Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 preview: wall running, co-op, and future tech

I'm playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 as Seraph, a female criminal assassin raised in Singapore's quarantine zone and one of nine Specialist character types that can bring a unique weapon or ability into a multiplayer match.

For more, check out Black Ops 3's minimum system requirementsand the first gameplay trailer.

as Seraph, a female criminal assassin raised in Singapore's quarantine zone and one of nine Specialist character types that can bring a unique weapon or ability into a multiplayer match. I pick up the enemy flag and quickly get out of sight by powersliding 15 feet into a nearby building. It's a lot like the slide in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, but faster and longer.

Inside, I shoot another player in the back. It's still Call of Duty, where sometimes you get kills because you're lucky, which I was. On the other side of the building, I choose the left route back to base. I can get across a long stretch of it by wall running over an abyss, which is quicker, and in this instance, much safer than the shooting gallery which was the open courtyard in the middle of the map.

Halfway across the abyss an enemy player started wall running at me from the opposite direction. We can both aim down sights and fire our guns mid-run. I, however, am fully in the zone at this point, and my special ability is charged.

I push the right and left bumpers (I played on PS4; PC wasn’t made available to us during this demo), pulling out Seraph's special weapon. It's a cannon of a revolver that kills anyone in one shot, so I blast the fool away and watch him fall to oblivion as I take the flag home for a point.

Then someone kills me and in the next life I catch a bullet before I do anything cool. Despite some significant changes, it's still Call of Duty, meaning players take turns kicking ass and getting their ass kicked.

Off the wall

Treyarch managed to get through a two-hour presentation without ever mentioning Advanced Warfare, and when asked, it said that no, even if both games are set in the future, Black Ops 3's soldiers aren't wearing exo suits—they're cybernetically enhanced soldiers with jetpacks.

The distinction between one future war fiction and another is silly, and I'm here to tell you that despite what Treyarch says, movement in Black Ops 3 is very similar to Advanced Warfare, especially because of the ability to boost up into the air. It's not exactly like Advanced Warfare's double jump—you expend a recharging thrust meter by holding and feathering the jump button—but the overall impact on Call of Duty is the same: you have more freedom of movement, especially vertically.

To Treyarch's credit, movement in Black Ops 3 does feel better—slower and smoother—than Advanced Warfare, but not as good as Titanfall, which despite its problems, has bigger, more interesting maps that encourage improvisation.

Only after playing Black Ops 3 did I realize Advanced Warfare was too jittery, with incessant jumping, dashing, and sliding from side to side. It's a complex system worth mastering, but the short bursts of movement divided the action into short, violent spurts, a familiar problem in Call of Duty multiplayer that Advanced Warfare made worse.

With unlimited sprint, smooth mounting animations, no dashing, and other small changes, Black Ops 3 let me connect wall runs, slides, kills, and special abilities so my turn kicking ass was fun enough to justify waiting for another.

You'd think that wall running would be the biggest addition here. It isn't. Maps are still Call of Duty-sized, with three, interconnected lanes combining tight and open spaces. Some lanes or interconnections include a wall running opportunity, which adds some nice variety, but based on the three maps I saw, that's about it.

Swimming serves the same function. That's right: For the first time ever in a Call of Duty, I was running around the level, and when I saw a body of water I didn't treat it as off limits. I could jump in, shoot every gun as I could on dry land, and with the jetpack, break through the surface like a beautiful marlin, kill someone in midair, then dive back into cover.

There isn't a body of water in every map, but it was cool when it was there. In this early alpha state, there was a cover advantage to being underwater, and a mobility advantage to being out of the water, which made for some interesting hide and seek moments.

Treyarch seems to understand Call of Duty is in desperate need of variety in terms of loadouts as well. Black Ops 3 has more guns than necessary that you can customize with up to five attachments, each with one purely cosmetic variation, crazy deep paintjob tools, and Black Ops 2's "pick 10" perk system. But loadout variety thankfully goes beyond gun fetishisim.

We've spent more than 10 years playing Call of Duty games as generic soldiers, and now Black Ops 3's Specialists are finally adding some personality to multiplayer characters (even Call of Duty devs play MOBAs, it seems).

You commit to a Specialist and either their special weapon or ability before the match, and there's no restriction on who gets to pick what. If everyone wants to go into a match as Seraph, it'll be a bit boring, but balanced.

In addition to Seraph, I played as Ruin, a viking-looking rusher with either a ground-pound area-of-effect attack, or a special speed ability. A robot named Reaper was another popular choice, probably because his arm could transform into a minigun, which is easy to understand and pretty badass. A character named Outrider wields a bow with exploding arrows, but I was more interested in her vision pulse ability that revealed enemies through walls.

The abilities are cool and powerful and can be snatched away from you with a stray bullet. They're just another type of Scorestreak (which are still here), only they charge up on a timer that goes faster with every kill.

You'll customize your Specialist's appearance, too. I didn't get to see what that looks like, but I do worry it will make Specialists harder to identify on sight, which is important information to have quickly in a first person shooter where different characters have strategic significance.

Buddy systems

Black Ops 3 is set decades after the events of Black Ops 2. You won't see returning characters, but you'll see how they impacted the world, which in short has gone to shit. Following Raul Menendez's devastating drone attack on the United States in 2025, nations split into two, opposing world factions, both of which which employ comprehensive air defenses that put a new emphasis on boots-on-the-ground warfare.

I didn't get to see much of the campaign, but there are big changes here as well. The biggest is that the entire story has four-player co-op, with each player bringing their own campaign-specific customizable character into the session. There's progression system that lets you upgrade your cyber-soldier with different abilities, and as each player can change the appearance and gender of their character, they're not named, celebrity-voiced characters as in previous Black Ops.

In the level I saw, the four characters arrived in Ramses station in Cairo, which in the midst of a hellish war, looks like something between between a Warhammer 40,000 planet and 2013's Judge Dredd's rendition of Mega-City One.

There was a lot walk-and-talk exposition, classic, jingoistic Call of Duty monologuing, and then someone shouted "look out!" or something like that and the shooting started.

Ball shaped drones dropped from the sky and exploded into dozens of blades, impaling poor redshirts. A harrier dropped a prefabricated barricade with gates and sniper nests, which blocked of city streets by extending into nearby buildings, smashing cars in the process. Drones buzzed above, peppering the battlefield with bullets and missiles. A swarm of bee-sized nanobots set humanoid robots on fire. It's Call of Duty turned up to 11, but it's where the volume dial has been stuck for years, so it's not that impressive.

With four players running around, you need more room than the narrow corridors Call of Duty is known for, and in the Cairo section I saw, once that instant barricade dropped from the sky, it did create an open space for fighting that looked bigger than usual.

I'm extrapolating here based on one section and Treyarch's promises, but I imagine that rather than an endless on-rails experience, Black Ops 3 will make frequent stops in these arena-like sections, giving you and your friends more freedom to decide how exactly to blow everything up.

Since players are presumably choosing different upgrade paths for their campaign soldiers, they bring different abilities into battle that can work together in interesting ways. A player with a bunch of movement enhancements can act as a great flanker, while another player can stick to the high ground with a sniper, provide cover, and mark targets, which other players will see with their shared 'direct neural interface.' Another player with the ability to remotely hijack drones could initiate Call of Duty's signature, eye-in-the-sky turret sections at any given moment, which is another way to help your friends.

If the campaign includes more of these sections than it does corridors, than I'm genuinely excited. If this is just one out of a handful of sections in the game, I'll be pretty insulted. The corridor of epic set pieces is just not going to cut it anymore.

Treyarch will have a lot more of Black Ops 3 to show before it's released on November 6 this year. More specialists, a social layer to tie multiplayer and campaign, an esports strategy, and the return of Zombies mode, which Treyarch created in the first place.

What I've seen so far is promising, potentially much better than Advanced Warfare. Traversal improvements and Specialists are changing multiplayer for the better, and co-op could finally open up the campaign a little, and at least let you experience it with friends.

Red Faction: Armageddon screens have martian bugs and mech suits

Red Faction: Armageddon takes the series undergournd, into the catacombs that lie beneath the surface of Mars.

Red Faction: Armageddon takes the series undergournd, into the catacombs that lie beneath the surface of Mars. You know the ones, right? The ones full of giant martian insects acting under the command of a mad cultist? There are 19 new shots below, full of muzzle flash, exploding aliens and occasional mech suits.

The new Red Faction game has abandoned the open world smash-o-thon of Red Faction: Guerilla, but promises to keep some of the superb destructability tech of the previous games, and take it underground. Check out the Red Faction sitefor more info on the game. Red Faction: Armageddon is coming out May 31.

