Games are brilliant, that much is obvious. But some are more brilliant then others, which is why every year, the Golden Joystick Awards ask you to vote on the most brilliantist games of the last year. Voting has begun for the 31st edition of the awards, with a new selection of categories for you to pick a favourite in. And as a reader of PC Gamer, maybe you'd like to pop over to the voting page to represent your rigs.

For instance, here's the shortlist for the Game of the Year award:


Borderlands 2 (2K Games)
Dishonored (Bethesda)
Forza Horizon (Microsoft)
Halo 4 (Microsoft)
The Last of Us (Sony)
Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft)
Tomb Raider (Square Enix)
BioShock Infinite (2K Games)
The Walking Dead (TellTale)
Pikmin 3 (Nintendo)
Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar)
Call of Duty: Black Ops II (Activision)
Guild Wars 2 (NCsoft)
Fire Emblem Awakening (Nintendo)
Hotline Miami (Devolver Digital)
Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (Namco Bandai)
Saints Row IV (Deep Silver)
Splinter Cell Blacklist (Ubisoft)


Now I'm not trying to influence your voting decision. That would be wrong. All I'm saying if that some of those games are available on PC, and some of them aren't. Oh, and what's this? It's the link to the Golden Joystick voting page. I'll just leave it there. You know what to do.

The winners will be revealed on Friday 25th October 2013, at the Westminster Park Plaza, where once again the ceremony will be hosted by comedian Ed Byrne.

What we've seen of The Witcher 3 looks breathtaking, but it's also only a tiny part of the game. The trailers and screenshots coming out of CD Projekt RED have all been taken from the Skellige Islands, just one of the many and varied locations Geralt will be witching through. Talking to us at Gamescom, story writer Jakub Szamalek revealed some of the massive RPG's other regions, as well as the stories to be found in them.

No-Man's Land

"There will be many other regions," Szamalek said. "The most important being the no-man’s land. It’s a territory that has been ravaged by war, through which armies have marched and they’ve burned everything they’ve come to on their way. It’s a dark, creepy environment covered by swamps primeval forests. There are sparsely populated areas, small villages full of very distrustful people who are not welcoming to new-comers."

Where the previously shown Skellige Islands are based on Nordic culture and mythology, the no-man's land will have a different set of inspirations. "This part of the world is based off Slavic mythology and myths and legends," Szamalek said. "It has a feel of Brother Grimm’s tales. It’s a dark environment in which there are many secrets to uncover. At times it will feel like a Lovecraft story where you come in to a small community and you know from the start something is wrong, then you discover just how wrong things are."

That tone will also set the stories that Geralt encounters. "Nobody will be talking about dying a hero’s death. It will be a new world with people behaving a different way, having different problems. On Skellige there will be a guy wondering how to become the fighter that people are singing about. On the no-man’s land they will be thinking about how to survive until the next day, get food. That’s going to be very different."

Novigrad

While Szamalek claims the story will have less emphasis on politics than in The Witcher 2, there is still a place for shadowy manoeuvring. "Another large region is the city of Novigrad, which is based on medieval Amsterdam which has pre-musketeer feel to it, so there’s a political intrigue of cloak and dagger sort of feeling. They don’t worry about food or honour, they want power and gold. This is what motivates them and what makes this environment work.

"It’s not only a city, it’s the surrounding forests, fields and residences of the nobles, of the powerful emergent for Geralt to go to parties and learn about the liberal schemes and so on. Again people will be talking in a different way, they are shaped by a different culture and so on."



Szamalek is clear that this is by no means the full range of environments in the game. "It’s not just a huge world," he says, "but it’s a very diverse world."

And it's a world you can experience in any order. "If you become tired, or bored, you can always go to a different place. What’s exciting about the Witcher 3 main storyline is that it’s not linear structure branching, it’s actually a collection of elements which you have to find, combine and then get a full picture in your head.

"You can follow the main story and wherever you go, you can go to one location, get your hands on the main story, learn certain important facts, but at any point you can go to a different location get the main storyline there and then get back, for example. So there is another layer of non-linearity, and additional variation and I think you can decide how you face the story and which direction you can go.

"Actually the order you can do things influences how you can see them. In an additional play through you can try making different decisions and you can also try doing things in a different order and get a slightly different angle on things. That for me is a unique exciting thing as a story writer as it opens up new possibility for us to tell even more complex stories."

Even if you're not planning to peer inside Malthael mysteriously masked face-hole with Diablo III's Reaper of Souls expansion, the fallen angel's appearance will still have an effect on the base game. Much like World of Warcraft expansions, Reaper of Souls will be pre-empted by a huge "2.0" patch that will overhaul Diablo III in preparation for new items, abilities and areas.

