In this week's Mod Roundup, the Game of Thrones mod for Crusader Kings 2 gets its v1.0 release and a GTA 5 mod lets you buy additional houses and rent hotel rooms in Los Santos. You can also explore the fantastic environments of Alien: Isolation—without that damn determined alien chasing you around—and begin a new life in Skyrim as a skooma addict or traveling merchant.

Here are the most promising mods we've seen this week.

 A Game of Thrones, for Crusader Kings 2

One of the best full-conversion mods of all time is even better. The Game of Thrones mod for Crusader Kings 2, which transforms Europe into George R. R. Martin's Westeros, has released version 1.0. It's been a while since I've played it, but there are lots of improvements in the latest version that make me want to dive back in. You can download it here.

No Alien, in Alien: Isolation

Obviously, this isn't meant to be a true alternative way to play the horror game, but instead a way to explore Sevastopol and take in all the incredible details of the environment at your leisure and without fear of being horribly impaled by the dreaded Xenomorph's tail. Chances are, you missed something while you were busy creeping, hiding, and dying the first time through. Details and download here.

New Beginnings, for Skyrim

There's a great mod for Skyrim called Alternate Start, that lets you skip the opening sequence at Helgen and begin a new game as a homeowner, a guild member, someone living at an inn, a bandit living in the wilds, and so on. In other words, it gives you the chance to play as a simple citizen of the world instead of the fabled Dragonborn. New Beginnings expands on that, letting you start the game as a lowly skooma addict, a beggar, a traveling merchant, a prisoner in the jail of your choice, a vampire who was recently laid to rest, and others. You can find it here.

The Savehouse Mod, for GTA 5

We know Michael, Franklin, and Trevor each have their own home in GTA 5, but why stop there? Let your millionaires buy a whole bunch of houses around Los Santos to serve as alternate save points and hideouts. This mod also allows you to rent rooms at hotels and create other savepoints around town. You'll find it here.

I love Alien: Isolation, and recently felt the urge to replay it—primarily to revisit that amazing retro-futuristic setting. But then I remembered the stress of my first experience and decided not to bother, until I had a thought: what if there s a way to mod out the alien and just explore the environments? And there is!

This modified file created by Steam user Thark alters the alien s behaviour so that it doesn t chase you around, leaving you free to explore Sevastopol at your leisure. It ll still be there in the world, but will never emerge from the vents it loves to hide in. Androids and humans can still kill you, though, so it s not completely safe.

And this got me thinking: is there a mod community for Alien: Isolation? I had a look around, and found a handful of files on Mod DB. There s nothing that majorly changes the way the game plays—or any player-made missions/levels—but enough small tweaks that could add some variety to a second playthrough of the game.

Life Savers

This mod overhauls most of the game s weapons and tools, making them more effective against the alien. Now the stun baton will stun it briefly, or even scare it away, and smoke bombs do a better job of obscuring your movements.Download

Unpredictable Alien

If you thought the alien in the vanilla game wasn t a challenging enough adversary, this mod mixes up its AI to make it more unpredictable. It removes the leash that keeps it near Ripley, giving it more freedom to scare the shit out of you.Download

Motion Tracker Remover

Do you find evading the xenomorph too easy? Then try playing without the help of Ripley s motion tracker. This basic mod simply stops it from working, meaning you ll never really know how far away, or close, the creature really is.Download

Flaming Bolt Gun

A modification for the bolt gun, making it more powerful and adding secondary flame rounds. There s an acid version too if you d prefer. Interestingly, these mods also make it so that, when attacked, the alien s acidic blood damages Ripley.Download

Overpowered Pistol

This pistol mod is comically overpowered, but ideal for anyone who wants to make enemy encounters less stressful. It kills humans and androids in one hit, and damages the alien so much that it runs away, similar to the flamethrower.Download

Silent Movement

Another mod designed to make the game easier, this time making your footsteps completely silent. This means you can sprint around Sevastopol and never alert the alien or other enemies, so long as you stay out of their line of sight.Download

If you want to make the game look prettier, try this mod by AngelGraves, which adds an extra super option to a few graphics settings. It improves, among other things, LOD range and reflections, and adds 4K resolution shadow maps. This, combined with supersampling, really improves the look of the game.

