of course Bioware were keen to stress they weren’t forcing people to play with their friends – the new multiplayer is a secondary skirmish, not the frontlines of the war.

I took to the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) – the clumsy name for games of League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth’s ilk – grouped together with PC Gamer US’s Josh Augustine and Lucas Sullivan. Josh chose to play tank, absorbing blows as Warcraft 3’s beardy Muradin Bronzebeard.

Lucas played as Uther Lightbringer, his skills honed for healing his allies and managing and murdering the steady streams of AI munchkins streaming stupidly across the map. Uther’s classified as a ‘support’ hero – the other three designations being the attackfocused ‘DPS’, the aforementioned tank, and a novel addition to the DOTA edifice called ‘siege’.

Towers are much less scary.

Siege characters – including, fittingly, a Terran Siege Tank from StarCraft II – are best used as tower-killers. The static defences are different prospects in Blizzard’s take on DOTA to their MOBA peers, as Blizzard’s Johnny Ebbett explains. “We’ve made towers much softer targets. We gave them ammunition that slowly regenerates over time. You can take a tower down within a couple of minutes.”

The genre’s traditionally been home to gaming’s least patient community: Blizzard DOTA hopes to change that. “We feel there are certain mechanics that are really inflaming people.” Chief among these is the reliance on ‘last hits’ for players to earn the best rewards. “It creates all this degenerate play where everyone’s holding back their best abilities because they want the kill.” Blizzard DOTA does away with individual statistics, giving players points instead for whaling away on an enemy with a friend as ‘takedowns’.

The goblin shop is adorable.

But this egalitarian approach only stretches so far. Back on the BlizzCon show floor, I’m using my transatlantic friends to cover my retreat. I’m playing as StarCraft II’s Nova. I’ve built on her potent attack power, buying damage upgrades from the in-game shop, and I stand at the edge of the battle sniping. The kill notifiers pop up: “Nova has killed Thrall, Nova has killed Arthas.” We encroach on their base together, PC Gamers US and UK leading the charge, and our enemies mount a lastditch defence. I activate Nova’s fourth and best power, calling in an orbital strike and razing a circular area. Four heroes collapse under the onslaught, and we’ve won the day. For the first time in a DOTA game, I love my team – and I’ve only just met them.

The closest comparison I can think to how the whole thing might work is John Woo’s Stranglehold, and that was completely bonkers. You could swing from chandeliers and run up and down dinosaur spines in slow motion shooting each other. Max Payne 3 is likely to take a much more serious tone judging from the screenshots below.

Good. Now get a friend to stand behind you facing in the opposite direction. Then get a third friend to stand slightly behind both of you off to the other side.

Finally, adopt your most dramatic aiming pose and pretend you’re on an alien planet.

Congratulations, you are a Mass Effect 3 screenshot!

What next? What hideous mindrending monstrosity, dredged up from the abyss of the human psyche, could follow a villain as truly malevolent as Deathwing? Now we know. Pandas.

WoW’s next expansion centres around these small and furry creatures. Animals so evolutionarily backwards that they use their ursine teeth to rend and tear only bamboo. So dopey that they have to be shown panda porn to be coaxed into having sex to ensure the survival of their race.

A creature so fragile that a group of them, after an earthquake in their central China habitat, had to literally be cuddled back to psychiatric health. Yet, this is genius. Deathwing rent World of Warcraft in two, demolishing subscriber numbers along the way; Mists of Pandaria could save it.

'Quick! To the booze!' Pandas love the pub.

This year saw two defining events in World of Warcraft’s history. For the first time in the game’s seven-year lifespan, Blizzard saw a decline in WoW subscriptions. But as interest finally started to wane in the west, the game expanded into the vast Chinese market.

Try to ignore the mental image of frolicking pandas for a second – it’s time for some cynicism. The new expansion is heavily influenced by Chinese culture. Pandaria itself is a green land, spotted with pagoda temples and rice paddies, and the new playable race who dominate the world are walking, talking versions of the country’s cutest export. Was the choice to add the new continent of Pandaria and its fluffy inhabitants a deliberate paean to the MMO’s new frontier? A love letter to China?

“We had a poll not too long ago. We asked: ‘What is the number one feature you’d like to see in World of Warcraft?’ The top response was ‘Pandarens’. The poll wasn’t even ‘what race’, it was ‘what anything do you want to see?’” Greg Street is Mists of Pandaria’s lead systems designer, and he sees the confluence of the new expansion’s setting and WoW’s new colonisation as a happy accident. He argues that, with Pandarens established in the game’s fiction already, it made sense to dress their homeland up like their natural habitat.

The result is Pandaria. Obscured by mists from the the rest of Azeroth for generations, the Pandarens have been left to grow fat and fluffy as the Horde and Alliance endlessly smacked each other around. They discovered the continent as a matter of chance, after being shipwrecked on the mysterious coastline after a naval battle. Pandaria is a peaceful place, with its native pandas preferring to use their kung fu to focus their minds rather than beating the frayed cloth armour out of their neighbours.

Pandas spend most of their days fighting.

That is, until you turn up. Blizzard consider Mists of Pandaria as an escalation in the conflict between Alliance and Horde, an unplundered place full of resources and new space to be squabbled and scrapped over. “When players get to Pandaria, there won’t be very strong Horde or Alliance influence in the continent. They’ll see a few Night Elves, Tauren, and of course a lot of Pandarens, but the former won’t have big established bases. But over time – say, with our first major content patch – both sides will have established a bulwark. And then maybe in the second patch, we’ll have a big open battleground where the Pandarens are caught in the middle between Horde and Alliance.”

Pandarens are neutral by nature, preferring to spend their time brewing beer and fronting international wildlife conservation campaigns. Reflecting that, players who roll a new Pandaren character start off as a third faction. They’ll find themselves at a fluffy crossroads at level 10, where they must choose between throwing their chips in the bamboo basket of either Horde or Alliance.

That makes the Pandarens World of Warcraft’s first playable neutral race. There was talk pre-Cataclysm of goblins taking that title, before they became Horde-only. I asked Greg if they’d switch them to the same set-up, and why the Pandarens were able to stay out of the top level fight for ten levels. “It’s an interesting idea, but probably not; we’ve established the goblins in the Horde.”

“If we made the Pandaren Horde only, in keeping with the history of Warcraft 3, boy would the Alliance players be unhappy! They’re such a core part of the game we felt that the right answer would be to give them to everyone.” For the first ten levels, all those who do pretend to be a panda will start out in the same area.

'Paint me. Like one of your French girls.'

Pandaria is split into five zones, given names out of earnest martial arts films. You’ll be galumphing through the Jade Forest, the Kun-Lai Summit, and the Valley of the Four Winds during your time in Pandaria. That Blizzard didn’t take the opportunity to include a ‘fur winds’ pun hints at a pervasive reverence for their too-cute subject matter.

The expansion’s Pandarens aren’t imbued with the knockabout silliness you’d expect from a kung fu panda. Instead, they’re a measured, insightful race, and Blizzard avoids playing the furballs for laughs so as not to piss off the very country they’re trying to court: China has rigid guidelines on how their fluffy treasures can be represented. It creates a slightly jarring effect that leaves Pandaria feeling more sober than you might expect. Even if a gigantic brewery acts as one of the continent’s major dungeons.

But what Pandaria loses in potential laughs, it gains in majesty. That the developers have managed to coax the expansion’s mixture of rich autumn colours and grand, impressionist landscapes from a seven-year-old engine is mightily impressive.

The continent uses space effectively: Horde and Alliance characters who pop over on either boats or zeppelins will find themselves dropped at opposite ends of the same sector. Being able to see your mortal enemies on the other side of a treeline will, Blizzard hope, spark the kind of animosity that future patches will escalate. But the most creative new landmass isn’t in Pandaria itself – it’s the new Pandaren starting zone.

Read part two of our Mists of Pandaria preview for Kung Fu fighting and the difficulty curve.

It’s almost impossible to partake of this medieval RTS (Royal Tribulations Simulator) without finding yourself enmeshed in the kind of court plots and factional feuds that make The Bard’s history plays such rattling good yarns. You might start out all sweetness and light, but before long you’re bedding your brother’s wife, Macbething your best friend, and doing a Richard the Third on your incarcerated nephews [Eww! – Cockney Ed].

One of the joys of all this unscripted knavery is just how simple it is to orchestrate. Compared to brain-strainers like Hearts of Iron III and Victoria II, CK2 is a petting zoo. Total War and Civ émigrés will need to cram for a couple of hours to get their heads round novel play priorities like heir production and plot engineering. Veterans of Sengoku and the first Crusader Kings can expect to be neckdeep in mesmerising medieval soap-opera much sooner.

Tripping over cities was one of the hazards of being a knight.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t pitfalls awaiting the inexperienced. For my first foray I foolishly selected King Levon IV of Armenia as my avatar, and 1337 as my start date. I’d barely finished getting the measure of my courtiers, assigning duties to my five-person council, and marrying off my broody half-sister to a well-connected French oaf, when the first declaration of war arrived. Lesson #1. If you want to see your dynasty prosper, don’t choose to play as the last Orthodox leader in the Middle East at a time when the region’s most popular hobby was Poking Christians With Scimitars.

Things went a little more smoothly in my second game. Studying the handsome Europe-dominated strat map, I finally settled on the English West Country as a home. CK2 lets you don the doublet-andhose of anyone from a minor aristo to a kingdom-bossing monarch. Baldwin of Devon – my chosen nob – had but a single county to his name. However, with four healthy sons and William the Conqueror covering his back, he seemed perfect for some safe social climbing.

That climbing began slyly. My toad-like chancellor was despatched to Dorset to fabricate title claims. My darling wife and spymaster went west to Cornwall to spread foul rumours. Things were going like clockwork until the note arrived from Lady Rohese. “Would you like to rendezvous in my bedchamber?”

Every family tree has it's rotten fruit and dead wood.

Seeing no profit in illicit rumpy-pumpy, I looked for the ‘no’ button. It wasn’t there. Bug? I assumed so until I noticed the ‘lusty’ icon among my character traits. It wasn’t dodgy code that was forcing my hand, it was hormones.

After that unavoidable tryst, Baldwin’s luck changed. Within a year the 36-year-old had quit Devon for Heaven (or possibly The Other Place). What took him wasn’t clear (death descriptions could be a little more detailed sometimes). The consequences though, were impossible to miss. In an instant, control of the Brionne dynasty passed from the strong battlescarred hands of a grown man, to the small milk-white mitts of a six-year-old boy.

Choosing a regent for the infant Robert was easy. Albereda, his mother, took the reins. Over the next few years she used every instrument at her disposal to prevent the court from turning against the little lord. As she politicked, her brood played alongside Lady Rohese’s oddly similar son. In May 1075, a deal was sealed that would, eventually, see Robert marry Agathe, one of King William’s homelier daughters.

Pre-unification Turkey was an aesthetic disaster.

Albereda was a perfect mother, but even perfect mothers are powerless sometimes. Consumption consumed Robert a few weeks before his 16th birthday. He was laid to rest besides his father. The poisoned dynasty chalice passed to another Brionne boy barely strong enough to lift it.

It’s at time like these that thoughts turn to CK2’s fascinating succession options. Control of a realm doesn’t have to pass from father to oldest son. There are seven different inheritance laws, each with their own pros and cons. A lord can, if canny, ensure power is handed to a loved sibling or trusted vassal rather than a craven son.

On the municipal and military fronts CK2 feels fleshier than Sengoku. There’s more to build, more unit types in your automatically generated armies. I would like to have seen some additional tactical options, but watching the three elements of opposing armies (centre, left flank, right flank) clash via the 2D battle display, it isn’t difficult to picture the martial mayhem. Total War-style scraps may actually have ended up diluting CK2’s engrossing uniqueness. After all, a few franchises let you refight Henry V’s most famous victories, but only one lets you murder his mum and inseminate his sisters,

Those patient enough to brave the hours of queueing get to play Diablo 3 for a short burst. The artificially constrained play sessions mean gamers are more eager than ever to carve their way through mounds of flesh. Looking out across the Diablo 3 show area, I can see legions of mice sitting quietly underhand, gently glowing in pain as their masters pound their tops.

BlizzCon saw the debut of one of Diablo 3’s first cinematics – a lush, gothic creation that tells of a black soulstone. It’s a good reminder that this game that involves clicking on things many thousands of times has a weighty storyline behind it. But how do you get gamers to stop hammering on their mice for a second and listen to what they’re being told? I asked Julian Love – Diablo 3’s lead technical artist – how his team have done it.

Sod the story, let's kill shit.

“It’s a big mistake to overload and pester the player with the story. They really do just want to keep fighting.” KILL THAT ZOMBIE HE’S GOT A PAIR OF TROUSERS… sorry what, Julian? Carry on. “But you also find a maximum level where players tire of it and want to take a break. We make sure that the backgrounds in the game can appropriately telegraph ‘this is a rest point’ – that it’s not combat – and then schedule them appropriately so that players are okay with that.”

Diablo 3’s recent beta has helped Julian and his team schedule these breathing spaces, and shown the danger of overstuffing the game. “We maybe had too many systems too early in the game: our new crafting system, our follower system, and ways to get back to town. Players would end up being forced to ignore things. So we’ve rescheduled the way those things are going to be introduced.”

Some mechanics were excised entirely. “We fooled around with, and even announced, the talisman. What that led to was players getting a new item and sitting around, trying to figure out what they should be doing.” The result is a stats screen that spits out big, easy to understand numbers. Attack, precision, defence and vitality combine to make your character’s power output obvious. Press a gleaming blue doublehanded war-axe into your barbarian’s hands, and the extra damage it deals is easily demonstrated by the game’s UI.

'You put your right leg in, right leg out... c'mon everybody...'

But Diablo has always catered to the calculator fiends, and Diablo 3 is no different. “There’s a little panel in your character sheet you can roll out that gives a deep breakdown of everything that’s going on.” Somewhere, Tom Francis has just let out a happy little sigh. There are so many sockets, slots, and holes in which to jam enchanted doohickies and magical wotsits that your level 20 monk likely won’t end up anything like your friend’s level 20 monk. That difference will also be reflected in the game’s visuals – something Julian wanted to mark as a difference between Diablos 2 and 3.

There are obvious character demarcations: the game’s customisable banners can be altered with augments earned through achievements, and dyes let players choose this season’s hottest demon-slaying colour. But customisation goes deeper than this overlay: gear is visualised. Snaffle two pistol-crossbows for your demon hunter and you’ll strap them on and start spewing bolts – a marked difference from a demon hunter chum “There are so many slots in which to jam enchanted doohickies and magical wotsits” who might be using a heavyweight bow and loosing arrows at a more leisurely pace. And your skill choices provide another layer of unique prettiness: even if you’ve stepped out in the same shade of leather bracer as another member of your party, Julian confirms that “there are trillions of skill possibilities, and all of those changes have a graphic change associated with them”.

Let's hope they're not playing in Hardcore mode.

Blizzard have been making Diablo 3 for a long time. Julian does a quick mental count when I ask him what’s changed during development. “I’ve been on Diablo 3 for nearly nine years. Right now combat’s very immediate; we really didn’t have that focus early on. Our goal now is to make every click feel awesome. But that wasn’t a big goal at the beginning.”

“It’s so much easier to make things complicated than to make things simple: most of our designs started out as a convoluted spaghetti mess. Over the years what we’ve done is simplify, simplify, simplify – pare them down to a point where they make sense and I think they’re still fun.”

Looking out across the sea of clickers on the BlizzCon show floor, their grins illuminated by arc lightning and sprays of rotting blood on LCD monitors, I’d say they agree with Julian.

I feel like I know Matt Higby. PlanetSide 2’s creative director lives half a planet away from me in San Diego, where he’s currently helming development on SOE’s second shot at the MMOFPS. But he once flew Reavers for the New Conglomerate in PlanetSide. He piloted a gunship, screaming through the sky over hundred-man battles. He rained rockets down on enemy tanks, he lanced snipers with his chaingun. He’s me, in a suntan and a nicer suit.

The Reaver, PlanetSide’s air-to-ground dominator, remains in PlanetSide 2. Most of the original vehicles and weapons are returning in spruced-up form. But where I once had to survive hours of combat before I’d earned a battle rank sufficient to be handed the keys to my very own Reaver, PlanetSide 2 will let me jump into any of my faction’s vehicle seats from my first minute in the game.

At least, that’s Matt’s plan: the eventual beta launch may change that. “We may say, ‘Hey, you know what? you have to have a certain amount of time in the Lightning before you’re able to use a Vanguard.’” The Lightning is PlanetSide 2’s light tank; the Vanguard the New Conglomerate’s trundling behemoth, armed with a 10ft-long cannon. This progression handily illustrates PlanetSide 2’s new skill tree system.

Learn how to attach a massive cannon to your tank while you wash up.

“The Vanguard has a ton of unlocks: different side-graded weapons that allow me to do things situationally. I might want a flak cannon on top because there’s a lot of aircraft in my area of combat. A new Vanguard driver won’t necessarily have access to all the different kinds of armour and countermeasures – all the different kinds of telemetry and radar systems that someone who’s been playing a Vanguard for a really long time has unlocked.”

I ask Matt how much time it would take before I felt totally comfortable strapped back into my Reaver. He counted it out as 10 hours, that time giving me a wide range of unlocks – enough to be dangerous in most situations in my one chosen steed.

But upgrades don’t have to be earned with timeclock stamping: players who don’t check in every day will be able to climb the same ability ladders as their more diligent friends. Pick one of PlanetSide 2’s skills and it’ll be queued to learn. Log off, and you’ll continue studying how to attach longer range scopes to your Bolt-Driver sniper rifle, get better at hacking enemy vehicles, or another one of the game’s multitude of skills.

'Be vewy, vewy quiet, we're hunting Weavers!'

Players who are online during their skill studies will see them unlock faster, but there are more immediate rewards for those keen to invigorate their learning process, as Matt confirms: “You’re able to shortcut your skills by burning resources.”

Resources themselves are earned by engaging in battle against the two oppositional empires: capture an area on one of the game’s continents and you’ll gain resources. Matt explains further: “You’ll also gain resources while your empire holds that territory. So if you are a member of an empire and own 50% of a continent, you will gain resources just for playing on that continent all the time, even if you’re not capturing anything new. You can use those resources for doing things like upgrading your weapons, getting new weapons from an equipment terminal, or buying things from the store.”

PlanetSide 2 will be free-to-play, and the store will offer items for Sony’s magical pixie version of real money: Station Cash. But Matt is adamant the game’s model won’t be ‘pay to win’. Items that are only purchasable with Station Cash – not resources – will just be cosmetic. Core to this approach is the idea of side-grades: things players can unlock that don’t conclusively better their lot on the battlefield, but specialise their abilities.

We really, really want a Reaver for Christmas.

Choice is built into the game at all levels, meaning players can quickly swap their focus on the battlefield without extracurricular menu tinkering. “Maybe I want to have a scope on my Cycler: I can go up to an equipment terminal and swap out my old weapon for the new one. That might incur some resource cost with it – we’re still balancing exactly where we want the resource drain to be in the game. Similarly, if I want my Magrider tank to have an AA flak gun on the top of it, I can bolt it on when I’m dead on the respawn screen.”

SOE plans to include a subscription model for those who fancy access to what Matt calls ‘premium features’, but I’m already sold on the idea of sticking with my chosen vehicle for the long haul. I relied on my Reaver in PlanetSide, and grew into the cockpit until it became a part of me. I was unhappy with my feet on the ground in Auraxis. The idea of plugging months’ worth of advancement into my Reaver, earning cannons and rockets and countermeasures and targeting systems (and all the things I wished I could tinker with back in 2003), is a prospect that thrills me like little else in gaming. Having known PlanetSide, Matt understands me. Now I know PlanetSide 2, I think you’ll understand my excitement too.

At this year’s BlizzCon, Blizzard revealed the new multiplayer units for StarCraft II’s next expansion, Heart of the Swarm, and I felt like my chest was going to burst with excitement.

StarCraft II is a toolkit. It’s a game that provides a hammer for this job, a screwdriver for that one. Each unit has strict rules and looser applications, and that means that players familiar with the game can immediately slot new units into mental replays of the matches they’ve played and watched. And those new units turn the battlehoned tactics and strategies, hammered out by professionals and amateurs the world over, on their head.

Kerrigan can turn the tide of battle.

The Zerg’s new monsters have the most obvious practicality. The Viper replaces the Overseer, usurping that non-threatening gelatinous eyeball blob with a sinuous sky-snake. Like the Overseer, it can detect cloaked and burrowed units, but unlike the Overseer, it doesn’t need to be ported into battle. The Viper can launch a standalone eyeball, gluing it onto another friendly unit. Before, Zerg players had to manoeuvre flimsy gasbags around during tussles so they could get a read on the field: now they can use their combat units as readymade spotters.

But you won’t want to be leaving your Vipers at home all the time. They’re Zerg spell-casters, their magic books rounded out with ‘Blinding Cloud’ – a gaseous mass launched at groups of enemies that reduces their effective combat range to spitting distance – and the intriguing ‘Abduct’. Abduct is built to break powerful siege lines, letting the Viper yank a single unit out of position with a fleshy tendril.

The Zerg’s second new unit is simpler to use. The Swarm Host is essentially a grounded Brood Lord designed to unsettle sufferers of trypophobia – don’t Google it, trust me. (Go on, Google it! -Evil Ed). Waddle one near enemy lines and hit R – it’ll burrow underground, then start pooping out scurrying, clawed Locusts. It’s a siege attack unit that can tear apart enemy defences. Combined with the introduction of the siegebreaking Viper, Terran turtlers in the BlizzCon audience were left making sad little noises.

Think of Zerglings like dogs. Horrible dogs.

But Terran players have their own new toys to play with. Last year’s Wings of Liberty focused on the race; this year’s additions feel more like alterations. The Hellion – a speedy ground buggy armed with a straight-line flamethrower – has earned the ability to transform into a spiffy little walker. In battle mode, the Hellion’s napalm range and speed are greatly reduced. Instead they gain a much wider spread of flame, and a buff to their toughness. They’re great for holding ramps and choke points, as I found out when I was able to tempt a host of Zerglings into the front of my base before barbecuing them in a few wide-angle spurts.

The battle Hellion isn’t the Terran’s only new stompy thing. Heart of the Swarm will rarify the bipedal Thor walker, doubling the price and only letting players have one on the field at a time. But there are mitigating factors to the switch: the Thor now kicks out damage at a ridiculous rate, and it has earned an understudy. The Warhound has inherited the Thor’s anti-air attack – making it perfect for dealing with Zerg Mutalisks – and comes with an anti-armour cannon that punishes the opposition’s heavier playthings. They’re also smaller, meaning that players won’t have to play factory Tetris to avoid a conga-line of walkers stuck on scenery.

Terran generals already have perhaps the game’s best territory control options in the Siege Tank and the Bunker – with Heart of the Swarm, they’ll be able to add the Shredder to that list. It’s a tiny robot that, when burrowed, produces a radioactive death field in a radius around its hidey-hole. Any enemy that sets foot/chitinous claw/floaty energy field inside that space is bathed in a horrible nuclear glow that saps their health. It’s ideal for closing off entry routes to your areas of interest, but park one of your own units inside the Shredder’s death field and it’ll shut itself off.

A fleet of Tempest's in action.

That’s no good if you’re relying on them for the irradiated death of your foes, but clever leaders could lure armies through ‘safe’ areas before allowing their little robo-chums to come back online.

If the Terran arsenal changes are all about finetuning, the new Protoss units are about wild experimentation. The mouthless space elves lose their fighter-spewing Carrier unit in multiplayer, but gain a new flyer called the Tempest.

It shoots in both of the game’s planes, firing blobs of blue goo that melt light air units like the Mutalisk, and sending an arc of psi-lightning down towards ground targets. Blizzard want Tempests as massed late-game options, and they’re a direct response to Protoss complaints that they can’t effectively counter large airforces.

Join the battle in the skies, build a Protoss stargate and you’ll have access to the new Oracle. It’s a flying spellcasting unit that specialises in buggering up your enemy’s carefully thought-out timings. ‘Phase Shift’ lets you scrub a unit out of existence for just under a minute – ideal for removing big nasties from army makeups while you rearrange your forces – and ‘Pre- Ordain’ allows you to watch an enemy building’s surroundings and production for two minutes. As if the floaty pixies didn’t have enough scouting options with Observers.

‘Entomb’ rounds out the Oracle’s spell-set, and lets players encase vital mineral patches in weird magic glass, restricting mining from them and halting economies until removed.

Finally, Protoss are way OP.

That leaves one last new unit, and here’s where things gets a little madder. The final Protoss addition is the Replicant: a glowing ball that can turn into almost anything it’s pointed at. It’s a potentially game-breaking addition: Replicant-heavy Protoss armies have access to three tech trees instead of one, and can create lethal armies of perfectly overlapping units.

But in practice, that’s not so simple. When tinkering with the new units in a skirmish game, I tried to saunter into my Zerg opponent’s base, cast an eye over their worker Drones, and sashay a copied version back into my own base. But without an escort, my ersatz Drone was popped by a minimal force. I elected instead to send an escort force to get my Replicant in and my new Drone out. I lost my task force, but I was able to gain a Drone. After 15 minutes of climbing up both Protoss and Zerg upgrade routes, my mixed force was able to smash through the solo Zerg’s front lines – Zerg Roaches ablating hits as my Protoss High Templars were free to sit back and launch devastating psionic storms.

Heart of the Swarm’s new multiplayer units are focused missiles, all introduced as either replacements or new entities to fix issues in the game’s asymmetrical matchups. It’s the same tactic that Blizzard have used in the singleplayer portions of this game, and in Wings of Liberty before it: units are introduced and shown as fulfilling a specific role.

The key difference is in execution – Heart of the Swarm’s singleplayer walks players through the best way to use a new toy; the multiplayer decides you’re mature enough to handle things yourself, presses the toolbox into your hands, gives you a wink, and says “have fun”. It’s enough to get me all emotional.

Chances are, if you’re reading this, that you already have a strong sense of who your Commander Shepard is and what they’ve been through. If not, well, you’re missing out on one of the standout game narratives of the last five years. What are you waiting for? You’ve got a few months. Come back when you have a deeply-held opinion about the nature of Shepard’s chromosomes.

According to executive producer Casey Hudson, ME3’s Shepard is a combination of the person you’ve made and the underlying themes that have been there since the opening moments of the first game. “There is a common experience among all versions of Commander Shepard. In particular, Shepard is really just an average human, swept up in exceptional circumstances. We’re trying some new methods to get people inside Shepard’s head, making them feel more of the internal struggle Shepard has been facing.”

Instant melee kills specific to each class have been introduced.

At the heart of that struggle are the Reapers, the malevolent machinegods that have finally arrived after two whole games of set-up. The race to fight back is Mass Effect 2’s companiongathering structure blown out to galactic proportions. As you progress, you’ll assemble a force of capital ships, special forces squads and vast armies, each of which constitutes a War Asset.

“As Commander Shepard you fight to build an enormous alliance and secure war assets across the galaxy,” Hudson explains. “But how effective all of that is in the final fight is dependent on how well the overall war effort is going. If your allies are killed, they won’t be ready to join you in the final battle. But if they are well in control, they will be ready to bring their full potential to the fight.”

That’s where cooperative multiplayer comes in. Separately from Shepard’s story, you and your friends can take charge of teams of operatives fighting the battles around the galaxy that the Normandy can’t. Performance here improves that readiness factor, making your war assets count for more in the singleplayer.

Your enemies are easily perturbed by goose stepping.

These high-level mechanics are supported by a retooled combat and upgrade system. Weapon mods that give you the freedom to customise guns to your taste are a major focus – Hudson shares his favourites: “I enjoy the mods that allow you to increase the capacity and rate of fire on sniper rifles, so you can target an enemy at range and still fire off quick shots before reloading. Using a scope on a pistol is a fun way to extend the effectiveness of an otherwise basic weapon.”

We know the broad shape of Shepard’s final outing, but not what it contains. Mass Effect’s use of transferred savegames makes it one of the longest coherent stories in gaming, and it’ll be good to come to its final chapter unspoilt.

We’ve been spoilt for amazing PC games this year, but it’s only going to get better in 2012. We’ve already brought you previews of Planetside 2, Mass Effect 3, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, Guild Wars 2, Dishonored, Hitman Absolution, Diablo 3 and Bioshock Infinite, but now we’ve compiled a list of every game out this year, for your reading pleasure. By the end of this feature, you should have an idea of just how incredible 2012 is going to be.

Check inside. The games of tomorrow are waiting for you.

ACTION

Grand Theft Auto V

Publisher: Rockstar
Release: TBA 2012

Being a numbered GTA title is a big deal. We know GTA V is set in Los Santos, Rockstar’s take on Los Angeles, and that it may have multiple protagonists. What we don’t know is whether it’s a continuation of GTA IV or a return to the pop culture of Vice City and San Andreas. The golden hues and gloss of the trailer suggests the latter, but, hey: that could just be California.

