World of Tanks creators, Wargaming.net are preparing to open up the alpha build of their next game, World of Warplanes to a worldwide selection of testers. You can be one of them, if you like. To apply you'll have to create a Wargaming.net account and sign in to the World of Warplanes site. There are different pages for European, Russian and American testers. There you'll have to complete a quick survey/pop quiz with multiple choice questions like "What happens to your plane's speed when it dives?" and "What happens to your plane's altitude if you perform a “chandelle"?" If you're chosen you'll get to fly one of 20 planes against other players in two warzones. Wargaming.net say they'll be adding more as their designers polish them up.

It's due out later this year, and will be free to play. It'll most likely have a similar pricing model to World of Tanks, which lets you pay money for experience boosts, new tanks and weapon upgrades, all of which can be purchased with in-game experience. For more on the game, check out the World of Warplanes site, and have a look at some of the screenshots they've released so far.

Sniper Elite V2's kill cams will stretch every shot into a macabre, slow motion short film designed to show the bone-shattering consequences of every bullet. Ew. This one in particular shows how Sniper Elite's carefully modelled bullet physics will reward exceptional moments of skill. Shooting a sniper through his own scope is surely about as impressive as a shot can be. We'll have to see if Remedy can better it in future. It looks as though this is the first in a weekly series of grisly death cams. It's out on May 4.

Perhaps you missed out on Deus Ex: Human Revolution last year. Maybe you've been biding your time, waiting for a price drop before you pick it up. Now's your chance. It's on sale this weekend for one third of its usual price on Steam. That's £10.19 for Brits and $16.99 if you're in the US. That's a pretty good price for a great game. We gave it a score of 94 in our Deus Ex: Human Revolution review.

Perhaps you own Deus Ex: Human Revolution, love it and wish there was more of it. In that case, you should definitely check out The Missing Link DLC. It's similarly discounted for the duration of the weekend. For £3.05 / $5.09 you'll get a 5+ hour campaign set on board an enormous futuristic ship caught in the midst of a storm. Find out why it's so good, and how it improves on Human Revolution's dodgy boss fights in our Missing Link review. The deal's set to expire on Monday.

Update: Thanks to commenter andrewfudge for pointing out that Deus Ex: Human Revolution is reduced to £7.50 on Green Man Gaming today.

The PC version of Max Payne 3 "will feature gloriously increased resolution and graphical detail" according to the Rockstar site. I'll believe that when I see it! I thought, then spotted these new Max Payne 3 screenshots. You win this round, Rockstar. The added crispness of the PC shots brings a few new details to the fore, like the parrots on Payne's blazing Hawaiian shirt, and the bulging wrist-veins of a man who has taken too many painkillers during too many gunfights. See some Max having a lie down on the job, and more of Max Payne 3's sunny Brazilian favelas below. Don't forget to click to blow them up to maximum size. It's the only way to absorb those parrots in all their gaudy majesty.

We've seen some impressive fan-made Portal guns in the past, but they've been rare, costly one-off projects. Valve are giving us the chance to get hold of our own Aperture Science Handheld Portal Devices without having to burn ourselves horribly putting together an injection mould. Joystiq mention that, at Valve's request, toy manufacturers, NECA have put together a life-sized Portal gun. It'll hit the shops this summer with a $130 price tag attached.

There will be lights and those lights will change colour, but will it make the "pwung" noise? There's only one way to find out, and that's to buy at least five. Perhaps ten. Maybe more. More. MORE.

NECA will also be releasing a line of Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life action figures, a few of which were shown off at the NYC Toy Fair. The Team Fortress 2 wiki has a snap of the new figures, you'll find that below along with a few shots of that Portal gun. Baggsy the Heavy.

You can accommodate a million players but you can’t craft a million stories. It’s the quandary that faces every MMO: how do you keep things personal when you’re treading in another player’s footsteps? World of Warcraft focused on looting and grinding, The Old Republic put you on one of eight paths. Ragnar Tornquist, The Secret World’s creative director has has his own take. Don’t pretend your players are anything special: “You’re not the chosen one. You’re a cog in a wheel. You’re part of an army.”

