Ken Levine's been dropping the scoops on his next project. On Twitter, he's been answering fan questions about the first game from his smaller, post-Irrational team.

For instance, did you know that the new game will be sci-fi, or at least sci-fi-ish? You do now. The team are also currently considering first-person for the view mode, and will be developing the game for PC. As for the genre, "I think small open worldish (but not necessarily outdoors) RPG with quest structure coming from passion system," he writes.

Back at GDC, Levine referred to the game as making use of "narrative Lego"—giving a presentation on how he plans to make repeatable, systemic stories. On Twitter, Levine was asked whether Shadow of Mordor had any impact on the project. He responding by saying "mostly in that it validated that people would care about narrative replayability."

The ultimate aim, Levine says, is a systems-based narrative to which the team can expand into. Not adding new story on top, but into the existing story—like a Civilization expansion adds depth to the existing game.

Thanks, Game Informer.

Welcome to our roundup of the best total conversion mods ever. Presented in no particular order, these are the mods that radically transform our favorite games into something different, with new and improved art, gameplay systems, locations, and adventures. Crafted through years of work, sometimes by large teams of volunteer modders, many of these mods have gone on to become PC gaming classics in their own right.

Here are the best total conversion mods ever made. 

Link: Sven Co-op on Steam

First released way back in 1999, Sven Co-op is still being both updated and played today. A cooperative mod for the original Half-Life, the mod allows groups of players to battle their way through the Half-Life campaign, where they'll find increased challenges and far more enemies, as well as new maps filled with puzzles and challenges. Over the years hundreds of new levels have been added along with new weapons, improved AI, and lots of customization options. Even if you don't own Half-Life, you can play it for free on Steam.

Link: A Game of Thrones mod site

For Game of Thrones fans, this mod is already at the top of your personal list or will be the moment you try it. It transforms CK II’s medieval Europe into the beautifully realised continents of Westeros and Essos and populates them with characters and events straight from the source material. Marry, mingle, or murder your way through the Starks, Lannisters and many other notable dynasties. Best of all, random game events will quickly spin the world into an enjoyable alt-reality of the fiction we’re so familiar with. This is an absolute must-have for gamers who are fans of the George RR Martin novels and the HBO series.

Link: Aliens TC ModDB page

Way back in 1994, this pioneer of full-conversion mods successfully recreated the 1986 sci-fi action film Aliens in Doom. It didn’t settle for just plopping face-huggers and aliens on a map, either: its custom levels mirror familiar locations and story beats from the film and even provide sound effects and voice clips lifted straight from the movie. Hearing Sergeant Apone through your headset reminding you to “Check those corners... check those corners!” not to mention Ripley furiously shouting “COME ON!” when climbing into her signature loader to do battle with the alien queen genuinely made me feel like I was part of the Aliens universe.

Link: Counter-strike ModDB page

You may have heard of it? The multiplayer Half-Life mod featured such team-based missions as hostage rescue and bomb defusal, each team with its own equipment and goals. With its quick rounds and exciting gunplay, Counter-Strike became an instant hit, and the community began creating maps of its own. Counter-Strike’s emphasis on teamwork and communication helped define a new genre of shooters, and the modders behind it were quickly hired by Valve.

Link: Nehrim site

Every full-conversion mod comes with a high degree of ambition, but it’s a truly special situation when the mod’s creators have the talent to match. Nehrim: At Fate’s Edge, created by German modding team SureAI over four years, does what the best full conversion mods do: reshapes the features that are lacking in the original game and provide hours of exciting new content. With original voice work by dozens of actors, big changes to several of the game’s familiar systems, and its own quests, story, lore, playable races, and a massive and beautifully designed new map to explore, Nehrim transforms The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion into an entirely new experience.

Link: Garry's Mod ModDB page

Plenty of games have a god mode accessible through console commands, but Garry’s Mod takes the idea to an entirely new level. A multiplayer sandbox limited only by your creativity, the mod has proven to be the ultimate tool for creating webcomics, videos and custom game modes, as it enables players to spawn objects and entities and pose them however they like. You can even play Half- Life 2 using all of the mod’s tools, turning Gordon Freeman from a simple gun-toting scientist into the ultimate expression of your will.