Where GTA V does seem to offer something new is in the promise of expansive outdoor environments. With the series traditionally tied to urban areas, the possibility of a little more freedom is intriguing, as is the suggestion that the main character’s hobbies include hiking. That said, Rockstar would do well to focus on fundamentals: bringing GTA’s combat up to scratch, allowing us to interact with the environment more meaningful ways, and moving from the one-employer-at-a-time structure.

Cross of the Dutchman

Publisher: Triangle Studios
Release: 2012

An action-adventure in the mould of Fable 3 from indie studio Triangle, this game places you in the enormous shoes of legendary Dutch warrior-pirate Pier Gerlofs Donia. You’ll liberate Frisia and do sidequests in a charming cartoon take on Western Europe. Grutte Pier was seven feet tall and could decapitate several people with a single blow, apparently.

Metal Gear Solid: Rising

Publisher: Konami
Release: 2012

As big-haired, sharp-cheekboned cyber ninja Raiden, you’re hunting baddies in the near-ish future. The emphasis is on quick, offensive swordplay, using the dev’s terrifying attention to how bodies are sliced and diced. The series is perhaps best known for its fourth-wall-shattering plot devices and inventive game mechanics: we’re always happy to see more of that on the PC.

Brothers in Arms: Furious 4

Publisher: Ubisoft
Release: Summer

It’s a team-based shooter, again, but rather than updating to a modern combat scenario, this new Brothers in Arms sees a gang of armed-to-the-teeth Yank soldiers take on those pesky Nazis. The demo we saw involved jetpacks and demented violence. It recalls Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, with plenty of gore and Nazi-branding. Like a 1940s version of Bulletstorm.

The Darkness 2

Publisher: 2k Games
Release: Spring

We didn’t get The Darkness the first time round: a mob-set shooter into which mystical forces have imbued the central character with special abilities. Fortunately, its sequel is set to enlighten the PC. It includes ‘Quad-Wielding’, which allows players to slash, grab and throw enemies with two demon arms while simultaneously wielding two guns. You also get to tell imps when to murder your enemies from the shadows. Ace.

Strike Suit Zero

Publisher: DoubleSix
Release: Spring

Many, many games feature the end of the world, but not many see you staving it off with a giant transforming space robot thing. It’s a very ’80s take on the space shooter, with ludicrous firepower and an infinite amount of power-ups, but the calibre of its creators should ensure it’s anything but 8-bit. It’s never going to be hugely challenging, but there simply aren’t enough giant transforming space robot things in games these days.

Prototype 2

Publisher: Activision
Release: Summer

2009’s Prototype was a solid cityroaming murder sim, with some smart touches like being able to take on an enemy’s appearance. The sequel sees new protagonist James Heller taking on evil mutants and evil soldiers with equal aplomb. Heller’s got a few new abilities, such as tendrils that can envelope enemies, and everyone can be ripped into fleshy chunks. Expect openworld carnage, copter takedowns and, hopefully, a bit more depth.

Spec Ops: The Line

Publisher: 2k Games
Release: 2012

A third-person cover shooter set in the sand-blasted remains of Dubai, this promises tough choices in an uncompromising narrative. The banner feature is ‘Dynamic Sand’, accurately-modelled silicates that can form avalanches to crush friend and foe alike. 2K remind us that ‘sand has no loyalty’, flagrantly disregarding the Cave of Wonders from Aladdin.

Shank 2

Publisher: Klei Entertainment
Release: 2012

We weren’t big fans of the original Shank,a 2D side-scrolling platform shooter (think Contra). This sequel promises to make amends with revamped controls and a new co-op survival mode. The cell-shaded art looks great.

Shoot Many Robots

Publisher: Ubisoft
Release: 2012

It’s a four-player side-scrolling shooter with a little RPG flavour. Hillbilly protagonist P Walter Tugnut can be upgraded with bits and bobs he salvages from the many, many robots he’s likely to shoot. It’s nice to see a game wear its mission statement.

Captain Blood

Publisher: 1C
Release: 2012

A swashbuckling third-person adventure. A mix of combo-based sword battles and ship-to-ship fi ghting, you’ll upgrade both your boat and crew on your quest for the biggest, pointiest hat of all. It’s been in development for a long time: wait and see.

Solaris Assault Tech

Publisher: Studio Inektek
Release: 2012

An arena-based mech combat game based on the Unreal 3 engine, and being developed with BattleTech founder Jordan Weismen. Long live giant stompy robot games. We need more.

Assassin’s Creed 3

Publisher: Ubisoft
Release: 2012

Rumour has it the French or American revolutions are pegged to appear – but it could, of course, feature both. Based on its treatment of history, we’re putting our money on fist-fights with Thomas Paine and a minecart chase with William Wordsworth.

Super Monday Night Combat

Publisher: 2012
Release: Uberent

The DOTA-inspired arena thirdperson shooter returns with three new classes – revolver-toting Gunslinger, robot-herding Combatgirl and groundpounding Veteran. New maps and increased customisation round out the package – and it’s free to play, too. It’s certainly one to watch if you like your DOTA with a side of TF2-style cartoon charm.

Street Fighter X Tekken

Publisher: Capcom
Release: Spring

Pitting Capcom and Namco’s finest against each other for the first time outside of bitter playground arguments, Street Fighter X Tekken brings tag team battles to the Street Fighter IV format. But is it coming to PC or not? A PC version was announced by Capcom in April, but quickly withdrawn as a ‘typo’, before being upgraded to a ‘maybe’. Come on Capcom.

Transformers: The Fall of Cybertron

Publisher: Activision
Release: 2012

The sequel to 2010’s vehiclesand- robots blaster, this demonstrates that Activision have finally learned the rule of sequels: namely, more dinosaurs. All we’ve seen of the game so far is a teaser trailer revealing T-rexin- disguise Grimlock. A revamped weapons and upgrades system promises to make character progression feel more meaningful than it was last time.

War of the Roses

Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Release: Summer

A slightly po-faced approach to the battles that ravaged England during the 15th century, it promises to take a gritty, shooter-style approach to sword and axe combat.

Star Trek

Publisher: Paramount
Release: Autumn

The tie-in game to JJ Abram’s take on Star Trek continues the story, with Kirk and Spock starring in a co-op shooter, hunting down an alien threat to the galaxy. Think Mass Effect but without the RPG elements. Devs Digital Extremes have already shown footage of Kirk leaping from an airlock, through the vacuum of space, onto the side of another ship. Question: will it tie into the next film, due out in 2013? Answer: unknown.

Darksiders II

Publisher: THQ
Release: 2012

Darksiders wasn’t actually too bad as a third-person action slasher. In the sequel, you take control of Death (the other four horsemen taking a co-star role) as you rock into the underworld and beat the unliving crap out of baddies, like it’s the end of the world. Which it actually is. The team responsible claim that levels will be at least twice the size of those seen in the first game, and that the hub cities will contain significantly more dungeons. Which is nice.

Max Payne 3

Publisher: Rockstar
Release: Autumn

Circumstances once again conspire to see Max Payne thrust sideways in slow-motion through the windows of life. Everyone’s favourite action-detective runs, guns and shaves his way through Sao Paulo in a Rockstar developed sequel to Remedy’s shoooter. The team responsible are making a big deal of the way Max moves naturally through the city.

Scivelation

Publisher: TopWare Interactive
Release: 2012

Taking place in a post-apocalyptic future where the Forces of Good and Evil and Arbitrary Capitalisation have wiped each other out, Scivelation is a third-person shooter that pits you against the Regime. It sounds a lot like RAGE, but looks more like Hard Reset.

Devil May Cry 3

Publisher: Capcom
Release: 2012

Ninja Theory have worked hard to show that their DMC reboot respects its roots. The game will see a younger Dante slicing and air-juggling his way through two different worlds: one bright and colourful, the other dramatically monochrome.

Raven’s Cry

Publisher: TopWare Interactive
Release: 2012

Pirate sandbox adventure that looks to be a darker, more gritty take on the wolves of the sea. The combat system mixes real historical weapons, complete with their own special moves and abilities, with a more tactical slant.

Ride to Hell

Publisher: Deep Silver
Release: 2012

Protect your territory from rival biker gangs in what promises to be a GTA style take on sixties West Coast America easy riding culture.

The Amazing Spider-Man: The Movie

Publisher: Activision
Release: 2012

The tie-in game for next year’s Spider-Man game is directed squarely at the tie-in-lunchbox and duvet set. Expect a mixture of free-swinging city traversal and third-person brawling. It looks all right, the swinging-down- New-York about as good as you’d expect. But the previous games from the same dev have been hit and miss, so it’s probably best to wait for the reviews.

Ghosts of Moscow: Death to Spies

Publisher: 1C
Release: 2012

A third-person stealth adventure set during the Cold War. The third Death to Spies game casts you as a trio of Russian spies undertaking missions in North America, Cuba and Europe. We’re not sure how it’ll compete against the new Hitman given IO’s ever expanding budget. But it’s possible this will fulfil your need to choke people to death and then pinch their undies.

Top Gun: Hard Lock

Publisher: 505 Games
Release: 2012

Merely a typo away from the original film’s subtext, Top Gun: Hard Lock takes the hit movie’s bombastic, homoerotic airborne combat and turns it into a bombastic, presumably homoerotic game. To get a pretty good idea of exactly what it’s going to be like, play Tom Clancy’s HAWX, Afterburner or Crimson Skies with Highway to the Danger Zone playing on your iPod.

Lollipop Chainsaw

Publisher: Warner Brothers
Release: Spring

Cute cheerleaders with chainsaws have been sorely missed in gaming. Fortunately, Juliet Starling – the cheerleader in question – is equipped with a chainsaw to massacre the undead. It feels like a one-note take on Dead Rising’s best jokes, but Suda 51’s involvement is sure to make it a triumph of style over substance. Its presence on the PC is a mere rumour at the moment, but we’d love to see it. Come on Warner, throw us a bone.

Anarchy Reigns

Publisher: Sega
Release: Spring

Tentatively confirmed by Sega for the PC, this gloriously ludicrous-looking multiplayer brawler comes from Platinum Games, the developers of absurdly leggy console title Bayonetta. Expect absurdly burly men (and ladies) hitting each other – a lot – in ever more creative ways, with the added bonus of being able to call in such everyday occurrences as black holes and plane crashes. Subtlety really isn’t on the agenda here.

Inversion

Publisher: Namco Bandai
Release: 2012

Inversion offers third-person co-op blasting in the company of the Grappler, a scenery-flinging descendent of Half-Life 2’s Gravity Gun that is described as “using a revolutionary gravity manipulation engine”. Yeah, whatever. You’ll use it to create cover and grab your enemies, a mysterious high-tech force known as the Lutadore. We are fairly sure that they are not Mexican wrestlers, but it is too early to say for sure.

Tomb Raider

Publisher: Square Enix
Release: Summer

This long-awaited reboot sees a younger Lara stranded on a Japanese island during her first trip overseas. What we’ve seen suggests a much darker, more violent game with a focus on survival rather than the improbable dungeoneering of yore. First impressions call to mind the excellent reboot of Resident Evil via Resi 4. But where does that leave Lara’s excellent platforming?

Resident Evil: Operation Racoon City

Publisher: Capcom
Release: 2012

A class-based third-person shooter where you tackle Hunters, Tyrants and the Nemesis in the setting of Resi 2. Full four-player co-op support for the campaign makes this one to watch.

Smite

Publisher: Hi-Rez Studios
Release: 2012

A mythological take on the DotA format from Hi-Rez, the folks behind Global Agenda and Tribes: Ascend. It’s based on Unreal Engine 3 and will ditch the isometric RTS approach for plenty of over-the-shoulder twitch action.

Ravensdale

Publisher: Spellbound
Release: 2012

A steampunk fantasy action game. A hack and slash RPG, but with the slashing powered by coal. You’ll be tapping into steam vents to supercharge your foecrushing weapons and gadgets. Excellent hats, too. Which is extremely important to us.

MechWarrior Online

Publisher: Infinite
Release: 2012

Infinite Games’ MechWarrior series reboot boasts customisable mechs, a detailed stat-tracking system, and a story that evolves based on the results of your actions. Who says there’s no such thing as a free hundredfoot walking tank?

Awesomenauts

Publisher: DTP Entertainment
Release: Spring

Huge robot armies, 2D graphics and DotA-style levels should make for a perfect PC title, and the developers are keen to bring it to our desktops. But their publishers want it to be console only. Boo!

SIM

Combat Wings: The Great Battles of WW2

Publisher: City Interactive
Release: Autumn

Aerial combat simulators have gained momentum in recent years, and Combat Wings takes us back to World War II. Again. Apparently it’s all been painstakingly recreated from actual battles and aeroplanes, while maintaining a arcade level of approachability. Combat Wings could open its doors and pelt us with bombs of fun.

War Wings: Hell Catz

Publisher: Mad Catz
Release: 2012

The first game from noted peripheral manufacturer Mad Catz, War Wings: Hell Catz is part of a planned series that will explore a variety of different eras of air combat. This first sortie is set in World War II’s pacific theatre and looks to be a little more arcadey than its more traditional simulator cousins. Nonetheless, it’s probably safe to expect that there could well be more than a few tie-in flightsticks and the like.

PUZZLE

Nabara World: The Labyrinth of Light

Publisher: Mentor Interactive
Release: Spring

An English-language version of this Spanish title is reputedly heading to the PC early next year. Naraba World: The Labyrinth of Light is an educational game for young children that allows players to learn maths by manipulating light and colour. Let’s see if Rich can tell the difference between this and StarCraft.

Quantum Conundrum

Publisher: Square Enix
Release: 2012

Kim Swift returns with Quantum Conundrum, a first-person puzzle game in the vein of her most famous brainchild, Portal. You’re trapped in your mad-scientist uncle’s manor house and must shift between dimensions to manipulate the environment – swapping into the Fluffy dimension to make heavy objects lighter, for example. Sounds like real science to us.

A Virus Named Tom

Publisher: Misfits Attic
Release: Autumn

“A Virus Named Tom has a nice Dexter’s Laboratory-esque ’50s vibe to it. It’s a game about a strand of dodgy DNA infecting retro robo dogs, among other things. It’s basically the pipe puzzles from BioShock, with the twist that you’re controlling the virus as he changes the flow of fluids. It’s a simple and amiable take on an old favourite, but we figure Tom is a much less threatening name for a virus than Elk Cloner or MRSA.

Toki Tori 2

Publisher: Two Tribes
Release: Spring

Two Tribes’s sequel to platform puzzler Toki Tori is being developed with the close participation of series fans. They’re opting for an open development process that involves a free (but limited) development version of the game on Steam. The teaser trailer hints at various transformations for the teleporting, egg-collecting hero. Bloody egg collectors. Always ruining omelettes.

Monaco

Publisher: Pocketwatch Games
Release: 2012

Monaco describes itself as Gauntlet meets Hitman, a top-down retro heist game for up to four players. You play as criminals attempting to pinch cash and loot from secure locations. It’s also dead good: in 2010 it picked up the Excellence in Game Design award at the IGF. Don’t take their word for it, either. We’ve been playing it, and it’s blummin’ ace.

RACING

Time@tack

Publisher: Yami Hoshi.nl
Release: Spring

A free car time trials game set to leave the grid after the launch of Windows 8’s Store. Apparently it’s been made by a not-for-profit bunch of journalists. We doubt it’ll have the depth of DiRT 3, but it’s sure to offer a few drop-in bouts of fun.

Ridge Racer Unbounded

Publisher: Namco Bandai
Release: Spring

Marks the long running series’ first move away from the arcades towards more realistic racing, as well as its first venture onto the PC. It promises exhilarating collisions and a TrackMania-style track editor.

Crash Time IV: The Syndicate

Publisher: RTL Interactive
Release: 2012

Race around 100km of racetrack in modern Cologne while solving automotive crimes. It received a critical panning when it came out on Xbox earlier in the year, so best not to get your hopes up.

Project Haste

Publisher: Ubisoft
Release: 2012

It’s an ATV racer by Techland, the folks behind nail’d. Project Haste is a working title, so this could well be a sequel. All we know is that it’ll feature aerial tricks and extensive multiplayer. The original picked up a solid 76% back in PCG 223.

RaceDriver: GRID 2

Publisher: Codemasters
Release: 2012

The little we know about this track racer suggests increased online integration in the manner of the most recent Need For Speed games. As a cousin to DiRT and direct successor to the venerable TOCA, it’d be great to see it make a return.

F1 Online: The Game

Publisher: Codemasters
Release: Spring

Codemasters have firmly re-established the F1 franchise, but F1 Online sees the racer go free-to-play. We saw it at Gamescom last year and it looked like a fun but basic topdown racer, with direction and speed worked from your mouse. Low system requirements make this an accessible web-game for genre fans, and you can buy new bits for your car too. Vroom?

F1 2012

Publisher: Codemasters
Release: 2012

When F1 2011 escaped from its predecessor’s shadow, shedding a legacy of evil, cheating AI drivers as it went, we were there on the sidelines cheering it on. There are still important places for the F1 sim series to go, however. Proper weather modelling would be nice, as would a long-awaited revamp of the Career mode that has remained unchanged since F1 2010. We’re excited to see what Codies Birmingham will do with a solid base to work from.

Carmageddon Reincarnation

Publisher: Stainless Games
Release: 2012

1997’s Carmageddon introduced an anarchic, fruity approach to the racing genre that remains unmatched. Stainless Games have retained the rights and are updating the game as Carmageddon: Reincarnation. Without a publisher behind it, will Reincarnation get the attention and love it deserves?

ADVENTURE

The Mystery of the Wicked Village

Publisher: Alachofasoft
Release: 2012

A follow-up to Murder in the Abbey, The Mystery of the Wicked Village marks the return of Brother Leonardo de Toledo. He’s stranded in a backwater village following a funny turn and must point and click his way to the bottom of the strange goings on in this rural locale. Guest starring the Devil, of all people. Well, he always likes to poke his pointy nose in.

The Thirty Nine Steps

Publisher: Lace Mamba
Release: Summer

An adaptation of the John Buchan novel of the same name, The Thirty-Nine Steps is part of an initiative to bring classic stories to people who don’t read. It’s billed as a storytelling experience rather than an adventure, using on-screen text to help players stage manage their own experience. It’s a laudable goal, but we’re not sure whether it’ll qualify as a game.

J.U.L.I.A

Publisher: Lace Mamba
Release: Spring

Sent on a mission to investigate the first extraterrestrial lifeforms, astrobiologist Rachel Manners wakes from a cryogenic sleep onboard her spaceship and finds her fellow crew members dead. The plot immediately recalls RAGE, but this is a very different kind of adventure. Her only companions are a giant robot called Mobot and the eponymous mothership AI. It’s all pleasingly reminiscent of The Dig with a touch of Silent Running.

Extrasolar

Publisher: Lazy B Studios
Release: 2012

Browser-based space science from the chaps behind Cogs, all wrapped up in an alternate reality-style package. You control a planetary rover in real-time, waiting hours between orders while trying to uncover the mysteries of another world. An earthbound narrative runs alongside the game, fleshing out the mysterious company funding your activities. Potentially a very cool use twist on the longform browser game.

Fables

Publisher: Telltale Games
Release: 2012

Based on the comic book series about fairy-tale characters in exile in the modern world. The focus has always been on smart dialogue and detailed characters: something that we’d love to see refl ected in the game.

The Silver Lining Episode V: A Thousand Times Goodnight

Publisher: Phoenix Online Studios
Release: Spring

The fan-developed follow-up to King’s Quest by Phoenix Online Studios. Episode V brings the saga to a close nearly ten years after the project began.

Catherine

Publisher: Atlus
Release: Christmas

Catherine is an intriguing adult psychological thriller in which the woman prances around in a variety of frilly but ultimately impractical underwear. We want this to appear on the PC so badly, and informed rumour has it that it’s going to do just that.

Realms of Ancient War

Publisher: Focus
Release: Spring

Realms of Ancient War – aka RAW – is a two-player co-op fantasy hack and slasher, with a topdown perspective. It’s being developed for Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network as well, and it looks like a cross between Magicka and Lara Croft and The Guardian of Light. It’s promising stuff: if the devs nail the ‘dip in and out’ feel of hack and slash, it could really work.

The Lost Chronicles of Zerzura

Publisher: Lace Mamba
Release: Spring

Horror adventure titles can be really, really good (Amnesia) or really, really bad (pretty much everything else). There is no such thing as a mediocre horror adventure game. This one follows a young inventor who discovers the mythical land of Zerzura during the Spanish Inquisition. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t look or sound particularly scary. More horror please.

The Journey of Iesir

Publisher: Big Blue Cup
Release: 2012

An indie developed Adventure Game Studio project, The Journey of Iesir follows a young Viking looking to reclaim his heritage. Similar to Monkey Island, it combines a historical setting with modern humour, sending up hippies, gangsters and Japanese demons, among others. Iesir certainly looks remarkable, with a hand-painted style that rivals anything else in the genre.

Y: The Case of John Yesterday

Publisher: Focus
Release: 2012

Amnesiac point-and-click adventure hero John Yesterday is tasked with tracking down whoever is burning homeless people alive in modern-day New York. The teaser hints at a supernatural change of pace for developer Pendulo, better known as the studio behind the Runaway series. Here’s hoping for an unexpected take on the ‘hero without a memory’ cliché.

Twilight Zone

Publisher: Legacy Interactive
Release: Spring

The classic black-and-white American sci-fi horror TV series is transmogrified into a game. You play as a struggling actor who gets trapped in a recurring role in a TV series, and you have to find out why you’re in this nightmarish scenario. Developers Legacy Games have established themselves in casual TV licences – they’ve already made tie-in games for Doctor Who and House.

Lucius

Publisher: Lace Mamba
Release: Spring

Lucius’s twist on the Omen mythology is that it sees you take control of the so-named spawn of Satan. It’s a horror title that revels in references to classic ’70s scary sprog movies The Exorcist, Carrie and The Shining, too, with Lucius riding a trike and being exorcised by priests. The key to getting it right is going to be making Lucius someone players can identify with – and making it as scary as Amnesia. Both of these are pretty tall orders.

Haunted

Publisher: Lace Mamba
Release: Spring

Taking place in 19th century Europe, this sounds like a wacky counterpart to the Blackwell series of point-and-click adventures. It follows protagonist Mary as she befriends ghosts in old London, Scotland and Transylvania. Up to six companion ghosts – and a werewolf – are available to help solve puzzles, including a giant blue Scotsman and a tiny pirate

Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller

Publisher: Phoenix Studios
Release: 2012

Jane Jensen is best known for her work on the Gabriel Knight series, and more recently Gray Matter. Cognition employs her talents as a story consultant in a game where heroine Erica Reed is able to investigate crimes by seeing into the past. Kind of like a less useful Minority Report. It’s currently seeking Kickstarter funding, so it might never see the light of day unless YOU donate.

Men in Black: The Videogame

Publisher: Activision
Release: Summer

The world really needs another Men in Black film, doesn’t it? You wouldn’t have imagined that to be the case, but those whacky folk at Columbia certainly think so. And of course with it, along with the action figures and lunchboxes comes the inevitable tie-in game. It’s being made by Activision, whose Transformers titles have been sort of all right. It might not be entirely terrible. We can hope.

The Testament of Sherlock Holmes

Publisher: Ubisoft
Release: Spring

The latest in the Frogwares series sees Holmes attempting to clear his name when he becomes the main suspect in a vast fraud. Puzzles are said to have been toned down to make the game more accessible to new players. Holmes’ new clue-finding ‘sixth sense’ sounds a bit like Detective Vision, shortening the distance between the World’s Greatest Detectives. We approve.

The Secret Files 3

Publisher: Deep Silver
Release: 2012

Those Secret Files aren’t so secret any more: after the original and its sequel, many, many people know about them. So why don’t they call it Moderately Well- Known Files, instead? The third in the series sees protagonists Nina and Max return, and the only thing we know is that they’re getting married. What could possibly go wrong? And will it result in a series of convoluted, mindless puzzles tacked together to make a ‘story’?

Botanicula

Publisher: Amanita Design
Release: Spring

Amanita Design’s Machinarium was a charming, beautifullypresented point-and-click adventure that sadly ran out of steam towards the end. While ploughing a similar furrow, Botanicula seems to lose Machinarium’s swampily melancholic atmosphere, and is more focused on being fun and cute. That’s not necessarily always a bad thing, although it does look a tad Worker and Parasite at times.

Deponia

Publisher: Lace Mamba
Release: Spring

A comedy adventure game with multiple protagonists set in Deponia, a world modelled after the work of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and Matt Groening. It’s a comedy of errors in the traditional sense, complete with elaborate cases of mistaken identity. The hand-drawn backdrops certainly look nice, and it’s interesting to see an adventure game wear its influences so openly on its oversized lacy sleeves.

Amy

Publisher: Lexis
Release: 2012

A small midwestern town is beset by zombies after a mysterious meteor strike. Protagonist Lana is infected, and must take care of an eight-year-old autistic girl with mysterious powers in order to survive. As high-concepts go, it’s a mixture of the novel and the deeply familiar: providing it avoids the usual escort-quest pitfalls, it could be one to watch.

Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle

Publisher: Reef Entertainment
Release: Spring

Follow Morgane as she searches for the lost treasure of Turtle Island and tries to become the most fearsome female in the Caribbean, proving that turtles really are the new monkeys.

Hidden Mysteries Titanic 2

Publisher: Big Fish
Release: Spring

You are an amnesiac ghost tasked with creating a timeline where the Titanic didn’t sink. It’s a hidden object puzzle game, suggesting that the fabness of a high concept is inversely proportional to its actual mechanics.

Beyond Good and Evil

Publisher: Ubisoft
Release: 2012

Three years have passed since Beyond Good & Evil 2 was teased and we still don’t know very much about it. Rumoured to be too massive for the current generation of consoles – but it would be good to know that the game does exist.

Mage’s Initiation: Reign of the Elements

Publisher: Himalaya
Release: Christmas

Build your character by earning the favour of the elements: fire, earth, water and air. The pre-order version even comes with a cloth map, if it wasn’t already old-school enough for you.

Jack Keane 2

Publisher: Astragon
Release: 2012

No details – save a 2012 release date – have emerged for this sequel to Deck13’s 2007 matinee point-and- click adventure. Here’s hoping that Jack’s second outing is able to escape from the long exhausted Monkey Island influences.

MMO

World of Darkness

Publisher: CCP Games
Release: 2012

We still don’t know how badly CCP’s White Wolf MMO has been affected by the recent layoffs, but their senior producer Chris McDonough has reassured the community that it really is still happening. Honest. Pitched as a brutal take on the vampires ’n’ werewolves roleplaying setting, World of Darkness will feature the rather nasty sounding permadeath: but we’re not quite sure what that means when everyone has already died.

Infinity: The Quest of Earth

Publisher: I-Novae Studios
Release: Christmas

The dream of seamless spaceflight has been around as long as PC gaming. Infinity is incredibly ambitious: a freeform sci-fi MMO featuring everything from fighters to dreadnoughts, set in a vast randomly generated universe with full atmospheric flight. Few details are available, but as dreams go, we really, really want this one to come true.

Phantasy Star Online 2

Publisher: Sega
Release: 2012

Currently confirmed for Japan only, the sequel to Sega’s 2000 action MMO features new boss battles and a revamped combo system. The original game introduced a number of concepts – like hub areas with combat instances branching off them – that have since become part of the fabric of the MMO. Who knows – maybe the sequel will be just as forward-thinking.

Living After War

Publisher: Prosiebensat.1 Digital
Release: Spring

Real-time strategy gets post-apocalyptic (read: mohicans) in this free-to-play title. Some 200 years after a nuclear war, humans return to find earth overrun with radioactive mutants. The blend of strategy and shooter sounds interesting, with players able to control mechs and tanks directly. However, surely we’re getting a little tired of the post-apocalyptic setting by now?

Otherland

Publisher: Gamigo
Release: Spring

If the Mass Effect MMO never happens, I suppose we’ll have to make do with Otherland. Based on Tad Williams’ popular series of virtual-reality themed novels and running on Unreal Engine 3, it thankfully looks a tad more substantial than your average sci-fi opera MMO. Better than all that, it’s going to be free to play, too, so you won’t have to part with your cash if it turns out to be rubbish. But we’re sure it won’t be.

Royal Quest

Publisher: 1C
Release: Summer

Marking 1C’s first venture into the world of MMOs, this comes complete with castles to capture and loot to gather. 1C have form in the fantasy genre: they published both King’s Bounty and Fantasy Wars, and this should put the game on a good footing in the bulging MMO market. Hopefully they’ll stick some IL-2 Sturmovik planes in there as well.

