As reported on Game Informer, Ubisoft have made dramatic changes to the Rainbow 6: Patriots development team. Lead designer, David Sears, has been replaced by Jean-Sebastien Decant, who was previously lead on Driver: San Francisco. Ubisoft Montreal have moved David on to another "major project for a major brand."

"Another opportunity arose that was a really good fit, and I am more than delighted to contribute to that," Sears said.

Narrative director Richard Rouse III, lead designer Philippe Therien, and animation director Brent George have also been removed from Ubisoft’s game. The restructuring hints that the series is going in a different direction, but Ubisoft Montreal CEO Yannis Mallat says that’s not the case: "We're definitely going on with Rainbow, evolving the vision that came from David's initial input," he said.

The proof of concept trailer we shared last year showed the series opting for a story-driven focus. Sears introduced the footage, explaining that the threat of a leak provided opportunity to “start a communication” with gamers.

Ubisoft released another trailer in December. It didn’t feature any gameplay footage, but it also contained a bit of story, albeit one which featured explosions and death.

We'll have more on Rainbow 6 Patriots soon. It's due for release in 2013, and is currently available to pre-order.

Remember the big flashy CGI trailer that Bioware released a few weeks ago? Remember how it starred the WRONG Shepard? Worry no more, the correct version has arrived. It's similar in almost every way, except the generic stubbly bloke who was in it has been replaced by the red-haired female Shepard that fans voted for.

This seems like a good time to point out that Mass Effect 3 is out on March 9 in the UK and Europe. Wait. That's TODAY. What on earth am I still doing here? Let me distract you with these shiny postcards of Mass Effect 3's prettiest planets while I make my escape. So long, friends. I'll see you in SPACE.

It sounds as though Star Wars: The Old Republic is doing quite a good job of keeping players interested. In a conference call reported by CVG, EA's CEO John Riccitiello mentioned that almost 1.7 million people are currently subscribed to the high-budget MMO, suggesting that TOR has dodged the one month slump that can happen when the subscription charge hits players for the first time.

It helps that Bioware have been so vocal about the updates they're planning. The Legacy patch is set to hit in April, bringing with it a new flashpoint, warzone and operation, expanding the legacy system, improving character textures, adding armour colour customisation and more.

In the long term, it'll be interesting to see whether Bioware plan to expand class storylines. The fully voiced narratives, full of cut scenes and moral decisions, are one of TOR's most unique features, but are time consuming and expensive to produce. They're one of the reasons that Bioware ended up recruiting hundreds and hundreds of staff to put TOR together. Will we see paid-for story expansions arriving in the future, will more story sections be added in far future patches, or will the rest of TOR's story be told through flashpoints and operations alone?

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.

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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.