Just as we were warming up for Intel's Haswell CPU, Nvidia go and drop a whole new generation of graphics cards on our laps, with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 at the vanguard.

Well, when I say "whole new" that needs to be qualified just a touch. Nvidia haven’t suddenly forgotten all those roadmaps they've been showing off. This isn't one of the new Maxwell GPUs. The GTX 700 generation is essentially a refresh with the same basic graphical technology that we saw in the GTX 600 series, though the GTX 780 is itself a bit of an exception to that. It's actually taking the Titan's GK 110 GPU and shaving a little power off the top, giving us a card that performs slightly below Nvidia's state-of-the-art monster at a lower price point, ostensibly making the GTX 780 the oft-rumoured GTX Titan LE.

An Nvidia spokesperson pitched it as being "for everyone who loved Titan but couldn't stump up to an £800 graphics card." Does that claim stand up?

When you’re talking about an £800/$1,000 graphics card then the massive £550/$650 price-tag Nvidia have stuck on the GeForce GTX 780 maybe doesn’t sound so unreasonable. But still, with this new card they are once again pushing up the price of the top-end card of a graphics generation. Inside the trivalent chromium-plated exterior there's the aforementioned GK 110 GPU, but instead of the 2,688 CUDA cores of the GTX Titan Nvidia have chopped off an entire graphics processing cluster (GPC) cutting that figure down to 2,304. That’s still a huge number of unified shaders compared with the GTX 680’s 1,536 and is one of the main reasons why the GTX 780 is so close in performance compared with the GTX Titan.

You're not missing out on much of the classic Titan make up

Another is the fact that while they’ve cut the amount of video memory in half, down to 3GB from 6GB, it’s still running with that huge 384-bit memory bus. The GTX 780 also comes with a slightly higher base clock than the standard GTX Titan - 863MHz plays 837MHz there.

Nvidia are targeting high-end gamers with the GTX 780, not than the pro-graphics folk who saw the GTX Titan as a cheap way to get hold of a Tesla K20X professional card. To that end, Nvidia have disabled the double precision performance of the GPU inside the GTX 780, though that really wont make any difference when playing games.

In performance terms, the GTX 780 is just shy of GTX Titan levels of gaming prowess. In this case "just shy" means about 10% slower than the card that’s still retailing for around £250/$350 more. Usefully, like the Titan, the GTX 780 sports Nvidia’s shiny new GPU Boost 2.0 tech you can overclock the living hell out of the poor GK 110 GPU. Thanks to the impressive and robust cooling solution Nvidia have tucked in behind those chromium plates, I was able to push the clock speed up to 1,189MHz. At those speeds the GTX 780 can easily outpace a stock-clocked Titan across the board.

That still puts it some 20% slower than AMD’s top card, the still somewhat irrelevant dual-GPU HD 7990, but compared with their best single-GPU card you’re still looking anywhere up to 70% faster performance from the GTX 780 versus the HD 7970 GHz Edition.

Does that justify the price? It's impossible to ignore the fact that this is the single most expensive graphics card launching a new generation I can remember. At £550/$650 it is a huge amount of money, though that might be because there's so much silicon in there – seven billion transistors versus three and a half billion in the GTX 680’s GK 104 GPU. If you're considering a Titan, the price tag will seem less alarming. You're looking at a card that is almost as good in games for a good chunk less cash. The next card down the stack, the GTX 680, is around £200/$200 less but suffers the same performance hit compared with the GTX 780 as AMD’s HD 7970 GHz Edition.

That kind of puts the GTX 780 in a bit of a no-man’s land between the affordable hobbyist cards of this technology generation and the likes of the aspirational, ultra-enthusiast class of cards like the GTX Titan, HD 7990 and GTX 690. With the GTX 780, Nvidia have almost created a new class of card sitting between enthusiast and ultra-enthusiast. Semi-mega-enthusiast?

The GTX 780 is also a card only for those lucky or well-off enough to be gaming on a panel, or set of panels, with a native resolution higher than 2560x1440. You really need to be pushing that much graphical data through your GPU to justify the purchase. At 1080p your expensive new card will just be bored twiddling its silicon thumbs while it idly throws polygons around your relatively low-res screen.

