Master of Draenor I'm pulling your strings: Metallica are playing at BlizzCon 2014

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The appearance of widescreen popsters Imagine Dragons at the League of Legends Worlds final last weekend drew nods of approval. It was another marker of mainstream success to note down alongside the LoL Coca-Cola bottles, American Express LCS sponsorship and Staples Center takeover.

But if eSports has a natural soundtrack, it’s metal. And if metal fans can agree on anything, it’s Metallica. The Californian sultans of speed will play out BlizzCon 2014.

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Ragnar Tørnquist defends ableist language in Dreamfall Chapters: "Those people exist in real life, and so they must exist in fiction"

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Dreamfall Chapters’ first episode is out now, and by early accounts it’s typical of Ragnar Tørnquist’s finest work: a bustling sci-fi world that takes pleasure in defying cliché.

But a flurry of ableist language from one character in the game has upset fans who’ve come to expect inclusiveness and diversity in the Dreamfall series. Tørnquist, however, is unrepentant.

“You know, when we create and write characters, those characters are not always pleasant and they don't necessarily reflect our own point of view,” wrote the Red Thread boss. “Those people exist in real life, and so they must exist in fiction.”

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The Stanley Parable sells over a million copies; "The Narrator decided not to tell Stanley"

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The Stanley Parable is the story of an office drone who looks up from his desk to find his workplace deserted. It began life as a Source mod, and grew last year into a standalone work of quiet genius.

The game introduced a wonderful twist to PC gaming’s traditional malevolent AI routine. Its narrator, the English actor Kevan Brighting, begins Stanley’s story in the time-honoured mode of BBC audiobooks - but becomes rueful, flabbergasted and downright grumpy as the player begins to contradict the tale he’s telling.

Sound like fun? A million other PC gamers thought so.

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World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor has a place called Gorgrond that’s positively beastly

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Lots about the next World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor, is being kept under wraps but as we get closer to Blizzcon and the expansion’s release date Blizzard are starting to pull back the blanket and show us what’s underneath.

Oh God, look away, it’s a dissected murloc!

Wait, no, it’s a new land for us to explore, Gorgrond, and it’s absolutely filled to the brim with wild beasts.

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Aliens by way of XCOM game, Halfway, gets mod support

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Halfway, the turn-based strategy game that harks back to the original XCOM in its mechanics but with a story more akin to the Alien films, has just been updated with mod tools.

If you’ve burned through the original campaign you can either get started on your own or start chewing your desk while you wait for someone else to make one for you.

That’s not the only thing to have been added in the new update.

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World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor gear guide: getting started

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Ah, that pre-expansion excitement. Warlords of Draenor, the next expansion pack for World of Warcraft, launches in only three weeks as of today. Servers are a hustle and bustle of activity as players prepare for the onslaught of new content and challenges ahead of them. If you’re thinking of coming back to Azeroth to see what the fuss is about, or maybe you’re already playing but you’re a bit clueless as to what to do, then this preparation guide should help you.

I’ll be discussing the best way to get to 90, how to get some raid-ready gear, and most importantly, how to obtain your level 90 heirloom: a powerful item that will accompany you on your travels throughout Draenor, all the way to level 100.

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Elder Scrolls Online and Skyrim books will cover the lore and the land of Tamriel

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Bethesda have announced a publishing deal with Titan Books to produce book series tied into Elder Scrolls Online and Skyrim. The MMO will have two books, one covering the lands of Tamriel and the other assembling the lore for players who want to know more of the game’s backstory.

The Skyrim book series will collect together all the in-game books as anthologies to put on your shelf.

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Red:Out is Wipeout, but on the PC. It’s about time.

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I don’t think I’ve played a game that ever gave me a similar thrill from speed as I got from WipeOut. It was masterful at throwing you round tracks, always very edge of control.

Red:Out is that game, but for PC.

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Lords of the Fallen is a ferocious, and infuriating Dark Souls clone

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I’m about to be cut in half again.

I’m fighting Lords of the Fallen’s tutorial boss, the First Warden, and it’s teaching me about timing and positioning, largely by slicing me in two. Every time I make mistake either by attacking too soon or attacking too late, or positioning myself too close to the warden it’s game over. Often with a single blow.

I’m also about to be cut in half again because Lords of the Fallen has some serious flaws.