Link: Long War at Nexus Mods

Harder, longer, and with hundreds of changes to the base game, Long War extends XCOM's campaign, lets you play with up to 12 squad members at a time, adds new soldier classes, voice packs, weapons and technology, and lots of improved and completely overhauled systems. Long War wasn't just a hit with players but with XCOM's developers, who brought the mod team in to work on launch-day mods for XCOM 2, as well as create Long War 2.

Link: The Dark Mod site

This mod isn’t simply a celebration of the acclaimed Thief series using Doom 3’s engine, but actually an improvement on some of its features, especially the wonderful and engaging new lockpicking system. The open-ended stealth adventure lets you slink through a gorgeous, highly-detailed gothic steampunk world as you fill your pantaloons with loot and try to avoid detection. Most importantly, the mod comes with its own mission editor, enabling members of the community to create and submit their own custom levels and stories. The Dark Mod was released as a standalone game in 2013.

Link: Black Mesa site

It sounded like an impossible project: building the entirety of the celebrated FPS Half-Life in Half-Life 2’s Source engine, but after eight years of work by a large volunteer team of modders it finally became a reality. While it stops short of recreating the entire game (Gordon Freeman’s leap into Xen is the mod’s endpoint), it’s still a remarkable accomplishment. For Half-Life veterans it contains a mix of new design elements and familiar confrontations, and it’s a also great way to experience the ground-breaking adventure for those turned off by the dated graphics of the original.

Link: DayZ mod on Steam

In a game featuring starvation, sickness, and swarms of growling zombies, it still falls to other human players to provide most of the horror. While the standalone version of DayZ became a big hit in Early Access, the original open-world multiplayer survival mod is perfectly playable. The vast map and lack of global chat provide a feeling of intense loneliness, but the prospect of actually meeting someone else is a constant threat.

Link: Complex mod site

The name is certainly apt: this mod takes the real-time space strategy game and adds an almost absurd amount of complexity to nearly every single aspect. Alongside improvements to the AI, physics and graphics, the mod adds scores of new units and maps, constructible subsystems, deeper tech and research trees, and a diplomacy system. It even adds an actual calendar so gametime can be marked in years as in the Civilization series.

Link: Dota Allstars, a recent iteration of the original mod, worked on by IceFrog, who now works for Valve on Dota 2.

An exciting combination of RTS and RPG, the multiplayer battle arena mod for Warcraft III (based on a modded map from StarCraft) is a lot of things: simple to understand, difficult to master, and most of all, utterly addictive. In its early days DotA was a project that was passed from modder to modder, and like an unending stream of creeps it eventually spread through the gaming world to become a massive hit, as well as the first lanepushing game to have sponsored tournaments.

Link: NeoTokyo site

This team-based multiplayer mod for Half-Life 2 is set in a slick, futuristic cyberpunk city and features three different classes to choose from, each with their own distinct weapons and strengths. With lethally realistic gunfire and cloaking abilities available to some classes, NeoTokyo requires more stealthy and tactical play than many online shooters demand. Inspired by anime classics Ghost in the Shell and Akira, NeoTokyo also features an amazing and engrossing custom soundtrack that you’ll want to listen to even when you’re not playing the game. The mod was released as a standalone title in 2009.

Link: Mechwarrior: Living Legends site

Combining FPS action and simulation, this large scale multiplayer-only mod brings wonderfully realised Battletech mechs to life in Cryengine 2, though it began as a mod for Quake Wars. Tanks, jets, mechs and hovercraft strategically battle for territorial control in beautiful, varied, highlydetailed outdoor environments with full day/night cycles. The mod was so impressively made it was even sanctioned by Microsoft, who own the Mechwarrior franchise the mod is based on.