Nvidia have used the exact same build as the Titan for the GTX 780

If you have the screen space, the GTX 780 represents a pretty significant performance boost over the GTX 680 and in those terms it’s tough to argue against it, but it’s also got a huge price premium which is going to push a lot of people further down the GTX 700 series stack. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to say anything about those cards right now.

Nvidia have put the GTX 780 out on its own, with nothing to really compare it against apart from one card that’s £250/$350 more expensive and a couple that are some £200/$200 cheaper. With AMD holding their next generation cards back until the end of the year the GTX 780 will have that middle ground all to itself. It’s almost like Nvidia has put a mark in the sand, challenging AMD to step up to it with their top card of the next generation.

Even if you do fork out that much cash for the GTX 780 you can’t lay any claims to owning "the fastest card." That’s something which, before Titan, you could pretty much guarantee with the new top card of a generation. With the GTX 780 you’re going to be paying out for second tier gear. At £550/$650 the GTX 780 has still been priced out of the reach of many of us PC gaming enthusiasts, and we’re going to have to readjust our sights down to the lesser lights of the GTX 700 series. The GTX 780 may be quick, but it sure is a pricey bit of kit.

The GTX 780 is one speedy ol' card, but it's got one hefty price premium attached to it

Benchmarks

All the benchmarks in this test were carried out on my standard Intel Core i7-3770K test bench. The CPU is running at stock speeds with 16GB DDR3 RAM running at 1,600MHz. The benchmarks were run at 2560x1600, at their highest settings. With the exception of Crysis 3 they were all run with 4x MSAA as well.

The first result is the average frame rate and the number in parenthesis is the minimum frame rate.

DirectX 11 synthetic performance
Heaven 4.0 - FPS: Higher is better
Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 - 33.5 (22.1)
Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan - 37.3 (19.5)
Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 - 22.9 (13.3)
AMD Radeon HD 7990 - 42.8 (18)
AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz - 23.6 (12.7)

DirectX 11 gaming performance
Batman: Arkham City - FPS: Higher is better
Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 - 94 (56)
Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan - 101 (60)
Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 - 67 (38)
AMD Radeon HD 7990 - 103 (34)
AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz - 69 (27)

Bioshock Infinite - FPS: Higher is better
Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 - 57 (26)
Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan - 63 (24)
Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 - 45 (13)
AMD Radeon HD 7990 - 78 (20)
AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz - 41 (18)

Crysis 3 - FPS: Higher is better
Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 - 33 (25)
Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan - 37 (28)
Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 - 25 (20)
AMD Radeon HD 7990 - 48 (35)
AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz - 28 (20)

DiRT Showdown - FPS: Higher is better
Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 - 61 (49)
Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan - 66 (50)
Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 - 45 (35)
AMD Radeon HD 7990 - 116 (87)
AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz - 65 (50)

Max Payne 3 - FPS: Higher is better
Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 - 42 (25)
Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan - 44 (25)
Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 - 30 (19)
AMD Radeon HD 7990 - 57 (37)
AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz - 28 (19)

Sleeping Dogs - FPS: Higher is better
Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 - 29 (17)
Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan - 33 (19)
Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 - 23 (15)
AMD Radeon HD 7990 - 46 (29)
AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz - 28 (20)

 

This article was originally published in PC Gamer UK issue 252.

There is a dead body in the cockpit of my MH-9. In my haste to get into the cerulean sky above Arma 3’s Stratis island I accidentally spawned a chopper with a pilot in it and he wasn’t budging. I could have hopped back into the editor and fixed it, but I was keen to see the island. And I had a rifle.

So I shot the pilot and then the co-pilot to save him from having to explain to the pilot’s widow, and hopped in. The co-pilot remained, dead, slumped in his seat, his hand still gripping the joystick, as I flew around the rugged little Greek island cooing at the sights.

"the newest version of the world’s most famous milsim is still ridiculous, and I love it for that."

