As reported on Eurogamer, Valve's DOTA 2 and Counter Strike: Global Offensive will both support the Razer Hydra, a motion control device which uses magnetic motion sensing to track its two controllers in space.

The Hydra costs £125/$139.99 and already works with over 250 Steam games. Hydra users also got access to six exclusive Portal 2 levels when the device got released last year.

Counter-Strike though, really? I can barely get a headshot when playing with an lazer mouse and four-ply mouse mat - attempting it with a waggle wand in 3D space all sounds a bit much. Still, I've not actually used the Hydra, I just fear change. And the chap in the following videos appears to get on just fine. Click through to watch a man explaining the Hydra's FPS controls, and playing a bit of Skyrim with the space-age apparatus.

There's been some interesting new laptops shown off this week over at the giant German gadget-fest that is CeBit. Most intriguing is Acer's next ultrabook, the Aspire Timeline Ultra M3. That machine is just 20mm from table to top, has a 15inch screen and a DVD drive, an Ivy Bridge processor and what appears to be a – if Legit Reviews is to be believed – a GeForce GT640M graphics chip.

Even if it is a GT640, mind, it's not known for sure which of the mobile 600-series NVIDIA GPU will be built using the company's new Kepler architecture – rumours have suggested that lower end chips will stick with Fermi for the time being. Legit isn't quoting a source for its revelation, but others are reporting the same specs. Screenshots posted to Notebook Review's forums yesterday appear to identify a GeForce GT640M in an Acer Timeline as a GK107 processor. The 'K' in NVIDIA's coding nomenclature stands for Kepler, just as the current GF1xx chips are based on Fermi.

In those screens, the GT640M appears to have 384 unified shaders - the same as a desktop GeForce GTX560Ti or top end mobile GTX 580M - which are running at a very slow clockspeed of just 405MHz. That yields theoretical fill rates somewhere between a GT550M and a GT555M. Which could, of course, all change.

Intel and NVIDIA aren't going to go on the record to confirm or deny what's inside the M3 or any other 'upcoming products' yet, but we are seeing a lot of laptop manufacturers being forced into rather equivocable language to describe their forthcoming ranges. The problem is that manufacturers have to show their kit off if they want to get it in stores, but if they're not allowed to say what's inside it there's bound be rumour and speculation.



Thus we get Toshiba's rather slick looking, high performance Qosmio X870 (above) – which I played around with the other day – fitted with 'the latest Intel processors' and 'next generation NVIDIA GPUs'. The Acer Ultra M3, as CNET points out, is non-specific about the CPU but has an HM77 Ivy Bridge motherboard inside. ASUS' K75 will have '3rd Generation Intel Core Processors' and 'the latest NVIDIA GPU'. And so on.

What is certain in all this bet hedging nonsense is that the next round of MacBook Air aping Ultrabooks will be a hell of a lot better for gaming than the current lot, whether they're using Intel's integrated HD4000 graphics or a discrete chip. And Intel is determined to get the price of superthin notebooks down to a reasonable amount too.

The bad news, however, is that according to a recent Financial Times report Intel doesn't expect Ivy Bridge laptops to go on sale until June. So it might be a while before we find out how good an Ultrabook can really be.

"DRM does not protect your game. If there are examples that it does, then people maybe should consider it, but then there are complications with legit users." That's what Marcin Iwinski, CEO at CD Projekt, had to say to Joystiq last night.

The value of digital rights management protection seems to be a contentious issue at the Polish developer. Back in December, CD Projekt's VP of Business Development talked up breakthroughs in DRM technology, saying they had achieved 100% accuracy in detecting pirates. They even sent letters out to thousands, demanding cash.

A few weeks before that, Marcin told us "DRM does not work and however you would protect it, it will be cracked in no time. Plus, the DRM itself is a pain for your legal gamers."
But last night, Marcin's message was was clear: "Every subsequent game, we will never use any DRM anymore. It’s just over-complicating things."

We talk about DRM a lot. It stops us playing the games we've bought and sometimes hides whole programs from us. Gabe has recently said that it doesn't affect sales one bit. A few days ago, Notch expressed a similar sentiment at GDC.

Tribes: Ascend will be well and truly, properly out on April 12. The free to play game that calls itself "world's fastest shooter" has been in open beta for a short while, and has been regularly updated with new maps, game modes and extra gadgets for its high speed-classes. The splendid Dead Island parody trailer above show what happens when one of those classes snatches the flag when he's not going fast enough, an act known among Tribes players as the Llama grab.

