Can Tribes: Ascend make it as an eSport? In this episode, Evan, Chris, Tyler, and Gavin discuss why jetpacks and Spinfusors could make competitive Tribes matches a new streaming staple, as well as Mass Effect 3's non-DLC-related controversy and the "revolutionary" new setting of Assassin's Creed III.

PC Gamer US Podcast 307: A Quest Called Tribes

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The debut Assassin's Creed 3 trailer suggests that Ubisoft are planning to take Assassin's Creed to the wide open plains and forests of early America. Up until now they've relied on heavily built-up cities to support its assassins' free-running style, from the behaviour of our new hero in this trailer, it looks as though we'll be vaulting through trees instead.

It won't all be countryside, though. Ubisoft promise a range of locations from the "untamed frontier" to "bustling chaotic towns" and even scenes set on battlefields like the one shown at the end of the trailer. We'll be playing as "Ratohnaké:ton," aka "Connor," an assassin of "Native American and English heritage."

Assassin's Creed 3 is being built in a new engine called "Ubisoft-AnvilNext," which promises much improved visuals, animations and enemy AI. Ubi say it's been in production for the last three years across seven studios, with Ubisoft Montreal at the head of the team. It'll be out on October 31. Expect to hear more as GDC unfolds.

Blizzard mentioned last week that a new official Custom Map was on the way. It's here now, and it's pretty neat, especially if you're interested in improving your advanced StarCraft 2 multiplayer skills. The StarCraft Master map now offers 30 challenges designed to test and teach advanced unit control in a safe, single player environment.

According to a post on Battle.Net, the levels will test many different skills, with missions that range from "kiting a single unit, to managing incoming damage and maximizing unit abilities, to controlling a mix of units to obtain victory over a superior enemy force," all of which sounds pretty darn useful.

StarCraft 2 already contains a few challenge missions which teach basic unit counters, but this custom map goes much further, and should give us a good way to sharpen our skills without having to experiment too much in the heat of a multiplayer scrap.

The mod's live now at the top of the Featured list on the Find Custom Game page. You'll be able to earn a few achievements for beating the map, and if you're really good, you could win yourself a new Battle.Net portrait.

In case you missed it last week, Jet Set Radio HD is coming to PC! The news was so nice and unexpected that it made me feel slightly fuzzy inside, and I since haven't been able to shake a powerful urge to put on massive headphones and spray the news on nearby walls. That that, The Man! Yeah! Jet Set Radio HD will hit our hard drives sometime during the summertime. Find out more on the Sega blog. The new trailer above shows that the remake will indeed be a slightly sharper version of the original. That'll do just nicely.

The giant conference room is quiet and empty as I write this, but just outside the decorated doors, 200 rabid TOR guild leaders anxiously wait to be let inside by the developer of their favorite MMO. Starting at 8 AM PST, BioWare will begin revealing their plans for TOR's future with the guild leaders, and asking for their input on how their guild members want to see the game change.

You can watch the whole thing live on this site all day, and a full schedule of events is inside.

10:00AM CST (4PM GMT) – Welcome and Introductions
10:30AM CST (4:30PM GMT) – State of the Game and Game Update 1.2 Presentation
Break (Livestream offline from 11:00am to 2:00pm)
2:00PM CST (8:00PM GMT) – Operations and Flashpoints Discussion
2:45PM CST (8:45PM GMT) – Player vs. Player Discussion
3:30PM CST (9:30PM GMT) – Legacy Presentation
4:00PM CST (10:00PM GMT) – Economy and Crew Skills Discussion
4:30PM CST (10:30PM GMT) – Roleplayer's Discussion
5:00PM CST (11:00PM GMT) – Guild Features Discussion
5:30PM CST (11:30PM GMT) – User Interface Presentation
6:00PM CST (12:00AM GMT) - ...And The Rest

We already have a pretty good idea of what the big 1.2 update for Star Wars: The Old Republic will contain. Bioware have already dropped details of Legacy races and dual spec support, updated crafting and companion dances, white lightsaber crystals and more. Now Bioware have confirmed that it'll definitely be here in April, and have revealed a little bit more about the new Flashpoint, Operation and Warzone that'll be added when it arrives.