My girlfriend, who started to watch after hearing me giggle at the hunched dead figure, found this distasteful. To placate her, I popped back into the editor and switched a few things around. Like Craig the Magnificent, I produced a bunny. I began hopping around the island, showing her how the game allowed me to control the body of a rabbit. Arma 3, the newest version of the world’s most famous milsim, is still ridiculous and I love it for that.

This alpha is the public’s first opportunity to advance into Bohemia’s long-held territory. Pre-order and you get access to it right away. It’s not the full thing by a long shot, having just twelve varieties of gun and eight types of vehicle, on a test island that’s a mere 20km2 chunk of rolling hills with a few settlements dotted around. The full game will have a 270km2 island.



You do get ‘showcases’ of the scripting and scenarios the game is capable of, however, and while they’re pretty small scale, they give a taste of what the infantry, ground vehicle, underwater and air combat will be like. More importantly, the alpha comes with the full editor and will support modding. People have already made zombie mods and co-op missions. There’s a lot of game here for £20, and it’s only going to get bigger.

I didn’t realise how important the ridiculous part of the game was to me until I was in Thumper’s body. I had feared that Bohemia’s drive to make Arma 3 accessible to everyone might smooth its edges out too much. But no, it remains true to the original template. It won’t stop you doing what you want, either in terms of mods or you own playstyle, for the sake of military-realism aesthetics.

"People have already made zombie mods and co-op missions."

When I played the first showcase, a gnarly little fight for a village that tore up my squad on more than one playthrough, that willingness to let events go where they wanted, even if the player was pushing in an odd direction, was much in evidence.

The infantry showcase reveals Arma as a well-matured game series: the changes are numerous, but built on top of an already impressive skeleton. Animation and movement are a lot smoother, and there’s a new stance-adjust system to exploit, which is important in this lumpy, rocky world. Each stance – prone, crouch, and standing – has high and low variants that give you extra height or better hiding potential.



When the first stage of the fight kicked off, with my team at the bottom of a valley protecting a crippled soldier as enemies closed in, it took a few restarts to get back into the Arma way of things. Hiding and firing helped. I was cowering really, as the bullets pinged all around me, and I dropped into cover behind a cluster of rocks. My AI squad leader was marking targets for me to fire at, and even managed to sound human while doing it. My new ability to peek made the cover a lot more useful, enabling me to aim up and over without exposing myself too much. I didn’t hit anything, but my shots forced the enemy into a position where the AI squad could take them out.

"I watched my squad push up against buildings, hunker down beside walls, and imagined the enemy doing the same."

Stage two: we’re sent up and over the hill into a village. The world is full of lovely little spaces like this, and this one, a cluster of buildings hugging the coast, would have been welcoming if the enemy wasn’t already in it. Another small squad, but this time they had buildings to shelter behind as we approached from our slightly hilly vantage point. This battle was tougher: the squad AI is surprisingly capable, and every building has an interior, so everywhere is a potential trap. I watched my squad push up against buildings, hunker down beside walls, and imagined the enemy doing the same. We all came together in one of those awkward ‘everyone turns the corner at the same time’ moments, but my squad was quicker off the mark and the enemy were soon all dead. We had a few minute’s grace to look around, but before I had time to start renaming roads after my pets, mortars started to pummel us and I was volunteered to stop them.

I had to hunt the mortar spotters down. I wish I could tell you the next sequence was a tense battle through the undergrowth, but the truth was the AI spotted them up in a cluster of rocks north of our position. I’d already skipped (hammer ‘V’ as you run) up the hill to look at a little church, so I was parallel with them when the information came in. All I had to do was crouch-run along the lip of the hill then push in when I was close. I sighted them and swapped to the underslung grenade launcher.

Boom! My revenge for their shelling of Craigtown. Then I was told to run, as the enemy were about to shell this place, too. Spoilsports! I celebrated my victory by roly-polying (go prone then hit the lean key) down a hill and met my squad the bottom, who were fleeing to the trees.