Link: Cry of Fear ModDB page

While it’s a standalone release now, Cry of Fear began as a Half-Life mod. It’s the story of a man who wakes after being hit by a car to discover his city is filled with gruesome monsters and his mind packed with psychological horrors. The mod has some interesting and immersive tweaks, such as an extremely limited inventory—and the fact that the game doesn’t pause while using it—that bring new challenges as you play through a disturbing, winding story with original animated sequences and multiple endings.

Link: Genkokujo ModDB page

The Sengoku period in Japan was a time of turmoil, political intrigue and near-constant warfare. What better time and place for a massive, openworld combat RPG built on the capable framework of Mount & Blade? The mod features actual clans and figures from Japanese history, new skins and armour types, new gunpowder weapons, and dozens of historically accurate locations spread across a map of Japan with twice the playable area of the original game. It also incorporates a number of other excellent M&B mods such as Diplomacy and Freelancer, which add even more great features.

Link: The Stanley Parable on Desura

You’re put in control of a clerk who suddenly finds himself completely alone at the office, but you’ll soon start to reconsider just how much control you actually have. While difficult to describe, the mod quickly proves to be a witty and insightful commentary on videogames, particularly the act of making choices. It’s also wonderfully narrated by a voice so soothing you’d like him to read you bedtime stories – if only you could trust him. It’s now a complete game with a lot more polish and an extended story, but the original mod remains a thoughtful, oddball delight.

Link: The Third Age on TWCenter

Every kid who ever picked up JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings novels has longed to step into Middle-earth, and one of the best ways to do it is with this mod for the turn-based strategy game Total War, capable as it is of portraying epic-scale battles. Third Age features over a hundred accurate locations and a dozen factions straight from the fiction. It includes custom units such as ents, trolls, giant spiders and wargs, and lets you play not just as heroes like the men of Gondor and the Silvan Elves, but also as the evil forces of Sauron’s Mordor, Isengard, and even the orcs of the Misty Mountains.

Link: Out of Hell ModDB page

As Donovan Ling, a lone cop investigating a garbled transmission from the industrial town of Grinwood, you quickly find yourself alone and fighting to survive a relentless zombie invasion. This mod is packed with astounding visuals of a city gone to hell, and a chilling original soundtrack accompanies you as you battle your way through more than 20 harrowing and atmospheric maps. Despite an arsenal of deadly weapons and melee attacks, you’ll never really have time to catch your breath.

Link: Natural Selection site

With one team playing marines and the other playing aliens, Natural Selection converts Half-Life into a multiplayer hybrid of first-person shooting and realtime strategy. It brought to life the concept of a commander in an FPS: a sole player who views the map in top-down fashion, giving orders, issuing supply drops, and managing the map in a traditional RTS fashion. The aliens have no overlord or shared resources, so must rely on communication if they want to win. Despite big differences in the two teams’ abilities and tactics, the mod remains a tightly balanced experience.

Link: Team Fortress ModDB page

Long before it evolved into a cartoony hat-trading simulation, Team Fortress was a mod for Quake. It originally featured five classes, later blossoming into the full iconic nine we’re familiar with today, and even provided a tenth class, the civilian, playable during VIP escort missions. Instead of just red and blue teams, certain maps for TF included two additional teams, green and yellow, struggling for map control and engaging in capture the flag games. The mod’s popularity led to a proper release and, much later, the Team Fortress 2 we know today, although the original mod is still played on a few servers.

Link: The Nameless Mod site

With a hundred new skins, sixty maps, custom cinematic sequences,and two storylines providing a hefty thirty hours of playtime, The Nameless Mod grew, over seven years of development, from something of an in-joke to a true mod masterpiece and Deus Ex fan favourite. Part homage and part satire, the mod sports thousands of lines of custom dialogue, tons of tweaks, and dozens of great new music tracks, not to mention books, newspapers and emails.

A quick search through the archives reveals that we're yet to write about System Shock Infinite 2.0. Let's do something about that, before we get the hose again. It's a System Shock 2 mod billed as an unofficial sequel to Irrational's late-'90s classic. It recently relaunched with the 2.0 moniker, and is currently in beta ahead of the full release.

