The social network, matchmaking and stat-tracking service, Call of Duty Elite will not arrive alongisde Modern Warfare 3 on PC next week as originally planned. VG247 have spotted a blog post from community manager Dan Amirch explaining that the service has been delayed due to security issues.

"We’re as committed as ever to the PC, but the need to ensure a safe PC environment is greater than ever," said Beachhead Studio head Chacko Sonny. "It’s really extensive. We need more time to get there, so Elite on PC will not launch on Day 1. We’re working our butts off to make it happen, but we won’t release it until we know that PC gamers can enjoy Elite as it’s meant to be." It doesn't sound like a small delay either. "It is not going to come out until we've done a lot more work" say Beachhead.

The devs cite the insecurity of dedicated servers as the reason for the delay. It also means that there won't be a Call of Duty Elite subscription option on PC. The subscription service gives members access to Call of Duty web TV series, competition tournaments and monthly DLC packs. The DLC updates will still be available to PC players as separate downloads, as with previous Call of Duty map packs.

"Not being able to trust stats is a big problem for our design. Because of this, we had to re-imagine Elite for PC. Elite for PC will be about access to your own stats, or those of your friends. Basically establishing a circle of trust. And because it will have some reduced functionality, it will be free for everyone," said Beachhead.

We won't see a PC version of Call of Duty Elite for a while, then, and when it does arrive, it will be a different animal to the console versions. It's the latest example of a familiar trend in the lead up to Modern Warfare 3's release next week. Throughout the entire multi-million dollar PR and advertising campaign, the PC version of Modern Warfare 3 has been conspicuously absent. At press and preview events, and at the Call of Duty XP conference every instance of Modern Warfare 3 was running on consoles.

All of the videos and screenshots released seem to have come from console versions of the game, too. We only know that the PC versions is coming because Activision announced it, but we won't know it even exists for sure until we hold it in our hands next Friday. If the devs are "as committed as ever to the PC," why aren't they showing it?

When I was in high school, I could do the splits. I'm pretty proud of that, so I thought you should know - but also, that's about what I imagine striking a "flexible" balance between subscriptions and free-to-play in the modern MMO space to feel like. That, however, is exactly what THQ's hoping to do with Warhammer 40K: The Dark Millennium. How?



"The markets are different around the world for the business models with which you can ship an MMO," CEO Brian Farrell said during a recent conference call (via IndustryGamers). "So what we've done is make the business model within Dark Millennium Online flexible, so we can use different business models in different territories and exploit the game on a worldwide basis."

"We will have not just one business model, like subscriptions. There will be other monetization mechanisms in the game... The team there is being very thoughtful about how we maximize monetization in this game."

So then, we could be looking at anything: subscriptions, microtransactions, fingernail-prying labor in the salt mines - you name it. Here's hoping, however, that players' wallets don't end up getting torn to shreds in the crossfire.

Conventional wisdom says the customer's always right. (Conventional wisdom also says that carrots give you night vision super powers and Mr. Rogers had a Call of Duty-sized killstreak in Vietnam, but who's counting?)

Ex-Cryptic Studios staffers Rick Dakan, Jonathan Willis, and Austin McKinley are giving that old adage a pretty stern test. Their new venture, Mob Rules, is asking potential players to help fund its first project - but with a twist: they also get to vote on what exactly that project will be. It's an ambitious plan in crowdsourcing, and here's how it'll work:



Mob Rules' Kickstarter page lays down each possible path on the developer's roadmap to success. During a week-long voting session that kicks off on November 24, fans will get to pick between the following:

Guerrilla Gorilla: A turn-based strategy game about ape revolutionaries fighting The Man. You must plan carefully and use ambush and tricky maneuvers to overcome The Man’s enthralled legions with your small but zealous band of simian guerrillas.
Haunts: A head to head haunted house game, where one side plays the brave explorers and the other side plays the supernatural entities that want them gone. Light and shadow, bravery and brains all come into play in this deadly game of hide and seek.
The Last Second: You play Zeta Cervantez, a pulp-era super-scientist whose latest invention can freeze time. In a city beset by criminal madmen, she must use her few stolen seconds to alter the scene of the crime that’s about to happen, turning the bad guys against themselves and pulling the innocents out of harm’s way.

All of which sound fairly interesting - not to mention incredibly far-removed from a city full of hyper muscular, tights-loving crimefighters or that other sci-fi multimedia behemoth turned MMO of middling popularity. Even so, what if I want to be a Ghost Ape Super-Scientist? What about my needs?

I seem to have missed the release of Achtung Panzer: Operation Star on Tuesday, which is a worrisome sign because I'm one of those few, proud gamers who has been keeping a close eye on this little-known wargame.

Operation Star is a sequel to last year's Achtung Panzer: Kharkov 1943, which I thought was one of the best tactical wargames in years. It's an Eastern Front wargame with solid graphics and sprawling battlefields that really emphasize the scope of WWII tank combat. Paradox published the earlier game, but developer Graviteam appears to be self-publishing Operation Star, which might explain the lower-profile release.