And if you want to take screenshots without worrying about getting impaled by the alien—and access to a free camera with adjustable FOV and depth of field settings—here s a Cheat Engine table by the Dead End Thrills community.

In my day, Mac games were limited to playing tag in your raincoat, so it's always great to see the Macintosh's relatively tiny game library expand. The latest big-budget developer to offer a Mac version of one of their games is Creative Assembly, whose Alien: Isolation is coming to Mac—and Linux—next week.

Feral Interactive are handling conversion duties, and they're bringing it to Steam for both Mac and Linux on September 29. (It's also coming to the Mac App Store sometime in October.) It's the 'Alien: Isolation - The Collection' version of the game, meaning it includes all the DLC. Here's a trailer:

The minimum system requirements for both versions are below.

Mac

• 2.0Ghz CPU with at least 4GB RAM
• 1GB or better graphics card
• Mac OS 10.10.4 or later
• AMD 5000 series graphics card or better, NVIDIA 600 series or better and Intel Iris Pro series graphics card or better

Linux

• 2.6Ghz Dual-Core CPU with at least 4GB RAM
• 1GB or better graphics card
• Ubuntu 14.04 (64bit) or SteamOS
• The game requires an NVIDIA 600 series graphics card or better running Driver version 355.11 or better. Intel AMD and GPUs are not supported
• A Steam account is required

Consolidated financial statements are a great way to lend an air of legitimacy to the job of writing news about games. It means I get to use phrases like "year-to-date", "equity in earnings" and "operating income for the previous fiscal period"—thus sounding like a serious journalist, even when four years of professionally writing about games has left me grossly unable to report on basic real-world journalistic concepts like law, politics, money or the comings and goings of reality TV stars.

That was a long opening paragraph. Sorry. Here's the news: Sega's full-year financial report for the 12-month period ending March 31 shows, in their words, "weak" performance in packaged game software—a category that, confusingly, includes digital PC sales. In total, the publisher sold 12.3 million units, which, while a year-on-year increase, was clearly below their expectations.

Breaking it down further, we can see sales totals for the company's releases. The multiplatform Alien: Isolation, for instance, shifted 2.11 million copies. The PC-only Football Manager 2015, meanwhile, sold 810,000 copies.

It's a shame that Alien: Isolation sold—from a multi-year AAA-project perspective—so little. It's a great interpretation of the Alien formula, and deservedly our game of 2014. Hopefully the less enthusiastic commercial reception won't stop Creative Assembly being able to do more with that team—as a recent job posting suggests they would like to do.

Thanks, GamesIndustry.

Organizers of the Game Developers Conference have generously posted many videos of the sessions recorded at this year's show online. You need to be a member to see some of them, but there's no shortage of fascinating talks that are available for free. After looking through them, these are some of the free sessions we think you shouldn't miss.

VR for Indies

Virtual reality was without a doubt the theme of GDC 2015. Sony had a new Morpheus model, Valve demoed Vive, and Carmack was on stage talking up mobile VR. However, the most down to earth, realistic session I saw about VR at GDC was VR for Indies, where Darknet developer E McNeill, Max Geiger, Ben Kane, Holden Link, and Vi Hart talked about how smaller developers can take advantage of this new technology, or if they even should. They weren't there to pitch you on a new product. They just talked honestly about what can be done now, and can hopefully be done in the future.

The Power of the Abstract

In this session, indie developer and game critic Liz Ryerson makes a really strong case for why we should stop chasing super realistic graphics and games that aim to emulate reality as closely as possible and instead consider the power of the abstract. It's not only a fascinating perspective, Ryerson also mentions several interesting games during her talk that you can download and play right now.