A "Beta 8" update has just been released, and it brings rebalanced difficulty through an optional "2015 Mode". The name is a clear parallel of Bioshock Infinite's 1999 Mode. Where that increased the difificulty, this, in the mod-maker's own words, "[tones] down challenges and quirks of the combat system."

System Shock Infinite 2.0 offers multiple storylines that the player can choose by summoning them through a "tear in protoreality". It's a neat concept, playing off both System Shock and Bioshock Infinite, and provides a neat way to extend your time on the Von Braun.

As the mod team explains:

"System Shock Infinite 2.0 is currently in beta phase and includes 10 new levels set in Cyberspace, with 4 storylines to unlock, new characters and cinematics. ... Keep an eye out for the final version, coming soon!"

For more info, and to download System Shock Infinite 2.0, head to its ModDB page.

Patch 6.1 for World of Warcraft is now in the Public Test Realm. You can see a run-down of its features—including a better Blood Elf and Twitter integration—right here.

Also in Patch 6.1: a S.E.L.F.I.E. camera. It's a camera that lets you take selfies, because it's 2015 and if a person wants to take a selfie of their digital avatar, they damn well better be able to take a selfie of their digital avatar.

To get the camera, players need to complete Field Photography, a rare level 100 garrison mission. If they subsequently complete the mission Lens Some Hands, they'll be able to upgrade the camera with three filters—a Sketch filter, Black and White filter, and "Death" filter.

When the patch goes live for the stable branch we will, of course, be asking you to send us your best WoW selfies. We're hip to the trends like that.

Image: 'Leeyloo'

On Saturday, ArenaNet announced Guild Wars 2's first expansion, Heart of Thorns. The day after, I spoke with Mike O'Brien, president and co-founder of ArenaNet, and Colin Johanson, Guild Wars 2 game director. Here's that interview, covering both Heart of Thorns, and what it means for the game and its future.

PC Gamer: Are you pleased with the reaction to the announcement?

Mike O'Brien: Definitely. We just had a fan gathering last night and got to hang out with a lot of Guild Wars players. Honestly, players are thrilled with what they saw yesterday. It's such a pleasure to hang out with them right now.

PCG: This expansion is unusual in that the lead-up has been almost two years in the making. Do you think it's going to be hard to balance the needs of players who've played all Living World episodes, returning players who have maybe only completed the main story, and any new players coming to the game for the first time? A lot has happened.

Mike: Well definitely a lot's happened. One great thing about Living World: Season Two is that anyone can play Living World: Season Two. Even down the road people can play Season Two. Certainly, right now, I recommend that anybody who's excited about Heart of Thorns should get into the game and play episode eight. Episode eight weaves right into the story of Heart of Thorns. Anybody who wants to set up for themselves what the story of Heart of Thorns is, play it now.

PCG: One of the big revelations at the end of episode eight was that the Sylvari were from Mordremoth. They're corruptible. How are you progressing that given that they're also a playable race?

Colin Johanson: You know, I think that's a great question that we are looking forward to showing people when they get in and play the game. We don't want to give away too much of that right now, other than to say that if people don't have a Sylvari character yet, it's a great time to make one and have one ready to go for Heart of Thorns. It's really going to be an interesting experience, and a twist that a lot of players are really excited about what it could mean for the game.

PCG: How big is the new region, Heart of Maguuma?

Colin: You know, we picked a different philosophy for building out this region. We're really focusing on doing less broad development and more deep development. I think historically you'll see expansions for MMOs do a bunch of maps that players progress through very quickly and leave a wasteland of empty worlds behind them. We're really focusing on doing less total maps and instead making them really, really deep, filled with a ton of replay value; a ton of content to explore and see. A lot of content that, as you progress through it, you'll see for the first time and you won't be able to get there, or you'll encounter challenges that you can't overcome the first time that you see them. As you progress and build through our mastery system, you'll be able to return and overcome those challenges and get to those places you couldn't get to the first time through. And so we're really focusing on: let's do a little bit in the grand scheme of things; let's do a smaller sized area for total scope, and focus really on depth. Make maps that have an incredible amount of replay value, so every time that you log in you can go back in there and have a new experience. Have an incredibly deep experience and enjoy playing over and over again in that content.

