Originally due in October, Ark's Aberration expansion lands today—bringing with it an new underground biome, dozens of alien-like dinos and over 50 new craftable items. 

Despite not being much of a cave guy, Chris appeared to enjoy his hands-on time with Aberration last month, as he traversed its inhabitable and hazardous underground world where sunlight is apparently deadly. In turn, you should expect earthquakes, environmental pitfalls, ziplines, wingsuits, climbing gear, and, obviously, a cast of fantastically terrifying creatures. 

Here's a look at some of that in video form: 

And if that wasn't enough to contend with, developer Studio Wildcard warns we should "Beware the ‘Nameless’: unrelenting, Element-infused humanoids, which have evolved into vicious light-hating creatures, and the Reapers, massive alien monstrosities which can impregnate foes to spawn their offspring." Chris bills the latter process as a "rather messy chest-birth to a squirming worm grub" that's equally gross and fun. I'll take his word for it.   

With new challenges and over 50 new craftable items to tinker with, Aberration provides plenty to get on with. Speaking to the new creatures, Studio Wildcard adds: 

The intense radiation of Aberration has led to incredible genetic mutations, resulting in dozens of new creatures with amazing abilities! Clamber up walls and glide through the air on the back of a camouflaging chameleon-like ‘Rock Drake’, keep the dark at bay with one of four friendly ‘Lantern Pets’, or grab and toss multiple creatures simultaneously with a massive ‘Cave Crustacean’, or—if you are brave enough—allow the horrific Reaper Queen to impregnate you, and spawn a vicious male Reaper alien lifeform you can tame and control.

The Aberration expansion costs $20 standalone, and can also be purchased as part of the Ark season pass which includes Scorched Earth and an as-yet unspecified third expansion. We've been informed Aberration will go live at 6pm GMT/10am PT. 

GTA Online's Doomsday Heist is now live as part of the game's latest update. To begin the heist, you need to buy a new building called a facility from Maze Bank Foreclosures. The cheapest one will set you back $1.25 million of in-game cash, while the most expensive option costs $2.95 million. You can also install an optional orbital cannon, which costs $900,000.

Is that basic cost justifiable? If you go for a cheaper option and play GTA regularly, I think that sounds okay, although I'll have to play the heist first to make a proper call on that. According to IGN, Doomsday Heist features about 12 hours of new stuff, which is about as long as I played each GTA IV expansion back in the day. In real money terms, $1.25 million of in-game money costs £12/$20 in Shark Cards. I've bought the facility closest to my hangar at Zancudo, which is $1.67 million. To use it as a spawn point, though, I'll need to buy sleeping quarters on top of that, which is another $290,000. You need to be a CEO or MC President to start the heist. 

The GTA Online subreddit has a really handy breakdown of the costs for new vehicles, facilities and more. As mentioned, you can have an orbital cannon added to your facility for $900,000, but according to the same thread, it costs $500,000 per manual shot or $750,000 per automatic shot (with a long cooldown), which I can't ever see myself spending. I can't verify those prices, though, because it requires more spare money than I have right now to buy one.

I've just downloaded the update, and visited my facility to begin the first setup mission, after watching the opening cutscene. There's a $65,000 upfront cost for that. As for the rest of the expansion, I'm unsure, but my aim is to play it across the next week and deliver some verdict on the quality of the new missions in Doomsday Heist. 

I'm excited, though, and even just having a sudden drop of new missions, vehicles and so on is pretty cool, this deep into the game's lifecycle. As ever, there's a bunch of stuff I'll never spend money on, then a few items I find tempting. Let me know your thoughts on the pricing and new content below. 

In his review, Chris praised Assassin's Creed Origins' "brilliant" setting and new systems that combine well with the series formula. Naturally, there was room for improvement—which is something today's extensive patch hopes to address. 

Due today, update 1.1.0 introduces a new Nightmare difficulty mode and adds a new NPC scaling option that lets enemies scale up to player's levels. Ubisoft qualifies this by saying enemies will only scale up to meet the player's level as they progress, and will not scale down. A new 'Horde' mode has been added to the Arena, while HDR display is now supported for PC players.  

Moreover, tweaks have been made to the game's economy, while Trinkets and Animal Goods have now been capped at 999. Stuttering issues have also been remedied on Nvidia graphics cards when playing in borderless mode, which is something a fair number of players have faced before now.  

A number of other fixes have been applied to graphics settings, UI, audio, the game's world and quests—not least how NPCs react to your presence. 

Again, Assassin's Creed Origins' update 1.1.0 is due later today. Head in this direction for its patch notes in full. 