The Secret World

Publisher: Funcom
Release: Spring

Ragnar Tørnquist’s story-driven MMO is set in a twisted take on the real world, where all conspiracies are true. Join one of three secret societies and battle dark Lovecraftian horrors while taking part in a grand ARG-style mystery that extends beyond the game itself. It’s a big year for MMO fans, and The Secret World is a serious, if quirky contender.

Sevencore

Publisher: gPotato.eu
Release: 2012

Cheap post-apocalyptic MMOs are usually greeted with a collective sigh in PC Gamer towers, but Sevencore does look a bit more interesting than most. Particularly because it features both dragons and motorbikes. But not dragons on motorbikes.

Wizardry Online

Publisher: Gamepot
Release: Autumn

The Wizardry tabletop RPG games enjoyed huge success in Japan, leading to this MMO. It’s currently in beta testing, with an impressive trailer setting the scene. We hope that western audiences get a hilariously dodgy translation, too.

Lime Odyssey: The Chronicles of Orta

Publisher: Aeria
Release: Spring

The lime of the title isn’t a fruit, it’s a mysterious artefact that will reunite Nisis’ ravaged realms in this MMORPG. It looks colourful and playful, with characters donning funky hats before milking cows.

Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium Online

Publisher: Vigil Games
Release: 2012

Last year’s E3 trailer confirms that while there is only war, ‘war’ can be broadly interpreted to include giant stompy Titan robots, motorcycles, and angry-looking shooty men. Good news!

World of Planes

Publisher: Gaijin Entertainment
Release: 2012

This just happens to also be a World War II air combat MMO. Locations have been painstakingly reconstructed from satellite imagery and contemporary maps, and the damage model boasts unprecedented levels of detail.

Bounty Hounds Online – Pro Pack

Publisher: Lace Mamba
Release: Spring

A sci-fi MMO set on ‘Clear Sky Planet’, which is presumably a place and not a theme-park dedicated to the Stalker expansion. You’ll pick one of five mercenary classes and battle on behalf of your choice of faction. The £9.99 game client comes with £10 worth of in-game credit. It’s an interesting business model: ‘free to play’ with a mandatory initial payment.

Eligium – The Chosen One

Publisher: Frogster
Release: Summer

Silly us – we assumed they’d just misspelt Belgium. Eligium is another free-to-play MMO promising five classes, a high degree of customisation, manifold dungeons and PvP action. And lightning. Apparently one player is “the chosen one”, which kind of defeats the point of it being an MMO. Maybe only one person will play it.

Age of Wulin – Legend of the Nine Scrolls

Publisher: gPotato.eu
Release: 2012

Age of Wulin – Snail Game’s latest MMO – certainly has a large budget, with astonishing graphics and proper human characters. It takes a skill-based approach to the genre, where your character picks up such Jesus-beating skills as running on water. Don’t write it off just because it’s relatively unknown.

Fallout Online

Publisher: Interplay
Release: Summer

There doesn’t seem to be any end to the Bethesda/Interplay interminable legal scuffle over Fallout Online. It makes the OJ Simpson trial look like an episode of Judge Judy it’s gone on so long. So far we know that humans and ghouls will be playable characters, and that the game will feature tough choices and quests with multiple solutions. Let’s hope it escapes the courts long enough for us to find out more.

Salem

Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Release: Summer

Set in a fantastical version of 17th century New England, Paradox’s MMO likes to do things differently. Rather than respawning, if your character dies they’re gone FOREVER. So all the items they’ve created with Salem’s alchemic crafting system can be collected by other players. It seems like a particularly masochistic take on the MMO, and it’ll be interesting just to see if it works.

Wakfu

Publisher: Ankama Games
Release: Spring

A turn-based tactical follow-up to the wildly popular Flash MMO Dofus. It’s got a lovely hand-drawn art style with a self-consciously videogamey twist: something like Hayao Miyazaki drawing Scott Pilgrim. Deep crafting and an interesting take on online citizenship – where players can take roles as governors, guards and outlaws – round out the package and make Wakfu one to watch.

Tera

Publisher: En Masse Entertainment
Release: 2012

If MMOs are growing up, Tera is a late-adolescent teen: slightly gawky but strikingly beautiful. (She’s over 16, honest.) It’s powered by Unreal Engine 3 which allows for some gorgeous visuals, and it adds shooter mechanics to the mix. Developers En Masse Entertainment say they’re tailoring it specifically for western gamers.

Wildstar

Publisher: NCSoft
Release: 2012

WildStar is billed as an attempt to create the ‘next great MMO’. It’ll feature varied challenges tailored to the player’s choice of faction, race, and class. It faces increasingly tough competition, however: not least from NCsoft stablemate Guild Wars 2.

Deadlands

Publisher: Cliffhanger Productions
Release: 2012

Deadlands Online is an action- RPG from Pinnacle Games, based on a horror western setting. Cliffhanger are still looking for a publisher, so don’t hold your breath – but we’d certainly be happy to have it see the light of day.

Shadowrun

Publisher: Cliffhanger Productions
Release: 2012

Cliffhanger’s take on the legendary cyberpunk pen-and-paper franchise will be an online browser game. It’s about time this setting got a proper outing, but with no game details the jury is out on whether it’ll do it justice.

Star Conflict

Publisher: Gaijin Entertainment
Release: 2012

A mass-multiplayer spaceship combat game, team-based with multiple modes and customisable ships. While it bills itself as an MMO, Star Conflict’s matchmaking and progression systems sound more like Battlefield than EVE.

RaiderZ

Publisher: Perfect World
Release: 2012

An action MMO, RaiderZ has been in development since 2006. It features acrobatic twitch combat and a bright, colourful design. This particular take on the multiplayer RPG hasn’t had much of a showing on PC, so it’s worth keeping an eye on.

RPG

The Dark Eye – Demonicon

Publisher: Kalypso Media
Release: Autumn

Despite being huge in its native Germany, the Dark Eye series has never really had any more than a glimpse of international markets. Demonicon takes up the mantle from last year’s Drakensang. Main character Cairon’s deadly fighting skills make it feel like a rough and ready kind of RPG. We’re just not sure if it’ll do enough to pull non-German players away from Skyrim.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Publisher: EA
Release: February 7, 2012

Kingdoms of Amalur certainly has a decent pedigree of games chaps working on it – Ken Rolston (Oblivion), RA Salvatore (Some books people like) and Todd McFarlane (children’s toys) have all contributed. But despite its action-oriented RPG setting, something just doesn’t quite add up about it – it all just feels a bit too Fable. And we haven’t seen any dragons in it yet.

Risen 2: Dark Waters

Publisher: Deep Silver
Release: 2012

There’s literally nothing that can’t be improved with the addition of pirates. Teutonic RPG Risen faintly impressed us last year, but its sequel adds a good ol’ dash of shiver-metimbers to the proceedings. It’s surprising no one’s thought of doing a proper seafaring RPG. A Yarrr-PG, if you will. And yes, we will wheel that joke out every time we write about it.

Northstar

Publisher: Kerberos Productions
Release: 2012

Hang about, is it still the ’80s? Freeform space exploration, trading and combat mixed with a strategic ground game? This is old-school PC gaming at its oldest. NorthStar developers Kerberos are the studio behind the galaxy-conquering excesses of Sword of the Stars, so they know a thing or two about spaceships and strategy and all that business – and there’s always room for another take on Elite.

Gorky 21

Publisher: Kalypso Media
Release: Christmas

1999’s Gorky 17 – aka Odium – was a Polish take on the postnuclear- war scenario, and in some ways a precursor to Stalker. For follow-up Gorky 21, TopWare have inserted just about every sci-fi cliché going, including steampunk weapons and nano-technology power-ups. It’ll be interesting to see whether or not TopWare go full Fallout 3, or just keep the original game’s top-down roots.

Dead State

Publisher: Doublebear productions
Release: 2012

An isometric zombie apocalypse RPG, Dead State is more about survival than it is about massacring hordes of your former friends. Advanced AI and involved mechanics promise to create emergent, open-ended narratives on the fly. Perhaps most excitingly, it has been written by Brian Mitsoda, the talented chap behind cult classic RPG Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.

Of Orcs and Men

Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Release: Summer

Of Orcs and Men’s big twist on the fantasy genre is that the traditionally despicable orcs are, in fact, suffering at the hands of humans. The RPG casts you as an elite orc soldier, who must recruit other orcs and goblins to fight back against mankind. It’s all a bit reminiscent of Overlord, but the tone seems a lot more brutal and eminently more gritty.

Clan of Champions

Publisher: NIS America
Release: Christmas

A hardcore tactical RPG from Japanese developers Acquire where you punch and sword your way through a trad fantasy setting. Acquire also made What Did I Do To Deserve This, My Lord?, possibly the only game to sound like a Leonard Cohen song.

King’s Bounty: Warriors of the North

Publisher: 1C
Release: Summer

The ridiculously enjoyable and completely absurd RPG gets a new episode in Warriors of the North. There’s, a new hero – called Olaf – and ‘gorgeous Valkyries’ as new companions. Wub at first sight.

Dungeons and Dragons: Neverwinter

Publisher: Atari
Release: 2012

Cryptic are building a new Neverwinter, which is also what you’ll be doing in this return to the well-worn franchise. It’s a cooperative online RPG, but the pricing structure has yet to be finalised.

Two Worlds II: Pirates of the Flying Fortess

Publisher: TopWare Interactive
Release: 2012

Pirate-themed expansion to open-world RPG Two Worlds II which boasts new weapons, areas and enemies and something called ‘impact-oriented horse armour’.

The Sims 3: Masters Suite

Publisher: EA
Release: Spring

There’s next to no information on the new Sims expansion, other than the name. There are also three screenshots, which show a lot of kinky bedroom and bathroom action – always welcome in The Sims universe.

PLATFORM

Rotastic

Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Release: Spring

Rotastic’s been doing the rounds on Xbox Live already this year, but it’s set to swing onto the PC next spring. It’s 2D platform gaming at its most simplistic, where your character swings around levels to grab goodies. It does look a bit iPhoney, but also offers perfectly-formed casual gaming for the masses, with a two-player versus mode for if you get bored of the old singleplayer format.

Closure

Publisher: Closure Team
Release: Spring

A haunting monochrome puzzleplatformer from Tyler Glaiel and Jon Schubbe. You’ll solve environmental puzzles in a world where objects only exist when they are illuminated. It looks remarkable, with strong art direction establishing an identity for the game alongside the Limbos and Braids of the world. It won Excellence in Audio at the 2010 IGF as well as 2009’s IndieCade Gameplay Innovation award.

MUSIC

Skillz: The DJ Game

Publisher: Playpen Studios
Release: 2012

A rhythm action game in the style of Guitar Hero, Skillz: The DJ Game expands the genre to include two turntables that can be spun, scratched, and tapped. It’s been designed for touch-screen portable devices, but is coming to the PC with support for gamepads. The soundtrack includes Diplo, Mr Scruff, Kid Cudi and Roots Manuva, we’ll have you know.

SPORT

Cricket life 1st Edition

Publisher: Gamebience
Release: 2012

Cricket Life 1 is a cricketer management sim from Canadian developers Gamebience. You’ll sign deals, make media appearances and build a business in addition to actually, you know, playing cricket. No mention of taking bribes, sadly. It’s endorsed by Australian cricketer Michael Hussey, demonstrating that he is probably doing very well at Cricket Life 1.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13

Publisher: EA
Release: 2012

Nothing has been said about what’s new for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13’s game mechanics, but EA are making a big fuss about the box it’ll come in. Fans voted for the golfers they wanted to see on the cover, with popular young golfing bucks Rickie Fowler and Rory McIlroy winning out in the end. Gripping stuff we’re sure you’ll agree. PGA Tour 12 scored only 15%. Whoops.

RTL Winter Sports 2012

Publisher: DTP Entertainment
Release: 2012

A PC version is on the cards despite an apparent focus on the Wii. It offers ten different winter sports and a variety of single- and multiplayer modes. Early screenshots have confirmed curling, which is very exciting, and the E3 trailer shows real people pretending to ski and snowboard in their incredibly clean houses. Less of that please.

Fifa Street

Publisher: EA
Release: Christmas

Footie Day, sweepin’ defenders away, on my way, to kick a ball with my feet. Can you tell me how to get, how to get to FIFA Street? Come and play, football by pressing ‘A’, you’ll find players there, and a team to beat. Can you tell me how to get, how to get to FIFA Street?

FPS

Aliens: Colonial Marines

Publisher: Sega
Release: 2012

Based on the characters of the Alien film series, Aliens: Colonial Marines sees another wave of doomed soldiers stranded in Hadley’s Hope following the catastrophic destruction of the atmospheric processor.

Prepare to be dragged into vents and impaled on tail-spikes as you and up to three friends find yourselves in a running battle for survival against H R Giger’s most famous creations. Gearbox’s devotion to the franchise shows in the details, from the sound design (in space, everyone can hear if you get the pulse rifle noise wrong) to the wintry gloom of LV-426 and sparse, loaded banter between squadmates. Where additions have been made, care has been taken to stay in step with the films.

Hopefully this will be the first Aliens game to capture the camaraderie that is so central to the films, and so fundamental to the space marine shooter. LV-426 is, after all, where it all started.

Far Cry 3

Publisher: Ubisoft
Release: 2012

After Far Cry’s technical chops and Far Cry 2’s relocation to Africa, the next installment in Ubisoft’s open-ended shooter series is taking another step sideways. Far Cry 3 is a meditation on madness: the island you’re stranded on is populated by sociopaths. It’s a drama as much about making you think as about making you wildly fire an AK-47 over a bit of cover.

The assault on a compound shown at E3 confirmed that freeform combat is still central, but the sequence is bookended by scripted events that tie it all together.

The scope of combat has expanded to include context-sensitive takedowns, such as killing a guard with his own knife before throwing it into his mate. I’ve got no idea where protagonist Jason Brody learned this, but it’s presumably the same place where he learned to blow up bridges and hijack helicopters. He might just belong on that island after all.

Miner Wars 2081

Publisher: Keen Software House
Release: Spring

Taking the role of a spaceship pilot, you’re free to make your own paths through huge asteroids, and shoot fellow players. A totally interesting concept, but we’re slightly wary of zero-G shooters following the dull as dishwater Shattered Horizon.

Iron Front – Liberation 1944

Publisher: Deep Silver
Release: Spring

Based on Arma II’s engine, Iron Front is a recreation of the Soviet offensive of 1944 in southern Poland. Taking the role of either a German or Russian soldier, you’ll be able to take control of tanks, planes and your own feet to destroy the enemy. Expect clips from it to show up in forthcoming ITV documentaries haplessly pretending to be real life battle action.

Gotham City Impostors

Publisher: Warner Bros
Release: Autumn

A very different kettle of bats to Arkham City, it’s a jokey online first-person shooter, with Batman, Catwoman and Joker impersonators battling to the death in a brightly-lit version of Bats’ home town. Developers Monolith have already proved themselves in comical shooters with the still-great No One Lives Forever, but they’ll have to pull out the stops to take on TF2.

Counter Strike: Global Offensive

Publisher: Valve
Release: 2012

What started as a port of CS: Source for consoles has become a wholesale revamp for the great-grandfather of the modern military shooter. Billed as a ‘bestof’ compilation of CS 1.6 and Source, Global Offensive is expected to boast detailed matchmaking to lower the barrier to entry for new players. Time to brush up on your bunnyhopping

Taking Point

Publisher: Cronix Games
Release: 2012

Taking Point is an indie FPS that promises multiplayer action on par with Call of Duty or Battlefield. It’s certainly ambitious, but there’s little of the game to see so far beyond a gallery of gun renders and early map designs. In that regard, at least, it’s making us nostalgic for the golden age of FPS modding. Those were the days.

Warface

Publisher: Warface
Release: Crytek

A free-to-play online shooter from Crytek, the smart folks behind Crysis. Features co-op and class-based PvP in a variety of modes as well as all the expected visual flare. It’s pretty much guaranteed to be the bestlooking free FPS on the market, but it’s not the only one with cool robot suits. ‘Welcome to Warface, soldier’ barks the trailer, remarkably keeping a straight face as it does so. Oh, Warface, how you amuse us.

Prey 2

Publisher: Bethesda
Release: 2012

The original was an interesting, innovative title that never quite added up to the sum of its gravitydefying, portal-planting parts. Prey 2 immerses us in an alien world, with a US Marshal waking up to find he’s a bounty hunter on a distant planet. Its emphasis on shooting and neon-lit visuals make it look like a Mass Effect quest in a Tron universe.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6: Patriots

Publisher: Ubisoft
Release: 2012

Ubisoft’s attempt to consolidate their place on the modern military shooter bandwagon. The hype describes it as a mix of tactical squad-based combat with ‘unprecedented levels of humanity’. Footage released by Game Informer caused a bit of a stir, not least for its nowinfamous wife-kissing quicktime event. Heavy handed, but the production values are there.

Ghost Recon Online

Publisher: Ubisoft
Release: 2012

A free-to-play modern military shooter with customisable skills and equipment. It’s looking far prettier than direct rival Battlefield Free 2 Play, and the presence of cloaking devices and other high-tech abilities suggests that it’s not taking itself too seriously. Ubisoft invite you to ‘become the ultimate ghost’, which we suspect we will achieve by dying a lot.

Blacklight Retribution

Publisher: Perfect World
Release: 2012

A fast-paced free-to-play multiplayer shooter set in a slick cyberpunk metropolis. It’ll be supported by microtransactions, but these look to be mostly cosmetic. It features jetpacking robot hardsuits and cool helmets that’ll allow you to see through walls and detect flaws in enemy armour. Seriously, 2012. We turned 14 years ago. You can stop trying so hard.

Sniper Elite V2

Publisher: Rebellion
Release: 2012

Rebellion’s game of sitting very still and summarily executing people from far away has been built specifically to take advantage of the PC’s more powerful hardware. Based on the teaser trailer, we can expect operatic music, dramatic pauses, and Nazis getting shot in the neck in slow-mo X-ray vision. It really is grotesque. But hey, it’s not gratuitous if you’ve waited a long time to make the kill, right?

Metro: Last Light

Publisher: THQ
Release: 2012

Metro 2033’s tense, oozing atmosphere covered a lot of the game’s flaws. The follow-up aims to fix them, with THQ’s Danny Bilson reckoning that it “Improves on the original in every way.” The tunnel rats and mutants are back, too. An ongoing civil war over a doomsday device provides the backdrop. And everyone loves a fight to avoid the threat of total violent annihilation, right?

Arma 3

Publisher: Bohemia Interactive
Release: 2012

PC gaming’s premier hiding in a bush and trying not to die simulator returns with a vast Mediterranean island to explore. In addition to the usual comprehensive array of weapons and vehicles, the singleplayer campaign boasts a renewed focus on narrative. For us, it’ll always be about emergent multiplayer madness and the mods.

Zone: The Battleground

Publisher: Xitol Softworks
Release: Sniper: Autumn

Details on this indie sci-fi FPS are scant. There’s plenty of concept art and soundtrack material doing the rounds on the internet, but actual footage of the game or screenshots are near non-existent.

Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2

Publisher: City Interactive
Release: Spring

For a game about dressing as a Christmas tree and shooting people from afar, Sniper: Ghost Warrior did rather well, selling enough units to warrant console ports. This time you’ve got a spotter at your side.

Syndicate

Publisher: EA
Release: Spring

It may have ditched isometric strategy for the fi rstperson, but the new Syndicate is looking no less cerebral than the original: it’s just that ‘cerebral’, in this case, means ‘hacking people’s brains and making them shoot themselves’. Ace!

STRATEGY

DOTA 2

Publisher: Valve
Release: 2012

Valve are in a strange position with Dota 2. As the straight sequel to the Warcraft III mod that invented a genre, it’s The Man: the conservative stalwart for its more experimental cousins to set themselves against. It’s not an accident that Valve revealed the game with a million-dollar International Tournament at GamesCom: this is a competitive game to its core.

This means the same creep-farming, last-hitting action RTS mechanics that have undergone constant refinement since 2003. Don’t expect upheavals like Blizzard DOTA’s mounts, just a relentlessly tested and veteran-approved take on a classic.

Valve are looking to address rage-quitting by teaching players when and how to turn a gank into an epic comeback, and spectator tools are designed to make it easier than ever to watch and learn. If you take your ancient-defending seriously, this is the place to start.

Fields of Glory: Wolves from the Sea

Publisher: Slitherine
Release: Spring

We picture lots of wolves paddling little wolfy boats up to a beach somewhere, with special oars that can accommodate their furry paws. We get a hexagonal strategy add-on pack. Apparently this one packs over 200 new battle group graphics and ‘12 plus’ new historical battles. We can’t confirm how many more than 12 there are though. There could be 34,000.

Jagged Alliance: Back in Action

Publisher: Kalypso Media
Release: Spring

Rid foreign lands of harsh dictatorships in this remake of 1999’s Jagged Alliance 2. Unlike strategy titles that pit unfeasibly large tanks against unnecessarily large aliens, this sees you control a team of four mercenaries, with the emphasis firmly on tactics over firepower. A new ‘Plan and Go’ system recalls Frozen Synapse’s tense battles.

Legends of Pegasus

Publisher: Kalypso Media
Release: Summer

Yes, it’s another 4X space sim, but at least it looks a little more interesting than a Sins of a Solar Empire clone. There are three races: humans, the Xor and a third unrevealed class. The lead character will be able to jump between them all. Developers Novacore Studios are working hard to make sure its singleplayer campaigns are accessible.

Magna Mundi

Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Release: Spring

“It’s just another Magna Mundi,” sang the Bangles, we think. Promising 400 countries and four centuries of world history, it seems to be along the lines of Paradox’s other Very Serious Grand Historical Strategies. Expect many, many pages of statistics, a manual the size of the Yellow Pages and country management complete with it own weather systems.

Prime World

Publisher: Nival
Release: 2012

The only MOBA to have a Zuma-like minigame built into it, Prime World provides a novel take on the classic DotA gameplay, leaning towards accessibility and opening the door to casual gamers. You design your kingdom in the game’s Facebook component, raising buildings and researching tech that unlocks and boosts champions in the MOBA game–which is just as deep and hardcore as any you’ve played, with skill shots, twitch moves and terra-forming terrain that shows which side is winning. The all-important champion design looks promising, with inspired designs and unique mechanics, like the Rat Catcher sending his quick-yet-vulnerable mice minions to steal gold from all enemy players on the map.

Dragon Commander

Publisher: Larian Studios
Release: 2012

Dragon Commander is a game featuring dragons with jetpacks. We’re going to repeat that: dragons with jetpacks. It’s an RTS with RPG elements set in the Divinity universe, but… dragons with jetpacks. Dragons with jetpacks? Dragons with jetpacks! You can also marry a skeleton who has enormous apples instead of breasts, and fly with her on a magical aircraft carrier. Magical aircraft carrier! Because dragons with jetpacks.

Port Royale 2

Publisher: Kalypso Media
Release: Summer

The latest in the series of aquatic trading games. Set in the 17th century, it sees your young character enter turbulent waters – both literally and figuratively. You can either play it straight as a trader and set up trading routes, or steam in as an adventurer and commit acts of piracy. We know which one sounds most appealing to us. We’re not sure if it’ll do anything particularly new, but it’s certainly going to be solid.

X-Rebirth

Publisher: Deep Silver
Release: Autumn

The X series essentially took Elite’s space trading model and revamped it for the 21st century. X Rebirth is the sixth release in the series, featuring a whole new user interface and high-speed space exploration. It won’t be compromised by console co-development, either – developer Egosoft have promised it’ll be strictly PC only. Yay!

Wargame: European Escalation

Publisher: Eugen
Release: 2012

It’s a Cold War-era RTS with a lovely descriptive title by the chaps behind Act of War. A proprietary engine allows hundreds of infantry and vehicles to be rendered at once, giving the potential for warfare on a Supreme Commander scale.

Men of War: Condemned Heroes

Publisher: Lace Mamba
Release: Spring

Placing you in command of a Soviet penal battalion during WWII, the latest in the series looks to be the toughest yet. It’s intended to tell the story of these poor doomed soldiers. A brutal challenge for strategy veterans.

Gettysberg: Armoured Warfare

Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Release: Spring

The free-to-play game is set in the American Civil War, but adds tanks, miniguns and a first-personshooter viewpoint to the traditional real time strategy. A pleasingly bonkers combo.

Naval War: Arctic Circle

Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Release: Summer

Paradox finally get round to an RTS set in the present day, and all it’s all about boats in the Arctic circle. It seems Russia has gone to war with the rest of the world (didn’t they stop doing that in the ’80s?) and it’s up to NATO to stop them. Expect much chasing around the chilly waters of the north pole, complete with state of the art weaponry and ships.

Warlock – Master of the Arcane

Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Release: Summer

Have you ever wanted to become a master of the arcane? A warlock, so to speak? Well, now your dreams have come true. Built on the hexy turn-based-strategy Majesty, Warlock lets you build a wizard up to warlock status by researching and mastering spells, and doing other wizardy things like growing a big beard and wearing a cloak.

Masters of the Broken World

Publisher: Snowberry Connection
Release: 2012

Hex turn-based strategies are a big deal in the eastern bloc at the moment. This gives you a whole broken world to, er, master. Starting as a bedroom project, it’s been picked up by Snowball Connection, who previously gave us Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword. True story: they’re marketing at retired Estonian schoolteachers. PC GAMING!

Carrier Command

Publisher: Bohemia Interactive
Release: Spring

A remake of the 1988 original, the new Carrier Command is a mixture of high-level strategy and real-time vehicle control with a sci-fi bent. Expect to pilot tanks, aircraft and drones from your comfortable seat on board a futuristic aircraft carrier. Not 2012’s highest-profile return of a beloved franchise, but it’ll chime with gamers of a certain age.

Crusader Kings II

Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Release: Spring

We’re pretty sure there isn’t any period in the past two thousand years that hasn’t been covered by historical strategy games. Crusader Kings II begins in 1066 and covers the next four hundred years, and it’s focused more on intrapersonal relationships than ramming ships into the coast of Spain until you win. Graham’s already played a bit and he liked it a lot, describing it as: “The kind of history I can get behind.”

Scrolls

Publisher: Mojang
Release: 2012

Not to be confused with more lumpily-titled The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Mojang’s Scrolls is a card battler that is designed to scale from small-scale competitive matches to long-form campaigns. True to form, and much like card games of the real world, a degree of random chance promises to keep the game fresh. We don’t know how it’ll play, but the mind behind Minecraft has earned more than a little benefit of the doubt

Star Wolves 2: Ashes of Victor

Publisher: 1C
Release: Spring

This presents you with an open-ended campaign set in a galaxy on the cusp of open war. It’s always been a tough series to crack for new players, so we’d like to see Elite Games Team try to lower the barrier to entry a little bit.

Circus World

Publisher: Excalibur
Release: Spring

Jolly circus management with an Appreciation Engine that allows you to monitor how audiences are responding to your show. You can take a seat from a fi rstperson perspective and watch over 30 types of performer. From the maker of Populous.

Victoria 2: A House Divided

Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Release: Spring

Grand strategy with a focus on the American Civil War, with new political, economic and cultural mechanics. Guide your nation through the upheavals at the birth of the 20th century and try not to get yourself shot in a theatre.

King Arthur 2: The Roleplaying Wargame

Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Release: Spring

This sequel sees King Arthur return to the land of real-time strategy, complete with all the dragons and mysticism that existed during the era. Expect huge battles and some lovely visuals.

Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm

Publisher: Activision Blizzard
Release: 2012

An expandosequel to the biggest strategy game in the world, the campaign focuses on one-time Queen of Blades. The new campaign allows you to upgrade Kerrigan and her Zerg swarm over twenty missions, while multiplayer has been updated with three new units per side. Almost everything else receives an overhaul too.

They had me at ‘pet battle system’. Casual WoW is back. At Blizzcon, Blizzard outlined their philosophy for what they’re attempting to achieve with the next, and possibly most important, expansion pack ever. More activities. More entertainment. More time spent out in the overworld. More time competing with your guildmates and server friends. Less time spent in the cities waiting for your dungeon group or arena team to start.

The problem Blizzard face is that the World of Warcraft player population is ageing; and with it, their interest in spending hour upon hour raiding is drifting. The long-term playerbase began asking awkward questions like “what am I achieving?” and “why am I playing if I’m not having fun?” Blizzard’s response: put some fun back in.

'Hmmn, I wonder if it's time for my tummy to be ruffled.'

So now we have the star attraction – slovenly bears with giant paunches, living a life of beer and entertainment while cruising the seas on the back of a giant turtle. We have a new class, the Monk, complete with a combat model that does away with auto-attack entirely. They can punch, they can hit. They can also tank, heal and do damage. For those players who like to click a lot, the monk is for you.

There are new ways to develop your character. The talent system takes its cues from Modern Warfare’s perks; rather than ploughing points into trees of statistical bonuses, at set intervals you’ll be asked to make a choice from three competing abilities. It makes those cloned systems in competing games feel obsolete. There’s a rebalance of combat abilities, a rethink of how players graduate to raiding (hello easy-mode raid finder), and six new zones.

