Saints Row and Darksiders publisher THQ won't have a booth at E3 this year, a change from the bombastic presence they've embraced in past years. THQ has recently found itself in dire financial straits.

Perhaps riffing on a Speak Up on Kotaku topic from last week, commenter Gusi A. Rincon wants to know which franchise you would obliterate if you possessed that awesome power?

If you were given the option to choose any franchise, and end it, either because you think its last game gave it a proper ending, because you think they are milking it or just because you hate it. Which franchise will get the axe?

I'll go with God of War. The three were perfect all in gameplay, story and graphics. Now Ascension is just Santa Monica Milking the name (and that Multiplayer? *Facepalm*)

Welcome back to the Kotaku Game Club, everyone. This month we'll be playing Diablo III, because this is one game that a lot of gamers have been waiting a very long time for.

"Expectations" is the name of the game for this month's Game Club. They often play a huge role in defining whether or not we think a game is fantastic, awful, or even worth looking at twice. It's been ten years since Diablo II was first released and even after all that time there are players who keep coming back to it.

A game that's kept people coming back for 10 years? That's a lot of pressure to put on an experience. I can only imagine, but for the series' most zealous fans anything less than perfection could be a disappointment. It doesn't even matter if the game is good or not. Among other things, we'll sort through our nostalgia, expectations, and other emotional baggage that comes with having a longstanding attachment to a franchise.

Are you a Kotaku Game Club first-timer? Wondering why we're here? The Kotaku Game Club exists because no one wants to experience a game alone. Even if we're playing individually, it's always more interesting to share our thoughts and hear other peoples' perspectives. The Game Club picks a different game every month or so to play as group so we can meet to discuss its narrative and mechanical themes, and reactions to them.

Our meetings take place every week on Thursday at 4pm Eastern in the comments section of a special Kotaku Game Club post. Remember that the Game Club is about dialogue as much as anything else, so feel free to speak your mind and discuss other readers' thoughts in addition to your own.

Seeing how we could potentially talk about this games for years to come given the opportunity, we've decided that the Diablo III Game Club will only last two weeks. Hopefully the truncated schedule will force us to be extra observant so that we get a chance to say everything we need to say. Our first meeting will be the Thursday after the game's release, two weeks from today.

Thursday, May 17th - Discussion 1
Thursday, May 24th - Discussion 2

As in the past, there will be a reminder blip on Kotaku each Wednesday to remind you that our meetings are coming up. If there are any emergency changes to the schedule, we'll make sure to let you know.

See you in Sanctuary everyone!

People often ask if PC gaming is dead. This is not a very sensible question. But I, a Mac owner, wonder daily if Mac gaming is alive. Look, I can play Adventure World on my Mac. And Solitaire. But, my goodness, Mac gaming sucks.

And so it was with shock and glee that I, owner of a wonderfully-light MacBook Air, saw today that The Elder Scrolls Online will be coming to PC and Mac next year.

Hooray!

Let me add that to my list of big, upcoming games I expect I'll be able to play on my Mac....

• Diablo III
• Counter-Strike: GO
• Ummmm...that next StarCraft expansion?

I am not foolish enough to depend on my Mac for gaming. I'm a survivor of the great Nintendo 64 gaming famine. I don't need that kind of stress again. But I also don't have a great Windows gaming machine these days and am not convinced I could do any modern gaming with a partition on my newish Air.

I am simply happy that the list of big-budget Mac games I could get excited about grew by about 50% today, 33% if we're counting StarCraft II's expansion. The fact is that I prefer smaller, more indie computer games and that the computer games I'm most excited to play are things like The Witness and Antichamber (the latter of which is -gasp- coming to the Mac!).

For all the popularity of gaming on the iPhone and iPad, gaming on Macs is still about as vibrant a scene as gaming on the microwave I have at home. It's too bad. But I get it. Windows machines are way better for gaming and people actually buy Windows computers to play games. Why should I expect EA to actually make Star Wars The Old Republic on the Mac? Last time I asked, they still wouldn't say if they're doing it.

Hey, the "new" Deus Ex just came out for the Mac! It only took them eight months. 2010's BioShock 2 just hit the Mac last month! What was I saying before? Mac gaming is in a renaissance!