I spent a weekend trying out the demo, and while Operation Star does not seem like the major refinement this fledgling series needed, this new edition looks as vivid and demanding as the first game. It also includes a couple features that should be standard in every wargame. Get the demo here, and read on for my impressions while it downloads.

The AI is tough to judge in this demo, but it seems much weaker than what I'm used to seeing in a game like Combat Mission: Battle for Normandy. It fails to use suppression fire, and is happy to send infantry marching into the open against a machine gun nest or two.

The scale is still really impressive, though. While the battle might be focused on a single sector of the campaign map, all the sectors are adjacent to one another, and so a small skirmish in one area can spill over into other parts of the larger battlefield. This was one of the coolest parts of the first game. Sometimes a skirmish would sputter to a halt after a couple platoons took pot shots at each other, but it was just as likely to become a pitched battle that sucked in tanks, artillery, and aircraft from the rest of the area.

The interface is clunky and employs a nearly incomprehensible set of hieroglyphic menu buttons. On the other hand, Operation Star's UI also has some nice features that I wish were more common in wargames. First, the map overlay shows a proper topographic map. It also labels what sector is currently under attack, and where the attacking forces are coming from, eliminating a lot guesswork. You know where the points of attack will be, and you have a rough idea of the terrain you're defending. That makes it easy to establish a basic plan of battle. Plus, you can bring up an overlay that shows the area that a units can actually see from its current position. It's a huge improvement over the checking-by-hand that is so common in wargames.

The full game is $30, which is cheaper than most of its competition, although not quite the steal that Kharkov 1943 was. The demo gives a pretty good idea of what you can expect, although on a much smaller scale.

John Smedley, SOE's President, announced on Twitter this morning that over 120,000 new players have signed up for their action-RPG MMO DC Universe Online on the PC since the game transitioned to free-to-play Tuesday evening. In the same tweet, he announced that the number of concurrent users logged into the game has increased 300% in that same time, and that they're planning to launch a massive TV and online ad campaign later this month. He did not mention any numbers for PS3 users.

Of course it's not all daisies and roses for players trying to get into the game during this massive spike in activity. Even during non-peak hours, servers are having stability issues and, anecdotally, login queues have thousands of players waiting to get in and play. SOE loves to boast about DCUO's "super servers" that allow all players to all play on the same realm within the game, which has a lot of awesome benefits (like never having to pay to transfer servers and always being able to play with your friends who are online), but hopefully they can resolve these stability issues before too many people run away from the game because of them.

If you haven't already jumped into DC Universe Online, you can download the client for free on the game's official site. Free players have access to almost all of the game's content and character power types, can join guilds, and all that good stuff. You can read full details on what's free and what's not here or read our review from the beginning of this year while you wait in the login queues.

Most of us at PC Gamer US are playing on the Hero side, and since the game's tech allows for all users to play on a single server (alternating between PvE and PvP phases at will), you're guaranteed to be on the same server as us! Send a message to any of the following characters in-game for an invite to the PC Gamer guild, and let us know if you're interested in being an officer!

Coconut Monkey guild contacts:
Alpheias
Jah Glory
Yogitus

Our Battlefield 3 review is here! Graham isn't kind to the single player campaign, which certainly seems incredibly linear and filled with 'press space not to die' moments. Tom Senior tells me that at one point he was inching closer to a man while holding a knife, when the stab prompt came up. Tom decided to edge a little closer to get a better stab, but the game didn't like that and he instantly keeled over dead from an overdose of free will. Amazing.

Check inside for a selection of linear, tightly scripted PC gaming news.


The Tribes Ascend beta begins tomorrow.
Bethblog announces that Fallout: New Vegas will get an Ultimate edition containing all DLC next February.
PC Gamer contributor Lewis Denby interviews Ken Levine for the Telegraph.
 
PRESS SPACE TO CONTINUE READING
EA tell videogamer Syndicate's Miles Kilo is 'not a good guy'.
VG247 say Dungeon Defenders sold four times as much on PC as on Consoles.
It's Gabe Newell's birthday! Happy birthday Gabe!

 
What do you think about linear games readers? How much is too much?

I'm still waiting for my copy of Battlefield 3 to finish installing and updating and all that, but as soon as it does I'll be putting to the test the many claims of hardware vendors that you need to spend a fortune on new kit to get it playing perfectly.

While I'm waiting, however, here's a little experiment I'd like you all to try at home.

There's no way I can benchmark every combination of kit available to see how it performs running Battlefield 3 in the lab. But you want to know which graphics processor you should buy if you own x, or how much better y CPU is going to be than z.

So here's a better idea: discuss amongst yourselves. With our help, of course.

We want as many of you to benchmark your PC or laptop running Battlefield 3 as possible, so that we can create the most comprehensive test of a program's framerates ever. If it works, you should be able to compare your performance with similar set ups, and figure out the best upgrade by finding other combinations of kit already tested.

If it doesn't I'll delete this post and we shall never speak of it again.