I think in a lot of ways, philosophically, you look at what makes a lot of games have really good replay value, and often times you look at competitive games where a lot of them have a game mode and people will play it over and over again for years. We're really trying to take that concept and that experience with our PvE and provide that same type of experience where you don't have a ton of maps that you tear through and go away. Instead, they have really deep experiences that you can play over and over again and have an amazing time with.

PCG: Does that mean you're pushing the dynamic event system much further this time around?

Colin: Yeah, I would say: every core pillar of what makes the Guild Wars 2 open world experience what it is, we're trying to build on those and build a richer, deeper experience—with our event system, with our content, with the creatures you encounter, with the difficulty of those encounters. We want to build challenging group encounters as part of this experience that you're not going to beat the first time. That you're going to have to learn how to overcome them and build tactics, and you're going to want to come back and play again so you can overcome those challenges again. And it's a really big part of where we want to go, and a part of Guild Wars 2 that we really think we can grow and expand on.

We realised one of the things Guild Wars 2 really needs is a system for clear end game progression that meets the pillars of what Guild Wars is all about.

PCG: In a sense then, it's an end game expansion? A lot of stuff that's comparable—perhaps even beyond—the hardest group events currently in the game. Like, for example, the Triple Head Wurm? Things that players need to work together and plan for.

Colin: Yeah, I think we realised one of the things Guild Wars 2 really needs is a system for clear end game progression that meets the pillars of what Guild Wars is all about. Challenging content that when you encounter it you're not going to beat it the first time. You can use this progression, and build and overcome challenges, and have challenging content that's harder than anything we've ever done, and do it more regularly than we've been able to do it before. I think that is something that Guild Wars 2 needs. I think it's been pretty clear from the experiences over the last couple of years that we've heard. That that's something people would love to see in the game. And that's one of the main reasons we built this expansion.

PCG: How does the verticality of the jungle play into that? Will players be able to see events happening at a different level, and think "I need to get there. There's clearly something happening I want to be a part of"?

Colin: Yeah. Verticality wise, the jungle has the most vertical game space we have ever built in Guild Wars 2. You literally can come at the jungle floor and climb all the way up to the very top of the canopy of the jungle, and the very tree tops above you. The end of our Living World: Season Two episode had the Pact Fleet crashing into the top of the jungle as it was destroyed, and literally the wreckage of that fleet is scattered all over the top of the jungle. And you're going to be able to go up all the way into that top and explore inside the wreckage of the fleet, jumping across the top of the jungle, and using our new mastery system to purchase abilities to master exploration. Like hang-gliding, so you can really experience that 3D space in even better and more deeper ways. And it's going to be filled with locations that you want to get to, and as you build up and earn these masteries, you can start exploring more and more of this incredible amount of vertical space.

Mike: The verticality is really off the charts, I've got to say. When you go into the jungle for the first time, it's really like nothing you've ever seen before.

PCG: Yeah, I'm looking forward to that. One of the cool things about the Silverwastes—when the jumping puzzle was added—was running over the top of the map and looking below as the other players were fighting for the events.

Colin: I think a good example is the concepts we played around with in Dry Top and Silverwastes. The broader experience. The more meaningful content. Events playing all as part of a broader experience—making more of a map-wide experience—and having a lot more replay value to those. I think a great example of what we want to do is to take that concept and take it even further, and build more on top of that. That's been really successful for us, and the jungle is really going to take that and take it to the next level with the event system and with the exploration. That jumping puzzle was certainly a little bit of an experiment for us, looking ahead at the stuff we want to do.

PCG: On stage, you asked the crowd if they wanted new levels and new tiers of gear, and got a resounding "no" back. Is that something you were confident the community wasn't interested in?