Growing the Participation of Women in eSports

Ever wonder why there aren't more women in eSports? This talk from professional players, Blizzard's Kim Phan, and Heather "SapphiRe" Mumm from the ESEA will not only tell you why, but what we can do to fix the problem.

The Dawn of Mobile VR

Look, I'm not even going to pretend that I understand what John Carmack is saying half the time, but I do know when I'm the presence of genius. Carmack made Doom, he dabbles in rocket science just for kicks, and he's doing a lot of important work on the current resurgence of virtual reality. Here he's talking about mobile VR, but you'll learn a lot about Oculus in general, and it's always interesting to hear him talk.

Divinity: Original Sin Postmortem - Success Stories and Lessons Learned

Divinity: Original Sin was easily one of the best games of last year, and a perfect example of what makes PC gaming so great. In this session, Larian Studio's Swen Vincke explains how they created Divinity. Spoiler alert: it wasn't easy.

Building Fear in Alien: Isolation

Speaking of some of the best game of last year, this session will tell you all about how Creative Assembly created PC Gamer's 2014 Game of the Year, Alien: Isolation. One of the coolest things about this session is that at some point Creative Assembly considered making Alien: Isolation a third-person game, and there's even the footage to prove it.

Building a Sport: The Design Philosophy of League of Legends

If you play League of Legends, watching this session should be mandatory. Ryan "Morello" Scott, League of Legends' Lead Designer, and Frank Lantz, the Director of the New York University Game Center, discuss how Riot Games designs and balances an eSports sensation that over 70 million play every month. Lantz is a big fan of the game, Scott is surprisingly open, and it's really interesting to hear them nerd out about the design decisions, big to small, that make League of Legends tick, even if you don't play it.

#1ReasonToBe

2014 was a pretty difficult year for women in the games industry. In the #1ReasonToBe session, game developer Brenda Romero hosts a panel including game critic Leigh Alexander, developer Adriel Wallick, Uncharted writer and current creative director at EA Amy Henning, and others who work in different parts of the industry. They discuss the highs and lows of their experience in games, and how to create a more inclusive way forward. 

Good news! Hmm, maybe that exclamation mark is a tad too definitive. You see, new job listings by The Creative Assembly suggests the team responsible for Alien: Isolation is moving on to something new. That could mean a sequel to PC Gamer's 2014 GOTY, which could mean another campaign of horror at the hands of a seemingly unstoppable, perfect organism. So "good," but in a pretty speculative and potentially terrifying way.

Good news

The job listing that caught the eye of Z-Giochi is for an Online/Muliplayer Programmer. The ad states CA is "creating another multi-platform AAA blockbuster," and lists PC, Xbox One and PS4 as platforms.

The multi-platform specification tells us its not a new Total War, as does the fact that the job is specifically listed as for the "Console Team," not the Total War team.

We know that an Alien: Isolation sequel has been discussed by the studio, and it seems more likely that it'll be that than, say, a Viking: Battle for Asgard sequel. If it is Alien, the need for a multiplayer programmer inherently implies a multiplayer component. That could be an interesting progression for the series.

Thanks, Videogamer.

District 9 director Neill Blomkamp, who revealed last month that he's turning his talents to the next Alien movie, recently told IGN that he's a big fan of Alien: Isolation. In fact, he said the game was so good that it actually forced him to question how he wanted to present the technology that will underpin the film.

One of the cool things about Alien: Isolation is the way it maintains the vision of the future as it was seen in 1979: Everything is big, clunky, and monochromatic, just as it was in the movie. "The chunky keyboards, phone receivers, distorted CRT monitors, and blinking coloured lights should look dated, but it has quite the opposite effect," as we noted in our review. "This is a tactile, practical, and convincing science-fiction world, with machines and environments that are functional and utilitarian, rather than overtly futuristic."