Civilization: Beyond Earth interview - everything you need to know about the new factions, aliens, technology and more

Civilization: Beyond Earth has been announced .

. We're the first in the world outside of Firaxis to play it, and you'll be able to read my hands-on impressions in the next issue of PC Gamer UK. While I was at Firaxis, I had the chance to sit down with the two lead designers, Will Miller and David McDonough for a comprehensive hour-long chat about every aspect of Beyond Earth. Read on for details on Beyond Earth's affinities, its dramatic sci-fi tech research web, orbital gun platforms, alien Siege Worms, new high-concept win conditions and loads, loads more.

It's a great big interview, so we've split it into chunks. Here's what you'll find on each page, if you want to skip straight to a bit that interestes you.

Page 2: On building your own faction, merging narrative with game systems, and the three affinities that your civ can pursue.

Page 3: On the planet itself, what the different biomes will be like, alien life, the extreme technologies you can research on the new tech web and the new victory conditions.

Page 4: On AI, diplomacy, extreme espionage, the best units you can research and launching satellites that can shoot lasers.

Page 5: On Beyond Earth's science fiction influences, the design process and the legacy of Civilization.

Rainbow Six: Siege won't have a campaign, but there's training and bots

Rainbow Six: Siege will not have a single-player story mode, a spokesperson for Ubisoft has confirmed.

will not have a single-player story mode, a spokesperson for Ubisoft has confirmed. Speaking at EGX 2015 (via PCGamesN), art director Scott Mitchell said that training missions and bots will serve those who do not wish to play online.

"There is no story mode per se," he said. "You go through training, where you get to experience different operators and their devices. You can play against enemy AI in co-op through all the maps. You can customise matches, so that’s what we’re offering on the single-player side of things.

“It’s a pretty good training ground," he continued. "On top or that you’re unlocking the same content as you would playing in PvP. You’re still gaining Stars, Renown Points, and new operatives.”

Single player's absence is no surprise for a tactical multiplayer-focused shooter like Rainbow Six: Siege, and in a world where a Star Wars game can ship without a fleshed out single player component, the move probably plays to the strengths of the title. Still, some will think back on past Rainbow Six games and miss the times they spent breaching and clearing with nary a headset in sight.

If you've been enjoying the beta this weekend, Ubisoft announced yesterday that the period has been extended until later this week.

Red Faction: Armageddon trailer encounters Martians

Volition's upcoming blow-up-everything shooter has a new trailer out showcasing the plot, which introduces bug-like aliens to the previously all human-on-human violence sci-fi universe. Sadly, it doesn't show off the part of the game I'm most looking forward to: the magnet gun, which spectacularly rips apart the environment by attaching super-powered magnets to any two points and collapsing them together. Anyway, click through to watch the trailer, and circle May 31 on your calendar to signify RFA's release date.

Civilization: Beyond Earth announced. Civ is going to space

Firaxis announced the next stage of Civilization's evolution at PAX today.

Firaxis announced the next stage of Civilization's evolution at PAX today. Civilization: Beyond Earth will take Sid Meier's classic turn-based strategy formula to an alien world for the first time since Alpha Centauri.

Your human colony makes landfall on a planet swarming with alien creatures, your relationship with the monsters, and your technology choices will have a profound affect on the evolution of your faction. You can embrace technology, build bionic commandos and follow the path of Supremacy, attempt to preserve humanity in its current form as a Purity player, or study the alien geneseed, and genetically modify your way to victory as a Harmony player. Each one of these "affinities" will change the way your faction looks, the structures and planetary wonders they can build, and the units they can create. Purity players can hold back alien influences with huge floating gun platforms. Harmony players can use local creatures as mounts, or grow huge monsters using the alien genome.

The procedurally generated planets will draw their art style from various biomes. Dune fans can campaign on an arid desert planet populated by vicious Siege Worms. Vulcan planets are covered in strange alien fungus. Aquatic planets will put you in conflict with Beyond Earth's nautical aliens. The new technology web puts you at the centre of a sprawling net of nodes, representing science fiction's biggest ideas. Research to the left and you'll find transhumanism. Elsewhere you'll find raw data sciences, terraforming technology, xeno-sciences and orbital units that can strike at the ground below.

It's an exciting direction for modern Civ. We were the first in the world to play it, and you'll find our hands-on impressions in the next issue of the mag. Meanwhile, you'll find loads of information on every aspect of Beyond Earth in our interview with its two lead designers.

EA skipped a Battlefront campaign because "very few" would play it

Star Wars: Battlefront will have AI-controlled enemies for single-player/co-op modes like Survival , but there won't be a proper single-player campaign for players to dig into.

, but there won't be a proper single-player campaign for players to dig into. The reason for that, Electronic Arts Chief Operating Officer Peter Moore told Gamespot, is simple: Hardly anyone would bother playing it anyway.

Moore said decisions like this are made years in advance of a game's release, and that can sometimes lead to problems. "Between when a dev team starts work on a game, and when it finishes, the world becomes a different place. I remember when we started work on Star Wars: The Old Republic; at the time, the model to go for was subscription," he explained. "By the time we had the game ready, the model to go for wasn't subscriptions. That's why we had to stop the game, and rebuilt it as a free-to-play title with microtransactions, but even then there were some people who said they wanted to keep their subscriptions."

Responding to the suggestion that 'triple-A' games like Star Wars: Battlefront "traditionally" sell better with a single-player campaign than without, Moore said "you might be right," but that "very few people actually play the single-player on these kinds of games. That's what the data points to."

EA has said in the past that Star Wars: Battlefront was intended to be a multiplayer game right from the start, but I think this is the first time that anyone has been so open as to exactly why that is. Do you agree? Numbers don't lie, as they say, but would the presence of a single-player campaign make you more likely to buy the game? Or is the online action really where it's at?

Star Wars: Battlefront comes out on November 17.

Red Faction: Armageddon delayed to next May

THQ's next hammers-on-Mars game, Red Faction: Armageddon, has been delayed to May 2011.

THQ's next hammers-on-Mars game, Red Faction: Armageddon, has been delayed to May 2011. It was originally scheduled for a March release next year. The only possible explanation is that they're injecting another 2 months of pure fun into it.

You play as the grandson of the character from Guerilla, and you've got to fight martians in caves beneath the surface. It'll have the same breathtaking, fully destructible scenery, but nothing so far suggests that it'll have the terrain deformation of the original. I've got mixed feelings about it. Am I excited to play the sequel to Red Faction: Guerilla that lets you blow up a bridge just as the evil cop guys drive under it? Sure. No-one loves explosive death hammers as much as I do. On the other hand, it's also the sequel to the original Red Faction, which I seem to remember totally sucking because you were stuck in underground corridors. Can Volition resist the temptation to tell a bland story of Man vs Martian and keep the game about caving in skulls with a big hammer? We can only hope.

Civilization 5 mod brings Blizzard's all-stars to turn-based strategy

I understand the desire for a lore-bending battle royale between Blizzard's various franchises.

I understand the desire for a lore-bending battle royale between Blizzard's various franchises. I also understand the desire for that all-star showdown to not take the form of a lane-pushing game. While Blizzard aren't about to create a 4X strategy, modders can certainly shoehorn their characters into an existing one. That's what has happened in Blizzard Allstars, which brings multiple of their factions into turn-based empire-'em-up Civilization 5: Gods & Kings.

The mod contains seven Blizzard factions, including Terran, Zerg, Protoss, Human, Elf, Orc and Undead, and contains races from StarCraft, Warcraft and Diablo. Each faction offers a different way to play, with individual tech trees, buildings, units and improvements.

More than a simple reskin, the mod completely changes certain systems. You'll find a new mana resource, which can be used to power spells, and a trait system to further improve and tailor individual heroes.

The full collection provides not just the main mod, but also a series of special reskinned buildings and a new soundtrack for the game. You can download the full thing from the Steam Workshop.

Thanks, Kotaku.

Bethesda has 'concerns' about Battlecry and is 'evaluating' it

Battlecry hasn't managed to wow audiences quite like other Bethesda-published titles, and Bethesda seems to have noticed.

hasn't managed to wow audiences quite like other Bethesda-published titles, and Bethesda seems to have noticed. At least, an official statement from the company has acknowledged that it has concerns about the third-person free-to-play action game.

"We have concerns about the Battlecry game and whether it is meeting the objectives we have for it," the company's statement reads. "We are evaluating what improvements the game needs to meet our quality standards. The studio remains busy during this process on multiple projects."