"This video demonstrates the perils of trying to caputre a flag while going too slow," explains Hi-Rez chief technical officer, Todd Harris. "The outcome is predictable but no less tragic."

Tribes: Ascend feels very polished for a game that's still not officially out. You can try it for yourself by downloading the client from the Tribes: Ascend site, and signing up for an account. It's free!

A free to play team shooter built in CryEngine 3 is actually a pretty exciting prospect, even before you factor in the giant mechs. If Warface is fast and accessible enough it could beat Call of Duty a its own game, providing a prettier experience for no money. Perhaps. It's still too early to tell, but it looks like have a chance to get our hands on an early build soon. Crytek are hunting alpha testers right now. You can sign up for a chance to participate on the Warface site.

Yesterday at GDC, we had the chance for a brief interview with lead designer Ed Beach about the upcoming Civilization V: Gods & Kings expansion. The add-on will include new religion and espionage systems, nine new civilizations, over 27 new units, new buildings, new wonders, new natural wonders, new scenarios, and new resources. That’s a lot of new, but our biggest take-away from the interview is that the expansion isn’t just about adding, but also improving the existing AI, multiplayer, and balance. That's great to hear.



But regarding what's new, the religion system will allow players to found religions and choose beliefs which give their civilizations bonuses. Religions are spread from city to city by proximity and through new missionary units, and converting the people of city-states or other civilizations can boost belief-based bonuses and have tactical benefits. Later on in the game, spies can be used to gather intelligence, steal technology, and instigate revolutions--all very fun-looking stuff. Read up on all of it below...



PCG: How similar is the new religion system to Civilization IV’s culture system?

Beach: I think what was engaging about the Civ IV system was just the idea of religions springing up and spreading throughout the map, bumping up against each other, and there being conflict there—wrestling for control of the hearts and minds of everybody. That gave a great flavor to everything, and it felt like it was a richer world because of that, but taking a hard look at that, we didn’t feel like there was a huge impact on the gameplay. It was like this cooler world going on, but it wasn’t really giving us interesting decisions, so we kept some of those neat immersive things about it, but added how it loops into the gameplay.

PCG: Do the religions--Christianity, Buddhism, and the others--come with existing beliefs? Can they be modded?

Beach: We have one scenario that’s set in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, where we actually do pre-bake in beliefs, and that’s a great example for our community about how the religion system can be modded. What they can do is add more beliefs in. We have a good set—there are between 50 and 60 beliefs that will ship with the expansions, but there’s no reason the mod community can’t expand on that.

But yeah, the historical religions are just sort of like containers that the beliefs get slotted into--there’s no reason that guruship doesn’t have to be part of Sikhism or Christianity.

PCG: And does religion’s influence taper off at some point?

Beach: What happens is, as you get toward the end of the Renaissance, we don’t just remove religion from the game--it’s still present and you’re still keeping those bonuses you built up. What happens is that the cost of missionaries starts to go up, so your ability to make sweeping religious movements and displacements diminishes. People are more accepting of other people having different faiths.

The other thing that happens during the Middle Ages and Renaissance is that we take the diplomatic modifiers for you forcibly spreading your religion onto some other civilization and we crank those up, and that becomes a very important part of the diplomatic game. But as you fall into the Industrial and Modern Eras, those modifiers get cranked way down, so it’s no longer a significant part of the diplomatic game.



PCG: There's a lot of new content. Has there also been a focus on existing issues? Something the community talks a lot about is the multiplayer...

Beach: Yeah, we’re not only adding new things, but rebalancing and looking at each of the AI subsystems. We’re actually in the part of the project now where we’re in that final balance and polishing phase, and we’ve gone and categorized all the different AI systems and areas where we can make improvements. We’ve already made a lot of improvements, and right now we’re trying to figure out the key items that are really going to take the AI to another level.

And in multiplayer, we’ve had one of our senior engineers on the project dedicated to hitting some of those items. The gameplay processing and graphics processing have been threaded out from each other, and that’s helping with the multiplayer stability. One of the requested things from the community was to allow combat animations to play during multiplayer--we’ve got that in and working. And there’s been tweaking and improvements and ease of use things. You know, multiplayer has never been a huge community for Civ, but it’s an important and vocal community, and we want to support that. It’s a great way to play the game.

PCG: So you’ve definitely been paying close attention to the community.

