Here's a trailer that focuses on the Exalt: those covert enemy operatives that Tyler revealed in his XCOM: Enemy Within preview. They're an enemy within, you see. Within the expansion, within your species, and, as your trailer shows, within your own base. While the trailer consists entirely of cutscene, it does suggest that base defence missions could be making a return.



If that is the case, then hurrah, base defence! The original X-Com's alien infiltrations were an excellent way to escalate the danger of the mounting invasion. It's not quite clear how that would work given the new game's multi-level dioramas, but hopefully the engine can cope. I found XCOM: Enemy Unknown frequently buggy when it came to mouse selection during interior battles over multiple floors.

One of the confirmed Exalt interactions involves you sending counter-operatives to infiltrate their own hideouts. For more on this, head over to Tyler's hands-on report, where he takes you through the tactical choices at the heart of the conflict against these enemy cells.

Were you worried that the new Thief wouldn't be a game? Put those fears to rest. As you'll see from this trailer, Garrett has to escape from a burning building, thereby confirming that yes, it will be an interactive video game. Further evidence exists in the fact that this is the first Thief trailer to show footage from the game as it is played. Sure, it's hidden around cutscenes and narrative brooding, but it's there.



Given how much of Eidos Montreal's promotion for the game seems tailored towards positioning it as a desirable sneak-'em-up for people new to the series, it seems like, for more experienced fans, we need the opinion of someone who's played the thing. Fortunately, Tom Senior did just that. To quote one of his thoughts from his time with the game: "hmmm". You can read his other, more eloquent conclusions in his hands-on report.

Thief is due out February 28th, next year.

Judging by their clothes, Exalt might have accidentally wandered out of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

Except in the case of a sitcom gag involving a hilariously awkward two-person costume, covert operatives should generally be of the same species as the enemy if they want to be at all covert. As XCOM: Enemy Unknown is about fighting aliens, and was not filmed in front of a live studio audience, covert operatives never had a place in the earth defense organization—until the human threat was exposed.

The upcoming Enemy Within expansion introduces a "literal enemy within," as Lead Designer Ananda Gupta puts it: a terrorist organization called Exalt with sleeper cells peppered across the globe. The underground group is piggybacking on the alien invasion to seize power from the world's governments, perhaps in hope of becoming the alien puppet government. For us, it means two new mission types against human enemies, and a new strategy layer with a Guess Who-style metagame.

Exalt cells are exposed through intel scans (which cost credits) or when they perform an operation—either a direct attack on XCOM or a propaganda campaign which increases panic. At the outset of my hands-on demo, I discover that Exalt has stolen 376 credits from my coffers, exposing a cell in Egypt. Not much of a take given that their punishment is me violently killing all of them.

Once exposed, an Exalt cell can't operate, but if it isn't infiltrated and destroyed quickly, it will relocate and go back into hiding somewhere else. The first step is to deploy a counter operative, which can can be any soldier except a Heavy, and can only be armed with a pistol. After implanting the agent and letting some time pass, I'm prompted to complete a covert data recovery mission. I could decline and abandon my agent, but I'm not a monster. I'm also not very covert—I'm about to very loudly kill 17 Exalt soldiers.

Exalt reinforcements can include perched snipers.

I put two snipers on my team, because I love snipers, but it feels like a mistake at first. Exalt attacks in big waves, and more grenades and rockets would have created opportunities to splash some damage into groups. Instead, I've got two guys who are good at aiming. But precision is helpful during data recovery missions. It begins with the Encoder, a device across the map which can be hacked by Exalt if they stand within its capture radius for three uncontested turns. Once hacked, the Encoder leads Exalt to the Transmitter. If the Transmitter is captured or destroyed, the mission is over, which means missed shots and irresponsible use of explosives are dangerous.

I'm too timid to save the Encoder—I should have known I'd have a few turns to move across the map before the enemy appeared—but I do manage to wipe out a pack of Exalt soldiers standing in its capture zone, expending one of my two rockets. I fall back to defend the Transmitter, and it looks like I'm in good shape until I'm surrounded by a wave of reinforcements.