Someone, please send me a message on iChat when Mac gaming isn't dead. If I don't reply immediately, there's a slight chance that that's because I'll be busy playing a video game on my Mac. Yeah, right.

Boston is my birthplace and always my home, but I haven't lived there since late 2005. So for three years and counting, when the time for PAX East comes I find myself sitting in an airport, abuzz with energy.

While sitting at the gate at Dulles or Reagan, it can be alarmingly easy to spot other PAX-borne passengers headed my way. In 2010, the guys at the gate with the Mythic bags and jackets were clearly bound for Boston; this year, the young man with the DS and his girlfriend with the previous year's PAX scarf were shoo-ins. I travel happily, knowing that I am in the company of people who would understand my passion (and, now, my profession).

But for everyone who fits the mold, for every gamer we see who looks like a gamer or who wears the tribal fan-gear markers of belonging, there are others who don't. I can always spot a few other PAX-goers, on my flights, but I'm sure I only see a tiny fraction, and I doubt they once have ever spotted me. I don't look the way a gamer "should."

A recent, widely-shared GQ feature on PAX East highlighted the problem without even meaning to. The gentlemen's magazine, even today, aspires to an image of sophistication and class more in line with Mad Men than with Mega Man, and so that they ran the story at all is an indication of just how large and mainstream gaming culture now is. It's an interesting piece, worth a read, but one moment in the introduction leaped out at me for all the wrong reasons:

The underground double bus on Boston's silver line is filled to capacity with an unusually homogeneous crowd this morning. Mostly male, mostly twenty-something, mostly white, mostly dressed in slouchy windbreakers, cargo pants, and baggy jeans.

Seated not too far from me is a pair of black guys who for a minute might seem to be the only other people going somewhere else-until I listen in and hear: "Nah, dawg, it's like a first-person adventure/fantasy. You're saving these villagers from like an evil sorcerer..." and so on.

Writer Dennis Tang's initial assumptions about who was and wasn't "in the crowd" disappointed me. It is a sad truth that gaming absolutely still needs to be more diverse. In our games, our development studios, our press, and our culture, we have many miles to go in dealing well with issues of gender, race, and sexual orientation, as well as accessibility.

But while our games really still need to mix it up more, the players are already a genuinely robust and diverse bunch, and that goes for the gamers who make it to conventions too. For me, PAX East in 2010 and 2011 unintentionally became ladies' weekends, spent almost entirely in the company of other women. And the women I met were a fairly mixed lot, coming from all manner of different backgrounds and perspectives.

It's true that a number of us head toward a convention as if wearing a uniform, and we certainly speak a specialized and exclusive language. Tens of thousands of revelers, exhibitors, speakers, and journalists descend on the Boston waterfront for PAX every spring, and you really can observe the legion approaching from miles away. And yet for all that we are legion, we are far from homogenous.

The two black guys on the bus weren't the only gamers to surprise Tang. Later, he tells the story of meeting Sam, a Marine, while queued up for the Friday night concerts:

When asked if this isn't kind of unacceptably strange for a Marine, he doesn't exactly say no; in addition to the rampant Call of Duty-type first-person shooter play you'd expect from that set, more than a few of Sam's peers are serious gamers. "Twenty guys in our platoon, maybe seven of them play MMOs."

By the point in the evening at which Tang met Sam, he was at least starting to understand that stereotypes were clouding his thinking: "Maybe it seems daft that it has taken me all day and dozens of conversations, to still be surprised that a person from this or that segment of society is secretly or publicly an obsessed gamer."

Tang's piece is a good reminder to all of us to open our eyes a little more widely a little more often, and to see beyond what we think we'll see — both within ourselves, and when looking at others. The world expects the army of gamer geeks to be young white men of a certain physical type and demeanor. And to be sure, a huge number are, which is totally fine; we all are who we are. But those expectations go a long way toward making a surprising number of gamers invisible.

Diversity isn't just about letting female characters wear actual clothes, or writing better roles for black characters, or considering that some characters in games might be gay just as some players are (though all of those things need to happen). It's about opening your eyes and seeing what players are already in the room. It's about not being horribly dismissive when someone you dislike likes your pastime. It's about realizing how many players out of the mold are already here. Overlooking what you don't think you'll find is just another, insidious, kind of exclusion.