Progress Barwas the original recipient of the statement, but I received it separately after contacting Bethesda's Sydney office.

The last we heard from Battlecry was Bethesda's E3 announcement that beta sign-ups were open– but the beta never happened. Our hands-on with the game wasn't exactly awe-inspiring, though Evan did see some promise, writing that "uninspiring as this first hands-on was, I ended the demo with some appreciation for how agile characters are in Battlecry."

Red Faction Armageddon site online, new trailer

The New Threat trailer shows off some of the alien beasties you'll be battling in the underground caverns of Mars, as well as some snippets of the new re-build ability.

The official site for Red Faction Armageddonis now online. It shows off an explosive new trailer.

The New Threat trailer shows off some of the alien beasties you'll be battling in the underground caverns of Mars, as well as some snippets of the new re-build ability. Of course, there's also a truck-load of destruction in there too, since Mars just wouldn't be Mars without EVERYTHING COLLAPSING AND BLOWING UP EVERYWHERE.

Bring glory to Arstotzka in this Civ V Papers, Please mod

This is brilliant.

This is brilliant. Steam user Snakeeeater337has created a mod for Sid Meier's Civilization Vthat makes Papers, Please's Arstotzka a playable nation in the game, with its own units, special traits, and even a new map.

Since Papers, Please never establishes the identify of the Big Brother-esque leader its Eastern Bloc-inspired nation, the mod's Arstotzka is led by "Glorious Leader." Its custom unit is the Border Guard, which has no maintenance cost and a 50 percent combat bonus in friendly territory. Outside friendly territory the Border Guard is weaker than a regular Rifleman unit. The custom building, appropriately, is a Border Checkpoint, which reduces the spy stealing rate by 33 percent and has no maintenance cost. You can also fill its specialist slots with Immigration Inspectors, who provide three gold each turn.

In addition, the mod also adds a map based off the one that appears on passports in Papers, Please, and ads Cobrastan as a City-State.

You'll need both Sid Meier's Civilization Vand the Brave New Worldexpansion to run the mod, which you can through Steam Workshop. Glory to Arstotzka!

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare 'Reckoning' map pack will be its last

The season for major blockbuster video game releases is fast approaching.

The season for major blockbuster video game releases is fast approaching. You can tell, because here's news of the final Call of Duty DLC pack for the year. To neatly tie off Call of Duty: Advanced Warfarebefore Black Ops 3arrives, the Reckoning DLC pack will release some time "soon" with four new maps. That's the trailer above.

All maps are built around the Exo Grapple mechanic, though if you'd prefer not to play in matches with that feature you still can. Meanwhile, the final chapter in the "Exo Zombies saga" will feature in the form of Descent, which stars the likes of Bill Paxton, Rose McGowan, John Malkovich and Bruce Campbell.

Details on the four multiplayer player maps are below. Reckoning releases next month for Xbox (due to a timed exclusivity agreement) but it'll be out on PC some time after.

Overload: Enjoy the grand view of downtown New Baghdad from this exotic compound, complete with fountains, gardens and decorative plasma lamps. The map’s multiple levels and long perimeter site-lines highlight medium to long-range combat and firing a shot at the lamps will send enemies flying in a burst of energy

Quarantine: Following a deadly viral outbreak, the island has been converted into a biological testing centre. This medium sized map’s tight corners dial up the speed and open areas combine to allow for any style of gameplay. Activate the map-based scorestreak to unleash a devastating ship-fired missile strike

Fracture: Discover what secrets are locked in the ice in this arctic excavation site. Take refuge behind wind turbines and heavy equipment through large combat areas cradled on the shelf of a glacier. Stay alert as the timed event cracks the ice sheet, sending one lane sinking to the depths

Swarm: Reconstruction is underway in Seoul, South Korea, congesting narrow corridors of this small to medium sized map with vehicles and equipment. Take position in war-scarred storefronts that provide plenty of cover over the streets or flank the enemy through close quarter interiors in the centre of the map

Red Faction: Armageddon E3 impressions

A couple of minutes into the Red Faction: Armageddon demo video, I thought I'd wandered into Dead Space 2 by mistake.

A couple of minutes into the Red Faction: Armageddon demo video, I thought I'd wandered into Dead Space 2 by mistake. Our hero was blasting away at skittery aliens with an assault rifle in dark underground passages. But then Red Faction did what Red Faction does best: it tore a building apart. The first shot from the new magna-gun went into one building, the second into the building next door. Then they magnetized, ripping the first to pieces and slamming chunks of it into its neighbour. It's not just good for demolition, though—when fired first into a building and then at the feet of an enemy, it'll cause an avalanche on demand, burying the target under rubble. Your move, Dead Space 2.

Here are some shots, including the devastating Repair Gun in action. No, wait.

Steam Controller isn't enough: why PC gamers need a couch-friendly keyboard and mouse

In 2013 Valve told us that it's making a controller , an operating system , and is sanctioning PC manufacturers to create Steam Machines .

. The three-pronged campaign to put Steam in your living room, deliberately revealed ahead of the launch of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, was the biggest PC gaming news of the year. It's a move that establishes Valve as something that resembles a platform holder, something it's been hesitant to do despite being the PC's biggest online retailer.

We're glad that Valve is removing some of the obstacles to playing Civilization V on our couch. It gets us imagining PC gaming as a more social experience for friends, family members, and whatever other human beings you let into your house. That picture will come into focus at CESnext week, when we expect a second wave of information from Valve on its initiative.

We'll also hopefully leave Vegas with a better understanding of how versatile the Steam Controller is, which we've been investigating. But even if Valve's controller exceeds our expectations and plays a very wide set of games comfortably, there's an serious need for a keyboard and mouse platform that can be used effortlessly on a couch. I'm challenging accessory makers like Razer and Logitech to make one.

Control issues

Just 290 of Steam's 2,459 games feature full controller support, and 502 feature partial support—a cumulative third of the library. Even if we give generous consideration to Valve's claim that the Steam Controller “[fools] older games into thinking they're being played with a keyboard and mouse,” I'm still going to need to edit command lines, to chat with my Steam friends, to Alt + Tab, and no amount of virtual keyboards, haptic feedback, and autocomplete will ameliorate that. In particular, I don't have high hopes for how well hotbar-heavy games like Dota 2, Starbound, Path of Exile, RTSes and MMORPGs will handle on the Steam Controller.

The peripheral, though, isn't actually the problem—it's the absence of a stable surface in the living room that rests above your legs. Our friends at Tested put it this way in an articlefrom last July: “If you just put your mouse and keyboard on the coffee table and perch on the edge of your couch, you're gonna hurt your neck and back, craning your neck to see the TV.” Conventional mice and keyboards can work in the living room, but not without a desklike platform to rest them on.

Infinium Labs—yes, that Infinium Labs—now known as Phantom Entertainment, produced one of the only commercial solutions to this problem, the Phantom Lapboard: a $110, wireless, cantered keyboard and mouse combo. It's bad. “The bottom line is that this thing is bad,” our sister site Maximum PC said in its 2010 review. The keyboard only tilts at a single angle, the mouse only features two buttons and a scroll wheel, and there's no lip on the surface to contain it. “The second you take your hand off the mouse to type something, that sucker's clattering to the floor,” MaxPC wrote.

The Couchmasteris the weirder and even more expensive alternative, a hulking, 24”-wide, upholstered thigh prison that at least provides a stable, ergonomic surface. But it's a frown-inducing $180, and its cumbersome shape doesn't seem conducive to easy storage or use in any living room that doesn't feature a wide couch.

Apart from Ikeaing something wooden and rigid together, the two options PC gamers have are pricey and strange. If anything, they show us two designs that any future lapboards should avoid, or at least iterate on aggressively. With Valve's initiative, third-party manufacturers should be scrambling to produce a lapboard that accommodates gaming mice and keyboards, if only because it's an item that will help them sell more mice and keyboards. Razer has a small history of experiments like the Artemis prototype and the Razer Hydra, but more practically, they already make left-handed keypads like the Orbweaver and Nostromo, devices that would be the perfect starting points for a compact lapboard. Logitech would be another good candidate; they make plenty of mainstream wireless peripherals, and on the gaming side they have an ambidextrous keypad we like, the G13.

Valve should want such a peripheral to be available as an alternative to its controller. After all, a sturdy, inexpensive, versatile gaming lapboard would absolutely increase the adoption of living room PCs and SteamOS. Valve's goal isn't to sell controllers, it's to get you playing PC games on your couch, and we should all want that proposition to be as effortless as possible.