Lead content designer Kevin Martens ran us through the free features of patch 2.0. "You're going to get all the loot, you're going to get all the new item types, you're going to get all the new legendary affixes, you're going to get our new gem type - which is the diamond - and you're going to get all the changes to the rules, the smart drop system, the targeted drop system, probably you'll get loot runs - we haven't figured that one out yet - probably you'll get paragon, etc, etc."

Martens explains the division as being between systemic changes to the game's rules and new content for the player to discover. "All the content is Reaper of Souls, like the act five stuff and the new higher level items, from sixty to seventy - so that level cap increase, which includes the new abilities, the new runes and the new passives for existing classes."

The new loot system is a particularly significant addition. Blizzard told us that it's a way to bring players away from the Auction House, and back to splatting monsters.

InXile have released more footage from the first of their two Kickstarter backed old-school RPG projects. Wasteland 2 is steadily approaching the revised October beta test date, and you can get a solid idea of the progress that's been made with this 20 minute demo of the Prison level. In it, you'll find turn-based combat, Ambiguous™ moral choices, and a goat with unnatural fondness for screaming.

Compare to last February's first demo footage for an idea of how the game is progressing. Project lead Chris Keenan talks about the level in the latest Kickstarter update, stressing that what's shown is merely a third of prison map, which itself is far from the largest level in the game.

If that slice of isometric role-playing is to your liking, non-backers can still make pledges towards the game. The Late Backer Store has a variety of price-points and rewards for those who fancy pre-booking their place in the post-apocalypse.

Hey, you! Do you like Minecraft? Do you like museums? Do you like physical spaces re-imagined as video game reality? If you do, or if like me you haven't really thought about it much, you can see it happen tomorrow at London's Victoria and Albert Museum as part of The World of Minecraft event. You'll find installations and architectural interpretations drawn from the game. Hopefully you won't find any Creepers. They're the last creature you'd want poking around a museum.

The event will feature music, installations, workshops, films, and a talk by Minecraft's lead designer Jens Bergensten. You'll also get the chance to wander around the creativity and fanaticism of the game's community, all packed inside a large building. That includes a series of artwork pieces depicting various YouTubers dressed as their famous mobs, but don't let that put you off. You can find the full and expansive run-down of activities and exhibits at The World of Minecraft event page.

The World of Minecraft will run tomorrow, the 30th August, from 6:30 – 10:00 pm. Entry is free.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified underwent a tumultuous, prolonged development, so it’s understandable that some of its pieces are polished but so few of them fit together. The resulting puzzle-piece jumble is best forgotten in favor of last year’s far-superior XCOM: Enemy Unknown or other recent third-person action games like Mass Effect 3 or Saints Row IV.

Early ’60s America is painstakingly recreated (with the love and attention you’d expect from a studio that worked on BioShock 2) as a golden era in American history, and then obliterated by an all-out alien invasion that only the fledgling XCOM organization can stop. Small-town soda-pop stands and homecoming-parade Americana slam up against infected alien plague sufferers and mutilated livestock. The world-building is top-notch, down to the omnipresent cigarettes and unironic fedoras, and I felt a real sense of outrage at the perversion of these quaint communities.


These humans are stupid
Unfortunately, exploring this gorgeous world is a chore, and the quality of The Bureau spirals downward quickly from the opening moments. As Agent William Carter, you command two other agents as squadmates, similar to combat in the Mass Effect series. Activating Battle Focus (the space bar, by default) slows time and allows you to coordinate movement and special attacks for your team, forcing enemies out of cover and into crossfire.

Friendly squadmates require constant babysitting, though, and I feel like I'm doing all the work. Even when I position my men in flanking positions and provide covering fire, I'm still the one making headshots and racking up kills by a factor of ten to one. During one of my firefights, an alien grenade lands at the feet of an agent. He duck-rolls into the side of the wall he’s been hiding behind, and the grenade goes off at his feet. “I need some healing here!” he yells. I question the caliber of his training.

Overall, the pace of combat feels uneven. Missions routinely throw you into back-to-back firefights, huge brawls with dozens of enemies that leave you short of ammo and barely hanging on, even at lower difficulties. These fights are exhilarating if NPCs actually follow orders, but frustrating when they don’t. Immediately after surviving a beating, though, I often wander through empty farmhouses and deserted streets for long minutes without seeing any enemies or NPCs. A chunk of every level feels artificially vacant, as though it was emptied out at the last minute.


Wasting time
Once outside combat, you’ll spin your wheels back at XCOM's boring headquarters. Unlike Enemy Unknown, there are no autopsies, research facilities, or other meaningful things to do, so your time there quickly becomes tiresome. Interminable dialog trees branch into subjects I don’t care about, like listening to characters squabble with other agents. When I finally receive a mission in the base, it’s a petty quest to scan for infected soldiers that sends me running to the far corners of the bunker to press F once and report back to the head medical officer. The tedium of running through empty hallways slows the game to a crawl.