I'm glad that Tang eventually realized that—from the black passengers on the bus, to the gainfully employed thirtysomethings, and to the upstanding marine—gamers come in far more types than his preconceptions allowed. The best thing about a large event like PAX East is that it does bring such a wide swath of the community together, face to face. The more we see each other not only as fellow gamers but as fellow people, and not just as anonymous pixels, the better off we'll all be.

Get Him to the Geek [GQ]

All kinds of vegetative devastation happens to the Big Apple in EA's upcoming threeequel. We've already gotten a preview of the new mechanics and weapons of the Cryek-developed FPS but these new screens show even more detail than before.

Flooded streets, crumbling buildings and a scarcity of any other human beings hint that this Crysis will be a different, moodier affair than Crysis 2 when it hits next year.

Crysis 3 [All Games Beta, via Reddit]

The announcement I've been waiting for ever since ZeniMax Online Studios was founded has finally arrived: there's a massively multiplayer online Elder Scrolls game on the way. Now I can deliver my list of demands suggestions for making The Elder Scrolls Online the best MMO it can possibly be.

Sight unseen The Elder Scrolls Online already has a leg up on other games in the MMO market, being based in a setting that's been in a constant state of development for more than 18 years. The first game in the series, Arena, arrived in 1994, and Bethesda's been adding to it ever since.

It's also got Matt Firor as game director, one of the men responsible for Mythic's Dark Age of Camelot. DAoC was a highlight of my lengthy MMO-playing career. With three different realms, each with its own lineup of unique character classes, it was almost three games in one, tied together with one of the most compelling player-versus-player experiences in MMO history.

With the right man at the helm and a rich world to plunder for content, I've no doubt The Elder Scrolls Online will be a rousing success, as long as they include everything I want to see in the game. Things like…

No Traditional Character Classes

The Elder Scrolls series has always been about the player making their own way through the world of Tamriel. There've been character templates, sure, but they were more of a guideline than a rule, giving players ideas rather than locking them into a specific set of skills.

How would completely open character progression fit into the standard MMO holy trinity of tank, healer, and damage? That's left up to the players, as it always has been.

Funcom's upcoming modern day MMO The Secret World features a similar mechanic. Players can invest in any skill they wish, piecing together a build that suits their play style. Experienced players have the options they crave, and character build cards are available to help the less experienced squeeze themselves into an easier-to-manage mold. They could have borrowed the system from older games in The Elder Scrolls series. The Elder Scrolls Online should borrow it back.

First-Person Action-Adventure

In many of today's massively multiplayer online role-playing games the first-person camera is a novelty at best, completely absent at worst. I generally have no problem with this. I've gotten used to playing in third person over the years. It makes maneuvering through constantly evolving online landscapes much easier.

In fact, there's only one role-playing game series I prefer in first person, and that's The Elder Scrolls. I might not be completely happy with the way combat currently works the series, but with a little tweaking it could make for an incredibly unique and versatile system that's unlike anything we've seen in the MMO genre.

If players want to swap between views, that's fine. Just give me a viable first-person option. And while you're at it…

Minimal Interface

If we're aiming for Skyrim-level immersion in The Elder Scrolls Online, there's one popular MMO convention that doesn't need to make it into the game: the hot bar. That's the portion of the MMO hud where the player accesses their skills and spells, clicking either their mouse or a corresponding keyboard key to activate them. It's an MMO tradition.

Please kill it.

Bethesda has done a wonderful job in minimizing the amount of screen clutter in The Elder Scrolls series. No colorful buttons, no quest-tracking sidebars, no quick-slot displays or indicators of how much gold you've amassed; just a health indicator and a great big beautiful world.

Faction-Based Player Versus Player Combat

An MMO needs player-versus-player combat, but simply throwing in the option to kill your friends isn't good enough for an Elder Scrolls game. If I'm going to raise my sword against my fellow fans, I'm going to need a compelling reason to do so.

Tamriel is a world of intrigue and conflict that's far from ‘this race hates this race, so they fight'. There are powerful forces at work behind-the-scenes, forcing players to throw their lot in with one faction or another in order to survive. Outside of the utter chaos of a PVP server, basing player conflict on factional strife is the only way that randomly killing one's fellow adventurers makes sense.

