Jon Shafer, lead designer of Civilization V, has taken to Kickstarter to fund his new turn-based strategy project At the Gates. Set during the final days of the Roman Empire, you play as an emerging barbarian kingdom seeking to fill the resulting power vacuum.



The team are hoping to raise $40,000 to finish development of their ambitious game. It's impressively detailed, featuring randomly generated dynamic maps that shift as the seasons change - freezing rivers and drying marshes.

It also sounds as if there'll be a heavy focus on supply lines and resources, giving combat a depth beyond "have more units to win". This means you can circumvent an opponents largest armies, concentrating on cutting their supply lines and forcing them to withdraw or starve.

You can see a more in-depth look at the game's progress in the 15 minute prototype tour below.

"I do wish you wouldn't urinate on the poor from your balcony, my Lord."It’s easy to be impressed and – if I’m honest – a little overwhelmed by Anno Online. I’m staring at a city built by one of the developers at Ubisoft Bluebyte, which he describes as “several weeks worth of playtime” and it’s a sprawling, intensely busy scene as tiny people dash around between myriad buildings, while ships clog up the harbour keen to deliver their goods. There are exclamation points everywhere. Apparently I need to build more vineyards to start wine production, there’s a shortage of goat farms, and some citizens in a far-flung corner of my empire are upset because they don’t have a road to the local market. Aaaaaaargh.

While the problems inherent in demoing such a deep, city-building strategy game like Anno Online should be abundantly clear by now, so should the ambition and scale of the game. If not, here are some stats for you. There are 120 different types of building in Anno Online, and you can place 1500 per city. Each starter island contains up to 20,000 decorative objects, and a single playthrough can see you populating up to six different islands. There’s even a story running through the game, although we suspect it might be a little fusty. Still, mighty impressive, considering it’s all running in a browser with absolutely no download to your PC or cost to your bank account.

Ubisoft are constantly referring to Anno Online as a next-generation browser game, and while that might be an oxymoron to some, it’s tough to argue from where I’m sitting. While it’s based on Anno 1404 (which came out back in 2009) it looks great. No, it can’t match the level of detail in titles like SimCity or Rome 2: Total War, but the intricacy Ubisoft Bluebyte has achieved is impressive.

“It’s certainly our plan to try and change perceptions of browser games,” says Tai von Keitz, Game Designer at Ubisoft Bluebyte. “Anno is much more complicated than most other browser games, but to balance that we try not to overwhelm the player at the start. We don’t give them too much all at once.” The introduction to Anno Online is very gentle, a world away from the terrifying sprawl of the mid-late game. Much like Bluebyte’s other world-building browser title, The Settlers Online, your knowledge is layered up one quest at a time.

First you build a residence, then a marketplace, then a road between the two – all the while the game explains everything clearly, dishing out rewards every time you complete a task. “We’ve made it so that players can decide when and how they progress. It’s not mandatory that you spend hours playing Anno during every session,” adds von Keitz.

Here's a little city I knocked up in my lunch break.

That, for me, is the true beauty of what Ubisoft Bluebyte are aiming for with Anno Online. Sure, the game looks brilliant for a browser title, but it’s the ability to appeal to a wide variety of players that will make it a truly ‘next-generation browser game’. While hardcore strategy types will spend hours micromanaging every aspect of their city, the gentle pace of missions will ensure the more casual ‘lunch-time’ crowd aren’t intimidated. There’s a tendency for regular PC gamers to dismiss browser titles as ‘fluff’, but Anno could well build a bridge between less and more demanding players.

There’s no doubting that the substance is here. The developers say there’s about four to six months of content in Anno Online so far, and the open Beta is likely to start very soon (they wouldn’t give a specific date, but it was originally due for release in autumn 2012). Once it’s up and running, new content will be fed in, potentially expanding its lifespan even further. They’ve also got big plans for cooperative play and guilds. At the moment you can trade with other players and chat to them via a window. When you buy goods from another Anno user, you actually send ships to their harbour to pick them up. According to the developers, ships are extremely customisable, so your fleet will be unique and easy to spot. And no, you can’t be pirates.

“You can also help other players by buffing their production line and things like that,” explains Daniel Schaefer, Junior Producer at Bluebyte. “Plus, we’ve got more features to come, especially when it comes to guilds, where players will come together and focus their efforts. Having a chat window is nice, but we want our guild interactions to have real meaning; we want to have content that you can really work together for.”