Mike: This was a very, very plugged in crowd. I was impressed with the audience at the show. Guild Wars players come to us very savvy about MMOs, and one thing we see over and over with our audience is they've been through it before. They know what it can be if we're not careful, and they are holding us to very high standards. I pretty much knew that if I got up there and said, yeah, this is the expansion pack where we're adding the gear treadmill that they were going to rush the stage and, you know, throttle me. So I had a pretty clear idea of what the fans are looking for. But as we went into every detail about Heart of Thorns on that stage yesterday, that was just such a plugged in audience. They had been anticipating and thinking about every detail of Heart of Thorns.

On the next page: masteries, specialisations and the future of Guild Wars 2.

PCG: Looking at the masteries, one thing you said was that mastery points were account bound. Does it follow the World vs. World system, where you expect characters to specialise in masteries rather than trying to collect them all? So you have one character focused on a particular thing, and another maybe another?

Colin: The World vs World ability system is in some ways a template for what the masteries system provides. But I'd say the mastery system is a more advanced, more expansive system than that—built on things we've learned both for what we want to do with PvE, and some of the things we learned from the World vs. World system as well. And we're actually going to make some changes to the World vs. World system to make it a little bit more like the way the masteries system is going to function. At its core, exactly how you progress is something we're going to come and talk about later—between now and the release of the expansion. The most important message we want to get across is you do it once, and when you've earned a mastery point you've got it for every character, and you've earned those abilities for every character. You don't have to go back and grind on every one of your characters to get all this.

PCG: Oh, so an ability you purchase for one character is applied to all of them?

Colin: That is currently the plan, yes.

PCG: Another thing you announced was profession specialisations. The one you revealed was the Druid. That the Ranger was getting a staff weapon. Beyond having a different weapon, how different will the druid specialisation be from a 'standard' Ranger?

Colin: We're really trying to make it feel like it's almost a sub-profession or a secondary profession if you will, and not just a new set of a couple of skills. It's not just opening up the capacity to use a staff. When a ranger becomes a druid, they have an entire new set of skills and traits that come available to them. And their profession mechanic changes as well. That's true with all the specialisations. You actually play the profession differently, not just in skills and traits, but in the core mechanics of those professions. Some of them will change an existing profession, some of them might give them entirely new profession abilities and remove other ones. It really varies specialisation to specialisation, but it really should feel like you are playing a new version of your old profession. And players can actually mix and match a little bit. If you are playing as a Druid you will be able to use a lot of the Ranger's skills, and you can actually slot them in to make a lot of creative builds. But a Ranger can not use any of the stuff a Druid has unless they become a Druid.

PCG: So philosophically, with creating these specialisations, was the idea to fill gaps a profession wouldn't normally be equipped for?

Colin: Yeah, I think that's a fair description. We definitely looked at each profession and asked what are some of the things that we think this profession doesn't currently do that we'd love for them to be able to do? What role do we want to try to expand on that they can't do, or what gameplay would be really awesome to add to this profession? In some cases, we went way outside the box to go with some stuff that I think people are going to be pretty shocked and pretty excited when they get a chance to see how some of this stuff works. It's definitely trying to create a wider variety of roles for players in combat and with their profession. That is a big part of the specialisation system.

It's also laying a permanent groundwork for us that we can use to expand and build on in the future, and that's a common theme with everything you're going to find in this expansion. Every decision we made, and the entire reason we made this expansion, was so that when this expansion releases we have the framework. We have the pillars we need so that we can regularly grow the game in the future. Specialisations is one of the key components of that.

PCG: So this is a template for not just Guild Wars this year, but Guild Wars over the next three, four, five, etc. years?

Colin: Yeah, absolutely. Every major system, from the way that we're handling progression with the mastery system, to the way that we're growing professions, to the guild progression and guild growth that we're doing with the guilds and Guild Halls—each of those are intended to be a very clear message to our fans and to our players. This is the system we will use now for Guild Wars, and in the future for Guild Wars, to provide permanently these systems of growth for you, your characters and your account.