There were a few Arma-ish flubs during this mission. The most serious was when an autosave was triggered just as a mortar exploded, which seemed like the sort of timing that could ruin someone’s save game. But at no point did I see a man with a gun walking face first into anything. That’s definitely progress.

The other big infantry addition is diving, and you can tell it’s new. While the land action is confident, the underwater antics remain a bit soggy. In the scuba-diving section, I dived into the ocean and headed to the first of a series of mines I had to disarm. As I approached, a tutorial popped up telling me all about the mortar support I had. I took that to mean I needed to hit the mines with the mortar, so I ordered the AI to do so via the map interface. As I waited for the bombs to drop, the noise of a patrolling enemy helicopter thudded overhead, dulled by the layer of water. The mortar pounded the mine and... nothing.

"At no point did I see a man with a gun walking face first into anything. That’s definitely progress."

I approached it, which every fibre of my being told me not to do, and was then presented with a simple dialogue to disarm it. At which point it occurred to me that the whole idea of me being underwater was probably to approach these targets stealthily. As tutorials go, that one about the mortars was really poorly timed.

I continued to the other mines, keeping low in the bay. The chopper that passed over was also a target, but to destroy it I would have to take over an enemy camp and shoot it with a guided missile.

Arma’s tendency to make trouble popped up again here. There was a speedboat that I could sabotage to make my mission easier. After finding it by popping my head above the waves, I sneaked underneath and watched an awkward animation play out a full metre from the boat. This was the sabotage, apparently. It looked lame and awkward, but given the level of detail in the rest of the game it was forgivable.



At this point two divers splashed into the water and Arma 3’s slow-motion underwater combat started. It turns out you can fire guns underwater, and my positioning behind a rock let me take them out without too much hassle.

There were other problems. Above water, the enemies exhibited psychic powers and spotted me instantly. The remaining soldiers on the boat took pot-shots, joined by the soldiers on land. If I hadn’t discovered a barricade of rocks I wouldn’t have made it out of there alive. I don’t mind the idea of being spotted, but the speed and accuracy of those guys in that situation needs dialling down. Thankfully I found myself in a good position to take them all out, and was left with the chopper and the guided missile. The rest was relatively easy.

"Two divers splashed into the water and Arma 3’s slow-motion underwater combat started."

The water-based stuff is an alpha implementation of a new feature, but the elements are there. In another playthrough I decided to attack the boat before making for land. I popped above the waves and shot at it, before ducking under. I watched a scuba-less soldier leap into the water and sink to the bottom. I could still grab his gun as he sank. Conversely, there were a few times when I alerted the patrols, when I had no idea how or why. They just knew.

It might have been the helicopter that alerted them. These birds are my favourite thing about Arma 3. They manage to be both terrifyingly functional and gorgeously atmospheric. The thud of the blades from inside the cockpit is nearly enough to lull me to sleep. For the aerial showcase, I was plopped into a chopper and sent on a delivery drop with a belly full of soldiers. About a minute in I was wrenched away from a neat little bit of formation flying to stop a couple of OPFOR from rustling a radar. My Ka-60 was directed along a slice of hill that gave way to a network of roads. Two trucks were trundling towards the bulbous station on a hilltop. I’m OK at flying, but bad at aiming. It took a few passes, and a few near flips of my bird, before I’d wrangled an angle. It’s worth noting that on subsequent playthroughs I just hovered alongside the road rather than trying a dramatic pass. I was making a meal of it.



I was ordered to land at the radar facility and deploy my troops, but that plan was scuppered by mortar fire. Then I remembered I had a secondary missile system, and that the cockpit view makes acquiring targets pretty easy. After locating the bombers in the hills I just had to line up a couple of squares on the HUD and fire, killing them without getting closer than the length of a football field.

This was followed up with another, similar little encounter out to sea, after which I spotted a fight for the lighthouse area. It was as big as anything the showcases had involved me in, but I was simply ordered around it. It carried on without me. I love that Arma does that. A The AI squads move slickly through the small towns. Tactics! I am sniping from behind a vehicle, like a soldier would. Just me on one of my helicopter trips through the island. dynamic, emergent battle across kilometres that doesn’t want or need me.