I'm thinking three or four major factions caught up in a never-ending struggle for dominance. Or better yet, level-based faction tiers that allow players to select their allegiance for each new tier of PVP combat. Side with the Stormcloaks in your 30s, switch over to the Imperial side in your 40s.

It may sound convoluted but hey, isn't that the Dark Age of Camelot guy?

And Finally, Mods

The unprecedented access Bethesda has given players of The Elders Scrolls over the years has resulted in games that are constantly improving via player input. They've not only enhanced the games, they've improved upon them exponentially. One might say that if you aren't playing the PC version of Skyrim with mods you aren't playing the real game.

Mods are easy enough to allow in a single-player experience, but when thousands of players exist in a single world, paying close attention to the competition, policing mods that give others unfair advantage becomes an extremely difficult task.

So? Make a mod-friendly server. Make two. Make three. The non-modding players can get a pure experience on vanilla servers, and the modders can go freaking crazy. Set up a service like the Steam Workshop for specially certified mods. Keep it cosmetic, or let players toy with the mechanics.

When it comes right down to it, there's one surefire way to make The Elder Scrolls Online one of the most successful massively multiplayer online role-playing games of all-time. See Skyrim? Let me play that with a few hundred of my close friends. Maintain that same spirit of adventure, sprinkle in community, and realize that the bugs we thought were funny in the single-player game won't fly in an MMO environment.

How about you folks? What do you hope to see in The Elder Scrolls Online, aside from yourselves?

The army wants to install Microsoft's controller-free Kinect sensor in military helicopters so pilots can use them both for body recognition and flying assistance, Innovation News Daily reports.

"New technology from the gaming world has the potential to substantially reduce the cost of adding head tracking to conventional helicopters, as well as the ability to do body tracking and gesture recognition to support future intelligent cockpits," the army writes in its solicitation for the new research program, according to the tech website.

Presumably this will involve awesome, Minority Report-style gesturing and not uncomfortable, Kinect Star Wars-style flailing.

Army to Test Microsoft's Kinect in Helicopter Cockpits [InnovationNewsDaily — Thanks, Jeremy!]

Photo: andresr/Stockfresh

Relic's popular Company of Heroes will be out next year, according to scans of PC Gamer magazine posted at Polygon. This confirms rumors of its development and will make Mr. Luke Plunkett one happy camper.

Max Payne doesn't wear tights. But, if insanely fast reflexes, deadly marksmanship and an ability to swill the worst whisky around count, you could argue that the gritty NYPD detective of Rockstar Games' shooters has superpowers. Powers or not, he'll be appearing in a new series from Marvel Comics which is being written by Rockstar's Dan Houser and Remedy's Sam Lake.

Both men have put Max through awful tragedies in video game form and, in the interview that follows, Houser and Lake say that the comics will show that the character's streak of misfortune runs all the way back to his childhood. Read on to find out about the comics that inspired Bully, why Viking myths showed up in the Max Payne titles and what Dan Houser thinks is a terrible thing about the internet.

Kotaku: What were the formative comic-book reading experiences for you both? Can you look back in your past and see stories or creators that made you want to become storytellers?

Sam Lake: I've been a big comic-book fan all my life. I used to drive my parents nuts by hauling a pile of Donald Duck comics to the dinner table when I was a kid. Then, I discovered superhero comics and became a big fan of X-Men and Chris Claremont. And after that it was Vertigo graphic novels, like Sandman by Neil Gaiman and many others. My love for comic books is definitely the reason why Max Payne used graphic novel panels as a storytelling method. And Gaiman's use of old mythologies is one of the reasons the Viking gods are present both in Max Payne and Alan Wake.

Dan Houser: I'm English, so I combined reading fairly obvious American superheroes—in particular early Batman and Spider-Man, both of which we had in our house in some compendium or other—classic horror comics from the ‘50s, along with various issues of The Hulk, X-Men, The Fantastic Four and very early Superman. Alongside this was an array of British and European comics that I was reading obsessively from a young age - The Beano, The Dandy, Whizzer and Chips. These were all a huge influence on our game Bully. There were more: Tintin (Hergé is an undoubted visual genius), Asterix, Lucky Luke, Roy of the Rovers, (an old British soccer comic - I know - it's not very cool - but I did love it when I was 9) Dan Dare, the Commando series, Warlord (both fantastic WWII series in the UK in the late 70s and early 80s - I think Commando is still going now), Viz when it first appeared in our house when I was about 11, and, of course, 2000AD (my favorite story was Strontium Dog).