Beach: We have. I don’t want to give people the misconception that, for instance, the community wanted religion so we turned on a dime and started figuring out how to put religion in. We’ve had the plans to put religion and espionage in for a long time, and it met a lot of our goals. Religion met the great goal of customizing the gameplay experience, and we’ve had plans to do that for quite a while. And with spies, we knew we had this rich AI world happening behind the scenes, and if we could bring that forward to the player so that they can look into that, it would be an amazing way to play Civilization.

So we’ve known about those changes a long time, but there are a lot of areas where we’re specifically looking at what the community is asking for and saying “yeah, that is a key thing to address.” We’ve made sure some of the really active members of the community are part of our beta test group. So, we put out two builds to our beta test group every week of the project, just to keep plenty of eyes on things and so balance and multiplayer gets a lot of attention.



PCG: You mentioned spy's intrigue system, which lets us peek at what the AI is planning. How will that work in multiplayer?

Beach: Yeah, intrigue doesn’t work in multiplayer. You picked up on that.

PCG: Is it completely turned off, or could we use it on AI opponents?

Beach: I think the current plan is just to have it turned off.



PCG: So you’ve mentioned a few new scenarios, can you tell us about them? Will we see a Cold War espionage scenario?

Beach: Could be, but that’s not one we picked. That would work with the city-state system and all the coups and everything. It’s absolutely something the fan community should jump all over.

PCG: But there are a couple religious scenarios.

Beach: We have one that highlights the religion system and how to mod it. We have another one—the Celts and the Huns and the Byzantines—we’re introducing that set of three new civilizations and we decided that a fall of Rome scenario would be perfect. And then the third scenario we’re shipping with is an interesting departure. We actually have a steampunk Victorian-era science fiction scenario that’s an interesting departure from the usual historical fare.

PCG: What’s different about that scenario to give it a steampunk or science fiction feel? A mix of technology?

Beach: We have specific units that are designed for that, and a whole new tech tree designed for it. It’s vaguely historical, twisted, technology, masterminds, and corporate leaders…you know, so we even have brand new leaders introduced.

------------

So there you have it, AI tweaks, multiplayer fixes, religion, spies, and... steampunk! Civilization V: Gods & Kings will be out this spring.

Remember the Steam Box that was rumoured to be announced at GDC? The one that was supposed to sit under your TV and use biometric signals to shape your games? We’ve been squeezing the truth out of Valve.

“Yeah, of course it’s a big story and obviously, it doesn’t surprise me that you asked the question.” said Doug Lombardi, Vice President of Marketing at Valve, when quizzed about its existence.

“We’ve always been very public with wanting to play with biometric feedback and new input devices, and yeah we are playing around with that stuff. We do think we have an interesting idea there and we’re pushing in different directions with that.”

But does the Steam Box actually exist? Doug almost denied it: “But all that is a long way from Valve shipping a hardware device,” he said.

The idea of biometric feedback in games still seems to be a priority for Valve. We spoke to Gabe about it in September 2010.

“We think there’s something there... Is it something worth spending our time and having fun with? Who knows? The future will tell us that," says Doug.

"We learned in Left4Dead that by connecting people to machines while playtesting we were able to - very matter-of-factly - measure what got them excited, what got them frustrated, rather than: ‘Well, he looks a little pissed off right now so he must be frustrated.'

"We spend a lot of time talking about scheduling peaks and valleys and the experience: players don’t get battle fatigued and they don’t get bored. And the two things offset each other; you want to have a little quiet boredom like in a monster movie and you’re like “OK, it’s been quiet for too long“ and then all of a sudden “EEK EEK EEK! Oh shit! Here it comes!”

You can read the full interview in an upcoming issue of PC Gamer UK.

Loot Drop's John Romero has been offering advice for upcoming indies during the "Back to the Garage: The Return of Indie Development (From Those Who Were There and Some Who've Just Arrived)" talk at GDC. Romero has previously worked on Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM and Quake, and is regarded as one of the first ever indie developers. He says these days there's too much too much procrastinating and not enough developing going on.

"This whole getting a job question, it hasn't really changed that much since the 80’s," he said.

"I mean, in 1980, if you were just coming out of high school and you were great at programming, you could get a job in programming, if you wanted that. Or if you just wanted the complete freedom to do everything your way and not necessarily ever get paid for it," continued Romero.