Thankfully, you won’t be forced to interact with other Anno players. 1404 was always a solitary experience, and you can recreate that in Online if that’s your thing. “It’s very important that players aren’t forced to interact with others,” says von Keitz. “There are a lot of players out there who simply don’t want that. One thing we definitely won’t do – and there are other games out there that do - is force the player to invite friends into Anno in order to access new content. That’s not the way we develop free-to-play games.”

Sadly, no matter how hard you try, it's impossible to set fire to your city.

“If you want to play alone that’s fine, but if you want to interact with others there will be content to support that. We have, for example, 60 resources in the game so you could group together with friends and say, 'Ok, we want to make our production more efficient, so you produce this kind of resource and I’ll make this other resource and we can trade.' We give the player the choice about how they want to play, and I think this is very, very important,” explains Schaefer.

We couldn’t agree more. Even the free-to-play aspect of the game is in keeping with this all-inclusive philosophy. While you can buy special resources that speed up building processes, it’s entirely possible to ‘finish’ Anno Online without paying a penny. The only downside is that this game is launching into a market already full-to-bursting with city-builders, and the original 1404 has been available for three years. Perhaps the next-generation of browser games really begins when something truly original comes along. Anno is impressive, but not revolutionary. For now, though, I'm thinking of more important things, like where the hell am I going to place these vineyards? My people demand the finest wine known to humanity and… you know the rest.

Stardock have announced *deep breath* Elemental: Fallen Enchantress - Legendary Heroes, a standalone expansion to their standalone expansion. But while Fallen Enchantress was Stardock's mea culpa for the problems surrounding Elemental: War of Magic, Legendary Heroes promises to expand upon FE's solid foundation. It promises new maps, monsters and an enhanced levelling system.

The purpose of the expandalone is to change the way Champions work. According to lead designer Derek Paxton, "In Legendary Heroes, the champions seek you out based on your fame. Your kingdom gains fame through a variety of means and as a result, the player’s affinity with champions is now tied to the choices their Kingdom as a whole makes."

"Players will immediately recognize that the world has changed," Paxton continues. "Besides just looking a lot better, the battles are far more intense. Units have a lot more skills to choose from in battle and the maps are much more varied. We redid virtually all of them."

A post on the developer's forum runs through the new features:

"A new Champion progression system. Instead of random traits your champions have a trait tree that they can select traits from as they level up, grow your champions the way you want."
"The ability to recruit special non-human champions. Champions aren't just humans anymore. Rare opportunities or quests may unlock champions of various monster races that can choose traits and use equipment."
"New tactical combat options. Swarm gives a bonus for every ally that surrounds the enemy you are attacking. Be careful where you stand as even weak creatures can become dangerous in groups (especially those with traits that improve their Swarm bonus). Weapons all have special abilities and every faction has a special ability they can use in combat so even lowly spearmen have 2 special abilities they can use in addition to their normal move and attack options."
"New monster types like the Banshee who is immune to physical weapons, or the Garagox who knocks enemies back with each hit (which makes it difficult to get swarm bonuses and control the battlefield)."
"New spells and abilities. New range types have been added that allow for adjacent and line spells and abilities. Use Wall of Fire in tactical to create a line, 7 tiles long, to block allies from enemy units. Master necromancy to summon up to nine different skeleton units at once with the Raise Skeletal Horde spell. Use Resoln's Wraith Touch to drain life from a nearby enemy or Altar's Rush ability to forfeit their attack to get an extra action."
"A new scenario. Relias has returned to warn the kingdoms of what he discovered in the East, but there is little time left. The war has begun."

Due in April, the expansion will be free for anyone who bought War of Magic before 31/10/2010, cost $20 for owners of Fallen Enchantress, and $40 for everyone else.

Thanks, VG247.

I've arrived a bit late to the Chompston party - the celebrity guests have all left, and the Pac-Man-themed power-pellet food has gone cold - but I'm too busy playing this engrossing, free arcade game to care. It's a mash-up of Pac-Man and Bomberman, essentially, but with a musical twist that generates a tune as you chomp dots and lay bombs. As you progress (as in Pac-Man, you complete each stage by eating all the nummy dots), smarter enemies emerge, though interestingly the levels themselves are randomly generated.

Chompston might look rather basic, but it captures the hectic panic of both Pac-Man and Bomberman exceptionally well, while the generative musical element keeps your toes tapping as you attempt to outfox the various ghosts. Although Pac-Man Championship Edition DX is still the rightful king of the genre, original Pac-Man is now dead to me. Dotty gameplay video below.

(Via IndieGames and TIGSource.)