An innovative controller can't and won't replace the decades-long relationship PC gamers have with WASD because PC gamers don't like compromise—we expect high framerate, high resolution, low cost, and total freedom to modify our devices and games. And while we're grateful for a controller that's built with PC gamers and PC games in mind, it's essential that we get a compromise-free way of bringing the core implements of our hobby, the mouse and keyboard, into the living room.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare gets sniper-only One Shot mode

I'm reliably informed by multiplayer shooter fans that snipers tend to ruin everything, the jerks, unless you're playing as a sniper in which case everything is totally balanced and fine.

I'm reliably informed by multiplayer shooter fans that snipers tend to ruin everything, the jerks, unless you're playing as a sniper in which case everything is totally balanced and fine. If you want fewer snipers picking you off from a distance in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, you'll be pleased to hear of a new mode that's just been added to the game. It's called One Shot, it's for snipers only, and Sledgehammer have roped in Call of Duty pro player NaDeSHoT to help them design it. You should find that it's been automagically added to Advanced Warfare's multiplayer, and while you search for a match I'll go into it in more detail below.

As explained on Sledgehammer's blog, One Shot is "a brand new snipers-only game mode with decreased health and highly specific classes. Each of the five classes have been custom designed by our development team and OpTic NaDeSHoT, to test the true sniper skill of Advanced Warfare in this new custom mode. Each class features the MORS, a bolt-action railgun sniper, along with a variety of perks, Scorestreaks, and Exo abilities". One thing it doesn't feature, however, is the option to carry a sidearm.

Those classes comprise Hard Scope, Zoomed, 4X, Ace and Irons, and you can see pictures of their loadouts below. To celebrate the occasion, and as a belated/extremely early Christmas present, Sledgehammer have also doubled XP gain for this weekend, just so long as you're playing in the new mode.

Hacking in Uplink

Why I Love
In Why I Love , PC Gamer writers pick an aspect of PC gaming that they love and write about why it's brilliant.

, PC Gamer writers pick an aspect of PC gaming that they love and write about why it's brilliant. Today, Phil explains why Uplink is the best depiction of hacking in gaming.

Films and TV shows have a patchy history when it comes to the accurate depiction of technology and computing. It's hard not to feel let down when a film like Inside Man uses invented over-the-top violenceto prey on the worst assumptions of the gaming illiterate. It's hard not to roll your eyes when admittedly dumb shows spout streams of nonsense, safe in the knowledge that many viewers won't know any better. And that's just games. The more specialist the technical knowledge needed to understand a thing, the dumber its on-screen depiction seems. For instance, hacking.

But unrealistic depictions can be fun, too. Take the film Hackers, which I fully and unironically love. It's dumb, but in a way that lets everyone be in on the joke. It doesn't sneer like Swordfish; it celebrates. It invents a world of 3D operating systems and neon punks, and then works hard to make you want to be in that world. It helps that it was set in the '90s, and everything in the '90s was already ridiculous.

Uplink—the first game from Introversion Studios—creates a similar fantasy. You’re a freelance hacker using a dial-up modem and an remote 8 gigaquad computer to work for a global organisation dedicated to cybercrime. To do so, you create long networks of connections and run various programs to break into a target server. It's absurd, but taps into the same feelings of excitement and subversiveness that are reason filmmakers keep unrealistically depicting hacking in the first place.

At their core these films are stories of a single person able to stand-up to and destroy an entire corporation. That same idea is at the heart of Uplink’s campaign. It starts off small, asking you break into servers to delete specific files, but soon ramps up in scope. Once your skill rating is high enough you’ll destroy research servers, track down rival hackers and frame innocent people for high-tech crimes. It all builds to a gloriously over-the-top technophobic finale, in which you're given the power to save or destroy the entire internet—Tumblr and all.

Uplink is great because it gets every aspect of this fantasy right. It's a tense sandbox of tools and possibilities that rewards initiative and punishes mistakes. It's a peerless lesson in how to make a game about hacking, and one I wish every maker of a hacking mini-game would learn from. Yes, it's unfair to expect a small section of an RPG or immersive sim to be as good as a game dedicated solely to hacking. I'm not saying these mini-games should have the same depth as Uplink, but there are some basic lessons that could be learned.

The most important lesson: tension. Too many hacking mini-games treat the hacking as a separate entity that's removed from the world of the game. Hack a shop in Bioshock, and the world stays frozen in place as you piss about with some pipe pieces. Break into one of Fallout 3's computers, and people politely wait as you play a word-based guessing game. This is pointless: hacking shouldn't be about the act, but the tension between the act and getting caught in it. (This applies to lockpicking, too. Automatic real-time lockpicking is inherently more tense than a convoluted mini-game in which the outside world ceases to exist.)

In Uplink, the tension is brilliantly realised through one of the game's most basic programs: the Trace Tracker. It emits beeps that mark the time remaining before a security system finds you. It starts out slowly, but as your window of opportunity diminishes it may as well double for a heart-rate monitor. The ramp up in tension it creates as you race to finish your objective in time is almost unbearable. Disconnecting with seconds to spare feels amazing.

Uplink's other stroke of genius is that it makes you click on and type things manually. It's such a basic idea: forcing you to use the real-world tools of mouse and keyboard, thus creating a difficulty curve that's directly based on how much pressure you're under. To break into a system, you have to juggle programs like the agonisingly slow password breaker, firewall bypasser, vocal analyser, proxy disabler and log deleter. That done, you still have to perform the task you've been hired for, whether it's typing in search queries or editing records. It's a race, and you'll only win if you perform every action to perfection.

That's what so many games get wrong about hacking. It needn't be complex, just frantic and demanding. Uplink has plenty of depth to its content, but the hacking systems themselves are relatively simple. You execute programs and perform actions. You manage your computer and search for information. You watch the timer and, at the last possible second, cut the connection. It's these basic actions, and the tension that bubbles under them, that makes Uplink the best example of silly sci-fi game hacking.

Civilization V: Complete Edition released in the US, will capture the rest of the world on Friday

Right now, the Humble Bundle has a pretty fantastic deal on some Sid Meier favourites .

. But for those just interested in Firaxis's most recent 4X strategy, the Civilization V: Complete Edition might be a more feature-rich bet.

No, not the Game of the Year Edition. That didn't feature either of the expansions. And no, not the Gold Edition. That didn't include the most recent Brave New World. This is the Complete Edition, offering the main game, both expansions, and all the DLC packs.

Sid Meier's Civilization V Sid Meier's Civilization V: Gods & Kings Sid Meier's Civilization V: Brave New World Civilization Pack: Babylon (Nebuchadnezzar II) Civilization and Scenario Pack: Denmark – The Vikings Double Civilization and Scenario Pack: Spain and Inca Cradle of Civilization – Mediterranean map Cradle of Civilization – Americas map Civilization and Scenario Pack: Polynesia Civilization and Scenario Pack: Korea Wonders of the Ancient World Scenario Pack Cradle of Civilization – Asia map Cradle of Civilization – Mesopotamia map Scrambled Continents Map Pack Scrambled Nations Map Pack Conquest of the New World Deluxe Scenario

Puzzlingly, I don't see mention of the Explorer's Map Packin that list, which is strange given the "Complete" of the title. The Conquest of the New World Deluxe Scenario seems new, though, but could be an upgraded version of the Spain and Inca pack's scenario.

Here's the link, although it will only work in the US, with the international release not due until Friday.

According to GameInformer, an XCOM: Complete Edition is also planned for a March 4th release. Firaxis haven't detailed what it will include, but we can probably take a guess based on the word "Complete".

2K have released a new video detailing the Conquest of the New World Deluxe Scenario.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Havoc DLC detailed in new trailer

Call of Duty: Kevin Spacey will get its first DLC pack "soon" in the form of Havoc.

will get its first DLC pack "soon" in the form of Havoc. It'll come with all the usual stuff, including four new maps, new weapons and airbourne, exoskeleton-wearing zombies. The trailer above discusses all the additions in detail, accompanied by very serious music and footage of things being shot at.

The maps are bluntly named, as is the Call of Duty tradition, with Sideshow taking place in a fairground, Drift taking part in a snowy village, Core taking place in an area featuring a core and Urban taking place in an urban area. The new zombies horde mode alters the template with exoskeletons, meaning zombies will be able to double jump, making it easier for them to chew your face off. But then, you'll be able to double jump away, so better luck next time zombies.

While the DLC is releasing for Xbox later this month, a release date for PC is yet to be announced.

Prison Architect's alpha 17 update breaks out the guns

If I've learned anything from prison dramas, it's that sometimes a stern talking to just doesn't do the trick.