It's entirely unscientific, since proper testing would require everyone to be running the same version of Windows and the same drivers and using exactly the same sequence to benchmark in. But as a rough guide to what's good for performance, it's more than just a bit of fun.

All you have to do to take part is install Battlefield 3 and FRAPS. Start FRAPS first, and set it to record the minimum, average and maximum framerates (Min/Max/Avg), bound to your favourite hotkey. Then, when you're in the game press the hotkey once to start the test, and press it again a minute or two later to stop it. Check the log in your FRAPS folder (usually C:\FRAPS), and enter the results, along with some hardware information, in the form below.

To try and keep things roughly comparable, if you could perform the test sometime around the start of Operation Metro, where you're running around and fighting outside, that keeps things simple and more or less the same. Needless to say if you die while benchmarking you'll probably need to start again after you spawn.

The important thing is that we're all using the same settings and - as far as possible - resolution. So if you could use a generic 'High' profile for graphics and submit one set of scores at 1920x1080, that'd be much appreciated too.

If you want to share the results on your triple-monitor 3D capable machine for bragging rights, that's fine - but getting as many as possible at the same resolution is what will make this work. So feel free to run the test twice. If you have a smaller screen, then you can also take part but just make it clear in the question about res.

Once results start to come in, I'll publish a live version of the spreadsheet as a separate post. If you're really keen, though, you can see the rawdata by following this link.

I should point out that no personal details are collected in this Q&A or held by myself or Future Publishing. It's all as anonymous as anything on the web can be.

So get benchmarking and fill in the form below. And when you've done so, invite your friends to do the same.

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Ubisoft have just announced Rainbow 6 Patriots - the next game in the successful tactical FPS series. It's being developed by Ubisoft Montreal with the support of Ubisoft Toronto and Ubisoft Red Storm, and will arrive on PC in 2013. The single player campaign will pit Team Rainbow (goodies) against the True Patriots (baddies). The latter are a revolutionist group who claim the American government is irrevocably corrupted by greedy politicians. So far, so Clancy.

Details are scarce, but we do know that you'll be playing as Team Rainbow and will need to make "tough ethical decisions" to stop the "new breed" of terrorists. The campaign will be presented from different character's perspectives, and there'll be a fresh selection of co-op and multiplayer modes present.

"Terrorism has evolved, and so has Rainbow 6," says David Sears, creative director. Poor choice of words there, David.

He also highlights that "all the team play, tactics and realism that fans of the series love have been coupled with an exciting new narrative direction" and that the new focus will add an "unprecedented level of humanity that will make Tom Clancy's Rainbow 6 Patriots an extremely tense and immersive experience." Official Xbox Magazine have the scoop in their Christmas issue, which goes on sale November 30.

We'll have more on Rainbow 6 Patriots soon. Until then, check out the official site and Facebook group. What's the most humanity-filled game you've played recently? And what does that even mean?

 
Todd Howard explains a few of his ideas behind Skyrim's grandiose soundtrack. He opens with "I hear the elder scrolls theme as sung by a barbarian choir." Months later, an army of gents gather in a studio in LA to sing heartily about dragons in dragon tongue. See it all in the new trailer above.

Todd Howard also gives us the brief that he gave to the theme's writer, which goes like this: "can you write a song that works in dragon language that rhymes in the elder scrolls theme, that when translated into English, also makes sense, and rhymes?" Instead of screaming "NO I CAN'T, TODD, WHAT THE I DON'T EVEN" the writer went home, drank warm mead and came back with it on Monday morning. So there you go, songwriters and dragon-speakers, warm mead is the key. Skyrim is out next Friday.

Market research companies IDC and Gartner have released their quarterly report on PC sales. Amusingly, on the day that we're supposed to be entering the post-PC era with the launch of Apple's iOS 5, they show interesting – if uneven – growth in shipments across the world.

Sales of PCs compared to this time last year were flat in the US, and down in Europe, but across the whole world IDC reckons they're up 3.6%, and Gartner broadly concurs with a 3.2% estimate. The numbers are short of estimates, which were rather hopeful at around the 5% mark, but still – all things considered – not bad. In total, both firms reckon 91.8m PCs were sold in the last quarter, give or take a little.

That doesn't include tablets, of course.

The biggest winner is apparently Chinese manufacturer Lenovo, whose market share increased 25.2% according to Gartner. Both analysts say that they have leapt into second place behind HP – whose PC portfolio they've also been widely tipped to buy. If that happened, more than one in three PCs sold would be manufactured by Lenovo.

Apple also sold a lot more OSX machines, especially in the US where they're now the third largest vendor. It's suspected that this is largely as a result of the performance boost and price drop in the MacBook Air line up earlier in the year. I know my father in law, who's never really liked Apple, went out and bought one off the back of that, and no doubt many others did too.

So there you are: Apple – technology your Dad likes. And he also listens to Status Quo. Never let that image leave your mind - is it any surprise all the young 'uns use BlackBerry's these days?

It's also a good news day for ASUS, who also increased their marketshare considerably and put on more than a million sales depending on whose figures you read.