"My failed experiment of Helicopter Jousting grew into the bigger failure of Helicopter Formation Jousting."

That can happen in scripted or freeform environments. I’m not an expert with the editor, but all it takes is a few clicks to turn an empty corner of the map into a battle your kids will ask you about. It’s where I tossed in a couple of dozen BLUFOR (friendlies) and OPFOR and watched them tear each other apart in a nasty little battle for a village. It’s where I made a game of trying to escape a single enemy attack chopper on the game’s hilariously cumbersome quadbikes. It’s where my failed experiment of Helicopter Jousting grew into the bigger failure of Helicopter Formation Jousting, and ended up in the now banned Helicopter Formation Jousting: Oh God, I Can See The Bone.

It’s also where I learned to appreciate the cold beauty of what Bohemia have made. I’ll often just pop into the editor for a spin in a chopper or a hike in the hills to see the lovely details that the devs have imbued their island with. There are bases, churches, lighthouses. The weather cycles from cloudless blue skies to thundery grey glumness. Stratis is a test island, but you can see glorious sunsets and watch clouds forming from the hilltops. Every blade of grass seems to cast a shadow. And it runs better than Arma 2.

There are some problems, and some holdovers from the earlier games. The AI seems sharper, but they also still go through a clumsy dance when attempting to flee. The cars feel floaty, like they’re full of helium. There’s a lot missing that I’d hoped to play with, particularly the dynamic missions that will generate all kinds of challenges.

But this is an alpha. There’s nothing here that can’t be fixed. And if Bohemia don’t do it, the players have proven more than happy to do so. What is here is probably the most confident and assured game the developers have ever released, and it’s still months from being finished.

As any good conspiracy nut will tell you, flags contain shocking secrets. And the one planted on the supposedly "Munar" surface of this Kerbal Space Program update video is clearly flapping around. FAKERS! This was clearly a staged performance to highlight the new flag-planting feature! Normally, I'd be furious, but those newly expanded rovers are just too damn adorable.

As well as the new vehicle parts and customisable flags, SQUAD's 0.20 milestone release also brings engine optimisation, bug fixes and editor improvements to the sandbox alpha.

Full patch notes below:


7 new Parts and 2 IVA Spaces
Cupola with IVA
Small Lander with IVA
2 new Probe cores
New large docking clamp
New Medium wheel
Attachable command seats for kerbals


Customizable Flags for your space program


Kerbals on Eva can plant flags with editable plaques
23 Stock flags to choose from.
Flags are Moddable, Make your own flag!


Editor Improvements


Added Flag interface to editor
The Editor no longer requires you to start with a command pod when building a ship.
The Editor now allows deleting or replacing the first part of your ship.


Optimizations and New Features


Vessel Filtering for the tracking station
Added Kerbal Knowledge base for vessel and planetary information
Upgraded scene loader and refresh logic
Added Game Database and repogrammed part loaders.
Mods and stock parts can now have their own folders for organization
New Loading Screens
Optimization of Memory Usage (Approximately 30% average reduction in usage)
Upgraded debug menu allows parts and cfg files to be reloaded while the game
Bug Fixes!


Thanks, PCGamesN.

Is it still a weekly sale if there hasn't been one for over a month? Does it matter when the upshot is a bunch of cheap games? Probably not. So instead of questioning their time-keeping, let's celebrate the fact that the Humble Weekly Sale has returned, and is providing a pay-what-you-want offer for Remedy's Alan Wake games.

For the next week, you can choose your own amount for Alan Wake: Collector's Edition, containing the bonus episodes "The Writer", and "The Signal". You'll also get standalone DLC pack American Nightmare, and a bundle of videos, art and other bonuses - including "developer commentary videos, an illustrated PDF book, and the Alan Wake soundtrack."

Along with the bundle, Remedy have released a video of creative director Sam Lake (of Max Payne's face fame) explaining the unlikely, but still possible, future of Alan Wake. Watch to learn about the game's slow-burn, cult success; Remedy's next project, the Xbox One exclusive Quantum Break; and how the studio doesn't appear to own a camera that doesn't drift listlessly to the side as it films.

