Put on your hard hat and prepare for mindless destruction, because Red Faction: Guerrilla has officially made the transition from Games for Windows Live to Steam. Nordic Games has made good on its promise to save the instalment from imminent GFWL doom, but the new Steam Edition also ushers in a bunch additions and bug fixes.

Steam Trading Cards are in, while six new Wrecking Crew maps are bundled in including Ruins, Repercussion, Imperial, Expansion, Frost and Abandoned. Elsewhere there's a new Behemoth game mode as well as a bunch of tweaks to the online experience, including Steam hosted leaderboards, voice chat and host migration.

Full notes on Red: Faction Steam Edition can be found on Steam. It follows confirmation at the start of the year that Microsoft will indeed kill off Games For Windows Live, which absolutely no one was upset about. Many publishers have announced their intention to move their GFWL hosted games to other platforms, with Dark Souls being a notable example.  

Each Friday PC Gamer s writers descend into the molten idea core and return with cooling fragments of what they have dubbed opiniononium . They re just like that.

THE HIGHS

Tom Marks: Grand Theft Auto V s PC port won t be a smash and grab What Rockstar is doing with the PC and next-gen versions of Grand Theft Auto V is downright admirable. Sure they are taking their sweet time doing it, but I much prefer a long wait to a slap-dash, press escape to instantly quit, port with more problems than new features. First they told us they are giving previous players a reason to come back, and now they confirm a first person mode and 4k resolution support. First person has been a rumored feature for a while, but the modeled vehicle interiors and suite of new animations are icing on the cake I wasn t expecting. A year after its initial release, Rockstar is still working hard to keep the latest version of GTA V feeling cutting edge, and at this rate the PC will be home to the definitive version.

Samuel Roberts: When systems come together I m late as hell to the Alien: Isolation party, but this week I ve been muddling through the game s colossal 20+ hour storyline in little chunks. I haven t found it especially scary, to be honest—tense, but not scary. In well-lit environments, I have adjusted to the sight and animation of the alien and no longer consider it an unseen threat. Last night, though, the systems of the game came together in a way that I found genuinely unsettling, as I manoeuvred through a strobe-lit environment and saw the alien drop out of nowhere, behind some fellow human survivors. I went straight for a locker and hid, hearing screams as the alien devoured them and then, a silence, until the locker tore open and the alien killed me, too. By itself, the alien s aura becomes undone the more you play, but the systems are smart enough to keep finding ways to make that creature scary. Brilliant game.

Chris Thursten: Endless Legend (and other space wizards) I liked the look of Endless Space more than I really found time to play it, but this week I decided to take a stab at Amplitude s fantasy follow-up: Endless Legend. Having been rather disappointed by Civilization: Beyond Earth, I m taken by just how many things Legend gets right. The combat system is an elegant improvement on Civ; empire development is involved and interesting; the UI is crisp and pleasant to use. The factions are varied, play very differently, and are beautifully presented.

It s the art and music that have really sold the game to me, though. Endless Legend s take on fantasy has a light sci-fi touch and the gentle pastel art reminds me of a Gene Wolfe book cover. This has been something of a trend recently—Destiny shows off many of the same influences. I ve been running a pen and paper campaign in Monte Cook s Numenera, lately, so there really couldn t be a better time to be surrounded by lovely hand-painted space wizards.

Andy Chalk: EFF seeks to legalize online DRM circumvention in abandoned games The EFF recently petitioned to legalize DRM circumvention in "abandoned" games, a move that, if successful, will make life a whole lot easier for retro gamers and preservationists. Older games reliant on matchmaking servers or online DRM checks are pretty much done in when remote servers go offline, and while cracks are always an option, they're often not a realistic choice. The process of legalizing this particular type of DRM circumvention is "burdensome and confusing," but if we're serious about preserving video games, both for posterity and playability, then this is a necessary step and hopefully one that will ultimately prove successful.