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Win a ticket to the Tank Museum and a premium Fury Sherman with World of Tanks

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You would not believe the fun you can have at tank museums. It was above the usual spot of a tank in the foyer of the Imperial War Museum that Wargaming CEO Victor Kislyi forlornly asked our Paul why schoolchildren were “not exposed to the beauty of tracked vehicles?”. And it was at the Polish Tank Museum that our Jules first saw a mother tank with her child.

Perhaps you can enjoy similar escapades to the PCGamesN team at the Tank Museum in Bovington, Dorset, England. Wargaming are giving away a family ticket as part of a celebration of their new M4A3E8 Fury Sherman.

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Judge dismisses securities fraud suit against EA; executives were just being optimistic

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Remember the lawsuits against EA and its executives over Battlefield 4? The securities fraud suit that appeared last year has been dismissed by a Federal judge. The suit claimed that EA’s top brass knew about all the problems with Battlefield 4 and then lied to investors by making public statements espousing the quality of the game. The judge disagreed. 

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Lucas Pope's Return of the Obra Dinn is a 1-bit mystery, and you can play some of it right now

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Papers, Please developer Lucas Pope is letting everyone take his latest project, Return of the Obra Dinn, for an early spin. It’s a short demo, a teaser that will no doubt leave you with a few questions.

A first-person mystery, players take on the role of of an insurance investigator onboard the titular Obra Dinn, a ship thought lost at sea, but recently returned to London, absent crew. 

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Considering you just moved to Haswell-E, I'd be relieved.

And they seem very optimistic when it comes to AMD's "Zen", too optimistic given the failed promises of the recent AMD CPUs.

With relieved I meant that at least the last upgrade would have payed off, you'll get more from your money even if after your upgrade you resell the older components. Upgrading is always... not fun but exciting.

And Nvidia, I guess when AMD launches the 3x0 series they will launch the 980Ti or whatever the name they come with.

From the reviews I've read, Haswell-E isn't a good overclocker, at least not the 5960X, but that's not surprising given that the lower s2011-3 CPUs ship with higher frequencies.

Broadwell-E, with the same 6/8 cores and 140W of TDP should be quite a bit faster if done at 14nm.

Assassin's Creed Unity system specs are as steep as Notre Dame

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It’s going to be a cruel Christmas. Over in the console kingdom, developers have tired of pulling along owners of older machines, content to let customers slide backwards down the hill on their sleds if they won’t buy a new box. And in the PC province, system requirements have taken a sudden and uncomfortable lurch upwards, like so much rum butter in your oesophagus.

To Shadow of Mordor and The Evil Within add Assassin’s Creed Unity, which is calling for the head of your ageing graphics card to be separated from its body.

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Warframe Archwing update turns you into a rocket-powered space ninja

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Warframe gave us space ninjas in 2013, a sizeable technological advance on 17th century Japan, and now they’ve gone and got jetpacks in the upcoming Archwing update. Which, by my maths, makes them about 18,027 times better.

Yes, Archwing’s going to let you fly around in deep space, dispensing ninja justice to robots and evil spaceships-alike. And for free.

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Dota 2 players outnumbered all 99 other games on Steam's most-played list put together today

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Press releases eventually slide out of inboxes; promo deals come and go. But Steam’s stat page is forever - a slowly-shifting stone tablet of absolute truths. 

Dota 2 has sat undisturbed at its topmost peak for many months now, but this morning the MOBA claimed another quiet victory. If you’d totted up the total player numbers for every other Steam game on the top 100 most-played list, they still wouldn’t have matched Dota’s concurrent roster of heroes.

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Risk of Rain patch 1.2 adds killer chef and Aliens-inspired Loader

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If Gordon Ramsey’s to be believed, chefs are angry people. They swear, shout, and hit things when they don’t get their way. Chefs haven’t always been this way so it’s a fair assumption that over time they’re getting worse.

Skip to the future-set side-scrolling roguelike Risk of Rain and Chef makes a lot more sense. He's one of the two new characters added in the 1.2 update. A killer robot cook, Chef throws cleavers, blasts flames from his chest oven, and lets you tear your enemies limb from limb.

Risk of Rain’s 1.2 update’s been a long time coming but when you see what’s in it you won’t be disappointed.

