Like a drunken uncle, CS:GO is going to be offensive this Christmas. It'll be making lewd jokes, swearing incoherently, and... oh, the other kind of offensive? I guess that makes sense. In that case, the Winter Offensive update will bring a new case of weapons skins, a new e-sports crowd-funding case, and - in a limited format - two new maps. All in all, it's not very wintry. But is it offensive?

Valve say they want to make the new maps "as fun and balanced as possible". To that effect, rather than release them to the general public, they're being restricted to community servers and offline play, as well as trialled for a limited through official matchmaking via Operation: Bravo. Here are the new arenas:





As for the seasonal part of this update, Valve explain the gift-giving connection: "The Winter Offensive Update is shipping with three types of gifts for the giving: the Gift Package, which will give a random item to one random player in your match; the Pallet of Presents, which will give random items to up to nine people in your match; and the Audience Participation Parcel, which will give random items to up to 25 viewers watching your match."

Head over to the Winter Offensive micro-site to see the new weapon skins. For more on the new maps, take a look at this post on the CS:GO blog.

Luke Hodorowicz is taking on the monumental (emphasis on mental) task of developing a city-building simulation, Banished, all on his own. He took to Reddit recently with an AMA, which not only shed some light on what his development process is like, but also revealed some new basic details about the game. For starters, Hodorowicz thinks the game will sell for around $20, and hopes for a January release, though this depends on final testing.

He would also like to add Mac and Linux support, and is considering porting the game to other platforms in the future if possible. "I'm used to doing this," Hodorowicz said, "I'm used to writing code that runs on more than one system. Which platforms get supported will depend on power of the systems."

Hodorowicz is also considering adding mod support, but it will not be available when the game launches.

Adding combat to the game, surprisingly, is still a possibility. "I have a design for it, but I'd really need to prototype it before I make a definite decision," Hodorowicz said. "Even if it does get added as an expansion, there will always be a way to play without it. . .sometimes I just want to build without worrying about the town being destroyed." A cooperative mode, on the other hand, is out of the question, with Hodorowicz explaining that the task was just too big.

So far Hodorowicz has put "around 5500 hours" into developing Banished (wow). He says that the Anno games we're a big inspiration, though I get a very strong Settlers vibe from everything I've seen so far.

Be sure to read our interview with Hodorowicz in which he talks about Banished in much more detail.

Square Enix has detailed the new content it added to Final Fantasy XIV in patch 2.1, which is now available to download. Most notably, the patch titled A Realm Awoken adds a new PvP arena, player housing, and The Crystal Tower, a new 24-player dungeon.
Oh, and it also used the opportunity to add a bunch of holiday-themed content to the game with this year's Starlight Celebration, which tasks you with saving a kidnapped snowman.
That, along with even more new quests and locations listed below, is probably where most Final Fantasy XIV players are going to spend countless of hours leveling up and hunting for gear. But what I'm most interested in as a casual observer of Final Fantasy XIV is the fabulous new aesthetician, who arrived in the land of Eorzea to grace players with the latest fashionable haircuts.
Even better, a new Trial in the expansion has players helping Final Fantasy's unbearably cute Moogles as they attempt to resurrect their legendary leader, Good King Moggle Mog XI. Here's a picture of him. Googly moogly, is that adorable or what?
You can even get a quick glimpse at him in the potentially seizure-inducing, 10-minute trailer, which goes over all the major 2.1 additions.


Final Fantasy XIV is yet another example of a game that got off to a bad start so bad that Square Enix had to issue multiple apologies and essentially re-brand it but it has a come a long way since then. The server issues have been addressed, and it has tons of new content and improvements, as exemplified by the full 2.1 patch notes.

Payday 2 continues to crank out content for fans, including this week s Christmas DLC dubbed Charlie Santa Heist which went out free to all players on Monday. To celebrate, Overkill released a surprisingly affecting trailer, assembled from the point of view of a 911 call, cell phone camera footage, and news helicopters.



Developer David Goldfarb confirmed on Twitter that the Christmas heist is a permanent addition to the game, and just this morning publisher 505 Games announced that Payday 2 will continue to get new missions and updates for the next 20 months more content that 505 will pay $6 million to fund.

A special bonus in this video is the scrolling news ticker, hiding such gems as Are silenced grenades now a reality? Scientist Dr. Sandroff thinks research team has it figured out and Game company release free content, internet users furious. Come for the gritty crime horror, stick around for Payday s trademark blend of chaos and winking, anarchist humor.