In a blatant bit of ironic naming, MechWarrior Online has added a new robot combatant: the Pretty Baby. It's 80-tons of metal and laser cannon, putting it firmly in MWO's heaviest class. Although I'll admit, the paint job is quite fetching.



The trailer's description contains the mech-specs. Try not to imagine a used car salesman in a ten gallon hat when you read them:

"Announcing Pretty Baby. Clocking in at 80 tons, this beast sports a 340 XL engine with a torso twist of 100 degrees on each side. Pretty Baby is a double threat on the battlefield with top speeds at 68 mph and 19 double heat sinks. Can you handle this monster?"

Piranha Games have also revealed their MWO development plans going forward. Rather than small weekly updates, they'll be releasing more substantial patches twice a month. Future updates promise a new map, Alpine Peaks, in April, as well as UI changes and performance tweaks.

I nearly linked the relevant TV Tropes article in the opening sentence, but that would have been mean. I'll stick it down here instead.

Thanks, RPS.

The new version of Futuremark’s 3DMark has just been released, offering us all ways to benchmark our graphics cards and PCs by using Matrix-esque squid robots. And who wouldn’t want to be able to do that?

I’ve grabbed the current top two single-GPU graphics cards from both AMD and Nvidia and have put them head-to-head in a battle royale to see who Futuremark's squid-bot believes is the quickest graphics card out there.

And the results aren’t massively surprising.

The HD 7970 comes back with a score of 3,406 and the GTX 680 hits 3,013 on the Extreme settings of the 3DMark benchmark. On the standard settings the gap between the two top GPUs increases with the AMD card hitting 6,911 and the Nvidia card just 6,049.

I was speaking with Nvidia about this yesterday, and while they are more than happy to keep ensuring their drivers work perfectly with 3DMark to give Nvidia cards the best possible results, they still see it as less important than real-world game benchmarks.

That’s perhaps not surprising given that AMD’s HD 7970 gives the GTX 680 a good spanking in the overall results.

The Fire Strike test combines the physics and particle effects to make an intensive benchmark

But it’s something I agree with too.

I haven’t used the last few generations of the 3DMark benchmark suite for the simple reason that a 3DMark score is less relevant to most of us than a straight FPS score in a game that we’re actually playing.

Given that a 3DMark score is also impacted by the CPU that is in the system, more than most game engines, it’s not a straight test of graphics capability.

Realistically though you want as many benchmarks as possible to give you a rounded idea of just how well, or how badly, a given GPU is performing.

What’s interesting about this version of 3DMark though is the amount of information it gives you afterwards and that makes better viewing for Nvidia than it does AMD.

The results graph is intriguing in that it shows a much larger, spikier variation in frame rate on the HD 7970 than it does on the GTX 680.



The Nvidia card is far smoother throughout the benchmark, and indicates that a GTX 680 will offer a more stable gaming experience even if it doesn’t necessarily give the biggest average frame per second score at the end.

Red 5 have announced their early 2013 development roadmap for Firefall, the MMO shooter-meets-RPG-meets-RTS-meets-bug squashing simulator (MMOFPSRPGRTS?). It's a huge selection of high-level game changes being made across the board, including PvP rebalancing, bolstered enemy AI and a new system to help ease new users into the game's many features.

Full list below:

"Armies & Social Features: A team is dedicated to bringing basic army functionality to the game. This means things like army names, rosters, tags, chat channels, etc. The army tech tree and gameplay elements are further in the future."
"Matchmaking Team: This team is focused on fixing bugs and balance issues with the PvP matchmaking system. They are also reworking the challenge mode tool to make it easier to use and understand."
"New Objective Gametype/Map: We are working to create a new PvP gametype that focuses on a single objective to create something that more closely resembles a sport and provides fair and balanced gameplay."
"New User Experience: The New User Experience in Firefall is currently non-existent. We want to build a system that introduces new players to the game and helps them get introduced to the nuances of what makes Firefall great before they are thrown into the open world or PvP for the first time."
"Open World Content: This team is working on additional open world content that will help bring life to the world and create fun encounters for you to stumble upon or seek out."
"New Progression System: We are iterating on the existing progression system to create something that is easier to understand and more fun to use overall. This includes the split of crafted gear from PvP, but also many changes to the tier and constraints system."
"New Crafting System: The goal of the crafting team is to create a more engaging, easier to use crafting system with more depth to gameplay to really bring resources and crafting to the forefront of Firefall as it should be."
"Chosen Warfront: The Chosen Warfront team is back on the case making more changes to how the Chosen interact with the world and how engaging the overall war is to players."
"Chosen Combat: A separate team is working on making the Chosen more fun to fight through AI behaviors, animations, new types of Chosen, etc. If the Chosen Warfront team is focused on the macro-level gameplay, the Chosen Combat team is all about the micro-level gameplay."
"Multiple Freelancers: Multiple team members are working on things that don’t require large teams and so they don’t have a particular team name. Expect to see changes with Thumpers, customization, UI, and more."