It's a style that Blomkamp was apparently taken by, too. "I m such a visual person that the narrative of stuff is neither here nor there for me sometimes. It s literally about imagery. And when I saw the images I thought, Sh*t, they can t be that good'," he said. "And then I played it and to me it was that good. It s so good. It s ridiculous."

The game made enough of an impact to leave him questioning how he wanted to depict advanced technology in the new film. Referring to the green CRT displays, dot matrix printers, and "Mother," the Nostromo's mainframe computer, he said, "That sh*t was real man. On the planet, in that future, that was cutting edge. So it s an interesting debate if you look at it from my standpoint, which is, do I make my cutting edge… is it cutting edge, or is it actually closer to the first two [films]? Because I wanted to be like it has the same parent. It s a genetic offspring of the first two movies, and Alien: Isolation made me question that quite a lot. Because they got it so perfect with all of the late 1970s, early 80s tech, it s really cool."

The actual influence that Alien: Isolation will have on Blomkamp's film remains to be seen, but it certainly speaks highly of The Creative Assembly's efforts to capture the "real" feeling of Alien—something we took note of as well.

Article by Jody Macgregor

One of Sevastopol Station s survivors opened fire on me and I didn t even think about shooting back. I was mad at the idiot, not because he was shooting at me but because of what that noise would attract. I turned and ran, ducked into a room and jammed myself inside a locker. As I was closing the door I could already hear it slither out of the ceiling and thud to the floor. The scream and gunshots were simultaneous, but neither lasted long. Then I heard the alien: that rasping breath with the aggression of a growl and the satisfaction of a purr. It s the sound of an animal beginning to hunt, and enjoying it.

While this was happening a movie of the events played out in my head, even though all I was looking at was a grill on the inside of a locker. That s effective sound design—the kind that puts noises in a context and a space so complete you barely need to look at the screen to know what s going on.

Jeff van Dyck was the audio director on Alien: Isolation (his credits at The Creative Assembly also include several of the Total War games; he won a BAFTA for his work on Shogun), and he chose the project because he was a fan of the original movie. The alien just seemed so unstoppable and massive, he says. Not necessarily physically massive—his character. You rarely saw him and when you did see him somebody died.

Initially it just didn t sound right. It sounded like a big robot or something like that—real thuddy and mechanical almost."

To help make a game that was as close to the first movie as possible, 20th Century Fox gave The Creative Assembly access to the original sound effects, taken from eight-track and dumped to a single ProTools session of the entire film. The audio quality wasn t high enough to simply copy sounds across, but it gave them a base to faithfully re-build from using modern technology. That article comparing the visual in the game to the visual in the movie? We were doing the audio equivalent of that.

A sound that did make the transition was one of the first things you hear as the camera pans across the stars. I used it in the main menu music, says van Dyck, what we dubbed the space whale. It s this weird bending WOOO sound right at the very beginning. He wanted to let players know from the start they were in for an genuine Alien experience. It s so authentic it s actually got a piece of the movie in it. To me it sounds fantastic, and then we did a surround mix with it. Rather than it being echoey we have it spinning around all the speakers.

Structural perfection

Among the games that Alien: Isolation drew on for inspiration, van Dyck singles out Visceral s sci-fi horror game Dead Space, which itself drew heavily from the Alien movies. In Dead Space they use these things called fear emitters and they were basically just a point they would put in various parts of the level, and if you walked near that point the music would cross-fade into tension and if you moved away it would be less. Not only were they fixed points in the world, but they would attach that emitter to monsters, specially significant ones. When they got closer to you the music would amp up.

The xenomorph in Alien: Isolation has a similar intensifying effect, but as well as making the music change—more of those quivering violin tremolos—its approach makes the ambient noises subside. Sevastopol s creaking and sparking and shuddering all recede when the alien s near, making you even more aware of protagonist Amanda Ripley s breathing and the clatter of items you bump or devices you turn on.