I also loved Mad Magazine when I could get hold of it but thought American Dennis the Menace was a bit wet compared to his British namesake. I loved all of them and, as some of them were pretty much my first reading experience of any kind, they were, of course, massively influential. But it is hard to say this or that influence was more or less important. They are all so iconic, and fairly typical for a British kid. Most of the culture I experienced is a weird combination of British, European and American influences. I love everything about the comics form—the art, the combination of words and pictures, the sense of place and of character—but I cannot draw at all, and for me, the heroes of this medium are the artists.

Kotaku: Both Rockstar and Remedy seem to align with ideas that spring from outsider cultures like pulp novels, comic books, grindhouse cinema and spaghetti westerns. What is it about cult subcultures that you all find so appealing?

Dan Houser: I'm not quite sure, but I know that for a lot of us at Rockstar growing up in the 1980s and early 1990s—when our cultural references and interests were established before the Internet became widespread—there was enormous, almost pathological reverence for the obscure and the underground. Things that were mainstream felt packaged and obvious. So, while we may have loved them, we had to pretend not to. We were always seeking out stuff nobody knew about, as if that would contain some truth or honesty that other, more mainstream things lacked. I don't know if that is still the same today, and I think one of the (few) great negatives of the Internet is that it does not allow subcultures to properly gestate and evolve. Movements, subcultures, styles of music… all those things nowadays become famous before they achieve any kind of creative maturity. Maybe that or simply constantly wondering about the answer to the question - what would make someone wear that?

Sam Lake: It's the stuff that inspires us, it's the brew we have been dipped in, soaked and marinated in since we were kids. We love that stuff, and we want to pass that on.

Kotaku: The new comics series takes place during the era of Max Payne 1 & 2, and will feature stories that predate those games. How far back will they go? Will we see Max walking a beat or romancing his wife? Will we see Mona Sax in these comics?

Sam Lake: The comics take you all the way back to Max's childhood. You'll finally see how far back the tragedy in his life goes and with that a lot of things will click into place.

Dan Houser: All the way back to his childhood, and through his career before and after Max 1 and Max 2, in a series of brief flashbacks. That was, originally, why I needed Sam's help! For the comic books to do their job, which was to glue this game to the old games, and fill in the blanks for people new to the series, we wanted to go back to the very beginnings of Max. To do that, I needed Sam's help and guidance to properly discuss the character's origins. I had some ideas, and plenty of questions. What was very gratifying was how often my ideas and Sam's ideas aligned. It gave me confidence that my understanding of the character and his were very similar.

Kotaku: What was the creative process when Remedy and Rockstar were making the Max Payne games together? Did the stories originate in one place and then get bounced back and forth? Or was there collective brainstorming from the very beginning?

Sam Lake: The Rockstar guys were very much involved in Max Payne 2, and while the story came from us, they gave a lot of feedback on it. It's been very exciting coming back to Max Payne after all these years and being able to play and give feedback on Max Payne 3. The Rockstar guys take the earlier games very seriously and they have a lot of respect for the heritage, they want to get all the details just right, so much so that they have noticed and included things that I'm sure I would have totally missed.

Kotaku: Max Payne has always had a strong visual connection to comics. Where did that stylistic imprint come from? Why not use some other method to advance the plot?

Sam Lake: At the time, cutscenes were still quite clumsy, the graphic novel screens felt like the perfect way to tell the story, not only could you make them look very good, but they also fit the pulp style.

Kotaku: Lots of video games spin off their universes into comics. Why hasn't Rockstar done this before?
Dan Houser: I don't know. We've thought about it, but for some reason it never seemed to quite come together. This time, it felt like it really worked creatively, as the character really fit in with Marvel's style, and more importantly, it felt like we had something to say. So, the comic would be useful and support the release, and be entertaining in and of itself. I can't say whether it's well-written or not, but I can objectively say it looks very beautiful. The artists really did an amazing job and it was an honor to work with them.