I'm terribly outnumbered, but I have two advantages. The first is my operative: In addition to my hand-picked assault team, I can command the counter operative I sent previously. He only has a pistol, but he gets the special ability to hack Exalt comm arrays (if he can get to them), which prevents all Exalt troops from firing during the next turn. When my medic is stuck in the open for a turn while I'm re-positioning her to heal an injured unit, the ability is crucial.

My second advantage is that Exalt's primary goal isn't to wipe out my soldiers. The bad guys' first goal is to reach the capture points, so they'll often give up flanking shots in favor of sprinting toward the Transmitter. They are plenty clever, though, using covering fire on my best sniper and tossing a grenade when I foolishly bunch up three soldiers. Even more frightening are Exalt Heavies—not only can their rockets decimate my entrenched defenders and their cover, a missed shot could take out the Transmitter. Later in the expansion, Exalt Elites will be introduced—I didn't see them, but Gupta teased that the group won't shy away from using genetic modifications.

The new Ghost Grenade stealth-ifies your units.

Near the end of my battle, Exalt units start slipping into the Transmitter capture radius inside the map's central building. I'm just barely holding them back, especially thanks to headshots from my star sniper, who I've backed against a wall. In one harrowing moment, a grenade injures him and destroys his cover, putting an Exalt Heavy in sight, with two other Exalt soldiers standing in the capture point. I can't risk letting the Heavy get a rocket off—never mind that he might turn my sniper to giblets, he might damage the Transmitter—so I ignore the capturing units and take the shot. The sniper is a hero, scoring a hit, but can't finish him off. Miraculously, my second sniper—who's been a bit of a dud the whole battle—hits a low-percent shot from behind a car outside the building and takes the Heavy down. The rest of my troops bring down the capturing units with one turn to go. Safe!

I prefer XCOM's objective missions to the "kill all enemies" missions, and point defense works well. The secondary goal creates more opportunities for clutch moments, heroics, and dramatic sacrifices. The one soldier I lost died to protect the mission, not another soldier, which would have been a tough decision were I playing with my own characters on Ironman mode (no save reloading). I'm also excited for the mystery-solving metagame: After destroying a cell, you'll be given a clue as to which country is harboring the Exalt HQ—e.g. "The HQ is not in Europe"—and after three clues, you can start making accusations. A correct accusation leads to a unique mission to take down Exalt for good, but a false accusation will cause the accused country to withdraw from the XCOM project—it's a dangerous risk, but so is letting Exalt increase panic and interrupt your primary mission.

Along with the already-revealed new locations, mech soldiers, and more, the Exalt subplot gives me confidence that Enemy Within is substantial enough to call me back to world saving duty in November. And Gupta tells me that "even this is not everything" going into the expansion pack. On to the next reveal, then.

As I climbed into the news cockpit this morning, I noticed the familiar flashing of the deep red alert siren. If anything, the warnings were becoming more frequent: a foreboding sign of the future. This time it had been silent for just nine days. Still, that's the life we chose; we knew the risks when we signed up for this job. We knew that periodically - nay, regularly - Star Citizen would make yet another million dollars.

Chris Roberts and his crew have now raised an unprecedented $21 million in crowdfunding for their multiplayer space sim. As Roberts explains, "Your support is now allowing the project to expand on ideas in ways we didn’t originally think possible. Every additional pledge makes Star Citizen a better experience. At the $21 million, you unlock the full salvage mechanic, which allows us to produce the assets needed to make salvaging an in-depth game mechanic akin to exploration or piracy!"

Thanks to the new total, salvaging will be a full career path. Using the flight and FPS elements of the game, you'll search the universe looking for secrets and cargo. The announcement even suggests that you could be the first to make contact with a new alien race.