The serial entrepreneur says all the tools required are already available to most: "I talk to a lot of people who want to become indie and want to make games and I guess the biggest thing I find when I talk to these people is that they are usually waiting for permission to make games for some reason. Like 'I need to get into school to learn how to do this, and then when I get out I will get a job' instead of 'hey, you've got a computer and get some books - all the information is right there.

"There’s the self learning thing and also the people who already have jobs... but they’ve just got too much stuff going on. Find some other people you can with in the same location. That’s the way a lot of us started here; we just made games because we wanted to or we had to... when I was at home, it was all about making games."

"That’s how you get it done, you don’t wait for permission," he concluded.

Are you waiting for an epiphany before beginning your indie? Let us know in the comments.

“It's not about what you show on the screen, it's what you cause to appear in the player's imagination.”

That’s what Firaxis’ Sid Meier took from The Seven Cities of Gold, a game he lists as a major inspiration. “Even today ... it's still the player's imagination that's the most powerful tool we can stimulate and use to bring the experience to life,” he says.

As reported on Gamasutra, Side Meier, John Romero, Will Wright and Cliff Bleszinski have been talking gaming inspirations at GDC.

Sid says that Seven Cities of Gold taught him that basic tech can still create an immersive backdrop. “The graphics...we might call them rudimentary. We might call them functional. But this was really the revelation of this game. Dan was able to create this entire world that you could explore, and I think there's a lesson there for us.”

“This game I created before I played Seven Cities of Gold was called Floyd of the Jungle. The games I created after were Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon and Civilization. I think this kind of encapsulates the effect this game had on me as a designer.”



Maxis’ Will Wright lists Pinball Construction Set as a major inflence, saying “It was an amazingly powerful set of tools.”

“It's kind of amazing how elaborate all the pieces were... you could resize, rotate, even go into a graphical editor. And this all ran on a 48k Apple II,” said Will.

He credited the creator, Bill Budge’s design aethetic too : “His love was really tools more than games. He enjoyed making things that would empower people to be creative.

Right after I started playing PCS, I started working on SimCity....I wanted to keep as few words in the interface as possible.”



Loot Drop's John Romero lists the spooky ambiguity of Pac-Man as an influence. He later went on to make Doom and Quake. He freaked out as soon as he saw the cabinet.

“It totally blew me away. The minute that I saw it, I still remember exactly where it was and what it looked like. Pac-Man was the game that really blew me away and influenced everything, because the game design was unlike anything that had come before.”

“The full force of the game hit me, and I kind of absorbed it all immediately, and understood the game design was different than what I'd seen before.

The four ghosts were crazy cool because they all had personalities...you start to learn them... it just kind of alludes to a deeper story even though there isn't a story there... the game was hugely influential on me, especially in the fact that it showed game design can be anything you think of. This game broke out of the mental box the whole industry was in.”



Epic’s Cliff Bleszinski said The Legend of Zelda had a dramatic affect on his career. “I fell in love with Nintendo. This was my first true love,” said the Gears of War dev.

“I was teased at school a little bit. I was chased off the bus and called Nintendo Boy. It kind of sucked back then, but my life is fucking awesome now, and they can just go on with their lame lives,” he mentioned.

“There's a compass and a map and a boomerang and bows and arrows...this was all new territory for me! It ignited my senses.” concluded Cliff.

Which games have had the most influence on you life? I remember thinking co-op Rampage was a pretty big deal when I was smaller, and slightly stupider.

We’re fresh from Valve’s “Team Fortress 2: From the Orange Box to Free to Play in Just Four Years” GDC 2012 panel hosted by programmer Joe Ludwig with some fascinating numbers. I know, you’re probably thinking you know the whole story already (HATZ!), but we there were more than a few cold hard numbers from TF2’s four year journey that surprised the hell out of us. Want to know where and why Valve is spying on you, or how much they pay community contributors? The answers are below.

400%
That’s how much Team Fortress 2 increased its concurrent player base by once they threw the free-to-play switch in June 2011. That was by no means a “last resort” decision, the kind made by many a languishing MMO, but one hard learned by Valve’s unbelievably awesome tendency to drastically lower the price of its games on Steam. We’ve all seen games drop by 75% without warning, and it goes without saying that such measures will undoubtedly increase sales. However, Valve’s Joe Ludwig revealed something even more interesting in TF2’s case: the volume of new games sold at sale price actually offset the loss in the discount.