There are new ways to play WoW, too; ways that don’t involve raiding. There’s the new dungeon challenges – asking you to beat bronze, silver and gold par times in groups of five – with leaderboards and rewards for the swiftest.

'Stop in the name of Pandaria, before I cuddle you to death!'

But… pet battles! This proves, yet again, that WoW is just a hole into which Blizzard are happy to throw whatever makes players happy. And what definitely makes players happy is Pokémon. You’ll be able to train your non-combat pets and take them into battles against monsters and trainers across the overworld, or against players. There will be Pet Battle Masters, rare pets, seasonal pets, even pet talents. Expect it to develop into a complete subculture – one that can be levelled through without reaching max level.

In 2011 WoW began a steady decline in player numbers; 2012 is make or break. If Pandaria works, WoW will remain the dominant force in MMO gaming. If it doesn’t, expect a free-to-play version to arrive sooner than expected; one that will probably involve buying pets.

As the MMO coalesced into its modern form, quirks that were initially necessary compromises became widely-accepted features. Mute characters that embody utility rather than personality; quest objectives that only relate tangentially to the story that frames them; raid bosses designed to be killed and killed again by the same groups of people. Good games have been made – and are being made – on those principles, but it’s hard to argue that they’re sacred cows. Instead, they’re the elephants in the room that Guild Wars 2 is setting out to slay.

“MMOs aren’t always great RPGs,” says Eric Flannum, lead game designer. “Most MMOs try to set a tone for the world, but they don’t necessarily try to tell you a story about your character.” Guild Wars 2 isn’t alone in placing renewed emphasis on the player’s story, but it is making the most comprehensive array of changes to the way the MMO functions in order to do it. Everything from quests – sorry, events – to guilds and grouping has been rethought in order to create the most dynamic and finely crafted experience.

On the surface, however, Guild Wars 2 doesn’t look like a wholesale rejection of what has come before. Quite the contrary: this is a game of action bars, inventory screens and objective trackers whose major breaks from tradition sneak up on you gradually over the course of gameplay.

Dynamic events ebb and flow through the course of your adventures.

You’ll realise that the objectives popping up in the top-right of the screen aren’t quests you’ve accepted but dynamic events occurring in the world around you. Then you’ll realise that the marker above an NPC isn’t an indicator that he’s got a shopping list, but a simple way of drawing attention towards a particular place where something cool is going to happen.

Guild Wars 2 will provide you with a personal storyline derived from your choice of race and background, but the majority of your experience is dictated by how you respond to a world that’s constantly changing. Event chains, while mostly confined to individual zones, are designed to interact with each other in such a way that you’re unlikely to ever encounter the same place in the same way. Rather than the emergent unpredictability of something like EVE, it’s a way of creating a living world without sacrificing the advantages of a handcrafted challenge.

During my time with the game, I found myself battling alongside another player and receiving increased rewards without grouping or sharing quests. Rather than needing to find other players to see the more difficult content, Guild Wars 2’s guilds will form organically. “We look at a persistent world as a way to go out and meet people,” says Eric Flannum. “Our world encourages people to play together… they will eventually communicate, then they’ll develop long-term relationships and guilds will support that.”

The Syvari are humanoid but made of vines and leaves. Yum!

Increasingly, PVP systems operate outside of normal play: battlegrounds with their own rules and conditions that sometimes feel like a different game entirely. Rather than attempt to mask the distinction, it’s something that Guild Wars 2 makes explicit.

“We look at it more the way you would an RTS,” Flannum explains. “The singleplayer and multiplayer are basically the same game but the singleplayer has this rich story because that’s what players are looking for, and the multiplayer’s just very convenient to jump in and out of.”

“We’re trying to facilitate the community that will develop around PVP,” Flannum says. “You join a match by going to a lobby area, so you’re going to see other players that are trying to join games practising their builds and things like that, and you’ll get talking to them in there.”

Rather than waiting in a queue, a FPS-style browser allows players to keep track of their favourite servers and the places their friends are playing. “What we expect to happen is a similar thing to Team Fortress or Call of Duty, where you play on the same server consistently and you start to see the same people over and over again.”

Edlar Dragons have seized control of Tyria in the time since the original game.

MMO communities are notorious for mapping out and documenting every inch of the games they play: a task that won’t be easy with Guild Wars 2, according to Flannum. “We never underestimate the ability of players to do things we don’t expect, but they can’t ruin the experience for other players and they don’t have to do that in order to get rewards.”

An MMO that can be enjoyed without one eye on the ‘right’ way to build your character, and that doesn’t simply accept the absurdity of queuing for a monster as a matter of course, is an exciting prospect.

“We’re having to overcome a lot of the preconceived notions and the training that people have got from other MMOs,” says Flannum, describing a player’s experience of Guild Wars 2 as a process of gradual discovery. “They’ll go in comfortable with the situation, and then start noticing the differences and saying ‘I’m playing this game in a entirely different way than I’m used to’ – and that’s cool, right?

Dishonored is about tools. You’re the bodyguard of a murdered empress – nice job, by the way – and you’ve been framed for her death. So you’re trained in combat, but even you can’t hack through everyone you’ll face in this strange and tumultuous city. You’re going to have to rely on your tools, conventional and otherwise.

Dagger, crossbow, traps. The basics are effective, but they’re not tools of brute force: the perfect application of each means using stealth or other trickery to get the jump on people. A single guard facing the wrong way can be silently backstabbed, but if that situation doesn’t present itself, Dishonored gives you the powers to engineer it.

‘Blink’. Dash forwards in an instant, skipping all the space between you and your destination. A blinked-into opponent is staggered by the force, and Dishonored is littered with collapsing scaffolds and other grisly fates for the stumbling victim. Developers Arkane have proven their knack for environmental misfortune with Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.

You can play through the whole game without killing anyone, but these guys look like they might be spoiling for a fight.

‘Pause’. Something of a step up from the traditional Bullet Time. Time is frozen for everything except you and the things you interact with: you can load and fire your crossbow, but the bolts won’t go beyond its prod until time flows again.

‘Vanish’. Not yourself, but a body. You could drag them around to a hiding place, but if you really want to be sure the corpse won’t tip anyone off, quietly vaporise it with your supernatural powers.

‘Possession’. A risky gambit, this is where you become someone or something else. Man or beast are equally viable candidates, but if you’re going to jump into a rat, be aware that if it dies while you’re in there, so do you. You’re actually in your host, in some gruesome sense.

In Dishonored you play an assassin with magical powers.

There are more tools, but the combinations of these alone are what really make Dishonored stand out. The dagger lets you backstab, but it’s the other tools that can put you in position to do so: blink past your enemy to get behind them, pause time and stroll to the best ambush spot, or possess one of their friends to get them when their guard is down.

Games that allow this intricate play are sometimes called immersive sims: a rather vague-sounding subgenre that covers intricate games like Thief, Deus Ex and System Shock. They’re all about tools, a wide selection of abilities that follow consistent rules the player can find creative ways to exploit.

A lot of those great games didn’t sell that well, so it was a rather underserved genre for years. But since BioShock’s massive success, it’s been slowly mounting a resurgence. Between Syndicate, BioShock Infinite and now Dishonored, 2012 could be the year the immersive sim rides again.

The first trailer of IO Interactive’s next Hitman game, Run For Your Life, looks like a departure from the series. The last game, Blood Money, exemplified the best of what the Hitman games had become: open, freely roamable environments in which no-one is hostile to you until you do something wrong. Infiltration was based around finding the right disguise, and there was very little actual stealth.

The first video of Absolution shows more sneaking in the shadows than playing dress-up. It shows hostile environments where Agent 47 can’t afford to be seen. And it shows a sequence in which you’re fleeing across the rooftops of Chicago, evading the searchlight of a circling police chopper. It’s not at all what we’ve come to expect, so we asked game director Tore Blystad if it’s representative of the rest of the game.

“There are times in the game that we want to dictate a part for the player,” Tore says of the chase sequence. “But it is quite rare and in most of the cases we’ve decided against it on the team, after play-testing it.”

Hiding in plain sight is the evolution of disguise.

IO want Absolution to tell stories. “What’s always worked well in the Hitman games is the strange and often seedy stories the player could encounter throughout the levels,” Blystad says. “It’s very much a voyeur game, where you often feel like watching something that you’re not supposed to see. We spend a lot of time integrating the situations and dialogue into the game, and the level designers work closely with the script writers to get the best possible drama out of the levels.”

In the same mission as the helicopter chase, an overheard clash between rookie cop Fizano and his sergeant adds a degree of humanity to characters that could otherwise be ignored. “There are all kinds of personalities and they have their own little feuds and disputes,” says Blystad.

When 47 subsequently takes the rookie hostage in IO’s demonstration, the moment is charged. “We get a lot of comments from our play-through where 47 kills Fizano, saying that it’s unfair. When the players get their hands on it they can choose the outcome by themselves.”

The chatter and scripted events that make up these stories go on while you play, so how much of them you experience depends on your play style. If you’re interested in what’s going on, you can stay hidden and listen to the whole thing. If not, you can start killing who you need to kill and sneaking past whoever you don’t.

'Would you mind holding still while I whack you with this vase?'

But while previous Hitman games have included incidental stories like this, the Fizano situation is unusual for the series. More commonly, guards and civilians were overheard bitching, snapping at each other or obsessing over sex – as Tore says, the stories are seedy. Their personalities seemed designed to encourage the kind of disdain a dispassionate killer might feel for the people he passes on his jobs, whether he kills them or not. “In a way you can say we do the opposite in Absolution; we want the NPCs to be more human and believable, so that the player thinks twice before going on a killing spree.”

Guards and bystanders are more human in other ways, too. “We have changed the way the AI works,” says Blystad. “They have far larger brains and they have a lot more information about the world. They can also communicate more logically. Previously they seemed telepathic, and if you set off one guard every NPC in the level would be on to you. In Absolution, things propagate more logically and the player can stop information from spreading if he reacts fast.”

The fact that the game has improved stealth mechanics – hugging cover, an indicator of who’s seeing you, and a brief x-ray vision ability – is not a bad thing. What is more worrying in that first footage is the moment when 47, disguised as a cop, puts a hand over his face to fool some passing cops. Is that conspicuous ‘blend in’ power what disguise has been reduced to?

What, no coppers? This screenshot has us stumped.

“The blend in is a powerful feature enabling the player to bluff his was past NPCs using instinct power. Instinct is an economy, and blending is pretty expensive, so it’s only possible to use sparingly.”

The rest of the time, disguise is more organic. “The NPCs see through disguises from a distance, but it takes time for them to find out, so mostly the disguise gameplay is about ‘surfing’ on the edge of the NPCs’ vision to scope the area, or using stationary interactive objects that are custom for each disguise – hiding in plain sight.”

“The doughnut trays from Run For Your Life are an example of this, which is specific for police. Interacting with these objects enables 47 to stay in character, and the NPCs will treat them as one of their own. So the player can use this mechanic to scope out the area and look for weaknesses in the defence.”

Finding the right disguise is no longer enough, you have to also play the role. It’ll be interesting to see whether making it more of a game will overcomplicate Hitman, or if it will feel like the logical next step in social stealth.

Not since Quake Test have so many played such a small chunk of such an exciting game for so long. The first two Diablo games mixed the compulsive character progression of an RPG with the reactive combat of an action game, and Diablo III refines both. It’s going to be the drug of choice for the addiction-prone PC gamer in 2012. And we know this because we’re playing the same small chunk of it – a modest beta version – over and over again.

Interestingly, though, it’s not quite the same chunk each time we play it. Not just because of some randomised side quests and environments, but because we’re getting to see Blizzard revise and overhaul the game as it gets closer to completion. Quite drastically, it turns out.

Until recently, one of the five classes you can choose from was rather underwhelming. The crossbow-based Demon Hunter had a few fun abilities, but she felt much more vulnerable than the other classes, without any extra damage output to make up for it. But as Blizzard shuffle skills around, changing damage percentages and the order in which they unlock, they’ve given the Demon Hunter some much-needed muscle.

Skeletons aren't very good at playing Just Dance.

An early Demon Hunter skill called Impale is now powerful enough to give her an edge: it’s a fast, high-damage projectile with almost no cooldown. It makes the Demon Hunter an assassin: with a full reserve of her main resource, Hatred, she can fire a flurry of these in rapid succession to cut down a boss monster brutally fast.

Soon after, she unlocks Rapid Fire. It’s a torrent of arrows that costs a chunk of Hatred to start, but is relatively cheap to sustain if you keep holding the button down. It gives her a satisfying crowd control ability, and adds an interesting layer of strategy: often it’s more costefficient to keep firing between groups of enemies than to stop and restart.

Between them, they define the role of the Demon Hunter better than before: she’s the only class for whom it’s cheap to take out single bosses, but costly to deal with crowds.

Thedemon hunter is fuelled by Discipline and Hatred. Aren't we all?

There’s also been a universal change in Blizzard’s take on how customising your character should work. Previously, you could switch between any and all skills you have access to, at any time. You had limited slots, but there was nothing to stop you putting something else in them midcombat. Now, you can only do that at Altars of Nephalem, stones found in town and at major checkpoints.

The previous system was pretty ridiculous, in terms of the potential exploits, but it also feels needlessly awkward now to trek back to town every time you want to tweak your build – why not just let us change skills any time we’re not in combat?

The general combat balance of Diablo III makes it magnificently fun: you butcher and frazzle enemies in seconds, and every skill feels ferociously powerful. But that did make it conspicuously easy. In the new beta, your powers are still devastating, but more of the monsters you encounter are vicious too. The Wizard finally feels vulnerable when mobbed, and death is no longer unheard of.

The zombies have been taking sartorial advice from Dr Manhattan.

The best of the difficulty tweaks do more than rebalance the numbers. Some boss monsters now have the ability to spawn floating points of purple light that fire out a beam of death that rotates around them. In frighteningly short order, you can find yourself surrounded by deadly clockfaces, dashing to avoid their swinging hands. They’re one of the few things in Diablo that force you to manoeuvre precisely in order to stay alive, and I’ve died at least once every time the bastard things crop up. They’re brilliant.

It’s a bit of a pain that you have to connect to Blizzard’s servers even to play singleplayer, but if they continue to tweak the algorithms and add new features like this after launch, it may be worth it. Particularly in a randomised game, encountering something you didn’t know existed is a great experience.

Skirt or no skirt, the Demon Hunter kicks monster butt.

Replaying it so many times has revealed an interesting difference in the way your character develops compared with the previous games. Almost everything, even the magical spells you cast as a Wizard, depends entirely on the weapon in your hands. When I fire an Arcane Orb, a glowing magical projectile that explodes on impact, the damage it does to the zombies across the room is a function of how sharp the sword in my hands is.

It’s a strange idea, but a good game mechanic: it means equipment is equally important to all classes, so Wizards can get as excited about loot as Barbarians do. It also means that if your character is struggling to keep up with the monsters, a trip to the blacksmith will usually fix it.

The formula is still evolving, and it’s exciting to see Blizzard work so fast. Diablo III is already slicker and more satisfying than any other action RPG out there; it’s almost scary to think how good it’s going to be next year.

Familiarity in Rapture? Not a good thing,” says BioShock creator Ken Levine, explaining why Irrational Games had to leave Andrew Ryan and his rotting underwater metropolis behind with Infinite. Luckily, the team’s come up with another location that looks just as good: the sky city of Columbia, where a network of dirigibles keeps a vivid chunk of turn-of-the-century Americana aloft. It’s got all the clapboard, Lincoln masks and bunting you could want.

Columbia is a world’s fair crossed with a flying fortress. Fantasy aside, it’s the perfect place to construct a game that examines a crucial point in America’s development: the period between 1900 and 1914 that saw patriotic ideals curdle into jingoism, while the nation’s experiments with power led to labour wars at home and gunship diplomacy overseas. If you’re used to the one-two punch of BioShock combat – period weaponry in one hand, more exotic attacks in the other – Infinite’s chaotic battles should feel pretty familiar, although some of the open-air environments hint at a new emphasis on ranged fighting.

What has changed, however, is the timing of your arrival on the scene. Unlike Rapture, which had gone to the dogs long before we first stepped from our diving bell, Columbia is tantalisingly perched on the edge of revolution, as the leftist Vox Populi prepare to rise up against the ultra-nationalist Founders. The latter want to keep Columbia aloft, the former want to send it tumbling to the earth, and that means Irrational are throwing us into a city that’s hours away from anarchy.

'Not the face! Not my beautiful face... !'

Can games handle a genuine riot? It’s certainly not the kind of thing you can convey with the level of set-piece scripting that the original BioShock was so reliant upon. Instead, Levine’s team has turned to AI negotiations as the solution, creating a dense mesh of NPCs that will constantly monitor the player’s movements, talk among themselves, and juggle a range of different reactions to whatever you’re doing. Pedestrians will watch you for the right moment to foil a mugging or buy a soda, while angry mobs may choose to hold themselves in check for the time being, or to start breaking windows.

If that’s a lot of pressure to put on behaviour coders, it’s nothing compared with Elizabeth, the mysterious girl you’ve been sent to Columbia to rescue. Part plot device and part combat modifier (she can reach into alternate dimensions to summon everything from ammo to a passing tram for flattening enemies), Infinite’s leading lady also sits at the centre of Irrational’s greatest challenge: to build a story-driven game that hinges on a convincing human relationship between the player and an AI.

The first King Arthur was a game of great ideas that weren’t fully realised. It fused Total War’s combination of turn-based and real-time strategy with RPG-style characters, spells and quests. The second game isn’t about changing that formula, it’s about refining it. Neocore have paid careful attention to criticism of the first game, and at every stage they’ve fixed, improved, upgraded and expanded on what went before.

The monstrous units are a big part of King Arthur’s appeal. Drawing on Celtic mythology to deploy an army of giants, wargs and fairy soldiers was one of the highlights of the first game, the sequel looks set to build on that.

Arthur's pain has caused a hole in reality, and monsters are pouring through...

I was facing off against entire armies of giants by my second battle, and while I didn’t get to see the high-tier units in action, Neocore assured me that there were many more monsters to come. Included among them are flying units, which could potentially add an extra dimension to the classic archer/infantry/ cavalry system. Dragons!

Don’t count out the humble humans though, especially when you can bring up to 4,000 of them to a fight. Your Knights, however – the upgradeable, spellcasting generals that lead your armies – remain your most potent weapon. Each one now has his own unique skill tree, full of abilities that can turn the tide of combat, or smash enemies apart with bolts of magical fire. For example, Septimus Sulla, my starting character in the prologue, had access to a tactically useful ‘slow’ spell, which turned even the most determined cavalry charge into a slow, sullen, shuffle. Another knight could sweep away several enemies with a mighty sword stroke, taking out whole units swiftly and efficiently.

Spells can be real game changers in King Arthur 2. In my first game I was too slow to capture the important victory locations, so my opponent, despite being outnumbered, managed to get my men bogged down with his heavy infantry, then pepper me with devastating lightning bolts.

By the second battle I was smarter: I quickly grabbed two shrines that boosted my magical resistance, meaning the enemy’s spells just bounced off my troops as they rapidly closed in for the kill.

Battles will be mighty when you can bring 4,000 men to the party.

In the previous King Arthur, the player with the most victory locations would count down to victory. The idea was to force your army to be mobile, but it didn’t quite work, instead meaning that fast cavalry or teleporting knights could win entire games without really fighting the enemy. Now the locations no longer contribute towards victory, but they do carry more potent spells, able to be used all over the battlefield, as I was unlucky enough to find out.

There’s also more emphasis on other RPG elements, like loot. Magic items were common rewards in King Arthur, so much so that you often ended up with more than you needed. Now taking three surplus items to the artefact shop will let you forge them into a single, more powerful object.

Which items you use in the process will influence the end result, but there’s a degree of randomisation. The whole process reminded me very much of Diablo II’s Horadric Cube, and should add a welcome layer of customisation to the items in the game.

The artefact shop is also home to one of the game’s more unusual innovations: they now act as a kind of ‘cloud storage’ for items. Anything be dropped off at one shop can then be picked up from any of the others, with a similar system for troops placed in castles. It might sound silly, but it’s certainly better than having two armies take a six-month detour just so their generals can exchange trinkets.

King Arthur 2 builds on the strengths of the first game.

Unlike most games that claim to offer ‘RPG elements’, King Arthur actually includes moments of narrative role play in addition to the numbers game. The quests from the first game – little ‘choose your own adventure’ moments where you decided how your Knight would deal with certain situations – are now bigger and more complex.

When I played, I had to win a debate in the Senate regarding my family duties. There were several layers and branches of conversation, resulting in something far deeper than the short and simple quests of the first game.

King Arthur 2 isn’t going to reinvent the first game; it doesn’t need to. It takes the strong ideas and setting of the first game and delivers them bigger, better, and more polished than ever before. Total War may finally have a real challenger

As a Consular I don’t have a Knight’s affinity for lightsabering. I do, however, possess a deep affinity for the Force. I know this for a fact because I’m told by two different Jedi masters in my first conversation. I offer to help my new master retrieve some Jedi archives from the nearby ruins, and as I head out for the first time, the affirmation of how special I am puts a spring in my step.

The tech and mech is re-ssuringly familiar.

In order to retrieve the lost recordings, I’ll need to defeat Flesh Raiders, the savage native inhabitants of Tython who have been kidnapping young Jedi. They hunt in packs, and some are armed with blaster rifles. My preferred strategy is to dispatch ranged foes through the careful application of big rocks, while keeping the others at bay with a channelled barrage of much smaller, more numerous rocks. If any get too close, I hit them with my training vibrosword until they fall over. Combat is quick, dynamic, and feels heroic – despite the fact that all the fathomless mystical energy at my command is being used to do the work of a leaf blower and a small catapult.

I do a single lap of the ruins, rescuing Padawans and clearing out Flesh Raiders at an easy pace. The zone is well designed, setting a precedent for smooth questing that applies to the vast majority of the areas I’ve seen. Predictably, the quest for the missing archives doesn’t end there, and I’m soon sent to the Jedi Academy proper to continue my search. Inside, I catch up with my master: but she’s got a guest. An eight-foot-tall, heavily armed, reptilian guest.

My master, it turns out, has a penchant for making use of unorthodox help: and she’s earned herself a reputation as a bit of a renegade. I wish I was a bit of a renegade. Her friend is Qyzen Fess, a Trandoshan bounty hunter who she’s tasked with uncovering information about the stolen records. He speaks in a mixture of gibberish and yellow subtitles, and seems quite nice really. I am very polite and do not draw attention to the fact that he is a giant lizard, though I appreciate that the game gives me the option to do so.

Your big reptilian pal - also great for keeping the flies off your chips.

We split up to broaden our search, and it is in this pursuit that I cover the rest of Tython. My personal story interweaves with that of the Jedi Knight and the planet itself, introducing the key Consular themes of discovery, diplomacy, and the seductive power of the Force. Each area unfolds like that first one: a primary objective supported by a number of side-missions that I share with the other young Jedi. I don’t talk to my classmates much, but I occasionally chuck a helpful rock in the direction of a Jedi Knight who has blundered arrogantly into one Flesh Raider too many. Later, I’m asked to recover another set of Jedi archives – I’m getting good at this – and told to bring friends. It’s a Heroic mission, optional group content that comes in two and four-player varieties. A tentative enquiry in the general chat gets me an instant group invite, and I find myself in the company of two Knights and another Consular. We tear through droids; the Knights leaping into the fray, we Consular throwing things from a distance. I sometimes use my new Force shockwave ability to scatter enemies out of melee range, passive-aggressively demonstrating the superior versatility of hurled debris. My new friends quickly tell me to stop.

Finding an ancient computer triggers my first group conversation. Seeing myself rendered in Jedi form, having an adventure, is a simple thrill. I am in the game! Unfortunately, the dice roll that determines whether I get to speak comes up snake-eyes. I hover awkwardly at the back and fail to get a word in edgeways. I am in the game.

Nice frock matey! Erm I mean robes, yes, definately robes...

Having established myself as the most socially inept trainee at the academy, I’m relieved when I finally get my own NPC companion. Qyzen, the giant lizard, gets in some trouble, and when I rescue him he is so taken with my abilities that he proclaims me the Herald of his people’s god of the hunt, the Scorekeeper. Qyzen’s job is to look more intimidating than me (this is not hard) so that I can throw rocks at people from a distance. In this regard, our relationship blossoms. I can also send him to sell my junk loot with a dismissive hand-wave. He is for all intents and purposes my terrifying butler.

The search for the missing data builds to a showdown in a lost valley. Along the way I’ve recovered the component parts of the lightsaber I’ll need to defeat my enemy, a rogue Force-wielder who has claimed the powers of an antediluvian Dark Lord. Qyzen and I find a small temple, and he waits outside. In a cutscene, my Consular closes his eyes and assembles the lightsaber pieces through the Force. A horn section makes its presence known. Pommel meets hand, and a green blade ignites. I get goosebumps, and sort of resent BioWare for it. The Old Republic warms up its fanservice engine slowly, but when it gets going there’s little stopping it.

This is the end of my time on Tython, it turns out, and consequently the end of the tutorial. The next step is to accompany my master to Coruscant: she chose my Jedi inauguration as the ideal moment to faint melodramatically, and the Republic capital is apparently the place to find decent medical care.

Check out Page 2 of of our Old Republic preview for crafting, grouping and flashpoints.

Jagged Alliance: Back in Action (BiA) uses the same setting and campaign mechanics as JA2. The exiled ruler of Arulco hires your band of mercenaries to liberate his country from Queen Deidranna, his treacherous wife who usurped his throne and inaugurated an era of devastating oppression and exploitation. You hire a team of oddball mercenaries, then begin retaking Arulco piece by piece. The campaign plays out on a grid map of the who country, and when a clash occurs in one sector, you go to a tactical battle. Over the course of the campaign, you hire more mercenaries, capture strategic towns and mines, carry out quests for NPCs, and buy new equipment with the funds you raise.

The big new idea is Back in Action’s “pause-and-go” system. BiA plays out in continuous-time, and a tap on the spacebar freezes the action so you can issue orders and plot out what your mercenaries will be doing when the action resumes. It’s a lot like Frozen Synapse, though the controls do not allow for quite so much fine-tuning of your soldiers’ actions and timing. In fairness, BiA does not seem like it requires the same level of finesse in angles and timing as Frozen Synapse.

This guard is charging right into a carefully planned crossfire.

You can also script your team’s movements so that certain members will not execute their orders until after another merc has fulfilled another. For example, the first mission is a night assault on an airfield. I wanted to avoid a huge gun battle. However, only one of my mercs, Dr. Q, had a suppressed weapon, and he was not the best shot. So I would sneak my team into range of a guard, then tell Dr. Q to shoot him once in the head and, just to be sure, twice in the chest. Since he was an iffy shot, I would give my markswoman, Buns, orders to headshot the target after Dr. Q finished his shots. Unpausing, he would shoot three times in quick succession. If he missed, Buns would instantly fire her hand-cannon and kill the guard before he could shoot back. If he hit, Buns would not fire because her target was already dead. It was good system, and allowed my team to massacre half the airport’s defenders without taking any damage.

When something unexpected happened, I could instantly pause, clear the orders, and issue new ones. It made for exciting and very natural combat. Some things that were excruciatingly difficult and tedious in Jagged Alliance 2, like room-to-room combat, now felt like a Rainbow 6 mission as my mercs worked in tandem to clear buildings. Pause-and-go works far better than I expected, and it’s a great new way to play Jagged Alliance.

Back in Action updates Jagged Alliance's visuals, but remains faithful to the original's perspective and art direction.

However, I also saw some worrying things in this preview build. First, enemies seemed about as reactive as fence posts, to the point that sentries would step over corpses without reacting. This is hopefully just an issue with an early build, but I am not so sure. Highlighted cones showed guards’ field of view, revealing that they can barely see their hands in front of their faces and making BiA look more like a stealth puzzle game rather than a tactical RPG.  This worry is not remotely allayed by my second major concern: Back in Action does not feature fog of war. You can see every enemy soldier on every map, so you don’t need to worry about blundering into ambushes or getting outmaneuvered. Night combat, one of the deadliest and most intense parts of JA2, now seems more like a cosmetic difference than a tactical one.

This is the kind of change that strikes at the heart of Jagged Alliance, and I’m not clear what Back in Action puts in its place. Dynamism and unpredictability were seminal features in Jagged Alliance, but Back in Action seems to have eliminated a lot of the mechanics that enabled them. The pause-and-go system is an exciting innovation, but the underlying game seems badly weakened.

Curiously enough, the clunkiest aspects of JA2 seem to have made their way into Back in Action without a hitch.  Inventory management and resupply remain the aggravating clickfests they were in JA2, and might even be worse. The dubious RPG elements, wandering around maps talking to quest dispensers, are also present and accounted for. All of it seems like a drag on the streamlined combat, a clunky holdover that takes time away from the best part of the game: waging a guerilla campaign.