The Star Citizen team have also announced the $23 million stretch goal: a playable "Xi'an" scout ship that will be unlocked when that total is inevitably hit:

"Xi’an ship design will be focused on a vertical aesthetic and maneuvering jets that can combine to thrust in multiple directions. Gimbaled, larger-than-normal thrusters sit on the four points of a star in the centerline, allowing each thruster unobstructed hemispherical coverage. The Xi’an scout can rotate on all axes and direct four thrusters to the rear or front! Because of this configuration the Xi’an ship has superb linear maneuvering abilities on all axes. This extra maneuverability comes at a cost however. Xi’an ships favor maneuverability over heavy armament or defensive protection."

You can find more details at Star Citizen over at the game's website.

But which animals will we be killing this time?

Far Cry 4 might have been inadvertently outed by Drive/Only God Forgives composer Cliff Martinez. In an interview with the site Lost In The Multiplex, Martinez mentions that his future projects include a "video game called Far Cry 4". Somebody has since broken into that interview, stolen the relevant admission, and sped away into the night like Ryan Gosling in a puffy jacket. Unfortunately for the would-be word robbers, the internet has a built-in time travel machine.



The suggestion that Far Cry 4 is being made really shouldn't surprise anyone. In fact, back in June, Ubisoft's VP of marketing and sales, Tony Key, said that a sequel had been greenlit. Given the commercial success of both Far Cry 3 and its neon '80s-inspired cousin, it seems as if the series is in a much more stable position than it was following Far Cry 2.

It'll be interesting to see what direction a sequel will take, given that, going be past games, Ubisoft can do basically anything and still justify calling it Far Cry. Personally, I'm hoping for at least a small shift back towards the scrappy mess of Far Cry 2. Where Far Cry 3 was an enjoyable and highly polished game, it seemed to lack some of the soul of its predecessor, instead reducing the campaign down to a smooth checklist of actions to be ticked off. What direction would you like to see the series take?

Thanks, Polygon.

The Dark Mod is an excellent Thief-inspired stealth FPS mod from 2009, and so, to an extent, it seems almost inconceivable that any fans of the series won't yet have played it. Of course, that's slightly mitigated by the fact that it was a Thief-inspired stealth FPS mod for Doom 3. It's entirely conceivable that any fans of the series wouldn't have bought that. Running? Gunning? Far too rambunctious. For those shadow-clinging sneaks, there's good news, as version 2.0 of The Dark Mod has been released, turning it into a standalone game.

"We have spent a tremendous amount of time and energy replacing all the sounds, textures, particle effects, and models that we had been using," explain mod creators Broken Glass Studios. "Hopefully this will open up a whole new audience of people who didn’t want to have to purchase a different game in order to try The Dark Mod."

Alongside going standalone, this mod update brings improved audio, graphics and AI behaviour. Many of the missions have also been updated, in response to the game no longer using Doom 3's assets. "Going standalone has been a mammoth undertaking. There were literally hundreds of assets that needed to be replaced, and around seventy maps that had to be checked to see whether any of those replacements broke anything."

For a fuller explanation of The Dark Mod, check out this introductory video:



You can download The Dark Mod for free from the mod/game's website.

The second expansion for Star Wars: The Old Republic has a name and a date. Galactic Starfighter, a free expansion will introduce rail-free space combat to the game for the first time, in the form of 12v12 PvP dogfights. How soon you'll be able to join in depends on your Subscriber/Preferred status in the game.

Subscribers to SWTOR will gain access to the expansion on December 3, followed by Preferred (anyone who has ever been a subscriber or made a purchase in the cash shop) players on January 14, and the scruffy-looking nerf herders that haven't spent money on the game will get it February 4. Everyone will get access at no charge, but non-subscribers will be required to buy a Starfighter Pass from the cartel market to have the same progression opportunities as subscribers.

Player starships will come in multiple classes with multiple roles. The three we know about so far are the light, fast Scout, the offense-heavy Gunship, and the Strike Fighter, which seems to be somewhere in between. You can see previews of each for both Republic and Empire on the expansion's announcement page.