Firaxis are breaking every rule in the trailer-making guidebook with this Policies & Ideologies featurette for Civilization 5's Brave New World expansion. For starter's it's called Policies & Ideologies. That's not what you call a trailer. You call a trailer "HYPER-BALLS ACTION SHINDIG," or something equally preposterous. At the very least, you add in a bombastic dubstep drop over blood-spattered bold text.

Confession time: I prefer this. Ideological choices that have an effect on diplomacy and abilities? Expanded and revised social policies? Oh, talk politics to me, Mr. Civ 5 Narrator.

Brave New World is due out July 9th in the US, and July 12th "internationally". For more on the expansion, see our hands-on preview here, or read Advisor T.J's guide to the new units and leaders.

The latest major update to PlanetSide 2 has landed, bringing some sweeping changes to the balance and design of the game. The most significant overhaul for "GU09" is the trialling of a new map system, that replaces the previous Hex-based conquest path with a "Lattice Link" of criss-crossing attack avenues. So rather than expanding out in any direction, now your invasion is going to rely on somebody in your squad being able to read a map.

"In order to maintain the integrity of their control protocols, the Empires have fallen back on an older system – a hard line network that physically connects bases and territories known as the Lattice Link," the update page explains. "While the hard line approach has been able to negate the recent security issues with using wireless technology, the Empires now require a friendly adjacent link to the Lattice in order to take control of an enemy installation."

In practice, it reduces the number of regions connected to each other, creating a clearer battle flow that will funnel players more naturally towards set lanes - something not unlike the push and pull of a DoTA-like map. SOE hope the move will also give defenders more focus when preparing to deflect an assault.

Other changes include the addition of a short interactive tutorial, designed to better prepare new players. As for new toys, the Harasser of GU08 can now be equipped with Empire-specific weapons, and MAXs have been updated with extra abilities, again dependant on the player's faction.

Elsewhere, there's the now-standard plethora of tweaks and rebalances as SOE continue to tinker with the game. There are too many to list, so I'll instead point you to the GU09 patch notes.

Although I will highlight this significant update:


"Stopped a jump pad at the Allatum Bio Lab from launching you into a tree"


Game changer.

Valve are beta testing a community-run self-regulation system for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. It will allow certain experienced players to review reports of "disruptive behaviour", watch replays, and issue temporary bans where necessary. Naturally, Valve have called this program "Overwatch", which was also the title of the transhuman Combine soldiers of Half-Life 2. Not that there are any parallels. This is just an enforcement squad, working under a larger body that has ultimate power over... Oh...

Valve explain how the Overwatch will function in a post about the now-live beta. "Prospective Overwatch Investigators are presented with an active Overwatch button in the main menu, which indicates that there is a pending case for them to evaluate. The investigators can then choose to participate by watching a replay (eight rounds’ worth or roughly 10 minutes) and selecting a verdict.

"If the investigators collectively agree that an offense has occurred, a ban will be issued. The ban duration will depend on the severity of the offense and the suspect’s history of convictions, if any."

Investigators are selected around a variety of conditions, including account age, game time, and a low report history. And the more an Overwatch member participates, and the higher their resulting accuracy, the more weight their decisions will carry in the future.

For now, though, the scheme is just being trialled. Overwatch cases will be reviewed and analysed before any bans are enforced, giving Valve the chance to ensure they aren't creating a force of power-mad storm troopers.

You can read the full details of the Overwatch program here.

You can't see my face right now, but it's contorted into an expression of bemused bewilderment. That's because of an interview by ShackNews with the excellently named Matt Booty, Microsoft's "general manager of Redmond Game Studios and Platforms". In it, he distances the company's Windows game strategy away from the perception of the "more traditional desktop PC game," heavily suggesting that the majority of the Xbox One's "15 exclusives" won't be arriving on Microsoft's other platform.