If you're looking for a new way to explore the procedurally generated splendors of No Man's Sky, you can now fly around in the Millennium Falcon—once you find it. The Morships for Atlas Rising Mod for No Man's Sky adds a dozen new ships, including the Falcon, to the game's procedural generation lists, meaning that a) the new spacecraft don't replace any existing ships, and b) they'll show up randomly as you explore. So, if you want to pilot Han Solo's famed smuggle-mobile from Star Wars, you'll have to keep your eyes peeled for it.

The ships have been crafted by a number of creators—see the mod's page for all the credits. All the ships are pretty sweet looking, and there's even a pod racer from The Phantom Menace included, if you can stomach the bad memories. As the ships appear on various docking pads and space stations you can purchase them as you would other ships. They might even show up as pirates and attack you.

One warning from the modder: "...uninstalling the mod will result in a crash to desktop if/when any save game tries to load the ships from the uninstalled mod." That's pretty serious, so keep it in mind if you decide you want to install this mod. The MorShips Mod will also be included in the next version of the (hopefully) soon to come RaYRoD's Overhaul. (I'd link to the old version of it, but it's been taken offline while its creator works on the next version).

Whether you like the Mega Man games or not, most have a lingering fondness for their bright and vibrant pixel art. Simon Andersen, the creator and artist behind Owlboy, is no different. Lately he's been experimenting with Mega Man, and it's interesting to see how one of the industry's best pixel artists approaches the series (if you don't believe he's one of the industry's best – you haven't seen Owlboy).

His approach is orthodox but the art is beautiful. 

Later Andersen posted a short video showing a working, playable Mega Man prototype. It's just a pet project ("I am not making a promise to make anything. It's just something fun to mess with during my weekend," he wrote) but it's still cool to see in action. "Unless Capcom comes knocking on my door with a reasonable deal, I am not making a Megaman game," he later tweeted.

"I might make a few changes to a few established tropes," he wrote. "Definitely weapon selection and assist item use. Though I'm very tempted to break NES limitations further and allow parallax scrolling and potentially widescreen."

And just so you're 100 per cent not under the impression Andersen is making a commercial Mega Man game, here's another confirmation: "Yes, I could do a MM8 style game, but I'm currently just messing with old sprites I have for fun, MM11 is already in production, an X project is a better fit, but most importantly: I'm not doing that amount of work for free. I'm not insane."

I'm attempting to immerse myself completely in Fallout 4 VR. In my pre-war house, my husband takes a seat on the couch to watch TV, and I sit next to him—sort of. As far as the game is concerned, I'm sitting (I have chosen the 'sit' option with my controller) but while I'm positioned on the couch I'm still at my standing height. Only by squatting—physically, with my real body, I mean—can I feel like we're really chilling on the couch together, not a care in the world. It's a wonderful life, a relaxing husband and his weirdly crouching wife watching TV together, at least until the bombs start falling.

While Fallout 4 VR shows some of the shortcomings of retrofitting VR into an existing game, it's also impressively playable. I had my doubts about whether I'd really enjoy playing a game that one could easily spend 100 hours in while using a VR headset I typically want to take off after 30 minutes, but after several enjoyable hours over the weekend, I've found that VR is a great fit for Fallout 4.

Note: The gifs above and below are from video capturing the mirrored footage on my desktop while I play, which shows up at an odd resolution and not in full detail on my monitor. The game looks perfectly lovely in my headset.

Instead of racing through it for what is probably the 10th time, I spend a while in Fallout 4's introductory sequence just inspecting things. I lean close to one of my terrified neighbors as we descend into the Vault (in fact, I lean so close I can see inside her skull). In front of an armored soldier, I hunch over so I can peer into the barrel of his gun. (I don't know why—what do I expect to see in there, a bouquet of flowers?) When I meet Dogmeat I get down on one knee (my real knee) so I can look directly into his beautifully earnest doggy face. The sights and sounds I know very well at this point are made fresh and exciting again by being able to move around inside them and get closer to them than I've ever been able to before.

There's been some tailoring to accommodate the VR experience. One of the best things in Fallout 4 VR is VATS, which works a bit differently than it does in the original game. Instead of allowing you to target a specific area or areas on your enemy (or enemies) and then watching your attacks play out in a cinematic view, VATS in VR works more like a traditional bullet time effect.

Once activated, time slows down. You aim, physically, by pointing your controller (which looks like the current weapon you're holding) at your enemy. As you aim your weapon, parts of your enemy are highlighted as you center your aim on them. Then, rather than watching your attack play out as your action points are spent, you actually fire your weapon in slow-motion. Instead of pulling you out for a cinematic observation of the carnage, you feel like you're in one long unbroken fight. It's a great rethinking of the VATS feature. In fact, I found myself preferring the new VATS to the original: you feel more connected to the action. 