A mere five days ago we saw the launch of a Kickstarter project for City of Titans, the spiritual successor to crime-fighting MMO City of Heroes. Developer Missing Worlds Media has now blown past its funding goal of $320,000 and shows no signs of a significant slowdown. With funds topping $360,000 as of this writing, City of Titans has already unlocked its first stretch goal, an Android port of the Avatar Builder.

In a post thanking Kickstarter backers, City of Titans project lead Chris Hare writes, “It’s going to take a while. We all know that. MMOs take a long time to launch, and we’ll probably slip a deadline or two. We will get other things out to you sooner. Parts, bits and pieces that are fun on their own, that will integrate into the final game. The Character Generator program comes first. Costumes and sliders and backgrounds. Possibly we’ll be able to fit other things into it, but I don’t want to count my chickens before I’ve irradiated their eggs with Kirbonium.”

City of Titans is planned for release in later 2015, so it has a long way to go. The Kickstarter, meanwhile, also has another 26 days on the clock.

It's been two years since Dungeon Defenders' quartet of child heroes saved the color-saturated world of Etheria with a mixture of tower defense and action RPG hacking, slashing and shooting. Since 2011, the Squire, Apprentice, Monk and Huntress have all grown into taller, lankier teenagers. Dungeon Defenders 2's tower defense fusion has grown up with them.

I donned the Apprentice's floppy wizard hat for a preview of Dungeon Defenders 2 with Trendy Entertainment's lead content designer Daniel Haddad and marketing director Philip Asher. The build we played represented only four months of work for Trendy, so it was completely focused on "core mechanics": Building towers and killing a whole bunch of armored orcs and skittering goblins. That focus came with a frank admission from Asher: the action RPG/tower defense combo didn't entirely work in the first game, and they want to do better.

In the first Dungeon Defenders, tower defense was fun. The combat was playable, if a bit mindless. But the two didn't gel at all. The camera would pull up into an awkward overhead perspective when you built towers, which also had to be selected from an equally awkward series of radial pop-up menus (though keyboard shortcuts did help). Aside from building, upgrading, and repairing, there was no interaction between players and towers.



A new trait system is part of Trendy's solution to that separation. In Dungeon Defenders 2, towers, hero equipment, and abilities can be assigned traits--freezing damage, for example--that affect enemies. A new Apprentice tower shoots flames that spread from enemy to enemy; if someone douses those enemies with oil, they'll take much more damage. Frozen enemies can be shattered. The Apprentice can also launch a tornado spell that knocks enemies into the air, where they're bombarded by devastating shots from anti-air towers that would normally ignore them.

Before I tried out the new tower/ability combinations, I spent a few minutes running around our preview map, a small village with multiple entrances, admiring the sequel's new look. Dungeon Defenders 2 is gorgeous. The first game's charmingly garish bloom and heavy black outlines are gone, and the new color palette is more pastel. Other than The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, I can't think of a game that looks more like an honest-to-god cartoon.

Dungeon Defenders 2 feels good, too. Asher said that the developer put a ton of work into improving basic combat mechanics for the sequel, and it shows. For example, in the first game, the young Squire swung his sword back and forth with each click of a mouse button, but there was no finesse or weight to his attacks. The same back-forth animation looped forever as he ran through mobs of enemies dishing out damage without much feedback. Trendy nicknamed it the lawnmower effect.



There's no lawnmowing in Dungeon Defenders 2. The teenaged Squire and Monk now perform attack combos with a series of animations for sword/staff swings. Trendy wants melee combat to be more third-person brawler, less landscaping. The animation improvements extend to the other characters as well; when I held down the right mouse button to charge up the Apprentice's magic shot, he held his staff behind him and then snapped it forward to unleash the blast.

The strategic build phase--planning out tower placement, collecting resources from chests scattered throughout the map, fortifying defenses--remains mostly unchanged. However, Trendy split the first game's currency, mana, into two resources: One for casting hero abilities, and one for constructing, repairing, and upgrading towers.