Not every sound can be as evocative as the space whale. There need to be ordinary noises as well, the ones that ground you, that give a believable physicality to the character you re playing.  Ripley has sneakers that squeak, a backpack full of tools and scrap that jangles when she turns, and jumpsuit pants that sometimes shwiff like George Costanza s when she walks. You can buy libraries of stuff like that, explains van Dyck, and we went through a bunch of the libraries because that s obviously the easier way to go about it, but we couldn t find anything that really matched and we thought, well, you know, triple-A title. May as well go for it. We had some budget left over and we went for the proper foley.

Traditional movie foley is the art of physically creating sounds that feel right rather than necessarily being similar to what s on the screen. During the infamous shower scene in Psycho you re hearing Alfred Hitchcock plunge a knife into a watermelon. For Alien: Isolation, Pinewood Studios were hired to create an archive of sounds that would suit Ripley s trek across Sevastopol, from the sterile plastic of its medical bay to the muck of an alien nest. They did this mainly by stamping on different surfaces, including soil covered in assorted squishy vegetables. It s amazing how much stuff they can do, says van Dyck, and you ve got to imagine all this expensive equipment in this room full of dirt and broken wood and sawdust and stuff.

Getting the right noises for the xenomorph was all about manipulating digital samples, however. Its footsteps were a trickier proposition than Ripley s. Initially it just didn t sound right. It sounded like a big robot or something like that—real thuddy and mechanical almost. He s got claws and we ve got to get a sense of the claw but we want him to feel formidable and heavy so that he s big and weighs a ton. We needed to get some sub-frequencies in there so that when he walked around you still felt the floor shake a little bit.

In James Cameron s Aliens, recordings of baboon shrieks, tweaked in post, were used for the xenomorphs. In Alien: Isolation a variety of animals were sampled to get the right sounds, then put through a talkbox—a musical effects unit that takes sounds musicians make with their mouths and translates them into instruments. It s the effect guitarists use to make it sound as if their electric guitar is talking or singing. We were taking animal yells and then putting it through that and getting some really interesting results, says van Dyck. Then the guys mixed in some of the alien sounds in the sounds of doors opening, which freaks the hell out of you. It s not all over the place but there s a few spots where there s a bit of that and it adds to the freakiness of stepping into a new room. You think the alien s in there because you kind of hear it.

When the alien was up in the vents and stuff, he actually is up there. He s not being rendered.

Sometimes though, you think you ve heard the alien because you really have. The sounds of the creature crawling overhead were initially placed at random, triggering unpredictably to startle the player, but van Dyck says the effect wasn t quite right. That changed when development reached a point where the coders and animators made it possible to realistically track the alien s position even when unseen. When the alien was up in the vents and stuff, he actually is up there. He s not being rendered, when he s off-screen he becomes just a wireframe skeleton, but he is actually moving around and moving to semi-logical places because he s looking for ways to find you. There s a cool mode you can get into using the development environment, you can turn off all the walls, see through all the walls, and you can see the alien running around doing his thing. When you move over here if you bump into something you can see him hear you and start coming over to you. Then of course in the final game, because you obviously have all the walls you can t see him, all the sound he makes sounds correct and in the correct location because he is actually acting like he s supposed to up in the rafters.

Most animals retreat

That sense of being able to track your opponent by ear is essential in a stealth game, and what makes Alien: Isolation fascinating is that it s not just one of the most stress-inducing horror games released in years, but also one of the purest stealth experiences. In horror well-crafted audio is vital because of the way it fires the imagination—all it takes to frighten someone in a house they thought was empty is footsteps on the stairs. In a stealth game, well-crafted audio is vital for a more prosaic reason: you need an idea where enemies are when you re the one perched in a dark shadow. You need to know whether guards are around the next corner and if they re approaching or moving further away.