Like Prototype, the sequel will let you climb, dash and glide around New York city. You’ll consume operatives of the evil Blackwatch corporation to steal their memories and identities. Your mission is to track down Alex Mercer, the shapeshifting anithero of the first game using the powers that turned him into a mutant killing machine.

Heller can shapeshift, too, but he’s a lot more flexible than his mortal enemy. Instead of being confined to a single mutation at a time, he can equip two and chain their effects into devastating combos. He can use enormous claws to mince through a squadron of Blackwatch soldiers, and then turn his arms into enormous hammers to finish with a horrible, crushing ground smash. Prototype 2 will be even bloodier than the original as well. Heller glides through his enemies. Limbs fly, bodies are cleaved in two and clouds of blood coat everything in the surrounding area. When he’s done, those left barely alive will try to crawl away from the scene on their stomachs, leaving trails of gore behind them.

Heller is capable of mercy, though. In the first game, once you’d picked up a victim you had two choices, eviscerate him and consume his remains or throw him into the horizon. In Prototype 2 you can put people down without harming them. Whether he’s manhandling men or war machines, Heller has more options.

He actually understands stealth, for a start. Playing Alex Mercer in Prototype, infiltrating an enemy base would let you start a big fight from a better position. Heller will be able to do more with his disguises. His ‘awareness pulse’ vision mode will highlight in white enemies that can be killed without raising an alarm. This lets him stalk a target through a compound. When the time is right, he can quickly absorb his victim and calmly leave without upper-cutting anything.

If the quiet approach goes wrong, Prototype 2′s new hero has even more creative ways to break things. He can kick a helicopter in half. He can beat a tank to death with its own turret. He can tear the rocket launcher off the wing of a chopper and then use it to obliterate everything.

He also has more ways to counter his enemies. The infuriating rockets that would interrupt your flight in the first game can be returned to their owners using Heller’s new shield mutation. By pressing the counter button at just the right moment, he can super punch rockets and reverse their flight path.

“Is there any way that this man can be killed?” I thought as I watched him throw a soldier into a chopper’s blades. In the portion I saw, Heller was nigh on invincible, but there will be much more menacing foes to fight in New York’s nastier zones. Radical say that there will be huge bosses, and the new infected creatures will be much tougher to kill than weak, squishy humans. It wouldn’t surprise me if Blackwatch had some much bigger weaponry hidden in the green zone, but Radical are keeping that under wraps for now.

Seeing Heller lay waste to several blocks was reassuring. Prototype was a great power trip. The feeling of being able to cruise anywhere and crush anything was addictive, even though it meant playing an inhuman monster. Prototype 2 looks like it will give us more blood, more explosions, more power. If it can give us something to fight for, and let us play as a character that isn’t an amoral monster, then it could easily surpass the original.

FTL is “a spaceship simulation real-time roguelike-like”, according to its website. That’s a fair description. You travel a galaxy as a spaceship, encountering random enemies, upgrading and maintaining your systems, re-routing power from life support to shields, and directing your crew to frantically put out fires. Every journey ends with your inevitable death, as your crew is killed from one calamity or another.

I’ve been playing an early build of the game, and it’s amazing. When it comes out in the middle of next year, you should play it because it’s amazing.

To convince you why you should start looking forward to FTL, I’ve written about my experience with the game below. Read on to find out why doors are important in space.

Everything was going great, till I flew too close to the sun.

 
You have no way of knowing what each new area of space is going to hold before you jump to it. You could warp to a star and be attacked by pirates, or find a distress call from a stranded madman.

I come out of warp and arrive next to a supergiant class M star. Solar flares from the star are going to regularly strike my ship, damaging my systems, a message tells me. If I don’t get out of here quickly, I’ll be destroyed.

My FTL drive needs to recharge after each jump, so I can’t immediately warp away again. I need to survive long enough for the drive to recover. I also need to destroy the enemy currently attacking me.

It’s a small droid ship, impervious to the sun’s heat. I aim my lasers at its shields, take them down, and quickly blow up the ship with a missile to its engines. I’m lucky that it’s a weak enemy, but it managed to hit me once, starting a fire in my engine room.

Each room within the ship represents a different system, and with the engines disabled, my FTL drive won’t even begin to charge. I’m stranded above the supergiant star until I can get the engines back online, but the fire inside the room would kill my crew. It’s often like this; a quick battle, easily won, followed by a panicked and desperate attempt to fix all the problems. Your spaceship always feels fragile; a real tin can, floating in space.

You don’t need crew to open and close doors, and nothing puts out fires quicker than the vacuum of space. I remotely open two blast doors at the rear of my ship, extinguishing the fire instantly as all the oxygen is sucked from the rooms. If I can now get my crew members in there, they’ll be able to quickly repair the engine

Which is when a solar flare hits me. The flares do general damage across the entire ship, and I’m now on fire in two empty rooms, weapons and… And the room that contains the systems for opening and closing doors remotely. My engines are no longer on fire, but the doors inside the engine room are still open. No crew member can go in there to fix the still-broken engine without suffocating.

 
I tell two crew members, Jack and Gracie, to scramble through burning rooms to reach the door subsystem. They’re quick to repair it, and I got the doors closed. Just in time for another flare to hit.

Now more than half my ship is on fire. Shields are down, sickbay is burning, life support is down.

Shit. The life support system is what generates oxygen on your ship, and all the air is now slowly draining from every room. It also means that the oxygen was never fully replenished inside the engine room after I closed the doors. Going inside the engine room still means almost certain death.

I sent all three of my crewmembers in to the room anyway. Another solar flare would destroy the entire ship for sure, so there was no time to fix the life support and wait for the oxygen to replenish. We had nothing to lose.

Jack, Gracie, and pilot Kirby went inside and began to repair the engine. All of their health bars were ticking down from asphyxiation.

Jack died first, already hurt from the fires still spreading through the rest of the ship.

Gracie died next, just as my engine turned from red to orange. It was still only half fixed. “SOLAR FLARE IMMINENT” flashed on screen.

Kirby, my ship’s pilot, was the last man standing. He’d avoided the flames by remaining on the bridge, and he got the engine operational again.

Another solar flare hit, and my ship exploded.

This is just one encounter, and it could have gone a dozen different ways. This is only the first playable build of the game, too, with lots more still to be added. FTL is due for release in the middle of 2012, and will cost between $5 and $10. Keep an eye on the official FTL site for more information.

All this may seem like a minor frill for a game that otherwise sells itself on big gun battles, but it goes to the core of PlanetSide 2’s remit, and spells out its vital difference from other claimants to the MMOFPS title, such as Dust 514. As creative director Matt Higby puts it, “We’re not just building a shooter, we’re building a world.”

This would sound like puff if it weren’t true. Like the original game, PlanetSide 2 is set on an open world of sprawling, diverse continents. This is the planet Auraxis, contested by the game’s three violently opposed factions. And that planet is there for more than just scene-setting – it’s as much a weapon as any sidearm. The terrain may look fresh from Mother Nature’s oven, but it’s been attentively tweaked to break lines of sight, to allow for cover and clever tactics.

'Ha, they'll never find me down here.'

“One of our largest development efforts on this project has been hand crafting every single area of those eight-by-eight kilometre continents,” Matt tells me. “To make sure that everywhere you’re playing, from a wilderness area to a really dense facility area, all feel like they’re custom created to support gameplay. And different types of gameplay: if I’m out in that wilderness area, depending on the availability of cover, the type of terrain, then it might be a field day for air vehicles, somewhere air vehicles can shine. But if there’s a lot of cover, a lot of places where infantry can pop out and fire a rocket, then suddenly it becomes a little bit more balanced.”

With a full day-night cycle, new strategies emerge: as the Terran Republic mass to deliver a 200-man hammerblow to a Vanu Sovereignty facility, they might scale an escarpment under cover of dark, flashlights off to give as little sign of their presence as possible. Then, as the rosy fingers of dawn stretch over the hillside to their backs, the soldiers follow the light washing down upon dazzled Vanu guards. Nor is this some canned Call of Duty skirmish, exactingly recycled with every victory – the target has been selected as part of a global strategy, hundreds upon hundreds of players self-organising to determine the time and angle of attack. Squad leaders pinpoint immediate objectives, focusing fire on a troublesome turret or rushing the barrier shield generator to allow aerial bombardment, while dedicated tank guilds roll in to breach the Vanu strongpoint’s courtyard. A spec’d up Galaxy dropship acts as a mobile spawn point, spewing out reinforcements as allied Mosquitoes zip and weave in the skies, dogfighting with the defenders’ Scythes.

The Vanu commanders will be hurriedly reacting to the assault, too, highlighting the battlezone as a high priority mission for all of their factionmates to see, manoeuvring and plotting, interpreting the repercussions of their loss or victory in the context of an ever-changing frontline. Since capture-time on an objective is based on the amount of peripheral real-estate that is claimed by your faction, real battlefield strategy emerges: pincer movements and encirclements become important ways to shore up a major assault and deny the enemy an easy recapture. The choice of targets may be influenced by the resources they contain. A plentiful supply of metal, nanites, or auraxium enables factions to deploy upgrades, their function varying for each of the three empires.

Vehicles are also highly customisable.

Denial is as important as acquisition, Matt tells me. “If the Vanu is attacking you and they have railguns on their mag riders, and they are fucking you up, then you know you need to capture auraxium and deplete their reserves.”

But as a mere grunt, that high-level strategy is another’s concern – on the ground you are one gun among hundreds, crashing against the walls of a vast facility whose three courtyards are themselves each the size of a Modern Warfare multiplayer level. Energy beams lance out from the defenders and rocketry spirals after targets through the still-dark sky, leaving a trail of smoke that sears bright in the HDR glow of the rising sun.

PlanetSide 2 does big and it does beautiful. To some extent it has to in order to overcome the dual stigma of being both an MMO and a free-to-play game, neither of which are famed for their glitzy production qualities.

“For me it’s all about seeing the game as an FPS – and that’s it,” says senior art director Tramell ‘T.Ray’ Isaac. “When we were working on [cancelled SOE game] The Agency, one of the comments we got a lot was, ‘It looks pretty good for an MMO.’ And that ‘for an MMO’ should not even be in the equation for me. People should look at it and see that it’s got the same level of quality as every other FPS on the market.”

PlanetSide 2 succeeds on that account, and then some – but does it play like an FPS, too? The old PlanetSide’s combat was muddied by unseen dice-rolls, not to mention creaking on 2003’s hardware specs and squeaking awkwardly through the internet’s tiny, tiny pipes. Not so now, says Matt. Not only has technology caught up with the original game’s forward-thinking vision, but the devs have a keener idea of what makes a satisfying run-and-gun experience. Bullets go pretty much where you fire them and the guns are not only lethal but feel it, too.

Let’s get this out of the way up front: yes, the Flash has a ridiculous contraption called the Cosmic Treadmill that he runs on to somehow transport people back in time. It’s weird, it’s goofy, and it’s going to provide some of the coolest gameplay moments of any superhero game ever.

How can a treadmill of the cosmos possibly provide such mind-blowing gameplay experiences? Well, just think of the most memorable, awesome events in DC comic history. Now, imagine getting to play out all of those events and see them unfold first-hand. That’s the power of the Cosmic Treadmill, my friend.

We sat down with DC Universe Online‘s Creative Director Jens Andersen, who walked us through all of the content in the big Flash-themed update releasing next Tuesday, and teased us about his big plans for the future, including revisiting the origin stories of DC’s biggest villains and heroes.

The first origin story is coming in next week’s big update and is, of course, centered around the Flash himself. In a new two-player Duo instance – balanced for players with top-end Tier 3 gear – you and a buddy will be transported back in time to stop meddlers from screwing with Barry Allen on the fateful night he gets struck by lightning and turned into the Flash.

The first portion of the Duo was my favorite: you’re tossed in a long hellish hallway filled with crazy electric minions trying to sabotage your attempt to travel back in time. A whirling vortex of time is constantly moving up behind you, threatening to suck you in, and if you can’t clear the baddies fast enough, you’re going back to modern day and Barry Allen is doomed. I felt the same panicked sense of urgency I get on those Super Mario Bros. levels where the screen is constantly moving to the right. One slip-up and you’re toast!

Jumping on these guys' heads will not instantly kill them-they're tougher than Goombas.

Once you break on through to the other side, you find yourself in a Central City police station from times-past, with all the colors bathed in a light sepia tone to complete the old-timey look and feel. I won’t spoil the story of the encounter, but there were a few elements that I really enjoyed about it and want to point out. During the demo, Jens told me that one major thing they’d learned from player feedback on existing content is adding more interactive objects to Duos. So, Central City’s police station is loaded with secret areas, computer terminals, and robots to interact with that can provide extra challenges or alter the way boss fights work.

For example, if you take your time and snoop around the office area, you can hack terminals to disable security robots that are protecting one of the bosses. In another room, prisoners are breaking out of their cells. Some of them start releasing their fellow prisoners, while others make a beeline for the wall of guns in the back of the room. Who you decide is the bigger threat and take out first will change how the fight in that area plays out. It’s a lot of small twists that add up to a diverse set of possible outcomes that should make these repeatable instances more exciting for players tackling them frequently.

The other thing I love about the Duo is that it features The Pied Piper. I have to admit I’d never heard of this guy before, but he’s a villain that plays a flute to mind control people (such as the well-armed cops surrounding him in the police station). It’s a cool concept that allows for some very fun combat mechanics throughout the instance, and I’m really excited that the devs are using these lesser-known characters in DC history, who would never get a chance in the spotlight in a limited-world game like Arkham City, to create unique and interesting content.

Zoom, the poor man's Flash, is no match for my Arc Lightning!

Of course, the Duo is only one part of the content pack, which will be free for subscribers and 10 bucks to F2Pers–a tremendous value for all the content it opens up. The pack also gives you access to a huge zone loaded with new daily quests, collections, and gear sets; about 10 new bounties for both factions (villain players hunt the Teen Titans and hero players hunt the Rogues); and a brand new Electricty powerset that has DPS and healer roles.

The Electricity power set is a lot of fun to play as. A few of my favorite abilities were Lightning Arc, which shoots a bolt of electricity at an enemy that bounces between other people near him (the closer the enemies are together, the more times it will bounce between them) and Tesla Ball, which launches an orb of high-voltage pain in a straight line out from you, continuously zapping anyone too distracted to move out of the way. The overall flow of the power set was strong – the healing lands somewhere between Nature’s high-burst reaction heals and Sorcery’s slow-and-steady prediction heals, and DPS isn’t quite as frantic as the other recently-added Light powerset, but has the same level of fun visual effects.

Or you could just bring both power sets and dominate everyone!

Central City, a modestly sized city plot instanced for 50 players at a time, is probably the closest thing we’re going to get to a third large city for a good long while, now that DCUO is doing quarterly updates. (There’s no current plans to build another city on the scale of Gotham or Metropolis, according to Andersen, but the team does want to start making origin stories a regular occurrence in DCUO.) The city offers some new areas to explore, but it’s not the sort of place that you’re going to be hanging out in during your downtime. Still, it’s leaps and bounds more exciting to fly around a city with alleyways, shops, and little nooks and crannies than run around an island that you can see immediately see everything it has to offer, which is what so many other MMOs add in updates like this.

Andersen saved the best part of our demo for last, though. After we’d taken down the Pied Piper, he used cheat codes to summon all of the new characters being added as open-world bounty targets in Gotham and Metropolis to let them duke it out in front of us. With collective nerd-breaths held tight, we watched as the Teen Titans did battle against the Flash’s Rogue gallery. Cyborg blasted Captain Boomerang with lasers, The Trickster chucked out toy helicopters and JLA action figures that came to life and harassed Donna Troy, and some weird “villain” named The Top twirled in circles semi-quickly to annoy everyone while Weather Wizard, Nightwing, and the rest duked it out. After the dust settled, Titan and Rogue lay side-by-side, and Cyborg emerged victorious. So there you have it, fellow geeks, we can all cross one “What if…” question off our comic book fight club lists. Cyborg wins.

If players don't kill the giant Paradox Reapers in Central City, they'll terrorize Gotham and Metropolis.

The trailer above shows how many of those guns will work, and the rapid fire shotgun looks especially cruel. There are also eleven new screenshots below, in which the player stands in the middle of Syndicate’s futuristic cityscapes, peering through the lens flare at the side of each weapon. Look ahead, there are men over there trying to kill you!

The last bloke you want to see on death row is the poxy preist.

It didn’t take long to convince Introversion’s two other founders that it was time to leave Subversion behind, and what their next project should be. “We agreed to do a six week ‘first playable’ of Prison Architect, and by the end of that period we already had more of a game than Subversion had ever been.”

The opening mission begins with the player taking control of an already functioning prison. It’s probably the darkest tutorial I’ve ever played: you learn the basics of the game by building an execution chamber, laying down the water pipes for the cell’s toilet and connecting the electric chair to the power grid.

The prison teems with life while you build: guards patrol the corridors, workmen complete the tasks you set for them, and prisoners monotonously wander from the cafeteria, to the yard for exercise, and back to their cells at night.

Bad stuff happens in the showers... possibly.

The mission is brief, but you can guess the problems you’ll be facing in future missions and in the free build mode. As you watch your population, you’ll spot prisoners hiding poison and forks in their pockets, ready for riots and break-outs.

While you build, the man you’re going to kill is waiting, kneeling in his cell with a priest. When you’re ready for him, you get to see what he did to end up here. The cutscene plays using a mixture of those same cute top-down graphics and grim, comic-style drawings. “It’s not our place to decide if he deserves this,” says your boss. “We’re just here to do a job.”

If Introversion can bring their dark sensibilities to bear on an old-fashioned management game, it’s a job I’m looking forward to.

You play as the young woman. Her name is Mary. In the long term you’re tasked with unravelling the mystery of her sister’s mysterious death, but in the beginning there are more pressing concerns. Mary’s search has attracted the unwanted attentions of mad scientist Lindsey Ashford and her axe-wielding grunt, Ethan. You wake up on a table in the heart of their crazed laboratory. An axe is hammering at the door. Top priority: escape.

Haunted’s characters and environments are all rendered in 3D, a bold decision in a genre that still regularly favours intricately drawn 2D backgrounds to textures and polygons. Sitting in front of the game at the developer’s HQ, it’s easy to see why Deck 13 made the decision to embrace the third dimension. Managing director, Florian Stadlbauer is controlling the action. As Mary walks down some steps into the middle of the lab, the camera whooshes in to bring us closer to the room.

Florian puzzles his way upwards, bringing down a ladder to reach a circular walkway high above the lab. As the automated camera jets off again, we’re shown the long drop from the chandelier’s perspective. I can see the room Mary started in far below. Florian explains the advantages of using a full 3D engine, how it allows for less static environments that let the player to get closer to the characters. He’s right. Haunted’s characters aren’t the most detailed, but they’re characterful and expressive.

Ghosts make useful companions. The mermaid can even fly.

So far, the puzzles have been standard adventure game fare. Find all the objects in an area – combine them with interactive hotspots – progress, but Florian is speeding through. He’s keen to introduce me to a very important character. He’s short, blue, and he’s wearing a tricorner hat. “This is Oscar,” says Florian, “a wannabe pirate. A failed pirate. Because he’s dead.”

Oscar is the first of a team of helpful ghosts that’ll team up with Mary throughout the adventure. Others include the spirit William Wallace, the spectre of a long dead pope and a mermaid. The banter between the growing cast of spiritual helpers will form the bulk of Haunted’s conversations, and provide a comedy counterpoint to the darker story of Mary’s sister. “You really have one main character, and then the five ghosts,” says Florian.

“Plus the werewolf!” adds creative director Jan Klose.

“Oh yes, and the werewolf.”

Each companion has a different special ability, even the werewolf (his keen sense of smell can prove useful). Instead of having to reach into your inventory for a solution, you’ll be able to enlist the help of one of your ghostly companions instead. William Wallace, for example, can only interact with objects connected to death. In one scene, Florian uses him to free the trapped mermaid from the ribcage of a dead fish, his connection to the underworld letting him pry open the bones with ease. Eventually, the ghosts will be able to combine abilities to bypass Haunted’s toughest puzzles.

Once recruited, each ghost can be summoned from a small pop up menu, they’ll jump into the world, comment on your situation and lend a hand when you ask them to use their special ability. Deck 13 say that the ghostly dream team was based in part by party driven RPGs, but they’ve also drawn inspiration from some more unusual places, including the character and ability switching common in the Traveller’s Tales Lego games.

William Wallace, ginger even in death.

But the ghost’s aren’t just extra tools in your puzzle-solving toolbox. The developers have limited the number of characters in Haunted to allow for more dialogue with the ghosts. Their relationships with Mary and each other will change over the course of the adventure, and each has his own side mission. Completing these will reveal more about each ghost’s past (and how they died). This will also unlock extra furnishings in a hub location Mary claims for her dead friends a short way into the game, and completing all of these will unlock more secrets.

There’s still a central plot thread beneath all of these extras, of course. The ongoing battle to uncover the truth about Mary’s sister and thwart Ashford’s plans is a full length adventure in its own right, but it’s the extras that make Haunted stand out in a genre restricted by a linear storytelling tradition. Haunted’s side quests introduce a dose of choice often lacking in adventure games.

It’s funny, too. The ghostly mermaid you befriend has the ability to fly, a trait only granted to those who have lived a pure life. The Pope, however, remains firmly grounded. The truth behind his dark past are revealed in time. William Wallace is still coming to terms with his mistrust of the English and Oscar the pirate is desperately seeking the chance to captain a ship, a task he could never quite manage in life.

Ironically, it’s the dead characters that bring a soul to Haunted. The game will get a UK release later this year, giving the ghosts plenty of time to warm up for release, when they’ll inevitably steal the show.

Desert camo is, like, totally in this season.

Unlock a hat or armoured vest in Recon and it’s yours to keep, the same as LOL’s legends. Over time, you’ll customise your sight, stock, magazine, barrel and more. And buying things is fun. Especially if those things are F2000 rifle scopes and red berets. Eventually you’ll end up kitting out your armour with subtle stat boosts – just like League of Legend’s runes.

GRO has taken some hints from MMOs: dauntingly thorough levels of customisation might have been too much to take if it wasn’t for the numbers popping off your enemies as they suck up bullets. It’s a mechanic that aids customisation without breaking the visceral combat.

My victim’s cremated. I switch to my rifle, slap into cover by pressing [space] and peek round a corner. It feels just right, like an evolution of Rainbow Six: Vegas’s system – intuitive, satisfying and perfectly suited to GRO’s third-person tactical skirmishes.

Open holes aren't as big a deal as this screenshot implies.

And ‘tactical’ is the key word. GRO will feature six maps, all asymmetrical. These rounds aren’t dominated by head-tracking snipers, even though they get to go invisible. Cover is vital, but breaking your opponents’ position equally so.

Another spawn. A Specialist stands ten metres to my right – he complements my Assault build perfectly and and has my flank covered. I like the way he used his Aegis system to bounce away bullets with a red forcefield earlier in the match. His passive ability is feeding me ammo as I buff his armour stat. We’re accidentally best mates.

My Blitz ability strengthens our bond. I take a shield from my back and sprint into two opponents, sending them flying, then my Specialist cleans up with a few wellplaced shots. I feel like a badass. The Specialist feels like a badass. And we both get experience to spend after the match. It’s a massive win-win.

Or maybe he’s both. The Secret World is a modern day MMO in which every conspiracy theory in the world is true. It doesn’t feature classes or levels, it’s concerned with guns not bows, and it encourages you to search for solutions to its quests on the real life internet. Ragnar continues: “Everybody assumes you have to do one thing. That’s like saying Ridge Racer is the only way to do a racer. You might not succeed with everything, but if we look at genres as a single product we’d never have a Call Of Duty, a Crysis, and a Battlefield.”

When I create my character for the game I’m restricted to a few predetermined options. I opt for the classy look – a white-haired chap in a dapper suit. I don’t need to worry about bullet penetration or armour buffs – in another MMO-breaking move, TSW’s outfits are purely cosmetic. A bit like real life.

Hang about - I didn't call for Cthulhu!

The intro is eventful. First, a glowing bee flies into my mouth as I sleep. Then light blasts out of every orifice. Four days later I’m juggling balls of magic as an achingly hip Londoner turns up at the door. She explains that I’m a Templar with powers “beyond what others can imagine”; I’ve played Assassin’s Creed and Broken Sword, so I get it. She’s pretty though, and fully voiced, just like the rest of The Secret World’s NPCs. Two more factions – the Dragons and the Illuminati – will be available, and all three will battle during PvP in 150-man warzones.

London is TSW’s main hub. It’s satisfyingly authentic and genre-breakingly detailed. I spend a few minutes staring at bollards, traffic lights and cockney cops before entering a tube station for a tutorial mission. It’s filled with zombies that need exploding, and although I’m using a shotgun, I’m also hitting hotkeys and timing cooldowns. This is still an MMO.

I can only choose from one starting weapon, but The Secret World doesn’t have any class restrictions. You get XP from killing mobs and completing quests, and points can be spent on any ability, and up to 14 can be equipped at a time. There are no levels either, just an ever increasing move-list. Is Ragnar intimidated by hardcore players breaking his game with an optimal build? He’s desperate to see it happen: “We’re going to monitor and add new abilities to mix it up. Then a new build will counter this one and the whole thing falls to pieces. Suddenly that flavour of the week has been completely destroyed. Our designers need to have this game live for that to happen.”

The regulation foe, made entirely of gristle and violence.

Once I’m kitted out, I leave for Kingsmouth – a town laced with horror homage and splattered with the undead. It’s a completely different art-style to the London hub, but still teeming with detail. References to Nightmare on Elm Street, Batman and Silent Hill make up most of the street names. Funcom love their in-jokes. They also love investigation missions, which sit alongside traditional collection and killing quests.

I loved them too – at first. Subtle markings on a set of manholes led me to a plaque that mentioned Francis Hals, and a quick Google search let me know that he’s a real painter. I found some paintings, clicked one and rejoiced as a new quest kicked in. Using my brain to figure out something real in an MMO made me feel like an awesome detective.

Then the game got mean. Even though I had a journal updated with a new entry and location, I was being led on a fake quest. I’d clicked the wrong flashing, clickable painting. I felt like a shitty detective.

Ooh look at the beastie. He's got chocolate tipped legs!

Twenty minutes older, and a bit angrier, I returned to the gallery, exercised my right to first-person, inspected the paintings and found a riddle written on the back of one: “Time is written in the province of kings and gods. The hands of time point to the truth, written by kings in the words of God. The path is open to the enlightened.”

I needed to find a clockface in the town hall, which read ten past ten. Then I looked up Kings 10:10 in the Bible. It’s about a lady giving King Solomon 120 pieces of gold. Next, I found Solomon Priest’s house, located the entrance to his cellar and typed “120” into the secret keypad, which had space for FIVE digits, not three. He had a locked computer hidden down there. The password? “LUX OMNIA VINCIT” – the words written around the rim of the manholes from stage one of the puzzle.

Of course, no-one really solved this puzzle. It’s the riddle of a madman. But thanks to random wandering, and TSW’s beta forums, most of us ended up in the right place. The Secret World is an MMO that’s eager to innovate and diversify. That’s hard. Here’s hoping they don’t hit too many red herrings along the way.

So, er, why are they rabbits again? “The game will have some really disturbing depictions of blood and pain,” says David Rosen, “and I don’t know if I could handle doing that with human characters.”

That’s not the only reason. As David says: “I suspect that audiences are hungry for novel experiences and settings, and would rather see something new than yet another game about masked ninjas.”

The sheer drops give you a quick way out of the fight.

Overgrowth is in the alpha stage of development, and if you preorder it now you’ll get the current version. It’s still a proof of concept at the moment: a few arenas to choose from with a few opponents each, but no context for the fights except some spectacular scenery. It’s hard to get a sense of what kind of game it’ll be, so I asked David.

“This isn’t final yet, but our plan is to have three categories of missions that you can choose – story, challenge and arena missions. The story missions focus on the characters in the world and how your actions affect them. The challenge levels are all about exploring the game mechanics and demonstrating your proficiency with them. The arena levels follow a professional entertainment fighter through his career, focusing on acquiring new abilities and equipment.”

The levels in the alpha are huge dramatic landscapes with weird stone relics and tall mountains. You can scamper across them with inhuman speed, leap huge distances, and even scramble up ledges and wall-run smoothly. There’s a really slick 3D platformer in here somewhere.

Given that they’re a small indie team making an ambitious game from scratch, is all this fancy engine stuff necessary?

The story involves rabbits, dogs, wolves and cats.

“I didn’t intend to make an engine,” David says. “I just wanted to make the game I had in my head, so I added one necessary component after another… eventually it all combined to form a pretty complex engine, but it’s all designed specifically for this game.”