The Pip-Boy, unfortunately, doesn't translate quite as well. At first it's cool to hold your wrist up to your face to activate the screen (it enlarges automatically, though since you have no arms it's just sort of floating there) and scrolling through the options using the directional pad works okay after a little practice. But considering how often you use your Pip-Boy, it begins to feel like a bit of a chore after a while. Having a quick look at something, easy with mouse and keyboard, takes a good deal longer with the controllers.

The workshop experience is a bit clunky in VR, too (to be fair, it was already a bit clunky to begin with). Building elements appear nicely over one hand, as if they were little spinning holograms you were holding, and placing them is done with the other controller, though navigating the menus is much easier in the standard fashion than with the touchpads. Wearing power armor is another feature that doesn't feel quite like it should in VR. Apart from being a couple of inches taller, and having a new HUD attached to your vision, it doesn't really feel any different than running around without it.

Obviously, Fallout 4 VR hasn't been built from the ground up for a headset, and sometimes you can really feel it. I've spent some time recently playing Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality, so I'm used to using my virtual hands to pull open virtual drawers and cabinets, and holding and turning items over while seeing a representation of my real mitts in front of my face. You can pick up items in Fallout 4 VR, but you don't see yourself holding anything, they just float there. Opening containers works like it does in the regular game, which doesn't do much for immersion or giving you the feeling that you can really reach out, touch things, interact.

But it's still a highly playable game in VR. I feel some of the wonder in a new way: watching the massive vault door roll open, looking up at Diamond City's gate as it rises for the first time, seeing ghouls and deathclaws lunging right in my face. I'm not one who feels motion sickness in VR, but it can sometimes be jarring or uncomfortable when something doesn't feel right. Fallout 4 VR feels right just about all the time.

Really, the only thing pulling me out of the VR experience is my knee beginning to hurt from standing on a hard floor for several hours at a stretch, but chalk that up to my old, shitty body and not to Fallout 4 VR. Without my bum knee and the inevitable sweatiness of the Vive headset, I could keep playing for hours more.

Camel toe, as defined in unexpectedly restrained fashion by the Urban Dictionary, is "the appearance of a wedge in a woman's genital region resulting from tight fitting clothes." It is also the cause of a recent bit of unexpected upset in Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, following a surprise change in female character models that appeared on the PUBG test server over the weekend. 

Courtesy of the subreddit: 

I'll be honest, part of me thinks this is a tempest in a t-back, but I also don't have to put up with watching hunky digital avatars running around with banana hammocks flapping all over the place (well, excluding Conan Exiles), so my perspective is admittedly somewhat skewed. And it's certainly fair to ask why the change was made now, nine months after its initial release on Early Access.

Apparently the whole thing was unintentional: "After looking into this, it appears it came as part of the character model we received from an outsourcer when we first started the project," Brendan Greene, the PlayerUnknown who gives the game half of its unwieldy title, said on Twitter. "The file itself has not been changed in two years. It will be updated shortly with changes! Sorry for any offense caused!"

Predictably, a certain subset of PUBG fans are unhappy with the change, but as one game dev unaffiliated with PUBG pointed out, there was no outrage or "screeching," and anyway, that's what test servers are for: To test things, and change them as necessary. "Cameltoes hurt and are similar to a wedgie. Would you like to fight for your life with a wedgie?" they wrote, "No. It makes no sense and is unnecessary. Simple as that."

Steam's November 2017 Hardware Survey shows an 8.23 percent rise in players who use Simplified Chinese since October, bringing the total share of Chinese-readers to a massive 64.35 percent of Steam's survey respondents. English accounted for 17.02 percent, and Russian was the third highest at 5.11 percent. Just one year ago, English was on top with 44.10 percent of respondents and Simplified Chinese only accounted for 8.60 percent.

The dramatic increase of Steam users in China began in 2012, when Valve and Perfect World partnered to publish Dota 2 in the country. Perfect World later published CS:GO in China, and the two games are now the third and second most popular games on Steam in China, respectively. The most popular, however, released this year: SteamSpy estimates that 78 percent of Steam users in China own PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

And that means something interesting could happen next year: Tencent obtained the rights to publish and operate PUBG in China. It's unclear whether Tencent's government-approved version of PUBG will remain on Steam, or release through its WeGame service. In the announcement, Tencent does not mention what platform its version of PUBG will release on, promising more information soon.