If I've learned anything from prison dramas, it's that sometimes a stern talking to just doesn't do the trick. You also need plenty of hard-work, a commitment to understand your prisoners, and a rousing and inspirational third-act speech, in which you learn that, actually, it was them teaching you all along. Alternatively, you need guns. For Prison Architect's seventeenth alpha update, Introversion have gone for the second option.

Armed guards will intimidate prisoners by increasing their "Supression" rating, and making them more compliant. The downside is that, to hire them, you'll need to build an Armoury, which will be an instant target for violent prisoners should a riot break out. In future, when reform systems are in place, suppressed prisoners will be less susceptible to education programs and rehabilitation, but for now, you're free to fill your jail with more guns than a Battlefield weapons crate.

Also in the update: trees! A new Forestry tile will automate the woodcutting industry introduced in the last update. You can read about all of the alpha 17 changes over at the Introversion forum.

Sid Meier interview: Ace Patrol, Civ's evolution, and the future of strategy games

Sid Meier is a game design legend.

Sid Meier is a game design legend. He co-founded MicroProse in 1982 and created Civilization, one of the longest-running and most loved series in gaming. Now the creative director at Firaxis—and overseer for both the Civ and XCOMfranchises, Meier can be choosy about what he works on. His choice: Ace Patrol: Pacific Skies, a WWI-era turn-based strategy game that's small in price but big on strategy, and even influenced by tabletop games.

PC Gamer spoke to Meier about his interest in smaller game design, and how it let his team take some risks. He also shared his view of the changing strategy game market, and how he thinks all gamers are strategy gamers at heart.

PC Gamer: What drew you to Ace Patrol?

Sid Meier : It was the opportunity to make a game in a shorter time frame, with a smaller team. I guess the last game that I actually finished was Civ Revolutions. We've done a bunch of big games, Civ and XCOM, and they were awesome. During that time, I got the urge to do a game with a smaller team that we could do in a quicker period of time. With a lower budget you can take more chances and do things that are a little more risky. Doing something on the iPad was an interesting new challenge—a new type of interface, a new device. I'd had this idea for a World War I flying game, doing it turn-based. Originally I designed it with cards in mind. When we put it on the iPad, we had virtual cards and things like that. It was a game design idea I'd had floating around for a while.

There's a prevalent board game influence. What were some of the games you were looking at as you were thinking about mechanics?

There was a game a while back called Wings of War. Basically each player had a book, and you'd be on a certain page. Based on what maneuver you chose, you would both go to a different page. That was a fun mechanic. Not one that we borrowed necessarily, but it was a turn-based way of looking at air combat, which I thought was interesting. Board games are just so clear in their representations and in their mechanics. That was what we were going for, a look that you could look at and say, I get it, these plays are flying in that direction, and they're so far off the ground… There's a clarity and an accessibility to a board game style of approach that I think we wanted to build upon with Ace Patrol.

That's always our goal, to give you something that you can start to play fairly quickly and easily, but has that depth and that replayability. That's something we always strive for, going back to the original Civilization. A game that's easy to start playing, but has this depth and replayability. I think everyone, at heart, is a strategy game player. They just don't know it yet. We have to get them started playing, and all of sudden they realize that this is interesting, to get these new maneuvers or try these new skills.

The hex map is an accessibility thing, too. It's pretty clear once you see those hexes… That kind of regulates the game and makes things very clear, the orientation of the planes and their relative directions and the distance you can move. The hex map, which we embraced with Civ V, has a lot of accessibility features to it, and we take advantage of that as well.

You mentioned that Ace Patrol was developed with a smaller team and a smaller scope. How big was the original team?

We had seven or eight people working on it for a little less than a year. I guess that came out in May, so it's been about five or six months working on Pacific Skies. Compared to Civ or XCOM, that's a very small team.

But it seems like you're definitely experimenting with different pricing models for what's really the same game. You were allowing a little bit of content in the original iOS game and then charging for the extra campaigns. How do you feel like that strategy has worked out so far?

The model that we really were most comfortable with was the classic PC: a free demo, and then basically a game that you pay for. When we did Ace Patrol, the closest thing to that in the iOS market looked like this idea of free-to-play, and then purchasing different parts of the game. That felt to us like, you get to kind of demo it for free, get to a certain point, and then if you like it you buy it and if you don't like it you don't buy it.

What we discovered was that free-to-play brings a lot of baggage with it, because of players' previous experience. It really isn't perceived as a demo followed by a purchase. It's perceived almost like a game within a game. How much can I play without paying? What tricks are they going to use to get me to pay? It becomes almost a distraction from the game itself. So with the Steam release of Ace Patrol, we went to just a premium model—here's the price of the game, if you want it buy it.

Serious players have had some negative experiences with free-to-play games. Where we are now is, we're looking at this as a premium game, a game that you buy. If you want to figure out what the system is like, you can play the iOS version of Ace Patrol for free and get a feel for the mechanics. If you like it, you might want to buy Pacific Skies or whatever. We feel that the premium model—just buying the game—fits more with what our players want. They want to buy the game and play it, and not have to worry about if it's all there, or if we're going to ask them for more money.

What are some of the things that you think have worked in recent editions of Civilization—and some things that haven't worked?

It's been interesting that each Civ has been led by a different designer: Soren Johnson with Civ IV and then Jon Shafer with Civ V. They've each brought a little bit of a different perspective to the game. They're all building on the core mechanics and the core gameplay flow that is fundamental to Civ. Civ V specifically has supported a couple of really good expansions as well. Even though a new Civ only comes out every couple of years, there's still energy and new stuff happening all the time with that franchise. In terms of what didn't work… I cannot think of anything. [chuckles]

I think what maybe didn't work on Civ V is that it's a PC-only kind of game. I think that's fine: most of our players are on PC. But the world is moving. In our dreams we'd love to have it on more platforms. There's no reason why it couldn't be on iOS and other places. That's really kind of a resource and strategy question. We'd like to have it on more platforms. But the PC supports what we're trying to do the best right now, so that's where we start.

Strategy games are going through a renaissance, where a lot of people lay a lot of arguably complex games, such as Crusader Kings II. Do you still see strategy gamers as this small hardcore niche market, or is that growing and becoming a more substantial part of the market?

Well, we'd certainly like to believe that it's growing. We're seeing that kind of growth, certainly, in the reception to things like Civ and XCOM. There's certainly a very avid and active strategy game audience out there. They're our bread and butter fans. We get a lot of encouragement and ideas and support from them. I think the growth is modest, but continual.

You have to convince people they like strategy. It seems a little daunting at first, when you hear about Civ. It takes 20 hours to play, and then you want to play again? [laughs] Not everybody says that's what they're looking for. But once you get them to try it, they see how it works and what kind of fun it is. So I think we're gradually accumulating more and more strategy players. But when you look at the market as a whole, it's not the same kind of hit-driven or fad-driven market that you see with other things. The strategy market is pretty solid and steady. Facebook games kind of grew, and then they didn't grow. Certain styles and genres appear, and they're innovative and new and they catch on, but they might not have the depth that a strategy game has, and so they have a limited amount of appeal. Then they're exhausted.

There's good news and bad news with strategy gaming. It's pretty reliable. The audience is there for the long term. But you don't get these flashes of popularity that some of these other genres might experience.

What's the next big thing for strategy games? Is it something like getting lots of people together playing a strategy game at once? Is it more about accessibility, like getting on other platforms? Is it creating the biggest, most epic grand strategy game in the world?

We actually have a philosophy in terms of Civ—that with every new feature we put in, we need to take something else out. We think it's reached the appropriate level of epicness and grandness, and going beyond that is going too far, in terms of complexity or length of play.

Back when I was young, we used to make flight simulators. They kept getting more and more complicated. The cockpit started taking over more and more of the screen, and what you saw outside got less and less. With every generation… There were some great games, like the Falcon series. But with every generation, some people said, this is getting to be too much for me, I won't buy it anymore. Eventually it just out-complexified itself.

What we want to do is avoid that with Civ. We think we've found a good balance of playability, depth and complexity. With Civ, we're actually deliberately keeping the complexity at the current level, because that seems to be what people enjoy. So I don't think the future is a super grand awesomely complex game. That's not something that we think makes sense for our players.

I think your idea of a multiplayer strategy game is really intriguing. If anything has changed over the last couple of years, it's the accessibility and the almost 24/7-ness of connectedness. We take it for granted these days, that our internet access is always there. Translating that into a game concept is probably one of the possible next big steps in gaming. Five years ago we had to go somewhere and sit down and push a button to turn off our normal life and go to a place to game. Today we have the tools to game with us every waking and sleeping moment. You've got your phone or your tablet or something right there with you. So integrating that into a game idea is maybe something that's around the corner.