That means the various systems fit together seamlessly. “There’s no shift between movement and combat modes,” David tells me. “You can smoothly jump out of a fight to wall-run up a wall at any time, without having to ‘tear’ yourself away from the combat system.”

That system is pretty simple: there’s an ‘attack’ and a ‘block’ button, and the rest is all movement. David says it’s about putting the complexity elsewhere.

“To attack in Overgrowth, you hold the left mouse to signal your intent, and then trigger the attack by moving within range of an enemy. This brings the focus up from low-level button presses to tactical positioning and awareness, and allows for fast and complex movement.”

You can knock weapons out of enemy hands.

Blocking prevents a blow from flooring you, but if it’s powerful you’ll still see your character reel from the physical force of it. Attacking after a successful block lets you throw your opponent, and duck-attacks sweep their legs from beneath them. The AI loves that one – I’ve lost a lot of fights where I try a roundhouse and they duck under it and trip me.

Fights end fast: one or two good blows can kill you, and even if they don’t, you’ll be lucky to get back on your feet before the AI kicks you to death. Or stabs you with the spear they picked up. The same goes for them, of course, so the instant you get in range of each other is critical.

I worry that it might be a little too fast right now: Wolfire’s own videos of the game feature elegant exchanges of blocked and dodged blows that I’ve never come close to. But release is a long way off, and by letting preorderers play the game in development, they’ve got plenty of feedback to work from.

It’s a big project: they’ve been working on it for three years and expect it to take one or two more. But we’re talking about it now because it’s starting to take shape: the movement is fluid and the combat is fun. There’s still no ‘game’ to it in the broader sense – if you’re only interested in how the current build plays, Overgrowth probably isn’t worth the $30 preorder yet. But if you want to follow its development into a proper game, now is a good time to get involved.

Since shortly after its first beta release back in 1999, this tactical, team-based Half-Life mod has dominated the competitive firstperson shooter scene, while countless hours of community yelling have made it a tight, balanced experience. A brief foray onto consoles in 2003 failed to expand the audience away from its PC home, so why are Valve attempting to create what they’re calling the ‘definitive’ version of a game that people like just fine as it is?

“We had been looking to create an XBLA version of Counter-Strike: Source as a sort of nostalgia thing,” explains Chet Faliszek, whose role on the game is loosely defined as ‘writer’. “But pretty quickly we began to realise how much we liked the game and it grew to something bigger.”

Snipe, sneak or shoot like mad - you can still battle your way.

The team have decided to make some changes to the tried and tested formula. Classic maps such as Dust have been tweaked and, while other stalwarts such as Inferno and Nuke will return, they’re joined by new maps designed specifically for the Arsenal modes. The new modes are based on the popular Counter-Strike: Source mod Gun Game, in which players start with a pistol and earn a new weapon with each consecutive kill. Many of these new environments are said to be inspired by other titles in the Valve canon, though they’re holding back specifics.

The graphics have also undergone an overhaul, though they could hardly be described as beautiful so much as robustly functional. Eight new weapons have been added too. These pack tactical characteristics, as well as additional firepower. For example, the Molotov cocktail is intended as much for blocking off areas of the map as causing damage to enemies. Meanwhile, the Zeus is a oneuse, Taser-style weapon that costs an eyewatering $1,000 of your load-out bank.

The machine gun is okay, but to show off, you need the Zeus!

Playing it though, it’s very much the Counter-Strike you’ll be familiar with, and Faliszek is keen to emphasise that the experience hasn’t been compromised through its shared appearance on consoles. “This is absolutely a PC experience,” he says. “One of the rules we had is that it’s going to be Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike. There is no auto-aim; it’s absolutely a game of skill. PC players will still be able to mod the game, host dedicated servers and all of the things that have made Counter-Strike such an enduring experience.”

Indeed, Valve looked carefully at what the community were doing in Counter- Strike and borrowed traits, including shorter round times and even entire match modes. Counter-Strike has always grown up in public, shaped by the rallying calls of the people who love it the most. While Valve are claiming CS:GO will be the definitive version, it’s still the community that will decide its future.

Preview by Simon Parkin.

“We want a huge skill component like Mount & Blade, but we’d also like to make it a bit more accessible. It should feel natural: like the way you start playing Battlefield or Modern Warfare. You don’t have to be a pro before you start playing, so when you get attacked you should get a feeling for how to defend yourself.”

How you’ll both defend and attack is still being hammered down this early in development, but Fatshark are set on using Mount & Blade-a-like mouse motions to swing, jab, or fire your weapons. Martin outlines lots of depth in his combat explanations, and the game is filled with potential weapon combinations. Armour can affect the speed of your character and their ability on horseback, and shields can parry attacks but may also break under sustained axe-y onslaughts.

Would-be knights who want to try their hands at the Middle Ages’ pointiest toys will be spoilt for choice: players can use swords, axes, spears, bows, and maybe even guns. “They had some gunpowder weapons at the time, but we haven’t decided yet if they’ll be in the game.”

'He marched them up to the top of the hill...'

Historical accuracy is important in War of the Roses, and that means period battlefields. Martin won’t commit to a playercount yet for fear of over or undershooting the end result, but it’s safe to say we won’t be playing with the Grand Old Duke’s ten thousand men.

Our Bosworth battles will be on smaller skirmish maps: still sizeable enough to manoeuvre heavy horses around, but given a definite War of the Roses flavour, something Martin says is “very important”.

The core multiplayer mode will be objective-based, and Martin’s keen to emphasise team play in achieving these. “We’re looking into a squad spawn mechanic like Battlefield’s: if you’re an archer, join an archer squad; if you’re a knight, spawn in the middle of the field.”

Whether you’re archer, knight or village idiot depends on your unlocks and your levels. “We level you in a horizontal way. We’re trying to avoid high-level players always winning against low-level players. Levelling should be more about variety and new types of styles.”

Poor Richard III. If only the doomed king had bought into War of the Roses’ unlock system earlier, he’d have had time to level up his mount. His kingdom for a horse of +2 armour.

Syndicate – like its top-down, squadbased predecessor – imagines a future war between merciless corporations, fought by hypertrained and utterly amoral killers. These corporations are sinister and faceless business octopi, with tentacles in every industrial pie. They’re the world’s largest and most influential companies. Were this real life, the player would be working for a 2069 version of Apple.

Instead, Syndicate’s main character, Miles Kilo, works for the worryingly blandsounding Eurocorp Syndicate. The game’s developers, Starbreeze, haven’t said what Eurocorp sell yet, but the company puts its name on guns. Any business happy to plaster their name on the barrel of a rifle isn’t going to be too altruistic.

Miles has a suite of abilities suited to murdering people. He can use his employees’ guns to insert bullets into their heads, of course, but that’s the boring approach. He’s got a better option already jammed inside his own skull. The Dart 6 chip is standard issue for the wealthy half of Earth’s population, and serves as a tiny PC inside the user’s head. Sounds ideal, I know, but that chip’s not just there to let you play Minecraft on the train: it actively informs buying habits and creates consumers.

When mind control isn't an option, shoot 'em in the face.

The corporations control the stream of information flowing into chipped-up heads, and Eurocorp want to wrest majority control away from their competitors to make people buy more of their socks (or whatever it is they sell).

Miles Kilo’s Dart 6 chip is weapons-grade, and a step above the chips of 2069’s anti-Eurocorpers. Point at an enemy, activate your chip, and you get to see Syndicate’s trump card: ‘breaching’. Kilo can hack into his opponent’s chip and, once secreted inside their brain, he has a number of gruesome options.

Select the ‘suicide’ option, and you can enjoy the grisly spectacle of your chosen foe putting his weapon in his mouth and blasting his brains all over a back wall. Select ‘backfire’, and you’ll overload his weapon, toasting his fingers and sending his nearby chums to the floor with the resultant explosion. Go for ‘allegiance’, and you can make a temporary mind-pact with your target, forcing him to focus his gun on his once-friends before, yet again, shooting himself in the head.

Somewhat fortunately for the sake of our humanity, players can’t just run around suggesting that people kill themselves and cackling as they do. Dart powers take time to recharge, but can also be upgraded. How? In typically grisly Syndicate style: by reaching into the gooey heads of your fallen foes, pulling out their implanted circuitry, and jamming it into your own ear.

Dart Vision - infinitely better than ChuckleVision.

Your Dart chip’s power over the world extends to inanimate objects. Get your timing right and you can hack grenades as they sail towards you, leaving them to clatter harmlessly onto the floor like sad potatoes. Hacking becomes necessary on some of the tougher enemies: Starbreeze talk of Kilo stripping the armour from a souped-up tank-man with his chip, before riddling him with holes from his gun. Which, it should be noted, can fire round corners. It is the future, after all.

Getting the timing right when completing breaches and hacks peppers firefights with small moments of challenge, which pay out in ‘IPA points’. These points power a slow-motion ability called Dart Vision that makes singling out incoming grenades and defusing them a little simpler, and lets you analyse firefights more easily.

Selecting your breach target is as easy as lining them up in your crosshairs and activating the ability, but timing it right – like taking a swing in a golf sim – will reap more IPA points. It’s a system that tacitly rewards stylish play, wheedling players into perfecting timings and using their abilities to get the maximum rewards.

Skintight lizard Lycra will be all the rage on the catwalks in 2069.

But how does Kilo cope when he can’t just crawl inside the cranial cavities of his victims and rewire their frontal lobes? Not everyone in Syndicate’s future can afford a Dart 6 chip and, strangely, that can make them more dangerous. Society is split into ‘Up’ and ‘Down’ Zones, and the denizens of Down areas are less likely to have the cash necessary for a chip. But they’re still ferocious fighters, and all of Kilo’s technical woo-hoo won’t make a dent on their fully organic brainpans. Lucky, then, that he can fall back on old-fashioned combat tactics: put bullet in face to win.

Syndicate’s combat looks advanced. Enemies aren’t glued to crates, doomed to poke their heads above a parapet until they’re popped off by an opportunistic player. They switch cover, and their bullets are as painful to you as yours are to them.

The switch from top-down squad management makes more sense for Syndicate than it does for XCOM. Those who pine for the return of the series do so not for the squad-management mechanics and clunky combat, but for that game’s dark dystopia and humour. In this reboot, it looks like they’ll be able to see the same thing at a much closer vantage point.

Being a heal-bot support class can be, in a word, underwhelming. What’s the fun of healing your allies, when they’re the ones who get all the kills and the glory? Personally, if I’m playing support, I want to contribute to the damage-dealing–not just passive make sure my teammates stay healthy (then somehow getting blamed if they die). Enter Gromki: the unassuming dwarf whose one rule is to make sure that your allies attacks hit way harder than they would without you. He’s one of two new heroes added to Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes (alongside Aessa, who we previewed yesterday), and we got the chance to take him for a spin with some exclusive hands-on. Check out the full analysis of Gromki’s skillset, with BioWare’s tips and gameplay footage to boot.

An enemy Gromki is like a bad cold: if you fail to nip him in the bud (a.ka. before he gets his Rune combos on you), you’ll be crippled by his debuffs and completely vulnerable to attack. Having a pocket Gromki on your side seems like it’ll be essential for teamfights; who’s going to notice the dinky dwarf amongst a crowd of attackers, even if he’s the one who’s making you take so much damage? Like any good support class, your team’s main damage dealers will love having you around, as you soften up targets for them to pulverize. And you can act as something of a spotter, debuffing targets to indicate to your team that the time is nigh to pounce on a specific opponent.

That demon skull, just like the Van Halen song, is inspiring me to jump.

BioWare Mythic breaks down Gromki

Gromki, the Dwarf Rune Priest, was conceived as a non-healing support Hero, but he’s changed a lot over multiple iterations. While he still has no healing abilities, he’s now moved into the role of a damage dealer with utility. Unlike other Heroes, his available debuffs don’t have durations, and are instead limited to only affecting one target at a time. Our intent was to create a Hero that’s almost a walking debuff, one that you dispel with damage. Gromki plays very differently than other Heroes—the key to using him effectively is to master the Shatter spell. This starts with choosing which targets to apply each of your runes too.

The most useful of these is your Grudge Rune, which should (almost) always be the first rune you use on a target. However, be careful when engaging anti-magic Heroes, as you’ll want your Rune of Dismay on them first to ensure that Grudge Rune sticks. At first glance, Rune of Spite can appear to only have value if your enemy is making extensive use of healing Heroes, but don’t be fooled. Many Heroes have the ability to heal themselves and Rune of Spite will be just as effective against those abilities.

I'm like a lighthouse of electrical death! Just try and stop me!

PC Gamer’s take

While I don’t see myself playing Gromki a ton, I will definitely appreciate when a good one is on my team. One of the developers who teamed up with me during my play session was straight-up nasty as Gromki, racking up points like nobody’s business while debuffing victim upon victim and leaving bodies in his wake. Comboing Rune of Spite with Grudge Rune means your target’s death is everything short of guaranteed: less healing + increased damage taken = 0 life expectancy.

I also got a kick out of using his Empowered Runestaff spell: running around crazily as I waved a massive white beacon that was zapping enemies to death. Shatter was also an excellent finisher against targets who were fleeing for their lives with a smidgen of HP left. Gromki will appeal to players that want to support their teammates while still being somewhat intimidating to the enemy. Having this hero on your team can drastically turn the tide of a fight.

Claim your key!

As you can tell from her arsenal of attacks, Aessa is all about being the first to battle, clearing the way for and supporting her allies by sustaining them throughout a fight. Pounce is the perfect initiation spell: Aessa will leap through the air and crash onto her target, snaring them in place. Her abilities flow well. Once I’ve entered the fray, I usually pop Elite Bodyguard to greatly reduce the damage my allies take by allowing me to intercept a percentage of the damage intended for them. Next, I activate Zealous Protector, which turns all that intercepted pain into pure damage output for me. If it sounds incredible, it’s because it is: using this skill in a large 6-vs-6-vs-6 teamfight (WoH has three teams fighting on each map) is insanely powerful.

Size means nothing when my entire team is about to beat on you.

BioWare Mythic breaks down Aessa:

In the last round of beta, we noticed some nasty imbalances in how much melee support Heroes we had, which was leading to ranged Heroes dominating the game. To address this imbalance, we wanted to create some cool, thematic, melee support Heroes. In Warhammer’s fiction, the White Lions are bodyguards and defenders, protecting their charges with their flashing blades. It was a perfect fit, and so Aessa, the White Lion, was created.

Aessa always wants to be near her team, and preferably for her team to be near the enemy! Chop and Slash are solid damage abilities, but you need to be close to use them. Aessa is also unique in that while she inflicts physical damage her attacks can’t be dodged, making her a particularly tricky Hero to defend against. If your opponents are using ranged Heroes, you can use Zealous Protector to charge your critical damage before you’re in range to Pounce. Pounce is not only great for getting into the fight—it’s also effective at running down stragglers trying to escape. If you’re clever, it can even be used to escape from trouble. Elite Bodyguard is a particularly difficult ability to use, but it can benefit your team immensely. It’s particularly effective at preventing your team’s softer support Heroes from being taken out too quickly. Be careful using it around Heroes that inflict a lot of AoE damage, though, or your health will vanish in an instant.

I didn't know Mufasa was part of the Warhammer universe!

PC Gamer’s take

Of the game’s current roster of 17 heroes, Aessa is my second-favorite character to bust face with, second only to the Black Orc Bax. Her skillset is similar to his actually, enabling playstyles that reward wading in the middle of fights instead of chipping away at enemies from afar. She’s also blessed with some of the coolest spell effects in the game I’ve seen thus far. Case in point, activating Elite Bodyguard causes a gigantic spectral lion head to roar above you. On more than one occasion, I found myself staring in awe at the majestic beast instead of smacking my enemies in the face, as I should’ve been. Plus, who doesn’t love swinging around a giant cleaver as a slender High Elf maiden?

My best moments in the game were when I was Pouncing from target-to-target during a fight, knowing that even if it all went south and I didn’t score a kill, I was helping out my allies just by standing there taking damage for them. Aessa’s certainly not invincible: when more than two or three DPS heroes start targeting you, it’s probably time to cut your losses and back out of the fight if you can. But for players who want to buff their allies while doling out a heavy dose of damage, Aessa is just the hero you’re looking for.

As a member of the organization of your choosing (the manipulative Illuminati, the chaos-conducting Dragon, or the fanatical Templars), sending these monsters back to oblivion is your number one priority. Our gruesome bestiary is the edge you’ll need in your quest to exterminate these paranormal horrors.

The Akab
Like the Lovecraftian abominations of legend, the Akab are beasts not of this earth, or even this reality. Conjured forth by necromancers who hoped to harness them as guardians, they long outlived their masters, and now wander their ancient grounds with no purpose besides exterminating intruders. They can be as small as a dog or as huge as an elephant, but no matter their size, they’re most definitely deadly.

Be warned: The Akab travel in packs, and you’d be wise to avoid their nests. When they spot you, the Akab will close the gap with a charging tackle. Try to escape, and they’ll slow you with a vile goo spewed from their repulsive mandibles.

He's REALLY good at tongue twisters.

Scarecrow
The ultimate patchwork monstrosity, a Scarecrow is a being forced into existence with a singular purpose: to kill. Assembled from a stitched-together mess of hay, human entrails, and tattered burlap clothes, this mute golem seeks to terrify more than just crows. Once he’s set his sights on you, he won’t rest until one of you is dead—but how do you kill that which was never truly alive?

Be warned: Scarecrows wield a variety of weapons, but the most brutal is a rusty chainsaw. Your only option may be to turn and face it, perhaps with a chainsaw of your own.

Market research shows that chain saws are more effective than fear gas.

Jack o’lantern
The origins of this freakish orange figure are shrouded in mystery, but it’s apparent that running into this ghoul in the middle of a pumpkin patch spells certain doom. Time and again, this cackling creature rises from the fresh soil to feed his bloodlust with the changing of the seasons. For the residents of Solomon Island, winter can’t come soon enough.

Be warned: The Jack O’Lantern likes to hide in pumpkin patches during the harvest, bursting forth from the ground to attack unsuspecting passersby. Instilled with the power of the earth, he can ensnare players with suffocating vines or hurl chunks of dead root.

This is what happens when you leave your Halloween pumpkin on the doorstep until Thanksgiving.

Deep Ones
Dripping with slime and salt water, the frightful fishmen known as Deep Ones have dwelled in the frigid depths of the Atlantic Ocean for centuries. With the emergence of the Draug, they’ve been forced to relocate to the shores of New England in search of victims to sate their carnivorous cravings.

Be warned: You may be fighting them on land, but they’ve retained the slippery, agile movements they once used to navigate through the watery deep.

His name is actually meant to imply that he has the soul of a poet.

The Filth
Those possessed by the pitch-black disease known as the Filth are no ordinary zombies. This foul, dark magic seeps up from below as a noxious liquid or imperceptible radiation, causing hysteria in its victims before mutating them entirely. Be you living, dead, or immortal, no one is safe from the alteration wrought by the Filth.

Be warned: Thanks to your anima-imbued powers, you’re resistant to the mind-warping powers of the Filth—but that doesn’t mean it can’t harm you. When Filth-infected enemies die, their vile disease will waft into the air as their corpse erupts into a plume of dark energy, debuffing any who step into it.

A cautionary tale for little boys who won't clean their rooms.

Spectres / Wraiths
Spectres are the unfortunate victims of brutal and undeserved death, who have—with or without their consent—returned to the corporeal world. Those Spectres with the most hatred for humanity become Wraiths: scythe-wielding ghost lieutenants who orchestrate evil like a maestro conducts a symphony. To face one is akin to staring down the Grim Reaper himself.

Be warned: Unlike harmless apparitions, Spectres have terrifying brute strength, which they can use to manipulate objects or rip their prey’s head off its shoulders. Able to materialize out of thin air, a Spectre can get the jump on you when you least expect it. Wraiths can use their supremely sharp scythes to rip a shred from the fabric of time itself, letting them warp around during fights in the blink of an eye.

This game will not reduce your hatred of mimes.

Bogeyman
This spindly freak is a being of pure evil, living solely to prey on the fears of lost children. He resides in an abandoned amusement park from the ’70s that was forced to close after a series of unexplained deaths. Now the Bogeyman lurks through the park’s attractions and rides, biding his time until the next unfortunate child crosses his path.

Be warned: The Bogeyman won’t face you head on. Gathering power from the surrounding rides, which he can manipulate at will, he’ll draw you into his own nightmarish realities, using illusions and trickery to gain the upper hand as he taunts you.

He'll give you the worst poking of your life with that finger.

The Draug
Birthed by the unholy union of the Filth and the waterlogged bodies of drowned Norse Vikings, these godforsaken creatures exist somewhere between life and death, transformed into coral-encrusted, tentacled monstrosities. Now the Draug use the bodies of their seafaring victims to serve as new soldiers in their army, or as raw organic material to facilitate their pod-based birthing process.

Be warned: This boss Draug is intimidating enough on his own, but things only get worse when he summons mind-wiped zombies to fight on his behalf. His gargantuan claws aren’t just for show, smacking attackers around or gripping them with bone-splintering force, and his would-be killers better get out of the water when he sends pulses of electricity in an area around him, lest they sizzle to a crisp.

If these guys are ruled over by a Draug Queen, I will absolutely lose it.

While the one I put my hands on was a pre-production model (the finalized mouse should be available in late-December), it looks and feels pretty damn sweet. The M.M.O. 7’s aimed at—you guessed it—the MMO gang. As such, there’s a programmable mini-thumb stick on the side, as well as a plethora of extra buttons peppered along the chassis, all programmable and within easy reach of the fingers. Other than the added buttons, the construction is mostly identical to the R.A.T 7, so the mouse should be equally as customizable as its sibling (allowing folks to tweak the size of chassis accordingly to fit their mitts).

Pricing on the M.M.O. 7 is undetermined as of now, but we’ll keep you updated as more info comes in. In the meantime, check out the pics below (revealed for the first time ever), and let us know what you think. As for me, I can’t wait to give it a test-run in non-MMO games such as Skyrim and Batman: Arkham City. The more buttons on my mouse, the better!

No plot spoilers here, but there are shots of the lovely scenes.

1. Icebergs

Skyrim’s Northern shore is the coldest bit, and in places looks like the arctic. Horkers – Tamriel’s version of the walrus – flop around on them. Kill them and turn them into delicious stew.

2. The bit that isn’t snowy

The area around Whiterun is one of the few places that doesn’t look uttery freezing. In fact, it looks sort of like Wales.

3. The coolest bit of rock

One of the most remarkable landmarks in the country happens to have a city on it. Solitude is awesome. Unless there’s ever an earthquake.

4. The coolest city

Every major city is unique and interesting in some way, but it’s hard to top Markarth. It feels like a place from another time, unchanged for thousands of years but still lived in.

5. The prettiest forest

Snow is nice, but trees are better. This stretch of brisk woodland feels like the great outdoors we’ve heard about from people who leave the house.

6. The highest point

OK, you probably could have found this on your own: it’s hard to miss. High Hrothgar, the place you can walk to, is not the summit though. Get a bit further in the main quest and you’ll be looking down on that place.

7. The best dungeon

Alftand, an unassuming Dwemer ruin. There’s a bit more to it. Not going to spoil what’s down there, but I can tell you it goes deep. The main quest will take you here eventually, but feel free to explore on your own.

8. The best cave

Do you like the Goonies? So do Bethesda. There’s a gorgeous, dripping, smugglers cave near Solitude, and a great quest relating to it in the city itself.

9. The best view of the aurora

You can catch the Northern lights on a clear night from almost anywhere in Skyrim, but for some reason I’ve always found the most stunning views around here. It might just be clearer weather, since it’s a warmer region. You can also get a Dragon Shout that makes the weather slowly clear up – doing that on a cloudy night will be the most magical 60 seconds of your Dragonborn life.

If you didn’t catch it, here’s my Skyrim review. If you want an even stronger fix, watch a man walk the length of the whole country in this video.

Gotham City Impostors now has a release date, January 10 next year, when it’ll be available as a download title only. Find out more on the Gotham City Impostors site.

You’ve probably noticed the narrator sounds a lot like Ray Liotta, who voiced GTA Vice City’s player character Tommy Vercetti. But the greying middle-aged man we see in the footage isn’t the only one in player-character situations. There’s also a shaven-headed youth in a car chase with the police, and a tattooed black guy running from a cop chopper. And hey, isn’t that all three of them together breaking into the jewellery store? Click below for a full size image of the evidence.

Chris Thursten points out that GTA IV used a deal gone wrong to link three characters that you ultimately ended up playing: Niko in the main game, Johnny Klebitz in the Lost and the Damned DLC, and Luis Lopez in the Ballad of Gay Tony. GTA V might give us a choice of three protagonists from the off, each with their own stories, and use this robbery as the flashpoint that links them.

It’d make for a more interesting story structure, and of course it would set them up beautifully for a co-op campaign that ties into the single player.

It’s clear from the latest screenshots that Max will be airborne quite a lot, hopefully for the majority of the game. See him diving, posing and exploding things in the four new screens below, spotted on the Max Payne 3 site.

So what makes Warplanes different?

“More dynamic, more manoeuvres, less camping,” he says. “Aeroplanes everybody knows, you are in 3D, you have to be moving all the time, like a shark.”

One of the frustrations of World of Tanks is that sometimes your team will decide to sit back and snipe at the enemy, meaning more aggressive players don’t have any support moving forwards. The constant movement of World of Warplanes enforces a very different style, unlike any other shooter.

Tsk, a flagrant disregard for Britain's anti-smoking ban.

Many of the basic concepts are similar to World of Tanks. You have a hangar full of different planes and winning battles will earn money and experience to upgrade your planes and unlock new ones. It’s a simple system, but an astonishingly compulsive one. When you first get a new vehicle, you start chasing upgrades to make it reach its full potential. But when you get there you realise you’re tantalisingly close to the next one. There’s always something to look forward to.

That effect will be boosted by cross compatibility between the two games. “Let’s have mutually acceptable gold, why not?” Victor enthuses. “It’s just dollars, or pounds, right? If you have the reserve of gold in your World of Tanks account, you’re going to want to try Warplanes, why don’t you use that money in World of Warplanes? There’s nothing against it.” There’s even the promise to move experience points between games. Victor tells us: “You can take one month’s experience in Tanks, and because you already have level 10 tanks, you can have those experience points from day one, put it into aeroplanes, and you’ll have a level 9 something right away.”

Matches are still 15 on 15, and you can still win by wiping out the enemy. One big difference will be in the alternate win conditions; World of Tanks relied on a control point system, which makes little sense in the sky. Instead each team will have a ground base, with hangars and anti aircraft guns, that the opposing team need to take out to secure victory. Seeing your base exist as an actual object with its own defences, rather than an arbitrary circle on the ground, is a big change, and should lead to a very different style of game.

The game will launch with US, German and Soviet planes represented. Sadly fans of Spitfires will have to wait. The British are the first planned post-launch addition, followed by the Japanese. It’s a disappointment for me – I could understand British armour being left out initially in World of Tanks, but the RAF, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz are some of the most iconic images of World War II, and it’s a shame we’ll have to wait for them to be properly represented.

Where's Biggles when you need him, eh?

There will be three broad classes of warplane to choose from: single engine fighters are the iconic dogfighter, light and quick to turn, they engage enemies closely and destroy them before they can react; heavy fighters turn slower but they hit hard if they catch you head on; and strafing aircraft, who focus on dealing out damage to ground targets. The last one is particularly intriguing, suggesting a much greater emphasis on taking out the opposing base.

World of Tanks never had anything like that, and as such games were often decided by eliminating the opposition, with capturing their base only being thought of when there were few players left on the field. By having a class dedicated to the base game, World of Warplanes should pressure their pilots to make earlier, riskier assaults, making games more interesting.

Like World of Tanks, World of Warplanes stretches either side of WWII. Starting planes will be small 1930s biplanes, while the highest levels will be represented by the early jet planes of the 1950s. Wargaming.net will be doing their research on this one: “It has to be historically realistic in terms of models, engines, internal components and relative parameters of different aeroplanes and different nations. Of course, it has to be well balanced, but the gameplay, the flight mode, the controls, they have to be somewhere in the middle, in that sweet spot, so that normal people can play.”

Meeting with the team, it was clear that they had a passion for military history. They know their planes like they know their tanks, but they aren’t afraid to fudge things a little in the name of fun and balance. For that reason, World of Warplanes will be removing takeoffs and landings, the most frustrating and disaster ridden part of any flight sim game. Players will get dropped straight into the world, ready to dogfight from the off, with no need to ever touch the floor.

Matt Higby isn’t surprised there aren’t more massively multiplayer shooters out there. “They’re fucking hard to make.” What surprises PlanetSide 2’s creative director is the lack of attempts by other developers to emulate 2003’s ultra-ambitious PlanetSide. “You talk to anyone who was a PlanetSide player, they’ll go all misty eyed.”