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Stockholm Syndrome: Why Scandinavia loves DreamHack

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If there were any worry that DreamHack would lose some of its unique allure in its move from the Swedish provinces to the capital, that doubt dissolved like the snow in Jönköping about a minute and a half after I lost my hotel keycard at the Stockholm Globe Arena.

I spent the 10 floor lift journey down to the lobby working up the grovel in my voice, but needn’t have bothered. 

“Are you at DreamHack?” asked the young blonde Swede at the desk, eyes brightening as his hands registered my new card. “I’m kind of a nerdy guy myself. What do you play?”

This is what DreamHack do: inclusive, wide-eyed events. Their feet are in PC gaming, and their heads filled with ideas for bettering eSports, the Scandinavian games industry, and themselves.

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3D Realms rises from the grave with a 32-game anthology

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Despite its legacy, developer 3D Realms has been known more for lawsuits than games over the last few years, and earlier this year, its remains were acquired by Rise of the Triad (the remake) developer Interceptor. This all happened while Gearbox was suing both companies for announcing a Duke Nukem game. 

Today, the veteran developer is back, reformed by Interceptor and some of the original team. First thing on the docket for the newly resurrected company is the release of a massive anthology of old 3D Realms games, from Duke Nukem 3D to Commander Keen. 

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Guild Wars 2: Tyria prepares for war with the return of the Living World Season 2

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“The road to war is paved by points of no return” - those words from ArenaNet’s blog post couldn’t be more true, as Guild Wars 2 players prepare to bring the fight to the latest threat against Tyria: the mighty elder dragon Mordremoth, who was awoken by Scarlet at the end of Season 1. On November the 4th, the second half of the Living World Season 2 kicks off with a preemptive strike against Mordremoth’s forces.

We sat down with lead designer, Isaiah Cartwright, to talk about the update. Find out why you’re not going to want to miss the “unforgettable end” that will likely change Tyria forever.

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Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty will come to PC "as soon as possible", and a beta is being considered

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Abe’s Oddysee remake, New ‘n’ Tasty, launched on PS4 way back in July, but the PC version has been in hiding, though it did make an appearance earlier in the month in a fully playable state. 

So it’s on its way and will launch on Steam “as soon as possible,” says developer Oddworld Inhabitants. There’s no specific release date yet, however.  

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Take a free weekend break in Arma 3

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Bohemia Interactive’s Make Arma Not War competition, which tasks modders with creating Arma mods for a chance to win up to €200,000, comes to a close at the end of this week, on the 26th. 

To make the end of the competition a wee bit special, Arma 3 will be completely free for the weekend, so you can check out some mods yourself, or simply pretend to be in the army on some lovely Greek islands. 

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Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare – PC Recommended Requirements Unveiled

A couple of days ago, Activision revealed the official minimum requirements for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. And today, the Steam store page was updated with the recommended requirements for this new COD title. Activision recommends 8GB of RAM, an i5-2500K (that is the minimum for Assassin’s Creed: Unity), and a graphics card with 4GB of VRAM. You can view the recommended specs below. Continue reading →

Interstellar Marines – New Content Update Expands Co-op and Singleplayer Gameplay

Zero Point Software today released its first co-op expansion update. Interstellar Marines was launched on Steam’s Early Access on July 2nd, 2013. Since then the developers have released 11 updates and several smaller update fixes. Interstellar Marines is being developed on the Unity 3D engine and is currently in Pre-Alpha. Continue reading →

Dead Synchronicity To Be Published By Daedalic Entertainment In Early 2015

Daedalic Entertainment and Fictiorama Studios announced a publishing deal for “Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow comes Today” – Fictiorama’s upcoming 2D dystopian suspense adventure game. Continue reading →

Motorcycle Club – Arcade-style Motorbike Racing Game – Releases Next Month, Gets New Screenshots

Koch Media and Bigben Interactive have released some new screenshots for their upcoming arcade-style motorbike racing game, Motorcycle Club, and revealed that the game will hit PC next month. Continue reading →

TOXIKK – “The Movement Model” Video

Reakktor Studios today released the first part of their “Making of TOXIKK” video series. In this video, the game director of the project, Martin Schwiezer, talks for about 10 minutes about the movement model behind the game, showing fresh footage and demonstrates the basic and the advanced movement systems of their upcoming back-to-the-roots Arena-FPS. The footage shows the alpha build of TOXIKK. Enjoy! Continue reading →

Beginning of a turf war? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLVa0NOFdwM

^lol. I'm sure "Farming Simulator 2015" will greatly benefit from this.