There is precedent, though: When Tencent secured Chinese publishing rights to Rocket League (as a free-to-play game), it was taken off sale on Steam in China. "Though new players will no longer be able to purchase the existing version of the game on Steam from this point forward," wrote Psyonix, "the existing community will still have access to the game you paid for in addition to all other currently-available features."

If PUBG follows the same route, Chinese players will be able to keep playing on Steam, though it will no longer be available to purchase. The massive Steam adoption may then slow down, though it's always possible another game will catch on in China sans a government-approved publishing deal. (According to Niko Partners, Steam operates in a grey area in China, as not all games on Steam are approved for sale by China's State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television.)

Despite the results of recent Steam Hardware Surveys, China isn't necessarily home to the most Steam users of any country, at least not yet. The Hardware Survey includes Chinese-speakers outside of China, of course, and Chinese is by far the most-known language in the world. Additionally, the data comes from users who logged in and agreed to the survey during November, and Steam doesn't offer the survey demographics, only the results.

But if China doesn't have the largest share of users, it's at least close. SteamSpy currently has China in second place for user count, with 11.34 percent of the world's Steam users, while the US accounts for 14.67 percent. Yet these estimations, which are based on public user profiles, don't include users who haven't put their location in their Steam profile. SteamSpy recorded over 20 million users as 'Other' on December 8th.

And China has the most active userbase by far according to SteamSpy: 19.48 percent of the world's active Steam population for the past two weeks compared to the US's 14.17 percent. This is backed up by more of Steam's own data. According to the past seven days of Steam records, The United States downloaded 58.6 petabytes worth of data, barely surpassing China's 57.2 PB. SteamSpy estimates that Chinese players own far fewer games on average than American players, so it follows that a petabyte of data in China represents more individual players than a petabyte of data in the US.

If this trend continues, expect to see more games on Steam with Chinese language support—currently, there are over 4,500. It'll also be interesting to see if there's any reverse effect, as well: more Chinese games releasing on Steam with or without English, Russian, and other language support. Tencent-published game Europa, for instance, currently appears on Steam. Alternatively, or at the same time, we could see Tencent work toward becoming a worldwide platform.

A new report from digital research firm Superdata says that the worldwide esports market was valued at $1.5 billion in 2017. Fully half of that came by way of investments from "high-profile sports organizations and brands," the company said in the Esports Courtside: Playmakers of 2017 report, "highlighting a growing confidence in its ability to break into the mainstream." 

"Once only large in core Asian markets like Korea, esports have expanded worldwide and are now top of mind of every publisher, platform, and brand," Superdata wrote. "At $1.5 billion for 2017, global esports revenue will grow 26 percent by 2020 as it attracts an even more mainstream audience. This increase will be fueled by a viewership projected to grow 12 percent each year and a swelling number of third-party investments." 

The report notes the success of crowdfunding in esports, seen primarily in the hefty prize pools put together for Dota 2 and League of Legends, but the really big money is in direct revenues, such as franchise fees, sponsorships, and merchandise sales, which are also predicted to grow. 

The Overwatch League, despite what appeared to be early struggles to get off the ground, gets special mention for having teams based in cities, which "bridges the gap between esports and traditional sports," the report says. "This makes Overwatch more approachable to traditional sports investors." 

At the same time, the report also suggests that there's plenty of room for the opposite approach to esports success, as typified by Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, which got its own nod for breaking 200 million unique viewers in just seven months.  

"PUBG's unprecedented viewership is now 20 times larger than its player base, indicating a growing popularity among non-players as well," the report says. "Overwatch League opens the floodgates for a new kind of esports governance, and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds rides a wave of esports performance with no formal strategy."

As for the people who watch esports, they still prefer Twitch to YouTube, although not by a very large margin, and the vast majority of esports viewers in the US watch both: Twitch for livestreams, and YouTube for "more curated content."

I recently wrote about the realism mods that exist for already hyper-realistic games, fastidiously detailed projects that are the perfect distillation of the PC modding spirit. There's beauty in adding the real, recorded sounds of train engines to Train Simulator, or adding the effect of moisture to bullet velocity in Arma. But what about mods that defy the intentions of an unrealistic game and forcibly mold it into something wholly different? A reader pointed us towards a hallowed Doom mod called Hideous Destructor as one of the most grueling realism mods ever, and I'm here to report back that they were totally, totally right.

Hideous Destructor grounds Doom in believable military strategy. We're talking vanilla Doom. The DOS shooter that came out in 1993. Obviously Doom is not a franchise known for its tactical wealth, nor is that an element demanded by its fans. The 2016 reboot stripped all the innovations and flourishes down into a minimalist blood orgy—a depraved celebration of quad-damage and chained melee kills that seemed to tell an alternative history of the last 30 years of FPS innovation. Hideous Destructor, which is available and designed for the popular ZDoom engine port, rejects that legacy entirely.