My army is the Illuminati. Unlike crusader fanboys, The Templars, and chaotic extremists, the Dragons, my faction are gas-masks and rifles, cash and research. I don’t look like a soldier and I probably don’t smell like one. At the start of my story I’m wearing a waistcoat and fingerless glove in my New York apartment. Just like the Templar’s intro, The Illuminati’s begins with a bee entering my mouth. Three days later, I’m juggling a ball of energy as a hipster/yuppie/salesman cross enters my trashed apartment . I probably smell like musky aftershave.

“Your talent is raw but obvious” he says, before beginning the hard sell: “Protection, power, and the best parties in the biz” are all on offer. All I need to do is attend an appointment in Brooklyn the next day. “Later Gator,” he signs off. “Twat” I think to myself.




Laundrettes and the iconic bridge provide a backdrop to the Illuminati’s secret underground base which, by contrast, is all neon lights and sharp angles. We all look hip in a Gok Wan kind of way. The Secret World will feature an in-depth character creator but for now, I’m Oneglove. It’s lucky that my outfit’s purely cosmetic. I get trained up in Elemental skills then it’s off to Egypt to prove my worth.

Next, I’m listening to a mummy in a suit as he nonchalantly drags on a cigarette; Egypt is weird. All three of the Secret World’s factions will end up in the same destinations, but at different times and with alternate motivations. To fill in the jigsaw that is The Secret World’s story you’ll need two alts and a hell of a lot of time.

Your choice of faction doesn’t affect your skills though. And there are 500 of them to pick from. It’s a statheads dream come true; just like Diablo’s runes, they compliment each other, allowing you to personalise your build to a ludicrous degree. It’s initially overwhelming.

Enter The Deck System. Players will have the option to aim towards a certain character build and specialise in magic, rifles, over sized splatty hammers and more. Complete the deck and you might get some unique loot. It’s the perfect way to flatten the learning curve without restricting players too much. Switching decks is essentially a free respec. And it’ll come in handy: group fights still follow the holy trinity of tank/healer/dps. Your spec might be orignal, but your role, not so much.



Decks aren’t just for noobs either. Ragnar’s even got his eye on one: “I’m more the explorer type,” he says. “I’m happy getting a deck that lets me fight most of the things in the game. But for the min-maxers, for the power players, there’s going to be so much flexibility.” Players will be able to share optimal builds easily, bolstering the competitive spirit within the community.

I’m rolling with an Elemental Hybrid build for this session. As I cast Shock, Stunning Swirl, Thor’s Hammer and Glacial Storm, things start to feel overly-familiar. It’s not that my rotation isn’t satisfying, and pyrotechnically impressive, but I’m back on MMO autopilot. This time however, I’m not surrounded by elves, orcs, charr, Orks, or droids; I’m going to investigate reports that The Orochi group have nicked one of The Illuminati’s artifacts. In real-life Egypt. Because a mummy told me so. I glance at a lady in hotpants and hi-tops. She’s projecting lightning into a cultist.

“Hopefully people can look at a screenshot and say ‘That’s The Secret World. I know that because you’re fighting demons with a machine gun. You don’t do that in any other MMO.” Ragnar is right. The Secret World is unique within the genre, if not within a wider scope: a world of homage sits alongside the fiction. And thankfully, things never get po-faced enough to evoke cringes. I ask Ragnar if current genre trends have had as much of an influence on development.

“Not really... I mean The Secret World has been in production and development for so long now - for six years - and we’re pretty close to our original vision even now. The game hasn’t changed that much. We have so many unique legs to stand on that we don’t really need to go and change ourselves to cater for the changing market.”



I group up and share out an in investigation mission. Until now, I’ve been killing, following, and collecting, but some of The Secret World’s quests actually contain proper secrets - the ones that require you to hit the in-game browser. For more details on the mission, check back for Josh's post tomorrow. There are definite brain-thrills to be gained from discovery, whether you get them from hitting the right section of a wiki page or from unravelling the narrative.