I think the other possibility for the future is this migration of casual gamers into more dedicated gamers and eventually into strategy gamers. We're seeing people move in that direction. We've always seen that over time, but now there's probably a larger audience of casual gamers with iOS and things like that. It may be inevitable that they evolve to become more serious gamers.

Prison Architect alpha 11 update brings land expansion and prisoner release

Introversion have released a new build of jail management sim Prison Architect.

Introversion have released a new build of jail management sim Prison Architect. Alpha 11 beings land expansion, prisoner release dates, an improved build menu and a timelapse video mode. Mark Morris and Chris Delay have created a video running through these changes, while also providing musings about misheard Slipknot lyrics. It's a public service that you just don't get from other game developers.

Land expansion is unlocked once researched by your accountant. It'll let you buy new plots of land to increase the size of your prison. Currently, there are no limits to how far you can expand, although the Introversion guys note that eventually performance will be an issue.

Other changes include prisoner sentences that run down, releasing the inmate when they've served their time; an enhanced object menu that highlights objects specific to the building you're currently viewing; and 'hearses', which will transport the dead bodies from your morgue.

As for the timlapse feature, the game can now take a single frame of animation at set points throughout your campaign, stitching these together into an OGV file. To demonstrate, they released this video of the system in action:

To see the full list of changes, head over to the Introversion blog.

XCOM's Slingshot DLC releases next Tuesday - is it what we wanted?

The first add-on for XCOM: Enemy Unknown will be released next Tuesday, November 4 for $7 (UK price to be verified).

The first add-on for XCOM: Enemy Unknown will be released next Tuesday, November 4 for $7 (UK price to be verified). The Slingshot DLC includes three council missions (you must start a new game to play them), as well as a selection of new hats, helmets, and armor decos. I played all three new missions earlier this week, and my preliminary verdict is: well, they're alright. Are they what we wanted, though?

The missions are interspersed throughout the game, and tell the story of an alien battleship headed for China. I'd never have worried about spoilers in XCOM before, because it's tough to spoil a story that's largely told in the mind of the player. In this case, I guess you should stop reading if you don't want to know how the China invasion plays out. It's not a shocker, really.

The first mission is an escort mission: save Triad defect Zhang (why did he defect? who knows!) and he'll give you a briefcase containing some alien something-or-other. Except for actually looking like some version of China, it isn't different from any other escort mission. After the mission, however, Zhang joins your barracks, giving you access to a high-rank soldier earlier than usual. The catch: he's not customizable and will always be Zhang. For me, that means he's benched.

The second mission has a 10 turn limit: the goal is to activate thingamajigs on a subway train intended to divert the approaching alien battleship. The turn limit makes it the most difficult of the three missions, and I failed because I didn't realize that after activating the thingamagics (transponders? they're probably called transponders) you still need at least one turn remaining to get someone to the train's control cabin. Oops. But aside from that, there are no surprises—as usual, Thin Men drop, somehow, from the sky of the underground train station every time you push up far enough to trigger reinforcements.

The third mission is the best, because it lets us do something we've been wanting to: invade an alien ship in-flight. As your soldiers trek across the battleship, they're tasked with shutting down power cores to disable its ability to ominously hover over populated areas. And when that last power source is dark...you've finished the DLC. At that point, you have Zhang and access to certain technologies earlier than usual.

The missions are fun because XCOM is fun, and they're designed the way other good XCOM missions are designed. That they look like they take place in China is nice, if only in comparison to Everytown, USA and This Is A Forest, USA. That they give you access to a non-customizable character is...well, I don't play XCOM for XCOM's characters. And getting access to existing technologies earlier isn't really exciting after having already played the game.

I haven't yet played the missions in the context of a full game (Firaxis had saved games prepared at the start of each), and that experience will inform the final verdict. They should fit in well, but I wonder if, two or three playthroughs later, Zhang's clockwork reappearance will only make XCOM feel more predictable.

If you weren't planning on another playthrough, Slingshot probably won't bring you back. It doesn't add anything radical or contribute to the unpredictability that makes XCOM so enjoyable for so long. There are no new weapons, no new research or facilities, no new aliens, no new mission types, no base invasions, no grand mission to the moon.

Slingshot interprets "add-on" in about as plain a way as possible: three missions and some aesthetic items. Actually, the new helmets are the best part. The baseball caps and intimidating masks still don't let me design soldiers just how I want, and I still wish character customization were much improved, but it's a start.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare update expected later this week

Sledgehammer Games co-founder Michael Condrey says a Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare patch is on the way that will implement changes to weapon balance, fix max exploits, and make a number of other optimizations and updates.

The word comes from Condrey's Twitter feed, where he recently wrote, "#AdvancedWarfare TU @X1/PS4 +PC Stay tuned for notes incl weapon balancing, ranked play updates, map exploits & spawn fixes, optimizations +". It's a bit squished, but such is life when you're working with a 140 character limit. Condrey explained in a later tweet that the update is expected before the weekend—that would be the one beginning on December 6.

This will be the second Advanced Warfare update to come out; the first arrived a few weeks agoand focused on more fundamental technical issues, including problems with connectivity and Prestige. Sledgehammer also recently confirmed that the first DLC bundle for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, entitled Havoc, will include zombies in power armor.

Yes, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is getting exo-powered zombies

General rule of thumb is that if you like video games and enjoy purchasing DLC then you're a huge fan of zombies.

General rule of thumb is that if you like video games and enjoy purchasing DLC then you're a huge fan of zombies. Or at least, a fan of killing zombies. Now Sledgehammer has confirmed what many have long suspected: that Call of Duty: Advanced Warfarewill get its own zombie horde mode much like in previous instalments, except this time the zombies will be in exoskeletons. Double jumping zombies are inbound, then.

Sensibly titled Exo Zombies, the first chapter of the co-op mode will come with the Havoc DLC pack, which releases some time early next year. The pack is the first of four spread out across 2015, including Ascendance, Supremacy and Reckoning. Each will feature zombies, because y'know. Zombies.

Prison Architect alpha 13 introduces escape tunnels; weekend deal shanks price by 40%

Introversion have released a new build of crim sim Prison Architect.

Introversion have released a new build of crim sim Prison Architect. Alpha 13 gives inmates the ability to tunnel out of your jail, which - and I'm just guessing here - sounds like something they might want to do. As always, Chris Delay and Mark Morris have created a video update taking you through the cells, buildings and underground holes of the game's latest version.

Using the contraband added in alpha 12, prisoners can slowly Shawshank their way to redemption. Searching their cells will uncover their escape attempts, but the most efficient way to unearth tunnels is with dogs. Unfortunately, dogs aren't in the game yet. That four-legged feature is planned for the next update.

The other significant change is an automatic punishment system, letting you send prisoners to lockdown or solitary, based on their crime. Introversion say this is the first major step to removing politics from the games systems, and letting players build a "right wing hellhole" without the game penalising their penal system.

Finally, because today is The Day of the Deals, the game is 40% off for this weekend. That means you've got until September 2nd to lock it up for the discount price of £11.99/$17.99.

Firaxis unveils new XCOM 2 enemy: "the Faceless"

2K Games has posted a video of the Firaxis Mega Panel recorded at PAX Prime 2015, in which XCOM 2 Creative Director Jake Solomon and Art Director Greg Foertsch, and Civilization: Beyond Earth—Rising Tide Co-Lead Designers Will Miller and David McDonough discuss their approaches to design, and show off a little bit of what's new in each game.

Co-Lead Designers Will Miller and David McDonough discuss their approaches to design, and show off a little bit of what's new in each game. The best part? A fun little segment at the end of the video that reveals a brand-new XCOM 2 enemy called "the Faceless."

There's a lot of good stuff in the video for fans of both series, but for my money—since I'm currently in the midst of my first-ever playthrough of XCOM: Enemy Unknown—it's the discussion of the bad guys in XCOM 2 that really sells it. Mutons are even bigger and brawnier than they appeared when we first laid eyes on them in July, and the fan-favorite Chryssalid has been "improved" as well with the ability to burrow underground and then spring out to attack resistance fighters who wander too close. It's basically a land mine that turns people into zombies.

As for the Faceless, we don't know much beyond they're not lookers. None of the panelists say anything about the creature beyond the name, but it appears to be some kind of shapeshifter or bodysnatcher.