Many recent stealth games have borrowed Batman s detective vision from the Arkham games, the ability that lets him detect criminals through walls when planning how to avoid their guns and get the drop on them. Since then we ve had Dishonored s darkvision, BioShock: Burial At Sea s peeping tom vigor, Dark s vampire vision, and the remake of Thief had its focus mode. If the player can see through walls it makes perfecting expensive and time-consuming 3D audio less necessary.

In the original Thief: The Dark Project there was no detective vision, so in levels like Return To The Haunted Cathedral you had to listen carefully to tell whether footsteps were echoing around the large central space of the cathedral or whether they were coming from the enclosed confines of the corridors and vestibules near your hiding position. In the Thief remake that was impossible—the sounds were hard to place, and in the Dirty Secrets level the sound of a man being spanked by a dominatrix in a nearby room followed me at full volume down a hall, round a corner, and up a flight of stairs.

In Alien: Isolation they put in the effort, and it shows. 3D mixing is really tricky, says van Dyck, because when a sound is off in the distance it s in a very narrow point and as you turn your head you can feel it move, but as it gets closer its sound now emanates from a wider area. Simulating the sound as it gets really close to you, that was one of the trickier things that we found. The other thing is that sound over distance starts to get filtered. High frequencies start to roll off and also low frequencies start to roll off and essentially a sound becomes thinner and thinner-sounding as it gets off in the distance. If you don t apply those effects artificially the soundscape sounds wrong.

In Alien: Isolation only the designers can see through walls, so instead the player has to learn to listen with pinpoint accuracy. When you hear a door open you know which one it was, and when the alien make a noise you know how far away it is. Your only way of telling where things are when you can t hear them is by using the motion tracker, but that s risky. When Ripley s attention is focused on its screen the rest of the world blurs, and its beeping is loud enough to attract attention. In space no one can hear you scream, but everyone can hear that goddamn motion tracker.

The guys spent a lot of time on the motion tracker, says van Dyck, because different people had different thoughts on what the motion tracker should sound like. We ended up going with a hybrid between the first movie and the second movie. The Sevastopol version of the device is made for tracking on-board vermin, as the safety posters explain: Before they breed... TRACK and EXTERMINATE. For that purpose it would be fine, but it s the world s crappiest and least reliable version of detective vision—as it should be. When you re hiding in a locker, leaning back to bring it up, it can draw attention to you, and when you re in the open it can blind you to what s right in front of your face. It encourages you to listen instead, to a soundscape that s as effective as the visuals, and even more frightening.

When Alien was released in 1979 van Dyck recalls being afraid before he d even seen the movie. I remember it coming out as a kid and being too scared to want to watch it, he says. I remember seeing the poster: In space no one can hear you scream. I loved that concept. It freaked the hell out of me.

Lost Contact, the fourth DLC release for Sega's xenomorphic horror hit Alien: Isolation, is now available. This time around, the ever-unfortunate Axel must use his wits to evade danger and escape from the remote area of Sevastopol Station in which he's stranded.

The setup is essentially the same as last month's Safe Haven DLC: Axel must work through ten increasingly difficult tasks as he navigates the perils of a new Survivor Challenge map featuring the Lorenz Private Wards and Emergency Power Plant. Completing each of the ten challenges earns points that can be used to access new collectible and craftable items, or even traded for a save slot. Opting for the save will cut into the final score and leaderboard position, but it might be worth the knock: Survival Mode gives players just one life, and when it's over, it's over. 

Even though it's obviously not the most groundbreaking DLC package ever, sometimes "more of a good thing" is more than enough. Like, for instance, when it comes to our selection for the 2014 Game of the Year, which Andy Kelly described as "the best Alien game ever" in his recent "Making Of" feature. Sega and Creative Assembly have clearly decided not to mess with success, and I suspect they might be onto something.

Alien Isolation: Lost Contact is out now.