The Secret World’s investigation missions are cryptic enough to punctuate any player’s game with some read-life WIki reading. And it all fits: The Secret World is historical fact, twisted with extra conspiracy. You might skip out the middle man and Google straight to the solution, but it’s still an investigation, even if you cheat. Check back tomorrow for Josh's analysis.

I loved talking quest but I was on a LAN, surrounded by friendly journalists. Ragnar doesn’t think the majority of players will pine for constant companionship: “ I think 80 per cent, or even higher than that: they want to play that PVE content, they want to play that on their own. They want to play it as though it’s a single player game but in a multiplayer setting because it’s fun; you can get help, you can see other people, it feels very different.

The Secret World is a vision standing defiant. And your experience will be unique: you might end up listening to every cut-scene and perfecting an award-winning deck. You might lie to your friends about cheating on an investigation quest. Or you might just grind or grief: “It feels more like a game that’s serious in tone.” says Ragnar. “I think people act appropriately. You can never stop anybody from being an ass but that’s life. It’s the fun of an MMO as well, that kind of chaos and unpredictability.” Whatever happens, If the Secret World gets under your skin, things are going to get itchy.

Funcom doesn’t want The Secret World to be easy, and it certainly doesn’t want it to be cute. Ragnar Tørnquist, the game’s creative director, believes that gamers crave grittier settings and creepier enemies than other MMOs are giving them.

Pushing “mature” content isn’t a new strategy for Funcom, the company that's hailed boobies and gore in Age of Conan for years. But after spending a solid day playing The Secret World at Funcom’s Montreal studio last week, I was really quite surprised by how that harshness—both in themes and gameplay design—really succeeds at making the game stand out, and gives it both its best and worst features.


Funcom lays it on early, averaging about one swear word a minute in the intro portion of my new Illuminati character. The fully-voiced cut scenes that introduce most quests provide some great entertainment—when the voice-actors are up to snuff. The illuminati recruiter that picked me up in the opening cinematic is eye-rollingly amateurish, but if the paranoid conspiracy theorist he sent me to made weekly YouTube videos ranting against “The Man,” I’d watch every last one of ‘em.

The first real quest I get sets the bar low. The conspiracy theorist believes the Illuminati are spying on him and wants me to find out how they’re doing it. There is no waypoint given for this quest—this is one of TSW’s investigation missions, designed to get me looking at the world around me and trying to solve the shadowy mysteries of this strange new world I’m uncovering. As I turn around, I just about smack into a giant camera as big as my chest mounted on the wall two feet from the guy’s “secret hideout” and pointed right at him. Okay, mystery solved.

Next, I traversed an underground maze to locate the Illuminati headquarter. Simple stuff, and not too exciting yet. And then the mad scientist put me on a crazy drug trip that teleported me to a horrific invasion of black “filth” taking over a Tokyo subway station, with tentacles bursting out of the ground and a corruption that's turning everyone into mindless zombies and giant, creepy-as-hell monstrosities. It’s incredible.



Pills here!
The Old Republic recently tried its hand at making a survival-horror dungeon with its Rise of the Rakghouls path, and I just about yawned my whole way through it. This, on the other hand, is downright scary—reminding me of the subway portion of Left 4 Dead’s No Mercy campaign. Funcom’s artists are downright brilliant at creating environments that match the “this is the world you live in, but everything has gone absolutely crazy in it” theme. Giant black, oily tentacles break through the ceiling and grasp frantically at anything near them, pillars are shattered and subway trains are infested—the entire place gives me the creeps.

And man is it dark! TOR’s dungeon dimmed the lights a bit, but The Secret World smashes the nightlight and makes you cry for mommy. On one occassion, I was forced into a pitch-black corridor leading into a destroyed escalator system. It was so dark I could barely make out my character’s silhouette, when suddenly a mob of people rushed up the escalator past me. Some were civilians, but there were definitely monsters mixed in there. Their cries and shrieks kick the audio into a frenzy as I panic—I can’t make out friend from foe in the chaos of total darkness. I just start firing my shotgun wildly. At this point, I’m content to take the good with the bad, just to move onto someplace where there’s light.