Even worse, nothing from the HQ segments has a firm relationship with what you do in The Bureau’s missions. In base-world, research director Dr. Heinrich tells me to retrieve alien weapons so they can be studied and reproduced. But in mission-world, I can pick up any alien weapon on the ground and use it immediately, without such study. In the most extreme instance, I find a shiny new pulse rifle and give two more to my squad mates at a resupply crate within seconds—without knowing how it works. What exactly does Dr. Heinrich do for my team?

The Bureau pays lip service to series essentials like permadeath and technology acquisition, but it fails to include these mechanics in the final product in a way that makes sense. But the biggest sin is that the terror and consequence that made me agonize over each and every decision in Enemy Unknown is absent here. The Bureau misses all of the things that make XCOM thematically interesting, and all that’s left is some imposter wearing nicely stitched XCOM clothes.

It's that time again! "That time" being the fateful occasion of a Minecraft update that completely shakes up how its procedural world maps are generated. In addition to introducing new biomes, the upcoming 1.7 patch will include new code that should create more logical climate zones, while doing away with vast, featureless oceans.

The Minecraft blog has given us a look at how terrain is generated now...



And how it will be generated post-1.7...



Unfortunately, it seems like we're losing the realistic continent shapes and land-to-water ratio. But in return, we should have better biome placement and more logical transitions. No more deserts right next to a snowy forest. This has been accomplished by grouping all the biomes into four meta-biomes: snowy, cold, medium, and dry/warm. Among these groupings are three new biome types, including redwood forests, rocky cliffs, and canyons.

1.7 doesn't have a release date yet, but you can read more about it on the Minecraft wiki.

If you enjoy watching live speed runs, tournaments, Let’s Plays, or basically any type of videogame-related streaming, chances are you’re spending some time on Twitch. If that’s the case, you might want to mute that stream that’s running in the background, because the service is getting some major changes to its transcode.

Twitch’s community manager, Jared Rhea, wrote up a handy blog post listing out some of the changes we can expect from the streaming service. For one thing, Twitch is ditching the RTMP format it currently uses for something more modern, all while moving away from Flash.

The transcode labels we’re familiar with (240p, 360p, 720p) are being reworded to “Low,” “Medium,” and “High,” as Twitch argues the resolution labels don’t take details like bitrate or framerate into account. The new labels will roll out sometime next week.

Twitch is also merging the two transcodes it uses for web and mobile into one video network to avoid transcoding a stream twice for different formats. According to the blog post, this will free up resources for Twitch to use on other processes.

It’ll be interesting to see how Twitch evolves over the coming weeks. The number of livestreaming channels seems to grow day by day, and one can only hope the number of technical difficulties drops alongside it.

 

Sony Online Entertainment has announced that it is laying off an unknown number of employees at its Austin and San Diego studios. The veteran MMO publisher best known for the EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, and PlanetSide franchises is currently ramping up on EverQuest Next, and describes the reduction in staff as meant to "strategically align resources" toward current projects.

The official announcement states: "As part of a strategic decision to reduce costs and streamline its workforce, SOE announced today that it will eliminate positions in both its San Diego and Austin studios. This strategic alignment of resources better positions SOE to remain a global leader in online games, as well as to align development resources towards our current portfolio of MMOs and the highly-anticipated future installments of the EverQuest franchise, EverQuest Next Landmark and EverQuest Next."

We've asked SOE for comment on which specific teams and MMOs are affected, and will update this article if we learn more.

Update: We earlier reported on an out-of-date statement regarding the closure of three of Sony's former studios. We apologize for the confusion, as the current round of layoffs only affect Austin and San Diego. It's hard to lay people off from something that no longer exists.

Update 2: We have been told by a trusted source that as many as 200 people may have been laid off, though this figure includes temporary workers. Allegedly, about 100 of these layoffs were from SOE's quality assurance and customer support areas.

Save files are a fickle thing. Sometimes they’re exactly where you need them to be, but more often than not, they’re lost. Gone. Listlessly floating in the ether of your hard drive while caught between various planes of existence. BioWare has realized saves are lost more often than remote controls, and has created the Dragon Age Keep to make your past Dragon Age saves irrelevant.

According to a recent blog post, The Dragon Age Keep is a tool for both new and returning players to choose which actions they made (or would have made) in Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II. You can decide who lived and died, who your previous lovers were, and which roads you took to accomplish the task at hand. All this information is stored in the cloud, allowing people to revisit decisions that left them with a weary heart.

As for those who actually have their saves neatly tucked somewhere in their computer, BioWare was a little more vague, saying it would have more to say about the process in the "months to come."

Those interested in trying out the Dragon Age Keep for themselves can apply for the beta, though the post mentions participants won't cross the drawbridge until early next year.