Players should have received the update in their Steam accounts on Monday. We also spoke to Goldfarb recently about Overkill s plans for its online community.

Mike Donatelli, design director for Carbine's upcoming MMORPG WildStar, isn't exactly your friendly neighborhood developer. The games community could probably use a bit more folks like him. Back during PAX Prime, he tells me, a casual raider complained about how WildStar seemed designed to keep him from getting top-tier gear without joining a 40-man raiding guild. "Then don't play," Donatelli said. "We try to make it open so you dip your toes in and see if you like the game, but sooner or later you're going to have to commit."

It was the kind of thing I'd expect to hear from an MMO developer in 2003; in this age of placating the dispersed and finicky playerbase, such frankness seems all but suicidal. And here's the thing--it wasn't just talk. Obvious displays of affection for the good ol' days of MMOs popped up again and again during a recent hands-on preview I attended in San Francisco, and I can't say I didn't feel a surge of nostalgia myself. But can WildStar succeed with such a design when so many of its competitors are focused on moving away from the old models?

My playthrough took me through the opening tutorial stages for both the Exiles and the Dominion factions and, later, some higher-level dungeon content I'm not allowed to write about yet. It was fun enough, particularly with its brief Pixar-styled cutscenes that occasionally pop up between quests, but the experience nailed home just how little innovation there truly is on the world of Nexus.

Carbine may have switched out specific number requirements for quests in favor of progress bars, but the "kill and fetch" quest was anything but dead on the besieged Exile mothership I battled through. The combat places a heavy emphasis on movement and area-of-effect abilities, yet the animations recalled the tab-targeting of earlier years in spirit if not in practice. Forty-man raids with rep grinds? That only marks the tip of the familiar elements in store here.



Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. According to Donatelli, that familiarity is intentional. "I hate reinventing the wheel for the sake of saying we did something different," he says. He used the auction house as an example, emphasizing his desire to tweak familiar models. "We say, 'This is how auction houses function in many other games, now let's see how we can add searchability to it and ease of use.'"

WildStar occasionally seems to push this philosophy to its extremes, as I can't recall a time when I didn't feel immediately familiar with its systems while playing. Even my time with the new Engineer class comfortably reminded me of my Hunter in World of Warcraft, and I quickly adapted to its idiosyncratic tweaks such as temporary armor and working with two pets at once. WildStar does have its innovative elements, but on the whole it seems content with taking the familiar EverQuest template and updating it with the best tweaks over the years and scrapping the worst.

Normally I leave these events with excitement for some flashy new feature that aims to "change it all," only to feel that excitement fizzle as I jump into the many hours demanded by a full review playthrough. I've thus learned to distrust those feelings, and it's worth noting that I felt no such excitement here. Rather, I left WildStar feeling as though I'd just finished playing a comfortable MMORPG--in other words, the games I tend to come back to after the rush of experiencing some new innovative feature in another game has worn off.



Perhaps Carbine is on to something here. Donatelli himself acknowledges that the WildStar team is more concerned with the evolution of the genre rather than firing off revolutions, even though he says "I hate using those words because I feel like it's such a dodge." After all, the most popular MMO on the market fits that comfortable paradigm, even though it suffers from the accumulation of questionable design decisions over the years. WildStar, however, is starting with a clean slate.

Could this be what we've been looking for all along?

Whenever a new creative sandbox appears, it's only a matter of time before it's compared to Minecraft. Despite the higher polycount, UemuU invites the comparison more than most. At times, it feels like a direct response to Minecraft's limitations as a community building platform; with flexible tools that are geared towards letting creators define, shape and share their ideas.

I spent a year and a half writing mods to try to make how I wanted it to be, and how the majority of people wanted it to be, says UemeU's project lead Jeremy Hindle as he takes me on a tour through the game's creative potential. Certainly there's a lot of influence that comes from it. Not so much directly from the game Minecraft, but from the community that was around it. Given Hindle's experience with Minecraft and its community, it's clear he wants UemeU to be an evolved version of that same construction and consumption of creative content.



If UemeU is the next step for sandbox expression, its expanded toolset does require some getting used to. Rather than individual cubes, you can bring up a list of shapes, then move, rotate or scale those objects in any way you need. A separate "Gizmo" creates a gyroscope-shaped rotation tool inside an object, allowing for an even finer degree of control. In terms of complexity to manipulate, it falls somewhere in between Minecraft and Garry's Mod; but the ability to automatically group and tinker with designs makes it potentially more flexible than either.