Fellow ex-players, please join me in a spot of eye-misting. I played PlanetSide for a year after the game’s launch, seeing the same potential in the game that Higby still eulogises today. “It’s an excellent team-based game, it has a lot of action and it’s just cool being able to hold a tower with 50 people when 200 people are coming in to it. You can’t compare it to anything else.”

Except, now you can compare it to PlanetSide 2. Like the first game, PlanetSide 2 is set in the midst a global war between three factions: the freedom-loving New Conglomerate, the totalitarian Terran Republic and the alien-fancying Vanu Sovereignty. Each of the factions has access to a wealth of guns, gadgets and vehicles, used to wrest control of the continents of the planet Auraxis. From hundreds clashing over a base in the centre of the most contested continent, to five-man scraps over a tower out in the wilderness, all this will be familiar to players of the original PlanetSide.

But for me, that PlanetSide, for all its glittering potential, never quite worked. Playing it in 2003, I wasn’t just fighting off Matt’s 200 attackers from my tower, I was also fighting against two more powerful enemies: my lethargic computer and a 56k internet connection.

Staying away from the electric shield shield thing seems like a plan.

Higby’s very conscious of the game’s context. “It sounds kind of arrogant, but PlanetSide 1 was just ahead of its time. When it came out, there were only 400,000 subscription gamers in the US. Plus, broadband adoption was low and a lot of players didn’t have hardware that could support the game.”

Going back to the game now, it feels too old and too clunky to repackage and shove out of the door rebranded, but as Higby’s boss, SOE head John Smedley, confirms, the plan wasn’t to do a proper PlanetSide sequel: “The original idea was to make it a free-to-play version of the original game.”

That scheme didn’t last long, though. As Smedley explains, “We fell in love with what we were making.”

The result is a hard reboot of PlanetSide. Higby says: “PlanetSide 2 has the spirit of PlanetSide 1. It’s got the same locations, the same factions, in a lot of cases the same vehicles and the same weapons.”

You can customise your guns to deal out death just how you want it.

However, the team felt uncomfortable pushing out a carbon copy with some spruced up textures. They wanted to dig into the foundations of the game and yank out PlanetSide 1’s problems at the root. Primary among these was the shooting.

“Our biggest change is the complete modernisation of the FPS mechanics,” says Higby. Firing a gun in PlanetSide 1 felt as lethal as coughing gently on your target. The technology of the era forced each of your bullets to be subject to a hidden dice-roll mechanic: on your end, it could look like you’d pinged every shot into a foe’s eyeball, but if the game’s fickle rules said you missed, you missed. That process has been stripped out.

“Someone who is familiar with Modern Warfare or Battlefield will feel very comfortable playing PlanetSide. The way the weapons work in terms of kick, aiming, recoil and iron sights feels very modern, like other current shooters.”

As in Battlefield 3, hit judgement is split between server and client-side, meaning where you shoot will be where you hit. The game has a realistic ballistics model: “When you fire a weapon it takes time to hit the location. If you fire a sniper rifle from a distance, you’ll have to aim your headshot a little above your target.”

Must resist the temptation to shoot him in the back of the head.

That mental calibration won’t always be the same, dependent on the rifle variant you use. PlanetSide 2 is big on customisation. Higby describes a few potential changes players can make to their loadouts. “You can unlock anything from transmissions for your tank that allow you to go up hills faster, to squad leadership, a cool branch that lets your squad respawn directly on you in the battle.”

Each weapon and vehicle has its own skill tree, with stages along it unlocked through experience. But branches aren’t solid upgrades. Instead, they’ll be variants of the base model – weaker armour making for a faster tank, or a larger clip at the expense of stopping power. Matt uses the Cycler assault rifle as his example, explaining how the Mk. 1, 2, 3 and 4 versions vary slightly in characteristics, but that key to this concept of ‘sidegrades’ is balance. “If you’re accurate and want to be fighting people from longer range, you’ll take the Mk. 3. It’s balanced against other models – one that’s more spray and pray, for example – so you’re not getting an actual power advantage.”

Earning the experience points to unlock new toys is a matter of time. Higby describes the mechanic as being similar to EVE Online’s: players can queue skills to train while they’re not playing, but there’s a bonus for those who can spend more time on Auraxis. “The hardcore guy that’s on for 12 hours a day will train skills a bit faster. If you’re actively playing, attacking and defending objectives, you get a small bonus to that offline skill system.”

Those hardcore still won’t get a definite boost to their power. Instead, they’ll have a wider pool of vehicles and weapons to swim about in and kill people from. PlanetSide 1 only let you call up vehicles from dedicated stations and pilot them once you’d earned the certification, and that system looks likely to continue in the sequel. PlanetSide 2’s top end will be able to scoot into battle on a quadbike, hop off to climb into a tank, eviscerate enemy defences from behind and jet out in a fighter gunship.

I poked around the Scrapyard paintball arena and scanned the ground while dangling from a zipwire, but there wasn’t a single PC to be found at the recent Call of Duty XP event in LA.

When asked about our platform, Infinity Ward employees only offered happy patter about their return to dedicated servers. Compared to Battlefield 3’s grandstanding, MW3 is short on PC love or technical boasting, and instead refreshingly open about design specifics.

The Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer that Call of Duty’s baying fans had travelled to LA to see isn’t a revolution – it’s the series putting its house in order. Anything that unbalanced the game back in the days of Modern Warfare 2 – and there was a lot – has been changed or removed.

Among the notable absentees announced to a rapturous crowd (yes, they cheered the removal of mechanics) were the One Man Army perk with its sneaky midspawn class change, the Stretch Armstrong arm-reach provided by Commando, the game-ending nuke and the prevailing threat of secondary shotguns. As fun for the individual as they might have been, they were ruining the game at large.

Beret-wearing onion seller on bike not pictured.

Killstreaks have undergone the greatest transformation, emerging Brundleflylike from a pod in their new form as Pointstreaks. In Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops, newer players could barely dream of access to the higher realms of Killstreak rewards, and success in more exotic objective-based game modes didn’t always involve chains of enemy death.

To help reward players more fairly, and encourage less antisocial play styles, the new system rewards not just kills, but flagcaps, objective grabs and basic teamwork.

What’s more, the streak rewards you choose are now split into Strike Packages. The first, Assault, will provide the explosive delights that are familiar to all, but the Support package is now home to all of the rewards that help your team. UAV scans, SAM turrets, drops of ballistic vests to divvy out among the troops, Recon drones and even a suit of Juggernaut armour can be called in.

Vitally, your ascendance to these team-helping goodies doesn’t reset when you take a bullet to the head, but instead keeps on ticking upwards throughout the round.

Remote turrets are a soldier's best friend.

Meanwhile, the Specialist Strike Package rewards talented lone wolves with an extra perk for every two points collected. However, dying at the hands of another still sets them back to the foot of the ladder.

Maps are international affairs. There’s an American interpretation of a London tube station, complete with a ‘Porter Potty’, and a mythical underground map containing delights such as Wrong Shoes Street and Big Beard Tower Station.

There are the streets lying in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and a foliage-packed African village surrounded by caves and waterfalls. All of them are fairer and better designed than most of those locations found in MW2, whose settings provided dozens of angles of attack via unnecessary doors, windows and rooftops in every conceivable direction.

In recent CoD games there’s also been a tendency to make the player feel guilty for specialising in one weapon. Modern Warfare 3 instead positively rewards you for remaining faithful to your chosen piece of hot, sexy metal. Guns now level up as you do, enabling you to strap different scopes and reticules to its body, and even letting you improve intricate details such as its kick, stability and the number of attachments it can handle.

Apart from the tower, this could be Tottenham on a Friday night.

These are all good, solid and intelligent changes to a multiplayer framework that, while loved, has long had rough edges in need of smoothing. Infinity Ward have risked angering the community in order to experiment, albeit with experiments that Quake III and Unreal Tournament modders first toyed with a decade ago. Firstly, there are user-tweaked game modes in private matches that work like UT’s mutators. Secondly, there’s a new mode called Kill Confirm. Here the deceased drop dogtags: collect an enemy’s tag and you gain 50 points; collect an ally’s and you deny the opposition their prize. It’s a simple concept, but it brings a new edge of teamwork to Team Deathmatch.

After running through the biggest changes to the game’s multiplayer offering, Activision announced the price for Call of Duty’s new premium service, Elite. The Facebook-enabled social network is £35 a year for 20 drops of map DLC, high-end clan features, prize competitions, in-depth tactical guides and twice-weekly, Hollywood-sponsored video content.

This is clearly the year that Call of Duty aims to go from gaming stranglehold to world domination. On PC, though? The day we actually see the thing running on a desktop, we’ll let you know.

Nobody likes a mindless grind in their MMOs, following in the footsteps of the countless players who have already optimized all the content. One upcoming MMO hoping to shatter the mold is Core Blaze, the Unreal 3-powered hack-’n'-slash from Gamania. We asked Jacky Chu, chief operating officer at developer RedGate Studios, how Core Blaze will differentiate itself from the pack. Check out his responses, translated into English.

PC Gamer: What sets Core Blaze apart from other action-MMOs?
Jacky Chu: A good action game should allow the player to perform combos, dodge, and block enemy attacks. While Core Blaze also has these elements, it’s much more than a mindless adrenaline rush. It’s also very cerebral, in the sense that players must figure out ways to work with each other to carry out a plan. The key element in this type of game is not only character design, but also the enemy AI. Each boss monster can be seen as a puzzle that can be solved in multiple ways. We didn’t design the game to rely purely on button-mashing or twitch mechanics (though we believe this should be viable on some levels). If you can make use of elements in the environment and your items, you’ll receive better rewards.

PCG: How much depth will there be to character customization? Talent trees, gear, etc.
JC: We can’t yet tell you how many skill trees or weapon types there will be in the game, but we can tell you that the players decide how they want to advance their character because there are no pre-determined paths for character advancement. Other than character stats, we came up with many statistics that are specific to action games, such as the length of combo attacks, attack range, movement speed, rolling distance, double jumps, or weapon-specific attacks.

Sup dude. Just wanted to let you know that my bow is 20 times cooler than your dinky cane.

PCG: What are the mechanics behind each of the four weapon styles?
JC: Each style must be played at a different rhythm. For example, a player using the dual blade style may mash the combo button as soon as he can, and dodge whenever the enemies attack. But a great sword user will have to play very differently to be effective. Due to the weight of the weapon, a great sword user can’t dodge freely while he’s attacking; he’ll have to find the optimal moment to strike instead of mashing buttons blindly. Conversely, when facing larger enemies, a dual blade user, while fast, can’t do as much damage compared to the great sword, which has more power and longer range. Also, for all of the weapon styles, we’ve designed at least one special mode: the shield and sword user can perform crippling shield attacks, dual blade players can enter a berserk mode, great swords can store up power to perform one devastating attack, and longbow users can utilize a special aim mode.

PCG: How will Core Blaze’s itemization work?
JC: All of the weapons and equipment in Core Blaze are crafted by the players and not dropped by monsters. This means that players can decide for themselves what equipment they want to make. All items have different properties, and players will be able to level up a weapon in specific ways, such as increasing damage or enhancing a stat. For players who don’t want to spend time crafting, they’ll be able to purchase basic weapons from the in-game store. However, they’ll be somewhat weaker than crafted weapons.

In Core Blaze, spiky armor isn't a fashion statement—it's the law.

PCG: Is four people the party limit? What happens if two people in a group want to use the same weapon style?
JC: Core Blaze is designed to encourage players to make use of all game mechanics to come up with the best experience that’s specific for them. Except for in rare cases, players can solve any stage however they see fit. The key to doing well in the game is not only the quality of the equipment or class choice, but also the players’ skill and teamwork. Therefore, there are no optimal builds, just builds that are suitable for you and your party.

PCG: Will players be casting spells, or are the attacks purely weapon-based?
JC: Other than weapons, characters in Core Blaze can also perform Oriental magic, or “Tao.” They involve items, traps, and magical weapons. Players will have to perform the Tao by using magical items or runes, such as Qi Men Dun Jia (Chinese metaphysical arts), fengshui, and chi.

PCG: Will there be any platforming-type segments to the levels? What kinds of items, like the hookshot, can the player use to access new areas?
JC: In Core Blaze, the stages are designed like a platformer. The players will have to use tools (such as a hookshot), jump, or climb in order to proceed. We want the players to look like an action hero. After getting past an obstacle, the player may find a hidden location with a key NPC or a treasure chest. What we want to do is design levels so that when a player meets a new obstacle, they’ll be able to find a solution intuitively. And the most important thing is that the players will be able to choose freely among multiple solutions.

PCG: What’s usually in these hidden areas, besides new bosses? Will they be accessible to anyone, provided they know how to reach them?
JC: Exploration is an important element in Core Blaze. Exploration can open up many possibilities in the game, such as a hidden quest, hidden NPC (maybe a hidden trainer that can grant players new abilities), a secret monster, or a secret group of mobs. And during the exploration process, the game will provide the players with many hints. For example, you may find a hidden path, or obtain information on a secret location from an NPC in town. The key elements in the exploration process are hints and information sharing, with a bit of random chance thrown in (for instance, some locations may not be accessible unless it’s raining). Most importantly, the world should be fun to explore.

Stabbing a guy in his peg-leg is just plain disrespectful.

PCG: What can we expect from boss fights? For instance, Liang Qu can have parts of his body, like his teeth, destroyed for bonus damage. Will all boss fights have these kinds of unique mechanics?
JC: The destruction of body parts will be presented in a very clear manner, with each destructible body part having a unique look. With one swing of the blade, a player might hack off a huge limb of a monster, and that monster will react accordingly (like doubling over in pain). This kind of gameplay mechanic can be very satisfying and we’re incredibly happy with it so far. We want to ensure that players have to do more than just hacking at the monster to destroy key body parts. In some cases, players must wait for the best moment to strike. Or in other cases, players will have to use special items or objects. The key is that every boss monster can be dealt with in a variety of ways. Our AI design forces players to stay aware of subtle cues and changes to the monster’s body and behavior. Even if its outside appearance seems the same, its behavior can still change drastically. How players deal with and adapt to these changes when killing a monster affects their bonus.

PCG: Thanks so much for your time! Anything else you’d like to add?
JC: Core Blaze has a very high degree of freedom. We want the players to decide on their own how to solve the problems they encounter and create entirely unique gameplay experiences. The last thing we want is a fixed and restricted path for all players.

….

Okay, so no-one actually knows anything about GTAV, but that doesn’t stop us from speculating wildly, so let’s make up some crazy ideas:

• GTAV: Concrete Misery continues the gritty realism of GTA4, and will be set in a pastiche of Baltimore in an obvious parody of The Wire.
• GTAV: Foiled Again will return to the cartoonish roots of Vice City, and will see you play as a costumed supervillain. Reaching the highest wanted level will get you hunted down by Batman.
• GTAV: Modern Warfare will be set in a middle eastern conflict. You play a corrupt soldier trying to ransack the town he is supposed to be liberating.
• GTAV: Grand Theft Stagecoach will be set in the past, you play Jack the Ripper in Victorian London.
• GTAV: Milton Keynes will be set in Milton Keynes. It will be as boring as that sounds.
• GTAV: IN SPACE will be set IN SPACE.
• GTAV: Retro City will be an isometric turn based strategy game. Fans will be outraged.

 
Check inside for a free roaming felonious selection of PC gaming news.

• MLG interview GSL champion MMA. Other acronyms may also feature.
• TechRadar say that Facebook has more gamers than Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony combined. I can only assume they’re not counting all those people accessing Facebook on a Windows PC.
• VG247 note that LA Noire costs twice as much in Australia as Europe and North America.
• The BBC report that AI researcher and inventor of LISP John McCarthy has died.
• Eurogamer say that The Secret World has 500,000 beta registrations.
• Baba ba bababa

 
How about you readers? Where do you think GTAV will be set? Answers can be serious or ridiculous, it’s your call.

The shots are taken from both the multiplayer and single palyer portions of the game, consisting of action shots as well as a few vistas that show the amazing draw distances and effects the FrostBite 2 engine is capable of. See bigger versions of the thumbnails DICE previously released of each of Battlefield 3′s nine multiplayer maps. Which one will you jump into first when Battlefield 3 finally unlocks?

From my time previewing the character, Natasha is all about footwork and combos. While you can glide through dungeons on the easiest settings just by shooting everything, you get no style points for doing that, and Rusty Hearts grades players not just on how many enemies they kill, but how artistically they do it. Why shoot someone in the face when you can kick-flip him, then juggle him in mid-air with a series of shots from her twin revolvers? This is a game that rewards players who take the time to linger over a battle in order to play with their victims before dispatching them. And Natasha has a lot of ways to play with her kills.

Natasha longs to play pool, but her back just doesn't bend that way

The blizzards of destruction that Natasha unleashes seem positively subtle next to her outfits and character model. Natasha is hyper-sexualized, and a lack of context for her character heightens the sense of gratuitous objectification. Since Natasha has yet to be written into Rusty Hearts’ main plot, her appearance is really all we know about her. She likes guns, clothing with lots of straps, and standing with her hips thrust forward and shoulders tossed so far back that she looks like nothing so much as a boomerang.

Natasha shouldn’t be a mystery for too long, however. While the story is focused on other characters for the moment, Natasha does have a unique backstory and motivation. She is a former con artist who made a small career out of “saving” villages from monsters that were working for her. Suckering villagers, however, stopped being an option when her brother was murdered by one of the vampire lord’s henchmen, and she joined the revolt that serves as the backdrop for Rusty Hearts. It’s a story that perfectly suits her combination of showy combat maneuvers and ruthless efficiency. She comes across like a carnival act suddenly playing for keeps.

The kind of punishment that Natasha dishes out is every bit as over-the-top as her wardrobe. Like Harpo Marx, she can reach into her jacket and produce something as absurdly oversized as a repeating rocket launcher. Parking it on the floor, it fires a steady stream of rockets in a straight line, which is devastatingly effective in tight corridors. It’s powerful on its own, but in combination with a party, the turret is a game-changing support weapon.

Since Rusty Hearts also tracks consecutive hits and rhythm, Natasha is able to pull off a few special moves if you get the timings right, or string enough hits together, Natasha might suddenly chuck a hand grenade into a swarm of enemies for devastating extra damage.

Natasha can hold her own in a fight, but she’s most potent when paired with more durable, melee-focused characters. When I was in a party with the scythe-wielding Angela, Natasha stayed on the edges of the battle dealing massive damage while Angela pulled aggro from the monsters. Since I barely had to worry about dodging attacks or looking after my health, I was able to deal far more damage from the battle’s perimeter.

The monsters only want to know why Natasha is carrying a hammerhead shark

Without her pistols, and at a little distance from her enemies, she is a little weak and a little vulnerable. This means that at higher level-encounters, her fast dodges, missile turrets, and double-jumps aren’t just for style. They’re a matter of survival, especially because so many of them also provide damage bonuses. As Natasha levels up and climbs the skill tree, I found myself looking at each skill upgrade with an eye toward whether it would be effective with my play style, and whether I would have to adapt my tactics.

If these screenshots fail to quench your Skyrim hunger, check out our huge Skyrim preview, a tale of theft, murder, exploration, alchemy and more theft.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My coffee is stone cold. I don’t even know how long I’ve had it, I’ve been so completely lost in Skyrim. I’ve been granted a generous chunk of time to play the very latest build of the full game – no restrictions on what I can do or where I can go. And I’ve only just finished creating my character.

At the start of the game, you’re being led to your execution. I’ve skipped to just after you get out of that, when you’re given one last chance to choose your race, gender and appearance before being let out into this vast and frosty world.

Bethesda don’t want to spoil the main quest, and neither do I. The reason to be excited about Skyrim is your own story: the unique string of discoveries and adventures you run into. And because it’s unique, I can tell you mine without spoiling yours.

Mine was the story of a scarlet-plumed Argonian with manic staring eyes. As I say, I spent a long time in character creation. Argonians are lizard men, and they’ve had a major overhaul in Skyrim: they look more monstrous, leathery, dinosaurian.

As in every Elder Scrolls game, you start as a prisoner with no history or status. But the war paint, scars and dirt you can add during character creation make it feel different this time. They’ve made it easier to make a character who looks desperate, bedraggled and fierce. Every race looks leaner and meaner: previously adorable wood elves have piggy, dead black eyes. Previously goofy orcs look fierce and tribal. Once aloof high elves look withered and cruel. And dark elves- wait, no, dark elves always looked like jerks.

My scary-eyed Argonian starts the game in a cave. At the other end, a dazzling light shines through chunks of blue ice, and as I step towards it, a prompt appears: ‘To Skyrim’.

Morrowind let you off a boat, into a misty fishing village overlooked by a giant tick. Oblivion let you out of a sewer, onto the shores of a shining lake. Skyrim lets you out of a cave, on the snowy slopes of a huge mountain. The craggy landscape stretches before you, half lost in the clouds. It’s one hell of a sight. I turn around and set off in the opposite direction.

This is what I love about Elder Scrolls games. I love not doing what I’m told, avoiding what I’m pointed at, and going where I shouldn’t. Anyone wanting to take the well-trodden path in Skyrim can head down that slope, discover the small town of Riverwood, and kill a boss spider in a dark cave. But we’ve seen all that in the E3 demo – I want to see the rest of the world.

A few minutes up the hill, I find a walled-off Nordic town I’m not allowed into. I hop on a few boulders and climb in anyway. Through a pair of heavy doors, I find subterranean torture chambers, and dead adventurers rotting in tiny cages. Only one seems worth looting – a robed guy with a book in his cell – but it’s locked.

Lockpicking is no longer a tumbler-tickling nightmare: you just swivel one pick to what you hope is a sweet spot, and try turning the lock with the other. It’ll turn a little if you’re close to the sweet spot, but turn too far in the wrong position and the pick snaps. It’s a system that works well in Fallout 3, and it feels slicker here.

Persuasion, by the way, isn’t a minigame at all this time. Certain dialogue options have ‘[Persuade]’ in front of them, and your chance of success – which isn’t shown – depends on your skill. I never succeeded at one.

The wizard has nothing much on him, but the book is worth it: it teaches me Spark, a streaming lightning spell. I try it out on a ribcage: a crackle of white energy leaps from my hand, jolting it across the room, and doesn’t stop. The roaring current keeps flowing as long as you hold the button. It’s an addictive feeling of power.

Back out in the wilderness, I decide I need a destination. The map, when I bring it up, is beautiful: a bird’s-eye-view of the world, in full 3D and rotatable to view its geography. Parts of it are swamped in mist because, apparently, it’s actually misty there at this moment.

He’d steal food from the castle and whinge about getting splinters. Then you had to construct a chain of a buildings to capture him, imprison him, torture him, try him, tar and feather him, and eventually reform him; all to make it so that you could get some wood. Rather than the tried and tested old-fashioned system of lopping his head off and recruiting a new carpenter.

Thankfully, they’ve realised the error of their ways and moved back to the old Stronghold model of simple castle-building fun. They’ve also moved to the Trinigy Vision engine of their competitors, The Settlers, bringing to it freeform castle design. You can drag castle walls into all sorts of shapes, drop in buttresses, towers, gateways and the like, then watch the walls morph like granite blancmange to accommodate them. Similarly, houses dynamically shift their appearance the further from the citadel they get, changing from singleperson shacks a mile outside the walls to whopping great burgher mansions nestled against the inner fort itself.

Meet you by the statue, just by the rotting corpse in a cage.

Aside from building them, Firefly are proud of how their castles and people fall apart when big rocks hit them, thanks to a new physics engine. We were shown a demo of what trebuchets do to castles (hint: they don’t wine them and dine them). The Havok physics were deliberately overblown: soldiers tumbled off the walls, individual stones were blasted away, and entire chunks of the structure were rendered indefensible – yet still impassable.

The newly-revealed combat system was much as you’d expect: peasants died quickly, foot knights hacked at each other, archers picked them off from afar. Yet other elements had that inspirational (and very British) sadism of Rome: Total War’s flaming pigs. Whether it was the burning logs rolled from a castle’s walls, cages of rabid hounds waiting to be unleashed on the enemy, or giant palisades of wooden spikes filtering knights into killing fields, Firefly really showed a nicely grim sense of humour. Similarly, in-game events that can affect your castle’s economy range, from mad cow disease to your woodcutters refusing to work because they’re scared of fairies.

For cow-catapult fans, we have more details on their ammo: they can actually fling a variety of infected animals into castles. You can choose a single cow (“…and your father smells of elderberries!”), two pigs, three sheep, or a bag of disgruntled badgers. These catapults spread disease rather than causing physical damage, and the animal type determines how many and how large the miasma clouds are that are left. Disease kills troops but leaves the buildings standing, and requires a new specialist, the apothecary, to remove it.

Aww! They're building some swings!

This new engine also introduces fog-of- war in the form of night battles. While it never made sense in daytime (“we’re in a giant castle on top of a hill, don’t you think we know what you’re doing down there behind that hedge?”) it does with the new day-night cycle. At night, only areas lit up by such new, special constructions as watchfires and beacons are visible to your troops, and your troops need to maintain them. This makes a surprise night assault – like that carried out by The Wolf in the first story mission – not only plausible and strategically sound, but pretty awesome to watch when lit by several hundred individual torches.

Yes, The Wolf has returned. In the first game, four lords usurped the kingdom and your goal was to restore the rightful king; it seems the singleplayer plot this time will focus on the revenge of The Wolf, the nastiest of the four, who has somehow recovered from being chopped up and thrown from the walls. He’ll return in the bloodier of the two singleplayer campaigns, while the other focuses on building castles and economies for the SimCity fan in all of us. This will be told through a dark comicbook style in between missions.

On top of that there’s a huge variety of multiplayer modes, administered through Steam, and players can also use the map editor to create and share castles – though lead designer Simon Bradbury is aware that they need “some kind of filtering system to avoid hundreds of castles looking like penises.” The team are even talking of letting you place your castles on an integrated Google map, and see how you’ve done in the campaign /multiplayer in your local area. At the moment, the only style of castle available is the classic Edward I – other architectural styles might be DLC later on, if there’s a demand. I think there will be.

Ever felt like there was someone working behind the scenes, constantly pulling the strings of your daily life? Either you’re really paranoid, or you’ve seen through the illusions put up by the world’s most secret societies. We’ve got an exclusive trailer for Funcom’s supernatural, modern-day MMO The Secret World, detailing the factions that fund your war for control. Who will you ally with: the chaos-conducting Dragon, the zealous Templar, or the stealthy-and-wealthy Illuminati? Whoever you choose, get ready to violently settle your differences in 100-player PvP warzones.

If I wasn’t already sold by the grotesque creatures you hunt in the game, then the possibility of firing bullets and bursts of flame in El Dorado surely sealed the deal. I’m leaning towards siding with the Illuminati: covertly manipulating stocks and bonds while I hunt demons sounds like the life of kings. If you want to know more about The Secret World and its inhabitants, set for release in April 2012, be sure to check out our in-depth preview right now and our monster guide in the US Holiday 2011 issue later.

Check inside to see the images in full. If you want more details on how it wall all work, check out our Mass Effect 3 multiplayer explained post.

Check inside for a full breakdown of how this will work.

The co-op mode won’t star Commander Shepard or any of his or her crew. Instead, you’ll play as a special forces team fighting in another part of the galaxy, representing the larger scale of the war against the Reapers. You’ll be able to customise your team by choosing from a variety of familiar Mass Effect classes and races like Asari, Krogan and Turians, each with special abilities.

The most interesting part of the announcement is how it will impact on the single player game. While the multiplayer mode is separate from the main story, it contributes to something called the ‘galactic readiness level’ which represents how prepared the galaxy is to fight off the Reaper threat. Having a high galactic readiness level is vital to getting a good ending to the story, but Bioware were keen to stress it is perfectly possible to get the best ending while only playing the story mode and ignoring the multiplayer completely. This all forms part of Mass Effect 3′s ‘galaxy at war’ system, which will see players able to affect their galactic readiness via a variety of methods across different platforms, although exactly what those other methods are is currently under wraps.

The multiplayer components are being made by a separate team at the newly formed Bioware Montreal, allowing Bioware Edmonton to continue focusing on the single player story. This comes as something of a relief to fans, some of whom were concerned that the addition of multiplayer would detract from the main game.

I was sceptical about the inclusion of multiplayer into such a heavily story driven series, but the new mode sounds like it could be a lot of fun. Will you be sticking to the single player? Or will the lure of playing as your own Krogan Battlemaster be too strong?

When news of Diablo 3’s real money auction house broke, gamers responded with the inevitable arguing and outrage, but amongst it was one shared opinion: if it did cause a problem, people would simply play its action-RPG cousin Torchlight 2 instead.

Max Schaefer, CEO of Torchlight developers Runic and co-designer of Diablo and Diablo II, explains their philosophy. “We want to establish that you can have a great, compelling, fun game to which you don’t need to make a long term financial commitment,” he says. “We also want to be able to move onwards – if you charge subscriptions and micropayments you commit to years of support and development on the game.”