And here's a big change: There's no longer a limit to the number of towers you can build in a map. According to Asher, the first game's build limit marginalized the strategic choice between building more towers and upgrading them to be more powerful. That will be a common choice in the sequel. Because using abilities is now a big focus of combat, and there are no build limits, both resources feel more valuable.



On top of making combat deeper, Trendy's introducing varied objectives and more opportunities for strategy into the tower defense framework. In the map we played, enemies came through a large set of gates in the middle of the map, while smaller gates let in more enemies from the sides. Where there were once generic Eternia crystals to defend, there are now main objectives and sub-objectives. On this map, the two sub-objectives were locks that opened up more gates for enemies to flow through. During the final round, we made the tactical decision to sell our defenses near the sub-objectives and pull them back to the main gate, which we had to defend at any cost.

Some of Trendy's small improvements do a lot to smooth out their tower defense/action RPG formula. The camera never leaves its behind-the-back perspective, even when placing towers. Building towers mid-combat no longer locks you helplessly in place, as heroes can still move and attack within a small radius as a tower is being built or repaired. Flying enemies now use AI to choose a target instead of beelining for a predetermined Eternia crystal.

Ultimately, the most encouraging thing about Dungeon Defenders 2 is how candidly Trendy's devs talked about the first game's problems. And there were a lot of problems, though they didn't prevent the game from being fun or addicting--according to Steam, I played 112 hours of it. DLC releases were geared towards higher difficulty levels, so players who were away from the game for a few weeks could come back and find themselves hopelessly behind. Loot scaling was so steep, only grinding for hours on the highest difficulties produced the best gear.

Every issue I could think of Asher admitted to, or even brought up first. Trendy Entertainment has gone through some adolescent growing pains of its own over the past year; when the developer first announced Dungeon Defenders 2 back in March, it was confusingly divided into a cooperative tower defense like the original, to be released at some point in the future, and a MOBA, which went into beta in the spring. The two would share characters and, supposedly, some form of progression.



But the MOBA was a dud, and Asher admitted that the studio grew so quickly after Dungeon Defenders' success, they ended up chasing the MOBA genre's popularity and making a game no one in the studio really wanted to make. So they scrapped it--all of it, with the exception of their new teenage hero character designs--and started over.

From what I played, I can't say how Dungeon Defenders 2 will improve upon the original's loot mechanics or character progression, or how well Trendy will vary its stages with creative objectives. Those are the elements that will make Dungeon Defenders 2 a 200-hour addiction instead of another 20-hour tower defense game.

Trendy is at least saying all the right things. Traits applied to weapons will affect how attacks animate and injure enemies. An ability hotbar at the bottom of the screen is the only hint of MOBA design in the cooperative mode, and each character will supposedly have multiple abilities to fill out that bar--there could be some very cool tower/attack combinations if they deliver on this front. Lead content designer Daniel Haddad talked about a metagame that would organize the community into taking on challenges together to push the Dungeon Defenders 2 story forward. Campaign missions will not be selected via a boring menu, this time around.



There's still one big wildcard left: How Trendy will implement F2P monetization into their game. Asher was adamant that the core gameplay would be there even if you didn't spend a dime. The good news is that Trendy plans to launch Dungeon Defenders 2 in open beta in the first quarter of 2014 and let fans influence the F2P structure. There will definitely be heroes beyond the core four, but how many, and how much will they cost? Until the beta launches it's too soon to say.

One thing's for sure: Dungeon Defenders 2 will still come packing a challenge. Haddad casually mentioned that the build we were playing was easier than the final game, since all of our objectives returned to full health between waves. We still lost on the last wave, to the final three enemies, who hammered our main gate into submission before we could deliver the killing blows. I left the demo thinking about how we could've set up our defenses more efficiently. Next time, I'll be ready.

Valve has revealed the specs for the Steam Machines prototypes. Evan, Tyler, Cory, and T.J. weigh in on the implications. Plus: Mongols racing F1 cars, gobbleshaft transplants, the Battlefield 4 beta, and callbacks to the bizarre world of early '90s television.

Accept no substitute for PC Gamer Podcast 364 - Doogie Don't Care!

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