What to do in Assassin's Creed Unity's Paris: Murder, stealing and a bit of detective work

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Paris is a busy, bustling place. I was once chased down a street by a dog after watching some rugby there - exciting stuff! Ubisoft reckons that its digital version of Paris in Assassin’s Creed Unity is pretty exciting and realistic too.

As always, Unity will be stuffed with diversions, some returning, some completely new. Creative director Alex Amancio goes over what you can expect when you’re sauntering out the 18th Century city. 

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Blizzard to deploy Australian servers for World of Warcraft ahead of Warlords of Draenor

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Blizzard have dedicated a set of realms in World of Warcraft to ‘Oceanic’ players for a long while now - but they’ve always run on datacenters in other continents. That’s to change in the weeks before the release of Warlords of Draenor. A new bank of servers in Australia will serve the country and New Zealand with that greatest of gifts: reduced latency.

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Riot chase down League of Legends hackers; "Every player to trigger this exploit will be punished"

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Riot Games are preparing a patch to tackle a wave of cheating in League of Legends - triggered by the discovery of a new and powerful exploit. Commonly misunderstood to be a bug, the exploit finds players taking advantage of a quirk in skill activation.

“This is a bannable offence,” said the developers last night. “Every player determined to have triggered this exploit will be punished.”

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Codemasters' Toybox Turbos offers kitchen table careening in the mode of Micro Machines

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You’ve never seen Toybox Turbos before, but it’s going to start looking intensely familiar from the moment you push play on its trailer. 

The inspiration for Codemasters’ miniature isometric racer in a household setting is clear to anybody who ever peered over the shoulder of a friend playing Micro Machines in the playground.

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Flak in the USSR: World of Warplanes 1.6 introduces new Russian jets, more airspace

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Wargaming might not yet have replicated the staggering success of World of Tanks with its skybox-scraping variant, but they’re updating it with the same frequency and dedication. World of Warplanes 1.6 adds a new line of Russian MiG fighters to the game, an extended map, and a ‘multirole’ class which will make existing planes newly customisable.

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Shelter 2 trailer makes survival look gorgeous while being totally harrowing

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Shelter put you in the paws of a badger mother caring for her newborn cubs over the course of a year. You kept them safe from harm, found them food, and nurtured them to self-sufficiency. I loved it and urge you all to go play it. Now. 

Shelter 2 may look like more of the same but it’s a very different animal. Might and Delight have taken all the mechanics of the first game and reframed them. They’ve made a new type of survival game.

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Phonopath turns you into an audio codebreaker

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There aren’t many games that teach you skills, real, translatable skills but Phonopath is something of a unicorn. It’s a puzzle game with a simple concept - listen to a soundbite and work out the password it contains to unlock the door to the next puzzle.

Where it gets interesting is that it’s up to you to work out what sort of audio wizardry you need to apply to the sound to crack its code.

By its conclusion you’ll be an audio cryptographer.

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Football Manager 2014 has been played for 23,000 years, and that’s not including the pirates

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The Football Manager series has sucked more hours from players around the world than almost any other. Even now, a year after its release, Football Manager 2014 sits in the top 10 charts on Steam.

Miles Jacobson, Sports Interactive’s games director, revealed to me that on Monday, 20 October, FM14’s players had racked up more than 23,000 years of play time.

Well, in fact, it’s significantly more but that’s just from the people who bought it.

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The Witcher 3's opening cinematic shows why you don't get into staring contests with crows

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The Witcher 3 is still some ways off, but you can pretend you’re just about to play it by watching the opening cinematic, shown off at the Golden Joystick Awards today.

Beardy Geralt’s following the trail of his old flame, Yennefer, who seems to have gotten into a spot of bother.

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Outlast 2 is in development; stock up on clean underwear

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Outlast left me a nervous wreck. I rarely make it to the end of first-person horror games, but I was reviewing Red Barrels grisly asylum adventure, and thus had no choice. It’s brilliant and also not very nice. 

So I’m not sure if I’m going to be powering through the sequel. Red Barrels confirmed that it’s being worked on right now, set in the same universe as the original, but in a different place with different characters. 