Originally released back in 2007, the mod slows Doom into a wicked, anxious crawl. Doomguy must now tap a keystroke if he wants to pick up the ammunition and health packs on the floor. Doomguy's aim wobbles when he's hurt; his vision flickers, he struggles to walk in a straight line. "Use slot 9 or look down in case you're bleeding to death," the mod's quickstart tips advise.

Doomguy is forced to page through an inventory before manually applying medical kits to his body—which restores his lifebar slowly over a period of time. I'm sorry. Did I say lifebar? There's no lifebar in Hideous Destructor. Doomguy can only tell how damaged he is by instinct.

Oh, and you can aim up and down. That alone should blow your mind.

The central fantasy of Doom starts and ends with the unimpeachable valor of the player. Honestly, that's the only feeling you can get when you single-handedly repel a demonic invasion (on Mars!). 2016 Doom leaned into that even harder, with its amazing, tongue-in-cheek christening of the Doomguy as some sort of prophesied deity. Hideous Destructor is the opposite of that fantasy. In fact, the game that Hideous Destructor reminds me the most of is Dark Souls, as cliche as that comparison's become. Both games feature an ordinary dude in a dying world, hoping against hope that salvation might lie across the chasm. The mod keeps all the aesthetic trappings from Doom—you'll still be shooting cacodemons and lost souls—but the Doomguy is humanized, vulnerable, and frightened.

That makes for a fascinating design challenge. The creator of the mod is a guy named Matt, who's in his mid 30s and lives just outside of Vancouver. He tells me that he views Hideous Destructor like something of a "Doom fanfic."

"Virtually every design decision comes from asking this question," Matt says. "Given Doom has *blank,* but also has or doesn't have *blank,* how do we harmonize those facts in a way that makes the setting plausible, and the gameplay fit the setting?"

What Matt means by that is Hideous Destructor is still very much a Doom game. He hasn't edited out certain enemies or weapons that might eat away at the tight verisimilitude he's after—instead he's done his best to rationalize a world of demons and monster closets. What would it really feel like to go toe-to-toe with Satan?

"[Hideous Destructor] is a generic 'Doom improvement' gameplay mod, I try to ensure that every canon weapon is represented in some way," he says. "Meaning there are some weapons that I *must* use, like the chainsaw or super shotgun, which you wouldn't even think about adding if you were designing a tactical milsim from the ground up."

As you might expect, Hideous Destructor is extremely difficult. In fact, it's recommended that you wade through the three-part bootcamp put together by YouTuber Hard Knox before jumping in. He details the subtle flourishes Matt has added to each of the weapons; the external cell pack required to power the chaingun's motor, (powered by the alternate fire key,) how you're forced to manually pump the shotgun every time you pull the trigger. It's all ridiculous and excessive. There are well-respected PC shooters like Counter-Strike and Rainbow Six: Siege that require less tactical upkeep than a Doom mod, and that's a beautiful thing. 

Matt is still an active participant in Hideous Destructor's development. His work has attracted a small but dedicated group of fans. Right now he's updating the mod into a programming framework called ZScript, which is "an ongoing attempt to unify as much of ZDoom's functions as feasible into a single comprehensive runtime-compile scripting language." There are also more gameplay tweaks on the horizon, and Matt tells me that the mod has been through a number of iterations and tones over the years. "I might reach a point where I might expect to start telling myself I'm finished, but that's turned out to be a lie before," he explains.

The lingering question I was left with was, simply, what's there to gain from creating a hyper-realistic Doom mod? Surely if you're after technical, demanding, slow-paced shooting there's a wealth of options available. Why apply that to such a ridiculous setting, draped in ancient source-code?  Simply put, Matt appreciates the relative straightforwardness of Doom—there's power of taking a game we all know by heart to its absolute extremes. 

"I take a lot of pride in trying to come up with ways to make Hideous Destructor as responsive to the player's input as possible without a multiplicity of buttons to memorize," he says. "I find so much 'realistic' fare unplayable when you've got a key to lean left, lean right, go prone, crouch, crouch slightly higher or lower, tuck your elbow in, start breathing voluntarily, etc. etc. etc. It just starts to feel like I'm trying to pilot a vaguely man-shaped remote-controlled robot."

The immediacy of Doom, blended with the hardcore stakes of a co-op Arma shootout. Hideous Destructor might not be for you, but I'm glad it's for someone.