Mike: That's why I said up on stage that this expansion pack is so fundamental to Guild Wars. This is not "hey, wouldn't it be fun to do an expansion pack, let's throw in some features". This is us thinking about what Guild Wars needs to continue to grow and evolve for years to come. When we sat down and thought about that at the very beginning of this process, what we thought is Guild Wars needs the ability for us to deliver really challenging group content—content that is challenging enough that you come the first time and say "wow, I'm not prepared for this, I've gotta go prepare". And it needs the character progression to keep that possible, so you can keep evolving your characters—even though you're max level, even though you've got the best gear in the game—keep evolving your characters and keep learning the skills and abilities you need to take on new content that you can't take on yet. So this expansion pack is all about laying the groundwork, the features that we need in place so that we can keep building that new character progression and new super-challenging content for years to come.

This is us thinking about what Guild Wars needs to continue to grow and evolve for years to come.

PCG: With most of the expansion it's easy to see how it's an extension of the game. With the new WvW borderland map you've announced, that sounds more integrated into an existing thing. How does that affect World vs. World overall?

Colin: Yeah, so the new borderland map joins the rotation with the borderlands we have today. I think it just expands the depth of the World vs. World experience. Currently, the borderland is replicated three times as a home for each world, and our new borderland will give us a chance to get a lot more variety in gameplay. As a map itself, the borderland map is the strongest interpretation of how we believe the World vs. World experience should be played. Every location really provides key strategic value to the world that holds it. I think when you consider World vs. World as kind of like playing a giant RTS, and you're one of the troops, you want to have holding locations provide strategic value. That's a big part of that component of building a giant strategy and fighting with your army.

Towers are located at chokepoints in the new borderland map, and have walls around them that guard those chokepoints, so holding a tower actually helps you control movement in the map. It helps you prevent enemy armies from making quick assaults on your keeps. There are shrines that you can take, and the more shrines you hold, the more abilities that become available to your world around your keep, so defending your home becomes easier the more shrines that you hold. It becomes more important to hold each of those strategic locations. We're going to take the philosophy that we've built into this map, and we're actually going to apply it broadly to World vs. World as well, to make holding and defending key locations a bigger part of World vs. World. We think some of the most fun experiences in World vs. World are when you have these battles that happen at these towers and keeps—these epic siege moments—and we really want to get more of that experience and make that more of an important part of winning in World vs. World.

PCG: The Living World has wrapped up, and players have got this expansion coming in the future. Do they have anything to look forward to between these two points? Are there any game updates planned?

Mike: Well things are going to start happening really fast with the expansion pack. We are six weeks away from PAX East and Rezzed, and so people are going to be able to play the expansion pack for the first time in early March and then get into beta testing right after that. Of course, the live game will continue, so there are updates for the live game. But mostly right now we're going to be focused on beta testing this expansion pack. We waited to announce this until we had the whole package together. The whole package is together and it's coming up fast. Sitting down with players last night, talking about the expansion pack, of course the first words on everybody's lips are "when?" The truth is, that all depends on beta testing. We are getting right into beta testing here and we will be playing the expansion pack with all the Guild Wars 2 players, and testing these very important groundwork systems that we're building in. When the groundwork is there—when this is the foundation we're ready for to build Guild Wars on top of for the coming years—that's when we'll release it.

I hate earnings calls. I do not exist in the centre of the Venn diagram between people who like shotgunning digital soldiers in the face and people who enjoy the phrase "during Q3, we repurchased 2.5 million shares at a cost of $97 million". And so, while my natural tendency is to ignore EA's fiscal 2015 'Q3' earnings call, a bit of news made it worth diving inside.

You can see a transcript of the call here, should you want to know EA's non-GAAP diluted EPS for the quarter. The bit relevant to my interests can be found in the section concerning Dragon Age: Inquisition, where it's revealed to be Bioware's most successful launch in history.

Take it away, EA's Andrew Wilson:

"[Dragon Age: Inquisition] quickly became the most successful launch in BioWare history. More than 113 million hours have already been spent exploring the depth and detail of the single-player experience in Dragon Age: Inquisition, and more players are joining each day."

Not bad going for the Bioware series that isn't about a cool space team shooting their way through the galaxy and chatting to each other about gun recalibration.