Phil Savage: Games for Windows Live is slightly more dead I love seeing bad things happen to bad people. Or in this case, to bad programs. Games for Windows: Live is undoubtedly a bad program, and I smile every time it comes closer to annihilation. This week, Nordic Games patched it out of Red Faction: Guerilla. This is surprising—despite their previous promise that it would happen. It's surprising because Guerilla was made by Volition for THQ—the former now with Deep Silver, the latter sadly deceased. Nordic acquired the rights to much of THQ's catalogue, but they didn't have anything to do with the game's creation; just its current distribution. To then go back in to remove the unwanted GfWL-wrapper is a step worth celebrating. Especially because Guerilla is such a great game.

THE LOWS

Andy Chalk: Dawngate is dead EA pulled the plug on Dawngate at the start of the week, a particularly surprising move given that it's been in one form of beta testing or another for the past year and a half. I suppose this could actually be seen as a "high," since a willingness to shut it down at this stage in development is surely preferable to just shoving it out the door and hoping for the best, but it's unfortunate that something couldn't be done to salvage the game, especially since some players clearly seemed to be enjoying it. It's also obviously not good news for the people at developer Waystone Games, which is reportedly being disbanded.

Samuel Roberts: High prices It s hard to figure out what s happening with Ubisoft s holiday titles vanishing from Steam this week (and not appearing on the UK Steam store at all). While opening two clients to play one game is never ideal with both Steam and uPlay, having the option to buy the game on Steam is ideal for a lot of players, and not selling through Steam is a break of form for Ubisoft. Hopefully they ll return to Valve s service soon.

Phil Savage: Fallout 4 An obvious choice, and not even a particularly notable one. Of course the Fallout 4 trademark was a hoax. This happens constantly, to the point where I've long since stopped paying attention to trademark discoveries. It s always a hoax. And yet, yes, there's still a part of me that wanted it to be true. I'm ready to see what Bethesda will do next. An open-world post-apocalyptic RPG made with current-gen hardware in mind? Yeah, I'd like to see that happen.

Oh well, there's always next year.

Chris Thursten: Oh god where did the year go Endless Legend might be my favourite thing this week, but the circumstances in which I discovered it are quite the opposite. We ll be beginning the process of judging our Game of the Year soon, and that means going back and considering a lot of games that I might have missed when they came out. I ve heard a lot of people say that 2014 was a little weak, release-wise, but the staggering task ahead of me speaks to the opposite. I ve still not started Wasteland 2 and I d like to return to Divinity: Original Sin; I m half-way through my first Shadowrun Returns campaign and don t feel ready to move on to the Director s Cut of Dragonfall yet. That s just RPGs. I still need to finish Alien: Isolation and Shadow of Mordor and, oh wait! There s Legend of Grimrock 2. And Jazzpunk. And The Banner Saga. Maybe I should give Metal Gear Rising a look? What about Luftrausers?

And so on. And so on. And so on.

Tom Marks: The Glove is coming off The Black Glove s kickstarter is finally over, falling woefully short of its $550k target. Even the belated support of big names like Ken Levine couldn t save what looked like a unique and clever concept, striking many of the same chords with me as the first time I saw Psychonauts. Raising the $220k it managed to is an impressive feat in itself, certainly proving there is a not insignificant amount of interest in the game, but setting such a high bar on an all-or-nothing platform is a dangerous game to play with a brand new IP from a team with no stand out names. Their video proved to me that they had the chops to get the job done, and The Black Glove looks like a game I d love to try, so the thought that it may never see the light of day is a discouraging one. 

[Update: Nordic has clarified that it's actually going to update Red Faction: Guerrilla to DirectX 11. "Instead of just abandoning DX10 we decided to bring it over to DX11," Nordic's Reinhard Pollice said. "With this implementation which will soon be available as beta via Steam we hope to deliver a great Red Faction Guerrilla experience for PC gamers especially on Windows 7 and Windows 8." The DX11 update went into beta yesterday and is expected to be ready for full release within a couple of weeks.]

Original story:

Nordic Games said at the beginning of this year that it would strip the Games for Windows Live requirement from Red Faction: Guerrilla, which it picked up, along with the Red Faction franchise as a whole, following the collapse of original owner THQ. And now it's finally gotten around to doing it.