And after I battle my way through this horrifying, incredibly detailed shattered world of corrupting evil, I find myself walking around in the Illuminati HQ, which might be the most boring capital city I’ve ever seen. The walls are plain grey with no texture worth mentioning and no set pieces or differentiating elements for huge lengths at a time. Only a few modern art-style pieces and about 20 NPCs break up the endless flat, grey surfaces that make up this ghost town. The whole place reminds me of an old Quake prison map I used to play.

It’s this inconsistency in quality that worries me about The Secret World—I went straight from what might be the most atmospheric area I’ve ever seen in an MMO to one of the least inspired. To be fair, after playing for a full day, the ratio of awesome areas to lame ones was probably 9:1 (in favor of awesome), but we’ve seen so little of the game’s content so far that that 10% is still troubling.

This covers just a tiny portion of what I got to play last week. Later today, I’ll continue our expose of The Secret World with my impressions of Egypt, wherein I play Assassins Creed and cry when I find cultists.

Warfighter is an advanced follow-up to 2010's Medal of Honor reboot. It's being built with Battlefield 3's Frostbite 2 engine and developed by Danger Close. DICE handled Medal of Honor's multiplayer mode, but GI mention that Warfighter's singleplayer and muiltiplayer will be built by Danger Close this time round. EA have shared "a visual inspiration and representation" (man with gun pic) of Warfighter on the Medal of Honor site. There will be "more details to come in the next few weeks," they say. We'll have plenty more info for you in the next issue of PC Gamer UK.

There's no release date yet but if it's out this year it'll likely be going head to head with the next Call of Duty, which is rumoured to be Black Ops 2. Can it compete? For more of an idea of what they're working with, check out our Medal of Honor review.

The 2012 Major League Gaming Pro Circuit comes to New York this weekend with the Winter Arena tournament. 32 Starcraft 2 players will compete for a total prize purse of $26,000 divided among the top eight finishers. The top sixteen finishers will be invited to compete in the Winter Championship in Columbus, Ohio from March 23 - 25.

You can purchase access to the streams at Justin.tv. The events air live, starting on Friday at 6 pm Eastern. You can test-drive the stream format and get an idea of what $20 gets you at this demo page. All the matches will eventually be available on demand for free, albeit a week after the tournament.

The Winter Arena features competitors like MC, Idra, Huk, MVP, Nestea, and MarineKing. The streams will be cast by Tasteless, Artosis, DJWheat, Rob Simpson, JP McDaniel, Adebisi, Tumba, and Robin.

For those of you who follow eSports, how do you feel about MLG's approach to the Winter Arena and its Pro Circuit? Charging $20 for pay-per-view access to the event was a controversial move, and I'm curious how much of that is just resistance to change, and how much of that is a genuine feeling that this is the wrong direction to take the MLG.

Stewards of military simulation (and makers of the best emergent gameplay anywhere, if you ask me) Bohemia Interactive have outlined their plans for Arma 3 in 2012.

Bohemia wants to get early feedback on the game to assure a smooth release. That’s deeply reassuring. An Arma 3 “Community Alpha” will release sometime after E3 in June to facilitate this. Read on for more information about the alpha, mention of new features, brand new screenshots, and a Q&A with two of the devs about Arma 3 in 2012.

The big blog update, typed by Project Lead Daniel Musil (also interviewed below, with Creative Director Jay Crowe) expresses Bohemia's development priorities and reiterates some features they're particularly excited about. That includes “completely new” motion-captured animations, which Bohemia says will result in new gameplay features (I'd be very happy if that meant military hand signals were being added). Bohemia reiterates that DirectX 10/11 is implemented and working, that A3 will integrate fixes introduced in Arma 2 1.60, and that Limnos will be the biggest map in the series. One of the new screens also shows working, reflective mirrors on vehicles as well as an in-vehicle video feed—both of which should make a first-person perspective while driving more viable.
New screenshots














 
Q&A
PCG: When will the Community Alpha be available?