Unsurprisingly, you can expect future DLC for both Inquisition and some of EA's other big titles. "Players in our current experiences," Wilson said, "including Dragon Age: Inquisition, The Sims 4, the EA SPORTS portfolio and Battlefield 4 will continue to see updates and new content in the future." That content will probably take the form of additional multiplayer stuff, but there's always the chance of some new singleplayer, too.

Update: An EA representative confirmed to Gamespot that the "most successful launch" metric was "based on units sold, but we are not disclosing that total."

Only a fortnight after Far Cry 4's first post-launch DLC drop comes Hurk Deluxe, a new pack bundling five new missions and a bunch of new weapons, including a harpoon gun. While the official release proves fairly unenlightening when it comes to what the missions entail, it's safe to say they'll offer fresh opportunities to kill things, which is what the game is all about, I guess.

Never mind though, because these screenshots should provide some sense of what the missions offer. Actually, they only prove that you will indeed be killing things again. The missions, titled Yak Farm, Blood Ruby and Hurk s Redemption, are all playable in single-player.

If DLC isn't to your tastes, Far Cry 4 boasts a pretty powerful map editor, which we've had plenty of fun with.

Dying Light came out today and our reviewer is currently eyebrow deep in cadavers while he puts the game through its paces. We'll have his verdict later this week, but in the meantime we fed Dying Light to the unfeeling computerised behemoth that is the Large Pixel Collider, set the graphics settings to "Best Quality," and recorded all the gory goodness at 1440p. Watch the video above to see the results, and be sure to check back soon for the final score.

Want to see more from the LPC archive? Check out some of our other recent videos: Far Cry 4, Middle-earth: Shadow of Morder, Fifa 15, Ryse: Son Of Rome, Metro 2033 Redux, Deus Ex, Watch Dogs, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and Arma 3. There's a lot more where that came from. Have a game in mind you'd like to see the LPC take on at ultra settings? Tell the LPC directly on Twitter.

Frontier Developments will make 15 positions redundant, the studio announced today. Following last year's Elite: Dangerous launch, and this week's announcement of an impending Coaster Park Tycoon game, the studio announced in an investor's update that it will "re-focus" its development activities away from its Nova Scotia office towards its Cambridge studio.

"Development roles are being moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Cambridge, and the overall staffing mix will be changed to match the needs of these two projects," the announcement read.

"15 content creation roles have been made redundant in Cambridge (from 281 total headcount), while Frontier continues to recruit in areas such as game and technology programming, server and web front end development."

The news follows the announcement of Coaster Park Tycoon earlier this week, which the studio intends to "run as a second franchise alongside continued development of its existing self-published Elite: Dangerous title".

While Elite: Dangerous launched to favourable reviews last month, it was not immune to controversy: the studio's eleventh hour decision to remove offline play resulted in many players demanding, and then receiving, a refund. The refund policy was later amended.

Capcom's action RPG Dragon's Dogma was a surprise hit when it released for consoles in 2012, and while there's been plenty of hustling for a PC port, it hasn't (and probably won't) happen. Instead, PC will get a taste of the series in the form of Dragon's Dogma Online, announced this week in Japanese games mag Famitsu. The free-to-play game is due to release later this year.

According to Gematsu's translation, Dragon's Dogma Online will inherit a lot of what made the original, single-player game special. You'll be able to climb all over the gigantic beasts you'll do battle with, for example. Four-character parties return, except this time your party will be controlled by human players rather than player constructed pawns. Meanwhile, producer Minae Matsukawa and director Kent Kinoshita insist that micro-transactions shouldn't prevent the game from feeling like a proper Dragon's Dogma adventure to returning players.

The world size will compare to the original's at launch, but the goal is to expand it to three times the size. Classwise, the game will launch with four: a Fighter, Hunter, Priest, and Shield Sage.

While it sounds promising, a cherished single-player game going free-to-play is sure to raise hackles. In the absence of gameplay footage or screenshots (there's a few grabs from the mag over here) we'll have to keep our fingers crossed.