Executive Producer Reinhard Pollice made the announcement on Steam, where he revealed that a Games for Windows Live sign-in is no longer required to play the game. Matchmaking and multiplayer, along with leaderboards, voice chat, and achievements, are now handled entirely through Steam. The game also now uses the DirectX9 renderer by default, because "DX10 created a lot of problems and resulted in performance issues," and it will attempt to migrate saves from Games for Windows Live to the new system the first time it launches.

In a follow-up post, Pollice explained that while some fans might be disappointed by the decision to default to DX9 instead of making DX10 work properly, it's not actually going to make a noticeable difference. "The whole DX10 support from MS side is not good that's why we believed it's the safest to go for DX9 mode. This will run perfectly on any DX10 system as well," he wrote. "Seriously DX10 in Red Faction Guerrilla was just a marketing gag as there was no real advantage."

To ensure that all is working as it should, Nordic is running a beta version of the overhauled game, open to anyone who wishes to take part. Instructions for doing so are here, but you'll also need a couple of passwords, which can be found in Pollice's forum post.

Written by Tom Marks
We ve already shown you what Metro 2033 Redux looks like when put side-by-side with the original, but the game looks so darn pretty that we wanted to spend more time in post-apocalyptic Moscow. We fed it to that benevolent giant we call the Large Pixel Collider and ran it on max settings at 2560x1440 resolution, and what do you know a video came out!. You can also check out our review of Metro 2033 Redux here.

Want more from the LPC video archive? Recently we've hit Deus Ex, NeoTokyo, Watch Dogs, Wolfenstein: The New Order, the Titanfall beta, Max Payne 3, Metro: Last Light, and Arma 3. There's much more to come. Have a game in mind you'd like to see the LPC take on at ultra settings? Tell the LPC directly on Twitter.

Back in May, the original Dawn of War and its many expansions cast off the shackles of Gamespy and Games for Windows Live and replaced them with Steamworks. Dawn of War 2 and Chaos Rising, meanwhile, required additional work work that's now been completed. A new update for both games has just been released, which gives GfWL the old heave-ho and moves achievements and leaderboards over to Relic's servers, while integrating Relic's battle servers to manage multiplayer networking in both entries.

In the process, Relic have removed a few features from the games. LAN multiplayer, Referee mode, and the option to pause during multiplayer are all gone. It's a shame, but at least the games are still playable online. Meanwhile, Games for Windows Live is still kinda, sorta trundling on, despite reports that it was heading for the guillotine Microsoft hasn't put it out of our misery just yet.

The Metro and Stalker games are incredibly atmospheric post-apocalyptic shooters, but where Stalker is set in a sprawling open world, Metro is a far more claustrophobic and linear experience. But it sounds like Metro developer 4A Games might just be aiming for something a little more Stalker-like in its next game.

In a lengthy interview with Eurogamer, 4A Games Chief Technical Officer Oles Shishkovstov talked about "the performance differential between Xbox One and PlayStation 4," the difficulty of developing for multiple platforms, the strengths and weaknesses of different APIs and all that sort of thing. It's good stuff if you're into that sort of thing, but the really interesting bit, at least for me, came around the midway point when he was asked if he could talk about what the studio is currently working on.

"For the game we are working on now, our designers have shifted to a more sand-box-style experience - less linear but still hugely story-driven," he said. "I will not go into details, but it requires some work from programmers as well."

It's only a couple of sentences and nothing more is said about it, although to be fair, it's a Digital Foundry interview focused on developing for the new generation of consoles. But the possibility of an open-world Metro game is incredibly exciting. And it's also the sort of thing that 4A Games might actually do: It was founded in 2005 by former members of GSC Game World, the studio that created the Stalker franchise.

Video by PC Gamer intern Tom Marks

Last week we gave you our review of Metro 2033 Redux, but today you can judge the graphical differences firsthand. We decided to throw both the original game and the Redux version to our irresponsibly large computer, the Large Pixel Collider, to scrutinize 4A Games' remastered environments, lighting and character models. We cranked all the graphics to max, set the resolution to 2560 x 1440, and started killing monsters. The original is still a good looking game, but Redux has some impressive new lighting effects, and runs much, much better it stayed at a rock-solid 60 fps even during combat, which would drop Metro 2033 down to about 40 frames per second.