The new Flashpoint (one of TOR's 4-player dungeons) is called Lost Island, a follow up to Kaon Under Siege, which was added in 1.1. The mission will send players to Ord Mantell to discover the origin of the Rakghoul virus. The new 8/16 player Operation is set on Denova, where a band of shifty mercs are shifting volatile Baradium bombs. That's called "Explosive Conflict," fittingly enough.

There's a new Warzone, too, which is good news for PvP fans. Novare Coast will have you and your team fighting for control of mortar points which can then be used to bombard the enemy base. In addition to the new endgame bits, 1.2 will add extensive UI customisation and guild banks.

The patch will also expand the Legacy system, letting you create a family/friend tree that will combine your alts together. Legacy XP amassed across all of your characters will unlock new race options for each class and give you access to convenient bonuses like "an on-board mailbox and Galactic Trade Network terminal" for your ship. In addition, "companion character affection and moral alignment will also benefit from Legacy bonuses, giving players even more control over their crew mates."

That's all to come next month, but the Friend Trial will launch tomorrow. That'll let players invite up to three friends for a seven day trial. Their progress will be capped at level 15, but they'll be able to try out all the classes.

The Star Wars: The Old Republic guild summit is kicking off in an hour, so there's bound to be plenty more info on upcoming features arriving over the course of the next day or so.

Even I've been forced to admit that PC hardware has seemed pretty dull lately. While there's been no shortage of new launches, there's been no must buy upgrade. That might have changed today with the launch of AMD's Radeon HD7850 and HD7870 graphics cards.

Based on 'Pitcairn' revisions of the Southern Islands processor design, the HD7800s are slightly cut down versions of the hugely powerful but hugely expensive 7900s, with the same Graphics Core Next (GCN) tech at their heart. They're fast, futureproof and with prices for both cards around the £200/$300 mark, they're also relatively affordable.

The Radeon HD7870 is the more potent of the two, available for preorder at eBuyer for less than £209. It has 1280 individual shader cores arranged into 20 of AMD's Compute Unit (CU), along with 80 texture units and 32 ROPS. The shader cores run at a flat 1GHz, paired with 2GB of GDDR5 memory running at the equivalent of 4.8GHz.

To compare that with the top end HD7970, the flagship card has 32 CUs for 2048 shaders, 128 texture units and the same 32 ROPS. The HD7970's clock speed is marginally lower at stock settings, running at 925Hz.

The new HD7850, meanwhile, is the one that's pitched to sell, currently available to order at £190. That is essentially a HD7870 with four CUs switched off to leave 1024 shaders, 64 texture units and 32 ROPS.

That's the basic details, but you could read all that at Wikipedia. What you want to know is performance. We've not had a card in to review yet, but early reviews mark the HD7870 as at least matching, if not beating, the more expensive GeForce 570 and Radeon HD6970. They're the 'play anything at any settings comfortably' cards which are just outside of what I'd consider affordable at the moment. You have to be pretty committed to spend £300 on a GPU these days.

The HD7950, meanwhile, seems to have a clear edge over the GeForce 560Ti in most games but not all. As Anandtech points out, the 560Ti can be had for a bargain if you shop around (which is why it's still my choice for the Rig). While the new Radeons look like a better bet for the future – they have more RAM, the drivers can only mature and they have AMD's brilliant power saving tricks on board – in terms of raw performance it's not a definitive win.

Then again, the prices for the new AMD cards are still only provisional and may yet fall. And there's NVIDIA's Kepler chips to look forward to as well, of course. They could finally spark off a real and more meaningful price war than we've seen for a couple of years.

If you saw the Project CARS trailer we posted back in January, you'll already know how good it's looking. Evil Avatar indicate that new screenshots have been released, giving us a closer look at those carefully modelled vehicles.