The team plan to share more details on their progression and crafting changes soon. Firefall is currently in closed beta. You can sign up for beta access at the game's website.

Thanks, PCGamesN.

While you could sum up Valve's plans for Linux compatibility as "full Steam ahead," it seems that not everyone is as sold on the OS's role in mainstream gaming. Yesterday, John Carmack questioned the wisdom of development studios working to make their games run natively in Linux. He tweeted, "Improving Wine for Linux gaming seems like a better plan than lobbying individual game developers for native ports. Why the hate?"

Carmack later expanded on his comments in a thread on Reddit's r/Linux, saying, "I don’t think that a good business case can be made for officially supporting Linux for mainstream games today."

"I wish Linux well, but the reality is that it barely makes it into my top ten priorities (Burn the heretic!); I use Linux for the flight computers at Armadillo Aerospace, but not for any regular desktop work. I was happy to hear that Rage ran in Wine, but no special effort was made to support it.

Carmack notes that Zenimax, Id's owner, doesn't publish Mac titles - instead partnering with Aspyr. "I would be stunned if they showed an interest in officially publishing and supporting a Linux title. A port could be up and running in a week or two, but there is so much work to do beyond that for official support."

And Carmack is no stranger to the Linux market. "The conventional wisdom is that native Linux games are not a good market. Id Software tested the conventional wisdom twice, with Quake Arena and Quake Live. The conventional wisdom proved correct. Arguments can be made that neither one was an optimal test case, but they were honest tries."

He argues that, despite the technical stigma, emulation is a more viable move. "Translating from D3D to OpenGL would involve more inefficiencies, but figuring out exactly what the difficulties are and making some form of “D3D interop” extension for OpenGL to smooth it out is a lot easier than making dozens of completely refactored, high performance native ports."

"Ideally, following a set of best practice guidelines could allow developers to get Linux versions with little more effort than supporting, say, Windows XP," Carmack finishes. "Properly evangelized, with Steam as a monetized distribution platform, this is a plausible path forward."

Yesterday's Witcher 3: Wild Hunt reveal gave us some important details: it will be open world, it's said to be bigger than Skyrim, Geralt has a new beard. Today, CD Projekt RED's official announcement provides us with more news, including the fact that this will be their last game in the Witcher series. There's also a completely pointless "title reveal" trailer.



Yeah. Wolf head logo confirmed, I guess.

Anyway, the announcement's meaty details sound promising. "Imagine playing a dark fantasy game with the same great non-linear story as in the previous Witcher titles, but now told in a world you can explore freely with no artificial boundaries," says CD Projekt RED head Adam Badowski. "The war-ravaged world is so huge that to reach farther places you will need to ride a horse or sail a boat to get there. A world where your choices have truly epic consequences."

As to this being Geralt's swan song, Badowski adds, "People may ask if this is really going to be the last Witcher game. Yes, it is. Why? Because we believe that we should end the series on a high note. Technology has progressed to where we can finally tell the story the way we want, with the visuals we want, in the world we imagined."

"This will be the ultimate fantasy RPG experience, and while we're hardly out of stories to tell, we believe it's time for us to look to new worlds and new horizons to keep pushing the boundaries of what we can create."

CD Projekt's distribution arm GOG.com are celebrating the announcement with a sale on the previous Witchers. If you've yet to experience Geralt's last two outings into the world of political intrigue and monster biffing, they're both 50% off until Friday.

Remember that 2007 Hitman movie that copped a lashing from critics, but people went out in droves to see anyway? (to the tune of $100 million?!) Well, Hollywood is preparing for another Hitman inning in the form of Agent 47 - a new film set in the Hitman universe. Fox International Productions is behind the reboot, and Fast and the Furious star Paul Walker is confirmed to play the lead role in Timothy Olyphant's place.

According to a report on Deadline, the film will be directed by Aleksander Bach, and written by Michael Finch and Skip Woods. You may remember Woods' name from the last Hitman filmic effort, as he also wrote the screenplay for the 2007 film. Filming will commence in Berlin and Singapore this Summer (Winter in the Southern Hemisphere).