In the world of video games it's just one outrage after another until you just wish Flanders was dead. This time people are upset about the pricing for 4A Games' forthcoming Metro Redux package, which includes both Metro: 2033 and Metro: Last Light. The former is a huge overhaul of the 2010 original, while the latter doesn't differ greatly from the 2013 shooter, though all DLC is bundled.

Of course, people who already own both games aren't happy that they'll need to pay again, despite 4A Games offering a 50 per cent discount to those who have either game in their Steam library. The controversy got so heated in the Steam discussion forums that it prompted a "blindsided" 4A Games to release a (rather lengthy) statement justifying the price.

"Almost the entire team of around 80 people at 4A Games will have been working on the Metro Redux titles for almost a year by the time we release next month," the statement read. "It has been a substantial project for the studio, with three main elements."

The studio went on to list the substantial new features, including engine additions such as global illumination and terrain tessellation, among other tweaks. Metro: Last Light will get some "minor" new features like a Check Watch and Check Inventory, as well as a whole new game mode. Finally, transferring Metro 2033 to the new engine, along with the new content and assets, was no small feat.

"We think the 50% discount is more than fair for the amount of work that has gone into this title," the statement continued. "It is a complete remake of the original game in the latest engine, that will offer a significantly different experience from the original throughout with improved graphics, performance and gameplay."

The studio's full statement is over on the Steam forum. A before and after trailer released last week, showing how the new edition will size up next to the old games.

Darksiders studio Vigil Games came to an untimely end in the wake of THQ's collapse, and yet it didn't: Instead of purchasing the studio, Crytek left it to wither and die, then hired a big chunk of its staff for its Austin-based Crytek USA. Now its happening again, as Crytek USA has been vastly downsized in the wake of Crytek's move to free-to-play, but the Vigil team is sticking together under yet another new name.

Vigil Games founder David Adams, who was also the chief of Crytek USA, actually left the studio three weeks ago, taking the "core team" with him to form Gunfire Games. He said Crytek's money issues were part of what convinced him to go, but it was also the fact that Crytek's problems were causing others to leave.

"It really was the team," he told Polygon. "When you make a game, one of the most important elements of that is the people you work with. You could get 12 of the best developers in the world and put them into a room and they may not make a good game."

There are currently only seven people at Gunfire, all of them "leads at Crytek USA," according to Studio Director Matt Guzenda. "We're still working on the next round of guys coming around."

Adams said the new studio is "exploring" the possibility of making Darksiders 3, and has actually spoken with Nordic Games, the publisher that currently owns the IP, but added that he doesn't want to "jump into anything immediately." For now, the team is looking at some smaller projects to get started, with a long-term goal of launching a brand-new game that would "build upon what we've done in the past."

"Third-person, games with a lot of characters, adventure aspects, player progression, hunt cool bosses, fantastical creatures," he said. "We have some ideas kicking around."

It may be premature to declare that before-and-after comparison videos are all the rage, but hot on the heels of yesterday's Project CARS trailer comes something similar for the upcoming Metro Redux. Major visual updates to both Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light are at the top of the menu, but there's a lot more to it than just a new coat of paint.

The video initially focuses on visual improvements to the console versions of the games, which will now be able to provide the same level of visual fidelity as a high-spec PC on the originals. Contemporary high-end PCs will still have the advantage in Redux, however, through support for 4K resolution and a wide array of graphical enhancements.

But the really interesting stuff is happening under the hood. The AI is improved, and features that were previously exclusive to Last Light, including better stealth gameplay, weapon customization and non-lethal takedowns, will also appear in 2033. New secrets, hidden areas and encounters have been added, and previously separate locations have been "seamlessly stitched together." Two new play modes have been added, Spartan and Survival, and Ranger mode is now available in both games.

I was a pretty big fan of the Metro games when they were new, so I was sold on the Redux release pretty much from the moment I heard about it; if it's possible, I think I'm ever more sold now. Metro Redux launches on August 26.