But live games of Team Fortress 2’s magnitude rely on continued developer support, which requires money, which back then solely hinged solely on the sale of the game. And therein lay the problem. “Each person can only buy the game once,” said Ludwig, also adding, “We can only earn revenue from people who have never played our game.” How do you encourage new players, while maintain existing fans? The solution to that equation was somewhere between that magic “hey, under $10!” price point, and how to fund consistent updates that’ll keep people coming playing. So not only did the decision to take the three-year old game free-to-play increase player counts by four hundred percent, it did the same for revenue... You know the rest of this, don’t you?
30 Million
That’s how many item trades have gone down in Team Fortress 2, courtesy of 8 million transactions between 1.7 million players totaling for one incredibly successful HATSTRAVAGANZA! But have you ever wondered “Why hats?” Ludwig made the answer seem so simple. Before embarking on Valve’s first free-to-play venture, their research revealed three basic player reservations under the umbrella attitude of “Paying for items is icky.” First of all, they found players hate to be nickel and damned in fake, virtual currency. Okay, not a problem. Obviously, not every game will have the benefit of reconfiguring a platform like Steam to float the idea of real money worth, but it’s because of this that TF2 was immediately able to skirt horrible, horrible problems of basic math. “This will cost you this, and you won’t have $1.67 of Space Bucks left to do nothing with.”



The second micro-transaction hurdle was that players hate the idea of “paying to win.” Early experiments with boosted apparel fell flat, as people disliked the idea of giving big spenders even the smallest advantage, and much more interestingly according to Ludwig, because “players don’t like being told what to wear.” So it was decided that only cosmetic alterations were to be sold in the item shop, with unlocking skill left to Achievements, crafting, and other more traditional means.



Lastly, players, especially ones who are part of a long-established game, don’t want to be forced to purchase anything. And honestly, what’s more useless than a hat? “It grafts simply to the headbone,” claimed Ludwig, making them easy to compatibly model, and thanks to the highly distinct look of each class, they barely so much as alter character silhouettes. Players who originally bought the game were given an “Proof of Purchase” lid to kickstart their reluctant obsession, trading hats has since become an in-game currency of its own and have continued to randomly drop ever since.
3 Million
That’s how much money has been handed out to community contributors, who receive a cut of what their hats make in the item shop. No, hats can’t give you advantage. But they’re still awesome nonetheless! They can be simultaneously worn as badges of honor, show support for a passion, and be waved like a flag of individualistic flare. So technically… they’re invaluable in a way. The TF2 team couldn’t crank out enough to meet rabid demand, even after the allowed players to submit their own designs for approval.



Enter the Steam Workshop, where the dev team could finally let the community decide what items made it into the game and when. Obviously, the cream rises, but using fans as a filter also eliminated duplicates, infringements, design theft, and thanks to the second-to-none expedience of Steam’s certification process, even had the ability to be topical and reflective of the zeitgeist.



Seemingly overnight, TF2 was able to raise $300,000 for Japanese earthquake relief last year, and the desire for hats has virtually redefined how we trade, gift, and purchase all digital items (at least on Steam) without fear of being scammed. Currently, there’s only one other game integrated with Steam Workshop, but if you know what it is, you know TF2 is in good company. (*coughSKYRIMcough*)
10 Million
That’s approximate amount of views Valve’s “Meet the Medic” short has enjoyed on Youtube. It’s fairly safe to say you’ve probably seen it, but within those quirky, enjoyable promotional materials, which include all manner of teasers, posters, and comics, lies the shadiest thing you didn’t know Valve was doing. Wait, that should’ve sounded more fun… okay, remember the Meet the Engineer teaser?



You may remember going apeshit over a robotic glove and-BOOM- it was in the update. However, in less than thirty seconds, Valve crammed in a dozen or so references, winks, hints, and yes, even misleads. They’re Valve, that’s what they do, and almost immediately TF2 fans everywhere went about creating volumes of speculation threads… where Valve is watching you. Why would Valve spy on fans pouring over teases that aren’t even real? Because they’re not real yet. The TF2 team keeps a keen eye on what hidden glimpses are getting attention on message boards and social media avenues because that’s where “players are secretly voting on what goes in the update.” Ludwig slyly exclaimed. Valve loves to stir up speculation, but it takes the sting out of the head-scratching a bit once you realize they’re basically focus testing what you want, and what makes it into the final game. Such is the case with the Engineer’s glove: it hadn’t even been developed until eagle-eyed viewers caught a glimpse of it in the teaser and went nuts.