Civilization: Beyond Earth—Rising Tide comes out on October 9, XCOM 2 comes out on February 5, 2016, and the second annual Firaxiconfan convention happens on October 3. Did you miss out on PAX Prime this year? Catch up on our coverage right here.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare patch incoming

Call of Duty: Kevin Spacey has been out for a week now, which is long enough for the cracks in its shiny, futuristic veneer to show.

has been out for a week now, which is long enough for the cracks in its shiny, futuristic veneer to show. Sledgehammer Games has kept an eye on player feedback and will patch the game in the near future, with a list of incoming changes released at the weekend. These range from bug fixes through to balancing issues identified by the community, as per below.

- Prestige reset issues, including emblems and challenges
- Adjustment to the in-game chat names notifications placement
- Fix for weapon reloads counting as speed reloads in certain circumstances
- Connectivity optimizations
- Fix for stats accumulating towards leaderboards after prestiging
- Adjustment to challenges to unlock Camos for weapons
- Fix for round-based game modes, affecting Win/Loss ratios
- Implementing ability to unlock eSports Rule options in Private Match

Meanwhile, Activision has addressed queries regarding dedicated servers. "Advanced Warfare employs game servers hosted at data centers globally on all platforms and listen servers as part of our proprietary matchmaking system. Our goal is to ensure the best possible connection and greatest gameplay experience regardless of location and time of day."

Tyler Wilde reviewed Advanced Warfarelast week, and the good news is that it's a vast improvement over Ghosts. "The campaign is mostly predictable, dumb fun, and the multiplayer is some of Call of Duty’s best—but still subject to every existing criticism of CoD."

Prison Architect's alpha7 update bangs up the backers

The latest Prison Architect update celebrates the incarceration management sim's recent milestones by inserting the faces, names and bios of all backers who've pledged the required amounts.

by inserting the faces, names and bios of all backers who've pledged the required amounts. Players who've paid at least $50 can find themselves in the new Name in the Game option, and request to have themselves transferred to their jail.

Which means you can now watch helplessly as you're shanked in your own prison. Weird.

Other additions in this new update include upgraded door unlocking, which stops prisoners from freely wandering about of their own accord, and a brand new feature called "changing the game's resolution." Sounds resolutionary.

It's not too late to get your name and face added to the list of Prison Architect's wrongdoers. Introversion have set up a new Upgrades pageto let people increase their pledge amount. Or, if you just want to buy the game, you can do that here. At least, you can when the website comes back online. It seems to have escaped right now.

Zumba Fitness publisher Majesco threatened with Nasdaq delisting

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare system requirements released

Those hoping to boost jump, murder and run away from massive waves next month will need to make sure their system can run Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare .

. Thankfully Activision has published the minimum requirements on Steam, though 'recommended' requirements are nowhere to be found. In terms of specs, it's only a small leap higher than what we needed for last year's Call of Duty: Ghosts. Memory and video card requirements stay the same, while the game will require a whooping 55GB space on your drive.

OS: Windows 7 64-Bit / Windows 8 64-Bit / Windows 8.1 64-Bit
Processor: Intel CoreTM i3-530 @ 2.93 GHz / AMD Phenom II X4 810 @ 2.80 GHz or better
Memory: 6 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 @ 1GB / ATI Radeon HD 5870 @ 1GB or better
DirectX: Version 11
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 55 GB available space
Sound Card: DirectX-compatible

Advanced Warfare releases November 4. That hasn't stopped Activision releasing a ' launch trailer' a whole two weeks ahead of the game's actual launch. I suppose when you own one of the biggest game franchises in the world you can release the launch trailer whenever the hell you like.

Prison Architect makes over $1 million from alpha purchases

Introversion's Prison Architect has tapped into a previously unknown collective desire to boss around hardened criminals without fear of retribution.

Introversion's Prison Architect has tapped into a previously unknown collective desire to boss around hardened criminals without fear of retribution. The management sim, currently being sold as a pre-release alpha through the developer's website, has now raised over $1,000,000 in sales.

"What an incredible milestone! We are incredibly thankful to everyone who has joined us so far," tweetedIntroversion. So far, 30,404 people have bought one of the various alpha packages, raising a total of $1,021,675 (approx. £652,000).

Looking through the figures, it was the $30 Base Pack that unsurprisingly proved the most popular. It's the standard package, granting an alpha copy of the game and access to all future updates. It's provided Introversion with by far the largest slice of cash - $734,400 from 24,480 buyers.

The next highest tier was the $50, the Name in the Game pack, which outperformed both the $35 and $40 packages in both money and buyer numbers. $97,250 was raised through this tier, meaning that, to date, 1,945 people paid money to have their namesakes incarcerated in your various prisons.

Find out more about Prison Architect in Graham's preview, or see details of Introversion's latest update for the game here.

Thanks, Eurogamer.

Drei is a visually-distinctive physics game about building towers out of irregular objects, a feat that

would be impossible to do on one's own. Therein's the twist: this iOS game is collaborative, and strangers from around the world get connected to touch and build together. The stylish-looking game has been nominated for Excellence in Visual Art in this year's Independent Games Festival .

Road to the IGF: Christian Etter's Drei

. Here, developer Christian Etter talks about how a concept once rejected for a corporate ad campaign ended up blossoming into a game about how community can defy gravity.

What's your background in making games?

Initially I started to do games when I was a child. I used a software called Game Maker. Then I did other things for fifteen years and now I do make games again with a software called Unity3D.

How much time did you spend working on the game?

We developed Drei over three years. But for most parts it was a side project, so we worked on it when we found the time.

How did you come up with the concept?

In 2006 I was working for a project for an U.S. telecom giant. They changed their company name a number of times and wanted to create a digital campaign that makes them look "cool and youthful" to improve their image again.

I developed the idea of Drei , a game that connects people to build towers together. They didn't like that idea. But I kept it in my mind because I thought one day technology would be far enough that I could produce it without a large budget. I didn't think that day would come already.

Drei works by connecting players around the world at random with one another, right? Can you explain how you tested and implemented that?

Yes, if you play Drei while being connected to the internet, the game connects you automatically with other players from across the world. We tested this first on a local network. Once it was stable we started to use a cloud-based server in Zurich (where we are too).

When we had that figured out, we studied the mysterious map of internet traffic to find out where to place the lowest possible number of servers to cover most of the world's population. Then we asked friends from different countries to test the connection from their home to see if it worked. Strangely it worked. Just not for Panama. And New Zealand, neither.

Did you hope players of Drei would experiment with ideas of community and friendship as they negotiated puzzles together?

Not to experiment, but I did hope they experience a feeling of community and friendship. That's the underlying aim of Drei .

The visual imagery is very modern and distinctive. What were some of your influences?

The design of Drei had to be honest, meaning that it's not pretending to be something it isn't. And computer graphics are made by computers, like the name says, and computers are not particularly good at drawing circles and smooth edges. But they are good with simple straight shapes, connecting dots, 0s and 1s.

At the same time the design had to be organic, to represent life and the human being. The final look was created by fusing these two criteria, colorful low polygon models, built in a very organic and imperfect way. Tribal patterns from India and Nigeria helped us to find interesting combinations of colors and shapes.

Have you played any of the other IGF finalists? Any games you've especially enjoyed?

So far I had only the chance to play. It's naughty!

What do you think of the current state of the indie scene?

I'm new here, can't judge that. But I can see that technology allows lot of people to make a lot of games now (just like Drei ). Thus the diversity and the number of games is rising, while revenue and attention per game is falling.

This probably means that people who do games for the love will be able to create even more small and beautiful games. Therefore the current state should be: poor and happy.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare video demonstrates upgraded Scorestreaks

Introduced in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 , Scorestreaks function very similarly to Killstreaks, but award perks for reaching a certain score in a single life, rather than for a specific kill count.

, Scorestreaks function very similarly to Killstreaks, but award perks for reaching a certain score in a single life, rather than for a specific kill count. They're undergoing some big changes for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, as explained by Sledgehammer Games co-founder Michael Condrey explains in the video embedded above.

Scorestreaks are now fully integrated into the game's Pick 13 system, and can be customized to suit specific styles of play. Advanced Warfare will enable players to select up to four Scorestreaks at once, or to pass on them completely in order to save points. They are also now customizable with purchasable modules that "layer in additional functionality."

The video shows how the UAV can be upgraded with as many as three modules that, in this particular instance, provide information on enemy locations and award points for supporting fellow players. Care packages can also be customized with modules including one that will increase the odds of giving it a better Scorestreak.