Daniel Musil, A3 Project Lead: The exact date will be announced following E3, but it should follow a month or so later. It depends on a number of internal and external developments.
Jay Crowe, Creative Director: Once we manage to shake off the jet-lag from LA—wash off that conference-hall smell—we intend to set out what's on offer and how we'll be inviting people to get involved in much greater detail.

How many people do you expect to participate in the Community Alpha?

Jay Crowe, Creative Director: Well, we're talking about an alpha build of the game. We accept that it's not something that those with only a passing interest would get involved in. Rather, we'd expect that our community will be the driving force behind this initial offering, at least.

Musil: We have no limits, though - anyone interested is welcome! This will be an iterative process and we will appreciate any proper feedback. If we took a guess, there could be thousands.

Crowe: You only need to look at the success and popularity of similar alpha releases to see that, if it begins to gain momentum, such previews can generate large numbers of really passionate players.

During the Community Alpha, what aspects of the game is Bohemia going to be most interested in receiving feedback on?

Musil: We're especially interested in the new technologies running on the broad range of hardware out there. In regard to our large, open world there is always lots of aspects to tune. Also, the new scripting frameworks are very flexible but relatively new.

Crowe: Yes, a very recent beta patch for Take On Helicopters added support for Java in the RV engine. Long term, its being considered as a replacement for our proprietary scripting language, but—at least for TKOH and A3—they'll operate side by side. We hope that once the Community Alpha is in place, modders will be able to explore the possibilities - and identify any pesky limitations - of this exciting new feature.

Musil: Overall, we'd expect quite general feedback to the game, which we'll then evaluate and seek to shape it up alongside our customers needs.

Crowe: Although we can get into details later, one option is to stagger the release of new engine features. In this way, we might focus upon a particular aspect and garner useful feedback. For example, one week after the Community Alpha launch, we might drop in the scuba guys or enable physics on vehicles, listening carefully to the feedback on how these systems perform.

Musil: We're not seeking overly specific feedback—I mean a missing screw here and there, it's fundamentally our job to retain the quality of our game - the goal is to identify and neutralise important stability issues, across the big range of hardware combinations our there.

The blog post references a delay. Are you delaying Arma 3 further than Holiday 2012?

Crowe: Yes, we've pushed back our full release, which originally stood as Summer 2012. Although, with the Community Alpha, many people will still get to enjoy their first experience with a playable build of Arma 3 very soon. This iterative model of development—sharing a public preview build—is becoming more and more widespread on the indie scene. Arma 3 is a big game. It's packed with a lot of complex new features. This Community Preview enables us, as a relatively small team, to spend more time polishing and improving it ahead of a full, retail launch. Take On Helicopters was a step in the right direction, but, we can always do more to improve day one stability.

Does Bohemia believe that Arma 3 will be one of the PC’s most-demanding games when it releases? Are you worried about that?

Musil: We consider the Real Virtuality engine to be more like a platform than a game. Our community has used it for a much longer period than is perhaps usual for the most modern games. It's why we're scaling the rendering quality and the whole engine to fit both current machines and also high-end desktops in the near feature. At higher settings, there is usually more to compute and render—longer view distance, better quality further in the scene, denser and more extensive particles, multiple shader-based effects, and so on. Generally, we would like to allow users to always set the best quality regardless of hardware performance, which we achieve with our powerful range of video options.

What's a weapon or vehicle in A3 that’s exciting to you right now?

Musil: For me, it's the Gepárd GM-6 Lynx. An impressive and modern anti-material weapon we had a chance to try ourselves. Makes me respect it both visually and when putting fire down-range. There will be another devlog about this recording, including some behind the scenes stuff.

Crowe: Well, I might just be a little biased from the last project, but right now it's the Mi-48 Helicopter Gunship. Our community christened it the “Hamok.” It's big and it's ugly and it's all the better for that!

Musil: Honestly, though—although it might sound a little staged—the best weapon for me is new lighting model, which I like very much personally. Visually, it's a big step up from our previous games. I hope this weapon will be great help for promoting our game.