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League of Legends is close to making $1 billion from microtransactions this year

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For a game where spending isn’t mandatory, League of Legends sure nets a lot of money. Microtransaction revenue for the MOBA is up from last year, with Riot making $946 million through in-game purchases. It’s getting pretty close to that ridiculous $1 billion figure, which no online game managed to achieve last year. 

SuperData Research has published its list of the top 10 online PC games, based on microtransactions, with League of Legends sitting in the number one spot.

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Dark Souls 2 is the Golden Joystick Awards' Game of the Year

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The Golden Joystick Awards were on tonight, here in Blighty, and all the awards have been doled out, with Hideo Kojima getting a Lifetime Achievement Award, and Dark Souls 2 being hailed as the Game of the Year. 

Take a gander below at the full winners list.

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First blood in the World of Warcraft Arena World Championship will be shed next week

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Even though Blizzard admits that World of Warcraft’s Arena PvP is “kind of hard to watch,” it’s there if you want it. The World of Warcraft Arena World Championship is part of BlizzCon 2014, with two groups of four teams duking it out in an attempt become the group champion. 

The first round kicks off next week, on October 31st, and while all teams will be heading to play at BlizzCon itself, the winners will secure two of the four spots in the semi-finals.

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Spooky Races: Project CARS gets a Halloween trailer

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Cars can be properly intimidating. Glowing red eyes, noxious fumes pouring out of their exhausts, engine snarling and roaring, the whole thing made of metal and fire - even a Volvo estate could be scary if you were in a dark alley and near sighted. 

So it’s probably not completely barmy that Slightly Mad Studios showed off a Halloween trailer for Project CARS at the Golden Joysticks tonight. 

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Final Fantasy XIV London Fanfest reveals EU servers, flying mounts and Dark Knight job

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If you thought that Square Enix were done with their initial reveal of the new Heavensward expansion pack for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, think again. Just a week later at this year’s FFXIV London Fanfest, director Naoki Yoshida announced that EU players can expect to see an EU datacentre put in place in the near future. 

Yoshida also revealed a couple of Heavensward specific features, such as flying mounts, a new primal boss and the confirmation of the Dark Knight job.

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New Omega Mode changes just about everything in Ultra Street Fighter IV

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Ultra Street Fighter IV is getting a free update soon in the form of Omega Mode: where each and every fighter gets tweaked with altered moves, some entirely new. In a new weekly Capcom Unity blogpost, developer Tomoaki Ayano breaks down just what’s changed for Street Fighter’s pedigree warriors: Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Edmund Honda, Blanka, Zangief, Guile and Dhalsim.

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Shroud of the Avatar hits Steam Early Access in November; "We are moving full steam ahead"

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Richard “Lord British” Garriott’s new Ultima-like MMO, Shroud of the Avatar, will be available on Steam Early Access on November 24th. While the team felt initially “nervous” about moving to Steam, a successful run on Steam Greenlight squashed any trepidation. While you don’t need Steam to play Shroud of the Avatar in its early state, the team is calling out to all backers to help them test the game within Steam for functionality.

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Watch the Dota 2 Starladder Season X finals kick off right now; winner takes home over $100,000

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The culmination of Starladder Season X is kicking off in just a few minutes, as Dota 2 teams Team Secret and Evil Geniuses face off in an epic best of five. Team Secret are already have a one game advantage by coming from the winners bracket; they’ve only lost one game in the entire tournament. Evil Geniuses on the other hand lost to them in the winner brackets final, but manage to crawl up the losers bracket to have a chance at revenge.

Now sit back, belly full from that delicious Sunday meal, and prepare for an evening of Dota 2 at its finest.

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Magic 2015 is relaunching; adds expansion and removes premium boosters

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Wizard of the Coasts and developers Stainless Games have announced a relaunch of their digital version of Magic the Gathering: Magic 2015. The game was greeted with mixed reception from fans - while they did add real deck-building to the game, some cards were locked behind a paywall of “premium boosters” that could only be attained by spending more money.

The new relaunch will remove these premium boosters, instead adding them as prizes for winning multiplayer matches. They’ll also be adding a new expansion dubbed “Garruk’s Revenge”, which adds a new campaign and cards from the Alara card set.

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