Get used to the interface, and it's possible to quickly create some amazing things. As Hindle was running me through the basics, programmer Stathis Aposporis worked quietly in the background of our server. Within half an hour, he'd finished his own creation: a recreation of the first level of Fez, complete with giant cube.



Beyond the basic shape of objects, it's possible to define their colour and material, or deform them into completely new shapes, patterns and groupings. Everything in the world - from whole maps down to custom objects and items - can be saved and, depending on the permissions you define, be loaded, used and further tweaked by the community.

Other options let you change how physics affects an object: whether it has a physical presence in the world, whether it's static or movable, and whether it obeys the laws of gravity. Alternatively, if you don't want to get into the minutia of how an object works, the behaviours menu offers off-the-shelf items - like jump-pads and teleporters - that can aid in the creation of levels.

The upshot of these possibilities is that levels and designs can come together quickly and collaboratively. You can switch between avatar and creative floating god hand with a press of the Tab key, easily letting you drop in and test your designs, or - in multiplayer sessions - allowing certain players to build things as others are playing the level. In our demo, Hindle demonstrated the pathing system by creating a platform under my avatar, then giving it a course to follow whenever I pressed a specific key.



The level options expand out to let creators set lighting and world properties. UemeU's creators are even thinking about a voxel-based terrain system, allowing for the generation of infinite worlds and varied biomes. Overall, it's an impressively powerful tool, and one that's starting to show its potential for those not interested in the creation side of creativity.

In the tradition of the Minecraft community's adventure maps, UemeU wants to fully support the making and playing of what are essentially in-game games: everything from platformers and RPGs, to stealth games and race maps. Creators can even define the permissions of their level - ensuring players can't cheat or reverse engineer their way to victory. Beyond that, the game and its makers are extremely mod friendly, to the point that Hindle assures that they will be actively engaging the community, and implementing many of the ideas and solutions they create.

Right now, UemeU's biggest problem is that its avatar controls are too clunky to support the type of games it could enable. That's a problem its makers are aware of, though, and a full control overhaul is on the way. If that goes well, and the game can attract the right mix of challenge-hungry players and talented, expressive creators, the potential for what it could offer seems almost limitless.

UemeU is now available as an early access alpha.

DayZ hasn't been on Steam Early Access for long, but it's spreading faster than a deadly necrotic infection. According to the big counter on the DayZ site, the multiplayer zombie survival horror game now has 201,514 survivors. It sprang straight to the top of the Steam sales chart minutes after release and, according to a tweet from developer Peter Nespesny, surpassed 150,000 survivors in 24 hours. Oh, and has 34,000 concurrent players on Steam. Blimey.

More then 150,000 survivors in 24 hours after release & 34,235 current players on Steam! #DayZ is going to be #huge! pic.twitter.com/YTDgVI0cxt— Peter Nespesny (@PeterNespesny) December 17, 2013

If you thought that DayZ fervour may have suffered from the long stretch since the release of DayZ mod for Arma 2, nope. It's still an enticing prospect, isn't it? 40 humans and an army of zombies on a huge island, scrambling for survival at each other's expense.

Andy logged in earlier, and found himself confronted by three goons dressed in military gear and wearing clown masks. Armed only with a torch, he was unable to fight back. They handcuffed him, stole his hat and then chased him down with an axe.

Last night I crawled into a village in the dark, scaled the highest point and sat watching the distant torch beams of a dozen other survivors scouring the town and surrounding countryside with their flashlights.

It's certainly an early build, but you can reliably log onto servers now, which is a plus compared to the mod. On the negative side, that ridiculous vaulting animation remains. Evan's been playing it, too, and we'll have detailed impressions up soon. Are you playing DayZ? What do you think so far?

The Just Cause 2 multiplayer mod was released earlier this week, adding multiplayer support to the tropical island of Panau. It instantly became our mod of the week, and we jumped in together at lunchtime to see if we could survive the chaos.

No-one survives the chaos, it turns out, but that's okay, because a barrage of ridiculous things are happening around you all the time. Here are but a few.