To be clear, the source of my confusion isn't the idea that Microsoft doesn't care about the PC as a viable core gaming platform - that's been a known factor since their focus shifted to the consoles. Instead, it's the outright bizarre detachment from reality shown in many of Booty's statements. When asked if PC gamers would see any of their planned exclusives, he said, "the Windows 8 gamer is certainly going to participate in some of that content."

When pressed on the type of "content" that Windows 8 gamers would "participate" in, Booty added, "we have got everything from very, very casual games, like our very much improved and reimagined Solitaire, all the way to graphically complicated games like The Harvest."

The Harvest. A "graphically complicated" game.

Asked whether, in light of this, Microsoft were focusing on the lower-end, rather than AAA PC production, Booty responded, "We're talking about console games, but there could be some franchises that also end up with a PC game." As if there's any difference in this age of x86 architecture, universal control pad support, and even Steam Big Picture mode. "When I think about more connected experiences across those platforms," he continued, "it's things that show up within that family of devices where we've got Xbox Live, like Windows Phone and Windows 8," and "not what you might consider a more traditional desktop PC game."

Here's how technology works in Crusader Kings II as it stands right now: You set the focus for your entire realm to Farming, Legalism, and Tactics... then you ignore that screen for the next 400 years unless you click on it accidentally. The Old Gods (and the accompanying patch that everyone will get for free) is attempting to change that by making technology a more active system. The final dev diary goes into a little more depth on how this will work. You'll find the video version above, and some analysis below.

The best way to describe the new system is this: Duke-tier rulers and up basically serve as the fonts of technology for the world, and their advances will trickle out to neighboring provinces over time. These fonts are fueled by tech points, which you will be able to spend to purchase an advance in each of the 18 newly-consolidated technologies. Unlike the base game, you won't have a random chance to discover the next level of a tech over time, and tech focuses are out.



The way you generate tech points is based on buildings in a province and the liege's skill. Martial skill will generate more Militatry tech points, Stewardship generates Economic tech, and Diplomacy will advance your Cultural tech. The spread of each tech can be seen in the newly-skinned data layer, demonstrated above. Because if there's one thing we grand strategy players love, it's more data layers.

The other tidbit we got that hadn't been previously spoken of is the addition of "Steppe" provinces. Much of Eastern Europe will now be considered part of the Steppes, allowing Altaic and Magyar culture rulers to build the new Steppe Warrior Lodge and Steppe Riding Grounds improvements. These will ensure that their levies are more dominantly composed of mounted troops, as they were historically, since the default troop boosting buildings tend to be infantry-heavy.

As a bonus catch, it looks like the Steppe pagans are getting their own holding portrait art, instead of using the default pagan ones.



The Old Gods releases next Tuesday, and we're fairly sure we've extracted as much possible info as we can at this point without actually playing it. If you're hungry for more, sink your axe into our announcement interview, breakdowns of the first, second, and third dev diaries, details from the developer livestream, and the most in-depth Q&A about the expansion in all of existence.

Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2014 almost has enough development mana to be summoned onto the battlefield this summer, preceding the release of the new card set in late July. We've been given the opportunity to bring you a first look at a new card that will appear both in the digital and paper-based versions of Magic 2014: Savage Summoning. It also happens to be green, which itself happens to be the best color. Dissenting opinions in the comments will be Trampled.



Some tips from the developers:

Savage Summoning is an instant that has a couple important uses. When you are playing against a deck that has creatures attacking you, you can use it to surprise their attacking creature with your own instant-speed (flash) creature. Because your creature is cast at instant speed, your opponent will need to commit to the attack and could be accidentally running their best, but smaller, creature into your surprise. And because your creature is getting a +1/+1 counter, it’s likely to be big enough to defeat the attacker and live through it.

When you are playing against a deck with counterspells, Savage Summoning becomes an important threat. Because it makes your next creature spell uncounterable, your opponent with a counterspell in hand needs to counter the Summoning because they won’t be able to counter the creature spell. Because it’s an instant, you can cast it at the end of your opponent’s turn, which means the mana they spend to counter can’t be used on your own turn, when you can cast the creature spell as normal.