Torchlight II is the uneasy adolescence between the fast-paced, loot-crazed Torchlight and the plans for an MMO set within the same world. “It makes an excellent stepping stone to MMO development,” says Schaefer. The original Torchlight was beloved enough that players begged for a multiplayer component, so this time around you’ll be able to fight with friends, either online or over a LAN.

There's a fresh selection of imposing monsters to slay.

But that’s not the only difference between the two games. “We didn’t want to make it seem like we were simply tacking multiplayer onto Torchlight,” says Schaefer, “so we made the decision to start from scratch on characters”.

In Torchlight II, there’ll be four new classes to choose from – the ranged, “lowmagic” nomad Outlander, the meleefocused, engineering-themed Railman, the fast-attacking Berserker, who’ll come with a selection of animal powers, and a mystery fourth character. Runic wouldn’t reveal too much about this one, but fantasy RPG tradition dictates that some form of mana-guzzling sorceress would fit nicely into that lineup. Each will have customisable male and female variants.

Rather than simply giving players a new set of dungeons to explore, Torchlight II is expanding above ground. The linear, claustrophobic caverns of the first title are being augmented by overworld environments that’ll include deserts, snowy temples, dwarven battlefields, and haunted forests and swamps. Each has a full day/night cycle and random weather.

Please, please let this be one of the pets.

Those environments are far larger than in Torchlight. The largest levels in the first game were comprised of six to seven ‘chunks’ in a random linear order, but in Torchlight II a typical area will be comprised of as many as 23 ‘chunks’ in a grid. There’ll still be an entrance and an exit, but there’ll also be hidden corners to explore, rivers to navigate and landmarks to investigate. “The world is bigger and deeper,” Schaefer says.

That world is split into three major sections, each with its own different hub town. Random events and tasks will pop up for your character to deal with in whatever way they see fit. Those will range from a broken down wagon beset by monsters to a slave camp that you have to burn down to free those trapped within. Each landmark in the game will have some form of mini-boss tied to it, marking a major increase in the number of boss fights that you’ll need to deal with.

Guiding you will be a bulked-out plot. Whereas the first game’s story was largely incidental to the action, its sequel aims for a more balanced approach. “We don’t want to change the action-oriented nature of the game, but we want the story to feel more immersive and compelling,” Schaefer says. “This time we even hired a real writer!”

'Fire wolves! Fetch me a proper shirt!'

The sequel has been delayed a little by the process of getting the first Torchlight out on the Xbox 360, but PC gamers shouldn’t feel left out. “It gave our artists and level designers a bit more time to make cool stuff,” says Schaefer. “Also, we made some technological optimisations based on the necessities of porting to the Xbox.” That should mean that Torchlight II will have the same low system requirements of its predecessor, despite an increased polygon count and larger environments. Schaefer won’t commit to whether it would come with the much-loved netbook mode of the first game though. “We’ll wait till its done before saying anything about netbooks, just to be on the safe side.”

By starting with the same basic technology and tools as the original game, the focus this time around can be placed more squarely on more and better content. “We’ve got a great running start. The development cycle will be around two years, which is almost twice as long as we took on Torchlight,” Schaefer says.

Don’t dismiss Torchlight II as a mere stepping stone between the purity of Torchlight and the endgame of an eventual MMO. The first game distilled the action-RPG genre into a simple easy-tounderstand package, but Torchlight II promises to perfect that package with the addition of multiplayer, more compelling environments, and a storyline worth paying attention to. If Runic can pull it off, that long wait for Diablo III might not seem so bad after all.

In Mark of the Assassin, you team up with a feisty elf played by Felicia Day, and must hunt down a mysterious gem housed within that dim fortress, which happens to be protected by Orlesian Chevliers, some of which seem to be riding monsters. See the Dragon Age 2: Mark of the Assassin trailer for an overview. It’s due out next Tuesday October 11.

Might & Magic’s heroes are pompous, whimsical sorts who you would never elect to run a country. Unconcerned with state matters, they ride forth with a posse of warriors to find gold and a fight. Your hero acts as your pawn of exploration on the gorgeous world map. Each turn he can ride a certain distance, picking up relics, investigating ruins and engaging enemies.

In battle, the hero stands at the back in silver armour probably worth more than his castle. In standard Heroes of Might and Magic fashion, war is waged in turns on a grid.

'If I just keep standing here, everything will be fine.'

My first act as ruler is to start a fight and order a unit of crossbowmen to certain death. My close combat units stand stock still in horror as my mis-click sends my only ranged unit marching towards a slobbering Cerberus demon. The old Might and Magic games were blessed with evocative lo-fi graphics that looked as if they had been lifted from old medieval woodcuts. Now, beautifully rendered models exchange blows.

My crossbowman puts down his bow, draws a tiny knife and shanks the demon in the neck. The beast roars, biting his face off, while at the back, my hero waves his magic sword and casts “inspire” on the crossbowman. You can do it, lads!

This sort of rash leadership is recognised by a new ‘blood and tears’ reputation system. Some missions on the campaign map offer reckless resolutions, others sensible ones. Charging in to hit the problem with a hammer earns blood points. Negotiation and bargaining sends you down the grossly misnamed path of tears. Getting enough points in either path lets you choose a new class for your hero, opening up new abilities and changing his appearance. The same system applies to every faction’s single player campaign. If you want to create a charitable necromancer, it can be done.

The most polite war it'll ever be your pleasure to experience.

My hero continues cheerfully down the path of blood, but in a fit of kindness, I retreat my crossbowmen to a safer station, and they plod slowly to the back of the battle. For all the graphical polish, there’s a total lack of urgency to Might & Magic’s battles. Death gets meted out slowly and politely. It’s more like cricket than war.

The sedate pace is part of Might & Magic’s charm. The pleasure of a long campaign comes from gradually turning an army of peasants into a war machine, a homestead into a gleaming palace and a pompous twit of a knight into a hero with god-like power. It’s doing it in the most mannered and traditional way possible, but Might & Magic Heroes VI looks set to deliver on all those counts

The other thing you forget? That BioWare are good at making Star Wars games. Knights of the Old Republic is one of the great RPGs. TOR is more of that, except rather than play as a fledgling Jedi knight, you also get to play as a fledgling smuggler, fledgling Imperial agent, fledgling bounty hunter…

I’ve played The Old Republic at trade shows and at press events multiple times, and always come away impressed. But I’d never had the chance to disappear into the game properly. Here, with no distractions, I simply vanished into it. In six hours, I burned through from level one to level ten, barely looking up. It was a brilliant, brilliant experience – polished, flowing, with quests that smartly escalate and a story well told.

I’ve been levelling a smuggler character through TOR’s opening area of Ord Mantell and beyond. The smuggler class is meant to be Han Solo incarnate – a character archetype who relies on chucking grenades, blaster fire and barbed wit at the enemy.

Jedi Shadows get to have double the fun.

The smuggler is at his best when firing from behind cover. You tap a hotkey to roll into safety, and then pop up from behind to pelt an attacker with fire. It doesn’t feel particularly heroic, but that’s kind of the point – smugglers don’t like getting into fist fights. Slightly later you’re given a couple of comic finishing moves – you can kick an enemy in the balls, and then smack them over the head with the butt of your blaster. I didn’t check if this works with droids.

I was surprised at the flexibility available in TOR’s character selection – there are far more examples of body types, haircuts, beards and random facial accruements than I’m used to in WoW, say. I was so surprised by just how fat your character can be, I’ve hereby vowed that every character in my menagerie will be artfully modelled on a lardier version of the Pillsbury Doughboy. Even the ladies.

The smuggler’s storyline begins on Ord Mantell. His ship and cargo are stolen; he’s stranded planetside, with the local crime lord chasing him for payment. Meanwhile, Separatists and the Republic are at war: even if he had a ship, he’s not going to get past the blockade. The quests start with small tasks for the local civilians and downand- outs. Retrieve a family heirloom from a village. Find the missing son of two local refugees. Get a doctor to come back and administer aid to the local Republic forces. Capture a pirate. Infiltrate a Separatist base.

The opening area is essentially an island. Quests send you to the north first, then the east, and finally the west. Quest goals are marked clearly on the map, any area transitions that you have to progress through shown with a bright green arrow. Along the way, you come across small subquests that can be completed in the local area. You’re never directly offered pure grind quests – no ‘kill ten Womp Rats’. As you move through an area, you’ll be given a running counter that will offer a further reward as you progress.

These guys are always ready for combat.

When fighting in a Separatist base, I was offered an XP reward for killing 15 soldiers. It didn’t matter what creed or colour, or what weapon they were carrying, as long as they died as part of completing my other objectives. This is very, very smart thinking – turning the expectation of grind into what’s essentially a really achievable… uh, achievement.

There are other clever interpretations of MMO mechanics. The opening settlement includes vendors of level-appropriate gear – in this case a blue chest-piece. This gear can be bought for commendations – currency earned for completing quests. By the time I reached level nine, I had enough. Extra commendations for a new blue waistcoat. Nice.

There was a similarly pleasant mechanical moment as I transitioned from one quest area to the next. My new companion (more on these guys later) warned me of the dangers that lay ahead. “Here,” he said, “take this”, offering his prized, heavily modified pistol.

Combat surprised me. When you’re levelling in WoW, you’re usually peeling off single baddies from groups, dealing with them one by one. You’re careful to watch for patrols, and if you get ambushed by more than one, you’ll probably have to quaff a health potion or blow a cooldown. Most monsters have one or two abilities that they spam. You’ll die if you take on more than two mobs. In The Old Republic, the default combat scenario is to face three or more linked enemies.

'Dude, I didn't change your entry on Wookiepedia.'

Aggro one, and they’ll all activate. That means planning where your crowd control is going to hit, and in what order you’re going to attack. At first, this sounds like combat is going to be harder, but it’s not. Their health pools are pretty small, and they go down very quickly. Each combat area, be it an underground base or overworld setting, is also much larger than those found in “insert generic MMO here” – and the pulls are all widely separated. The theoretical downside: much more wandering. That didn’t bother me. The upside is massive: you just don’t die from monsters respawning and then wandering into your back. I have no idea how this will play out at launch, when millions of players will be caning quests, burning through the opening areas in a few hours – but in my normal play session, levelling was a real pleasure.

There are serious quality of life improvements for MMO players. First: death is painless. If you die, you can respawn in situ by calling in a medical bot. You’ll then have a few seconds of immunity to find a safe location. All players seem to be able to resurrect other players out of combat freely, from level one. The smuggler includes a recuperation ability that lets him recover health and action points in a very short space of time. And, finally, companion characters can be sent back to town to sell any junk items – like Torchlight’s pet cats and dogs.

The Old Republic might not be the first to introduce these ideas, but I’m convinced everything listed above will be adopted by all MMOs going forward. They just make sense, ensuring your time in-game is spent playing, not fiddling.

It makes sense, because your time in The Old Republic feels meaningful. In practice, there’s very little separating what you do in the Old Republic MMO and what you do in the Knights of the Old Republic singleplayer game: find a guy, have a bit of dialogue, and then go out into the world to kill stuff. You just do it with your friends, and see other players running around.

A different approach to pest control.

I wondered how dialogue and conversation would work in practice: BioWare’s solution is pretty smart. If you’re about to have a story moment, you’ll pass through a glowing green forcefield – creating a separate instance of the game for you and your party. In there, you might fight a baddie, or talk to an NPC, but you’ll do it isolated from other players. All quests are introduced by dialogue and a cutscene, and when you’re talking to a quest-giver, the rest of the world will see a little speech bubble over your head.

Most quests begin and end with a small or major decision. When one doctor wouldn’t tell me where to find vital supplies, I threatened her kid. That helped, at the cost of 50 dark side points. When asked, in the course of invading a Separatist stronghold, to release a pirate prisoner, and an obviously bad man, I could choose to leave him in there, kill him, or release him – with consequences to my moral standing, and, I hope, the chance to meet the Greedo lookalike down the line.

By level six, I was cruising through the open world quests and met my first real challenge: a heroic zone. Heroics are areas designed for grouping, with harder monsters and better rewards. Even on the limited test server I was playing on, it was extremely easy to find a companion to play with. It took around 20 minutes to complete the quests – and the loot was a cut above what I was expecting. The only weirdness: seeing my fellow smuggler wander around with the same companion.

Traditionally, MMO questing is a singleplayer experience, but it gets better, and faster, if you do it in pairs. Playing in a pair means you can take on more mobs, and cruise through more quests, faster. Two organised players seem to complete quests at triple the clip of a solo player. TOR’s solution: give every player a pet AI to quest alongside. The smuggler’s first companion is a long-range sniper – but he can equip the same weapons and armour that you wear or use. In cutscenes, he’ll offer comments, and the conversations you’ll have bounce between the target, your companion, and your player character.

The Mirialan are one of the game's playable species.

In questing, I soon discovered that the companion was a useful friend. By level seven I’d perfected a rotation of abilities that could tear through mobs. First, throw an explosive pack at an enemy that will detonate if the target receives damage. Then throw a frag grenade for area of effect damage. Then a flash grenade for AOE stuff. Fire one shot at the first target to take him out. My companion would then grapple hook a weak mob over to us, where I could kick them in the balls, and smack them with the upside of my pistol. To end, focus fire on the final target.

The heroic area was a warm-up for an impressive climax – a separatist base dug into the side of a hollowed-out volcano. This was, essentially, a public dungeon – with multiple quest objectives coinciding. It’s where my smuggler discovered the fate of his ship and the lost cargo of blasters.

This is where BioWare’s experience with Star Wars pays off. TOR offers the same moral duality that we saw in Knights. You’re meant to be fighting for the Republic as a smuggler, but the game goes out of its way to portray the Republic as corrupt, narcissistic and morally bankrupt. It makes a point of appalling you.

This is why, I believe, The Old Republic will succeed. I’m never going to claim that it will offer Witcher 2 levels of choice and moral flexibility. But it’s doing as much as the old Knights games, in a world in which you can play with your friends. Its design includes elements that drive all MMO developers to do better work. And it does it all within the world’s most popular universe.

The Old Republic is a monster. I can’t wait to play more.

WildStar is a new sci-fi/fantasythemed MMORPG built to cater to each of those four types of gamers. It’s being made by Carbine, a studio of NCsoft comprising veterans of World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, Guild Wars and a dozen more. You pick a race, a class, and then a path: a style of play that you’ll stick to throughout the game.

Each one – Explorer, Soldier, Settler and Scientist – has a unique type of quest that you’ll keep getting wherever you go in WildStar’s world. The rest of the game is pretty close to the conventional MMO template: third-person perspective, numbered hotkeys for your ever-expanding quickbar of buffs and attacks, and friendly characters who need favours and have a few copper and some armoured trousers to pay for it.

Explorers carry a tracking device. Any time they’re near an area of interest, they can use it to point them to a spot where they can place a beacon. Sometimes it’s just a high point, other times it’s to analyse an anomaly, and in some cases it can help out local allies – by providing targeting info for some AI-controlled snipers, for example.

Warriors attack with big glowing swipes.

All they have to do is place a beacon in the right spot to complete the quest – there’s no combat involved – so the spots are accordingly tricky to get to. I found one near a gravitational anomaly that temporarily gave me super-jumping, letting me leap up to a series of high platforms. Another was only accessible via a secret route up a mesa: certain rocks are only visible to Explorers, so only they can clamber on them to reach the top. Once you’ve got there, placing the beacon gives you the same kind of reward as an ordinary quest in any other game: a chunk of experience.

Soldiers have a similar tracking device, but it locates outposts: areas that need to be defended from attacking enemies. Sometime’s it’s just a strategically important area, other times there’s a group of civilians to be protected. Either way, you choose when to trigger the onslaught, and you then have to fight off wave after wave of enemies. It’s not as hard as it sounds: each time I did one of these events, the attackers were much lower level than the roaming mobs of the area. You don’t have to fight them alone, either: everyone in the vicinity can join in your heroic stand against the hordes, and help you survive it.

The Settler is the social path. It wasn’t available in the alpha version of the game I played, so I don’t know much about how its premise of ‘social challenges and social rewards’ actually relates to other players in the game. But only part of this path is dependent on other people: you’re also helping the non-player characters of this world build villages and establish a society here. It’s a path for those gamers who treat their MMORPG as a second home, and want to see that place grow and have a hand in shaping it.

The Esper can conure temporary armour.

The Scientist is an interesting hybrid: your quests involve collecting data from items and creatures in the world in order to learn more about its history. It’s for both story-junkies and compulsive completionists: if you’ve ever scoured an open-world game for the last collectible item you need for the 100% completion rating, you’re a Scientist. Like the Settler, it wasn’t in the build I played, so I can’t judge how well it caters to that mindset in practice.

The character paths double as the explanation for what you’re doing here, on the exotic planet Nexus. Explorers are mapping a new world, Soldiers are here to fight bad things and save good things, Settlers have come to make a home for themselves and their people, and Scientists are in it for the research.

Nexus is the home planet of one of those hyper-advanced races that are always vanishing and leaving their mysterious technology lying around videogame worlds. In the case of the Eldan, they’ve left both technology and magic: WildStar fuses the two closely. The Spellsinger class, for example, dual wields pistols and enchants them to inflict different damage types. The game feels a little more fantasy than sci-fi overall, though: the other two classes I played were a sword-wielding warrior and a pure-magic illusionist.

The game’s art style is a notch more cartoony than World of Warcraft, and that’s actually an advantage. Game terrain tends to have a particular look to it: flat fields on which points have been reluctantly dragged into bumpy peaks by level-editing tools. WildStar doesn’t look like that. These mountains look like they were arced out by brushstrokes: their summits form sharp, jagged skylines, and their slopes curve like draped cloth. It has all the character of classic handpainted animation.

There are bonuses for defeating a boss efficiently.

One chunk of the planet is being torn apart by Loftite: a lighter-than- air mineral that lies beneath the world’s surface and threatens to burst out into space. It looks like the planet is exploding in slow motion: craggy hunks of this blue crystal have ruptured the crust and dragged shrapnel twists of rock up into the air, where they hang impossibly.

The area I played was a snowcarpeted valley in a blizzard. I landed in a drop pod, Space Marine style, and stormed out. I was playing as a Granok Warrior – a big rock man with a bigger sword – but chose the Explorer path. That didn’t change my main quest: beat up some yetis that are terrorising the survivors of a spaceship crash, and make my way to the mysterious tower causing the snow storm. The symbolism of playing a WoW-like MMO in which your first task is to stop a blizzard was not entirely lost on me.

The Warrior’s abilities are basic close-range damage dealers and area-of- effect attacks. Some drain one of two regenerating power cells, and others require adrenaline that’s built up as you do damage.

The Esper is more interesting: her basic attack summons a dozen illusory swords and flings them into your enemy. Basic attacks like this build her combo meter, which magnifies the damage of any finishing moves. One ridiculous power summons a vast imaginary hand to palm-squish your enemies from the sky, and another makes weakened enemies explode into ghosts. Playing as an Esper, I liked to palm-stun enemies, throw a few sets of swords at them to build two or three combo points, spend those combo points on a move that pretty much flings a hawk into their face, then explode them into ghosts.

The planet is littered with ancient alien technology.

The third class I tried was the Spellslinger, and I settled into a similar rhythm. He has a slow charged shot that’s good to open with, since you’re usually safe until you attack. A stun shot slows the enemy’s approach, a twirling barrage with both pistols drains their health, and his own finishing move blows them to pieces if they’re damaged enough. The animations on all these attacks have a Disney-esque flourish to them: big, expressive movements that show confidence and style.

Carbine want the experience of playing WildStar to have several layers to it at any given time. Producer Jeremy Gaffney gave the example of a quest to save some locals from alien jungle cats. You don’t have to do anything more than that, but if you kill a few cats in quick succession, the game will notice and offer you a challenge: kill five more in the next two minutes, and you’ll get a reward.

If you’re on the Scientist path, you might notice some of these cats are mutated. Now you’re scanning the mutant ones for a science quest then killing them to complete the challenge. Then you notice that the cats are hunting deer, and you have an easier time if you attack them while they’re already fighting. A tribe of local druids can intervene, trying to protect the wildlife with healing spells. And if you kill them, you find an item on them that starts a quest that takes you inside an enormous tree in the area, to a cavern beneath.

The Aurin. Don't worry, you can also choose cat ears.

“We don’t believe in killing ten rats,” says Gaffney. “We believe in killing ten jungle cats and giving you four different motivations for doing it in different ways.”

It didn’t always pan out quite that way for me. I did see a few layers in action: the challenges to take on more creatures within a time limit were the first time I’ve felt motivated to Kill Ten X. But playing the first zone through a few times as an Explorer and then a Soldier, the paths weren’t as different as I’d hoped. You can skip a lot of combat as an Explorer, and that’s a big bonus for me, but you always have to return to your main quest. And your main quest, as far as I played, is to kill local wildlife and save NPCs.

The character paths are still a step forward for the way MMOs adapt to the diversity of their player base. WildStar is only in alpha, with no firm release date, so Carbine may take them further still. If not, it’ll just be a very pretty world with a few cool new ideas. I can live with that

He was one of the dev team, and he’d spent the last few years coding this game. He should see it as numbers and rules. But there he was, grinning and gesticulating with my fellow journalists at this Hamburg press event as they battled through a dungeon, not five minutes after I left my chair.

“We’re trying to combat the barriers to having a cooperative experience together,” Eric Flannum tells me. He’s Guild Wars 2’s lead designer, and clad in the same white and red Guild Wars 2 T-shirt as my seat usurper. Prior to my interview, he was sitting on a spare seat, leaning over the shoulder of a colleague and dispensing tanking advice in staccato bursts. He seemed to be having such a good time, I felt bad taking him away from the group. But as he started to talk, his eyes lit up.

“We’re bringing a cooperative experience that’s a bit different to other MMOs. This isn’t a systemic thing, it isn’t ‘feature A’: it’s everything in the game coming together to make it feel very cooperative.” Central to this pervading co-oppiness are Guild Wars 2’s dynamic events: nearby players forming ad-hoc gangs to take down large enemies, without needing to join a formal group.

This is for not changing my litter tray!

Eric knows this inclusive method makes his game different to its MMO peers. “Say another group is on your quest and got to the marker before you. They need to kill their set of things, and you need to kill your set of things: it means you can’t adventure in the same area. So you leave because that MMO etiquette has developed: ‘we’re here first’.” But in Guild Wars 2, the sight of fellow players on the horizon isn’t a prelude to a gank: it’s potential salvation.

I had a shark attached to my leg the first time I was saved. I’d been floating ten feet under the surface of the water in a bay when it happened. I’d only gone for a swim.

Guild Wars 2’s underwater combat is peculiarly responsive. Venturing below the waves in games is usually an exercise in mouse-slamming frustration; here, it’s like flying. My character moved quickly and turned on the spot, a rebreather clamped to his face meant I didn’t have to worry about oxygen supply – even the weapon-set changed, switching my Engineer’s blunderbuss for a harpoon and net combo. Given that much freedom, I was confident in my combat ability. Too confident.

In an orgy of fish-murder, I’d unwittingly got close to the wreck of a pirate ship. Like most of Guild Wars 2, it was beautiful: dappled wood and burnished metal, illuminated by shimmering blue light. I cooed, turning my attention away from the seven foot-tube of teeth bearing down on me. I whirled around in the water, milliseconds before the teeth clamped around my extremities.

A haunted hammer helps in DIY.

The Engineer is built to be played from a distance. He’s got a huge range of toys at his disposal. His standard firearms pack a mighty punch, and he can use special kits to dramatically alter his role on the battlefield. The flamethrower kit is handy for cordoning off segments of the battlefield, while his grenade kit gives him devastating crowd control potential. But he’s not ideal in for a fistfight. Especially not a fistfight with a shark.

As the shark chewed, metal bolts started to fizz through the water beside me. It became apparent the pirate ship was still a nest for its former residents: I was being bombarded by pirates, who took offence to my proximity to their booty recovery efforts. Down to a third of my health bar and stranded alone, underwater, I contemplated my death.

And then, on the watery horizon: four strangers. They arced through the water toward me, and burst the shark nibbling on my leg like a fishy bag. They quickly moved on to the pirates, giving me time to surface, cast a healing spell on myself, then duck back underwater to help finish off my erstwhile attackers.

Eric quantifies my experience in our interview. “When you choose to play by yourself, you’re still playing an MMO. There’s a reason you’re playing an MMO: because you want to play with other players. But you don’t have to join a group, and you don’t have to feel you’re excluded from content.” But grouping isn’t an entirely amorphous process – you’re still going to need to band together to hit one of the game’s dungeons.

You can't kill a boat, silly.

Dungeons, as in other MMOs, provide late-game fun for powerlevellers. But Eric doesn’t want to restrict them – and the bulging sacks of loot they contain – to the top end. “We wanted to avoid the feeling that the game doesn’t start until max level, and that the game that you played to get to max level is an appreciably different game than when you are at max level.” As such, dungeons are open from level 35, and the eight the game ships with can be played in two modes. ‘Explorable’ mode is for elite groups, people who’ve already mastered team fights and can take down the big boys. ‘Story’ mode is comparatively simpler, and comes with the weight of a plotline. It was this mode we played when our red and white T-shirted overlords took us below ground.

Underneath the city of Ascalon is a maze of catacombs. They’d be a nice place for some caving, were they not infested with vengeful ghosts. Ascalon itself was once Charr land (Guild Wars 2’s race of giant fluffy cat-men). In the game’s fiction, they were pushed out by humans, only to fight back some 200 years before the current game starts. The catacombs became the final resting place for stubborn human king Adelbern, who refused to surrender his land to the Charr – even when they threatened to moult all over his best jeans.

I joined a small group. Together we were four journalists and one developer, and we sensibly let the seasoned veteran lead the charge. Dungeons played in story mode are designed for pick-up groups: meaning they’re balanced for any class combination. Our gang of elementalists, engineers and warriors would have been well-balanced in a traditional MMO in any case, but Eric tells us that this run had been completed earlier in the day by a flouncy gang of thieves.

Buuuuuuurrp!

The catacombs’ regular ghosts made for hardy enemies, but they fell fast enough to a combined assault. Our de facto leader yelped out targets with rising glee. “HIT THE MONK FIRST! YEAH THE MONK’S DEAD! KILL HIS FRIEND!” Given the softer learning curve afforded by story mode, and the screaming berserker in a white and red T-shirt occupying enemy attention, I was able to wander around the fringes of the battle and roast ghosts with my flamethrower.

While considering the physical improbabilities of using napalm on an ectoplasmic projection, I strayed far from the main group. I was admiring a sparkly cave wall when that wall collapsed in front of me. Through it burst a cave troll: one of the dungeon’s dynamic events. “That troll might have appeared somewhere else, or not at all,” relayed our raid leader helpfully as it punched me in the face.

“I don’t know if you noticed, but our dynamic events are very visual.” Yes Eric, I did notice, thanks. Your dynamic events are so visual they tried to eat me. “They don’t require a lot of explanation. Say you run into a city and there are centaurs attacking everyone: you know what to do, right?” And no, the answer isn’t ‘try to climb on their backs and ride them around like a horsey.’

'I will fall asleep on YOUR lap!'

Eric wants the dynamic events to form a pillar of Guild Wars 2’s personal story – showing you the heroic quest, not writing it in 14 pages of eight point font. It’s an approach closer to singleplayer RPGs than the game’s MMO peers.

So too is the game’s dedication to player choice. Playing as a low-level Norn (Guild War 2’s hardy Viking types), I was struck by the level of character options available to me. My Norn engineer was seven foot of hairy ginger muscle, but when presented with the potential of a brawl at a rowdy fireside boozefest, I smoothly talked him out of trouble. Looking one computer to my right, my neighbour – playing a female Norn engineer two thirds my giant’s height – knocked the sucker out. The choices you make change your personal story in physical ways – your home area will alter depending on who you help, a local vendor perhaps moving out of town because you helped the centaurs – but they also tie into a base human desire to actually craft a character.

“I think the biggest problem with current MMOs is that people aren’t trying new things,” says Eric. Yet Guild Wars 2 isn’t trying anything insanely radical. It is obviously an MMORPG – but it feels like the first of that genre to really understand both concepts in that jumble of letters. Dynamic events and ease of cooperation make the massive gameworld truly multiplayer; a focus on customisation, choice and story make it a true roleplaying game. By going back to the genre’s conception, Guild Wars 2 has a real claim to be the MMO of the future.

This is me flying through the game’s Nether dimension in the pre-release version of the next update. It shows the new randomly generated fort structures you’ll find there, and both the new enemy types: including the cuboid magma creature that splits into baby ones when it dies. I’m playing in Creative mode so I can zoom around and give you a sense of the place – and so I don’t die.

For instructions on how to play the pre-release version for yourself, see the impressions post.