"Customizable Scorestreaks in our new Pick 13 system add an unprecedented variety of unique upgrades and customizations that allow you to fine-tune your MP experience," Condrey says in the video.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare comes out on November 4.

Prison Architect Alpha6 update lets you know who to watch

Introversion have released a new build of Prison Architect, implementing a categorisation system to let you know who's naughty and who's not quite as naughty.

Introversion have released a new build of Prison Architect, implementing a categorisation system to let you know who's naughty and who's not quite as naughty. But still pretty naughty in the grand scheme of things. This is a prison, after all.

Coloured uniforms have been introduced to mark a prisoner's risk level, with grey signifying low, yellow for medium, and red for "grade A bat-shit lunatic". While this lets you house the most violence-prone inmates in a separate wing of your prison, Introversion's Chris Delay explains that there's some nuance to how the system works.

"As in life, prisoners are sometimes mis-classified and we thought it would be cool to have some doubt about whether a prisoner really is as dangerous as he first seems," Delay writes on the update's forum page.

"To achieve this we have implemented an internal "traits" system of which you have no visibility. These traits determine if a prisoner is violent, or murderous, or destructive, or all of the above and more. They determine how the prisoner behaves when he is angry or when a fight breaks out nearby. This system is totally internal and you never get to access it, so the only way to really see whether you have a pussy-cat or a Bane is to watch how they behave."

While traits are the determining factor of an inmate's behaviour, it's their rap sheet that decides their risk classification. Every prisoner now has a criminal history, but just because an inmate has been prosecuted doesn't mean they're actually guilty.

"A Prisoner who has been convicted of Murder may have pleaded Not-guilty and may, in fact, by innocent of the crime. This poor soul would pose no threat, and a miscarriage of justice has caused him to be surrounded by thugs and murderers - he would rapidly become a target and if you don't notice."

Currently there's no way to reclassify prisoners, but Delay notes that the feature is incoming as part of the inmates' journey from incarceration to parole.

You can read the full patch notes here, and buy the game from the Prison Architect website.

Thought EA had Star Wars locked up? Lego Star Wars says no

Today Warner Bros.

Today Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and Disney announced Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens , a multi-platform entry in the popular franchise which spans platforms from the Xbox One to the Nintendo 3DS and basically everything in-between this June.

But how did it happen, if EA has the exclusive rights to the franchise?

Turns out, not so much; as we reported in 2013, that deal covered games aimed at a "core gaming audience." Presumably shooters like its successful Battlefront (which recently laid out plansfor downloadable content) meet that criterion; apparently Lego Star Wars does not.

Of course, EA has other Star Wars games in the offing as part of its multi-year deal with Disney. No word, either, on what other games we can expect that skirt the "core gaming" provision and which other publishers might score a chance to work on the resurgent franchise. Disney itself, of course, includes plenty of Star Wars-related content in its own Disney Infinity franchise.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare will cut down on "quick-scoping"

I'm not a fan of "quick-scoping," the practice of quickly looking through the scope of a sniper rifle, snapping off a shot, and then immediately switching back to a normal view.

I'm not a fan of "quick-scoping," the practice of quickly looking through the scope of a sniper rifle, snapping off a shot, and then immediately switching back to a normal view. I'll admit that my dislike stems at least in part from my inability to do it with any degree of success, but I've also always been put off by the way hopping around while shooting an enormous rifle from the hip looks so utterly anti-sniper, too.

But while it's common in many online shooters, including previous Call of Duty releases, Sledgehammer co-founder Michael Condrey says the studio is taking steps to reduce the tactic in Advanced Warfare. Sledgehammer's focus for multiplayer is ensuring that skill, not an "overpowered create-a-class," will determine the outcome of online battles, so that someone who's perfected playing as a sniper will be on equal footing with other players who have developed comparable skills with assault rifles or shotguns.

"Sniper classes are not going to be overpowered relative to their peers. The ability to master a sniper rifle and be great at it will be equal to the ability to master any other class," he told New Zealand's 3 News. "We've done some things to make sure snipers are not able to take advantage of their properties—for example, there are attachments based on weapon classes that are specific. The ability to quick-draw with an assault rifle is important, but you don't want to have the ability to quick-draw with a sniper rifle because that lends itself to being a faster, quick-scope model."

The addition of exoskeletons will also be a balancing factor. "I'm sure people will get really proficient with snipers, but you've got more ways to move and can move faster than ever before," Condrey said. "Catching a person in the air with a sniper rifle, I think that will be very challenging, but very satisfying."

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare comes out on November 4.

Reinstall: Uplink

A couple years ago we gathered three shadowed men in our secret, extremely leet lair to discuss 2001's Uplink, the film-inspired hacking sim by Introversion Software.

A couple years ago we gathered three shadowed men in our secret, extremely leet lair to discuss 2001's Uplink, the film-inspired hacking sim by Introversion Software. In 2006, Uplink came to Steam, where it's still humming away today for $10(or only $2.49 during the Holiday Sale!). Though it's over 10 years old (and actually takes place almost three years ago in 2010) and our panel had a few issues with it, there's a strong case to be made for retreading the rise from script kiddie to black hat hacker one more time.

Logan Decker, Editor-in-chief: I know that crime is bad. I understand that it's wrong to steal. And I realize that the reality of computer hacking and subsequent criminal conviction is not as easy or as pretty as it is in the movies. But the truly awesome achievement of Uplink is that all of that gets turned on its head. Being a sociopathic criminal with the l33t3st skillz this side of Angelina Jolie in Hackers is high stakes, low-risk and fun as hell.

Robert Hathorne: Knowing nothing about Uplink going into this, I was blown away by how minimalistic everything is. The game is nothing but a fake OS interface. There're no cutscenes or mood-setting graphics, just some programs and the next job. What I was surprised by is how quickly I became comfortable with it. I didn't need high production values to be immersed; that was taken care of by great design. Shut the door, turn the lights off and hunker down in front of the monitor—you're a hacker.

Erik Belsaas, Podcast Producer: Yeah, a rookie hacker. Your first email introducing you to the mysterious worldwide hacking organization “Uplink” makes you truly feel like a part of something bigger than your own computer. Unfortunately, working your way up from the bottom means your first job of changing a kid's grades isn't exactly thrilling.

Logan: And that's the game's worst crime: repetition. Many of the missions—OK, most of the missions—are essentially the same thing: back and run a few more of those tedious missions before you can crawl out of the little leagues. But that's not a terrible trade-off. It keeps the risk at the right level: low enough that rewards are worth the danger of getting caught, but not so high that you want to quit.

Robert: Uplink really gives me that “just one more turn” feeling; it has to do with the upgrade system. As I began a new job, I always had my next upgrade in mind, which would lead to another, then another. There's always the next big thing to earn, and getting there is so fun you hardly notice how quickly you're burning through missions.

Erik: It captures the hacker movie vibe so well—an alternate title for Uplink could be Action Typing 2001. I love the pressure of setting up a fake proxy server to get through a firewall. The overarching plot of (spoiler alert!) an ominous corporation developing a virus made to destroy the very internet adds a dose of drama, too. Yes, it's cheesy, but it makes the game more interesting. The story keeps you on your toes, 'cause who wants to be responsible for the end of the internet?

Robert: There's something to be said for a game that drops you right into an interface with a brief tutorial that you have to find and execute in order to use. You're given all the tools necessary to get the job done from the start—you just have to figure out how to use them. This isn't a drawback at all. If tool tips walked you through the whole thing you wouldn't feel like a hacker, just a hack.

Erik: But if you spend too much money upgrading hardware and not enough on programs, you can dig yourself into a rut and get stuck. Something not too fun I've done more than once.

Logan: Agreed. The lack of information provided to make good judgements on upgrades is frustrating. It takes a lot of trial and error to understand when it pays off to upgrade, but that part is so tedious that I eventually caved and consulted a guide. And I've played the game before! The same goes for the software, which isn't clearly explained and takes a lot of painful stumbles to get the hang of, thus further extending your tour through the minors.

Erik: Totally forgivable in my mind, though. Introversion changed what I thought a game could be. Instead of blowing stuff up or crunching RPG stats, games can create entirely new genres. Uplink even had a secret IRC chat you could execute to talk to other people playing!

Logan: Lots of game developers at the time rocked us silly by crushing the barriers of what was possible on PC hardware at the time. But Introversion's genius was to match its game—the concept of hacking as entertainment and the simple “terminal” style of its graphics—to the hardware and its own resources. That it's still enjoyable now—and I don't mean in the novelty “retro” sense—is proof of that. You could never fairly adapt this game to a console; it just wouldn't have the tasty verisimilitude.