CARS has an unusual development model. It makes use of the World of Mass Development portal that lets community members donate money to the project in return for regular work-in-progress builds. Community members can take part in polls on future features, chat to the developers and eventually gain money back on their investment when the game's released. It's all explained over on the Project CARS site. In addition to the official releases, Slightly Mad have been posting some of the best shots from contributing community members. Take a look, and remember to click to see each pic full size.

There have been huge rumours this weekend suggesting Valve could be working on a "Steam Box" mini-PC designed to sit under your TV in your front room. The Verge dropped a payload of as-yet unconfirmed information on Friday which suggested that a prototype of the box was shown off to potential partners at CES. The Verge suggest that it would be an open platform capable of running different types of client software, not just Steam, and would receive regular hardware updates at set intervals every few years, allowing developers to plan their games around a predictable upgrade cycle. The base unit is said to contain a Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GPU.

Kotaku have dug up a tweet posted by Valve's Greg Coomer showing him working on a mini-PC with very similar specs back in November. The Verge also have word that Valve are working on a controller for the Steam Box. A patent filed last year suggests that it could have swappable components, and it's thought that Valve intend to put biometric measuring tech into the controller.

That might sound insane, but Valve have previously talked to us about how they use gaze tracking, skin galvanic response and pulse rate to gauge player reactions. They also made some surprising discoveries when they let players in a co-op session together see each other's pulse rates. Here's what Gabe Newell had to say about this back in 2010.

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Gabe Newell: There’s some surprising side-effects that we didn’t expect, like what happens when you expose that information in a social gaming context. It surprises us that how much value there is to the people who are playing. So if you’re in a competitive situation, and you see somebody’s heart rate go up, it’s way more rewarding than we would have thought. And if you see somebody in a co-op game who’s sweating, people tend to respond to that way more than we would have thought.

So we can stop using our guess at what your player state is in Left 4 Dead, that we kind of expected. But the value of being able to see what other people’s biological state is in social gaming, that was not something we were anticipating. But that’s just the way things go.

PC Gamer: This is for internal testing right? You’re not going to sell me a heart rate monitor and plug it into Steam?

Gabe Newell: Well, what you want to do is figure out how clients can expose their state. So you’re trying to find non-clunky, non-stupid ways of getting that data. I mean, if you sit there and give a medical technician 30 minutes to wire you up, you can get awesome, awesome data. But it’s just not the consumer experience.

Doug Lombardi: We can ask them to shave their heads before they play…

PC Gamer: That’s a small price to pay.

Gabe Newell: Right. But if someone comes up with a clever way to take some non-visible light and bounce it off your retina, and read it with your web camera, and get your pulse rate that way, then that’s pretty cool. Because it may be a hard problem, but if you solve it once then you’re done. It’s not like a recurring hard problem.

So we think there are several people out there with interesting approaches on the hardware side. Enough that we have confidence that the hardware side will be a sort of resolved problem in the not too distant future. So we need to figure out how to take advantage of it.
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The Verge also mention that the Steam Box would incorporate Valve's already-announced Big Picture mode designed specifically for use with big TV displays.

It's thought that the Steam Box could be revealed at GDC this week or at E3 in summer. Valve haven't confirmed or denied any aspect of the Steam Box chatter this weekend, so all of the info is firmly in rumour territory for now. If the it's real, it's huge news. A reliable, modular, open source alternative to consoles with no license fee or dedicated dev kits could be a game changer. What do you think?

Mass Effect 3 is out TOMORROW (in the US, Friday in Europe). Within a few days many Mass Effect fans will finally know how it all ends. It's the climax of a story that's taken Bioware five years to tell and the launch trailer suggests it'll deliver a finale we won't forget in a hurry. Hopefully Hollywood's trailer makers are watching, they could take a few tips from this one.

Also, a quick warning. If you're searching for Mass Effect 3 trailers, we'd recommend you avoid one called "The Invasion." It's thought to be an unofficial fan cut that includes scenes from the ending. If you're avoiding all spoilers, best steer clear.