Andy grabbed onto someone's chopper and wouldn't let go



The Just Cause 2 multiplayer mod lets you teleport to various checkpoints with a quick chat command. First stop: the airport. We'd played an early beta test of the JC2 multiplayer mod, and already knew that airports tended to be a hotspot. We were not disappointed. The sky was full of spiraling jets and attack choppers trying to shoot each other out of the sky - the perfect opportunity for a spot of trolling.

In Just Cause 2 you can press F to grapple distant vehicles. If you hit a chopper, you'll dangle haphazardly beneath with a gun in your free arm. Normally choppers are piloted by passive NPCs, but in the multiplayer mod they're piloted by angry, angry humans. There's little a chopper can do with an illicit passenger, though. This person wobbled around trying to shake Andy off, and then tried flying low to scrape him against a building, to no avail. Andy was soon killed by stray bullets.

An army of jumbo jets tried to bring down the Mile High Club blimp



Our next stop was the Mile High Club blimp, a party boat suspended high above the archipelago. This place was so manic that we stayed there for the remainder of the hour.

You can't bring down the Mile High Club blimp, but that didn't stop players from trying. We were playing on a pretty lawless server, which means anyone can spawn any weapon or vehicle they wish from a menu. Naturally, players started spawning the biggest planes they could and repeatedly rammed them into the blimp. The blimp withstood the charge and gradually became enclosed in a collection of blackened jumbo corpses.

Tom outran a crashing jumbo jet



The last place you'd want to be during a jumbo jet vs. blimp free-for-all is on the deck of the blimp. It's mostly given over to a snazzy neon bar, but there weren't many drinkers around on account of the risk of being completely squashed. In an accidental moment of dramatic self-preservation, I zip-lined across the deck as one landed behind me. It screeched to a halt a few metres behind me in this picture, taken moments before I was shot by an attack chopper.

People start "dangle jousting" with machineguns



The skies are full of fire in the Just Cause 2 multiplayer mod, in the open server we played on anyway. Some servers require you amass points to purchase weapons, but with hundreds of players, each with their own attack chopper or rocket launcher, our collective hour was incoherent, but wonderfully manic. The carnage was so intense we felt a bit aimless at first, but as soon as you start setting challenges for one another the mod comes to life.

In a savvy move, Avalanche have knocked 80% off Just Cause 2 on Steam. The mod is free, and also on Steam, so there are few barriers if you want to try it out yourself, and I'd certainly recommend it. I'd also recommend turning off the chat with F3 if you do, though. It's a bit of a free-for-all in there.

AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAAnd the next in the expanding Humble catalogue of bundles, sales and miscellaneous offers is the 'PC and Android 8' bundle. It's a scattershot collection of quad-classed games, with each offering fully levelled in Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. For users of Google's mobile platform, it's a great excuse to circumvent the atrocious Google Play store, and be reminded that the system does have some games. For us desktop users, it's another chance to be inundated with cheap indies.



This time, in the pay-what-you-want category, you'll get Little Inferno, Gemini Rue, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome and Jack Lumber. Alternatively, in the pay-what-you-want-as-long-as-what-you-want-is-above-the-average-price category, you'll get all that plus Anomaly 2 and Hero Academy.

It's a relatively strong selection, although I can't speak to the quality of Hero Academy or Jack Lumber. In particular, I'm a big fan of AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome - the expanded and upgraded version of A Reckless Disregard for Gravity. It's both a great twitch-arcade BASE jumping game and a pretty intense Oculus Rift experience. Also, maybe if they get enough money from this thing, they developers will finally finish 1... 2... 3... Kick It.

ALSO! Gemini Rue is an excellent sci-fi adventure, and Little Inferno is a nice bonus, if not a reason to buy the bundle in its own right. The bundle will run for the next (just under) 14 days, and will be expanded with more games "soon".

If nothing else, you've got to admire the Roman work ethic. Want to be adored by the people? Start a war. Want to relieve the boredom of politics? Start a long war. Want to get more glory than a rival? Start a war before them. As shown by this launch trailer for Total War: Rome 2's now available Caesar in Gaul expansion, the new campaign you'll be fighting through is largely being fought because Rome really wanted some more war.

That war is being waged on an expanded map of Gaul and southern Britannia, over a shorter period of time than the main campaign. That leads to a greater focus on the details - with 24 turns per year ensuring seasonal changes can affect your plans.

As for the base game, Creative Assembly continue to release patches in an effort to fix Rome 2's launch problems. The most recent update continues to tweak features and fix usability problems, and the upcoming 8.1 release will focus on AI behaviour.