Early Access reviews offer our preliminary verdicts on in-development games. We may follow up this unscored review with a final, scored review in the future.

Hexagons have never looked this good. Endless Legend paints a watercolor fantasy across its 4X strategy grid, and the pieces that fill those hexagons distinct warring factions, indigenous races, fire trees and magical orbs and mysterious ruins build a rich and deeply complex game world. Complexity is typically expected from 4X strategy games, but playing them before they're complete is not. And Endless Legend is definitely not complete.

I started playing Endless Legend after a beta update added multiplayer support, two factions (six of the final eight are now playable) and other improvements. It felt like the right time to jump in, and I was pleased by the stability of the private multiplayer a couple hours into the campaign. It was easy for my friend, who hosted our multiplayer match, to load a save file and get us back into a campaign. We didn't hit any desync or lag issues in our game. Instead, we ran into a different snag: we barely knew what to do.

Both of us played Endless Space, Amplitude Studios' last 4X game. Endless Legend carries over identical UI elements and mechanics: resources like food, dust (money), science (tech tree research), and industry (construction). I recognized the resources, but at the start had little indication where I should found my starting city, how to expand, or what to do as I slowly collected resources. It's not that I wanted the game to hold my hand through everything there was no way for me to acquire the information I needed. Legend doesn't have a single line of tutorial text in place yet, and without tutorials the tooltips are often frustratingly vague.

Quests add storylines to the sandbox landscape.

Endless Legend looks like a scaled-back Civilization 5, but it layers narrative atop its sandbox with RPG-esque sidequests and faction quests. Those quests did help guide me through the early turns, though again, vague tooltips sometimes made the quest conditions confusing. The sidequests are randomized, but I'm concerned that each faction's primary quest, which doesn't seem to vary game-to-game, will make repeated playthroughs with the same faction feel more same-y, less sandbox-y.

Amplitude also added equipment for its hero characters, who can lead armies into combat or govern cities to boost resource production. Buying and equipping gear can have a huge effect on a hero's efficacy in combat, but there are so many items (and so many underexplained symbols pertaining to combat) that I didn't know what to buy. I ended up ignoring the system until late in the game, when I was flush with resources.

The quest system and Endless Legend's beautiful world map make exploration fun, but the other Xs expansion, exploitation, and extermination left me bored for the first 10 hours of the game. I felt like I was doing everything wrong, early game, because it took so long to do anything. Every construction project took multiple turns. Troops plodded across the map. Resources came in at a trickle.

I eventually got the hang of expansion, remembering from Endless Space that I could allocate my population to specific tasks to speed up food production or research or construction. Expansion and troop movement got better, too, but mistakes early game can saddle you with damaging low approval ratings that slow production. My population was constantly angry at me for conquering new regions and growing my empire. And I didn't know there was a "right" way to expand cities: surrounding the central hub with districts, which levels them up and makes the population happy. I naturally snaked my cities outwards towards the most valuable resources, permanently damaging my approval ratings by having sprawling, low-level cities.

I spent most of my time in combat watching the AI make poor pathing decisions.

Most of my frustrations can be solved with tutorials and tooltips that explain how systems work. Legend's combat system is a bigger problem. It's about macro level decisions instead of unit micromanagement, which sounds fine. In practice, after telling my units which enemies to attack, I never knew where they were going to move. Melee units often took inefficient paths and took multiple turns to reach enemies, exposing them to more ranged attacks. Ranged units don't have clearly marked attack radiuses. Combat is automated to the point where I barely felt like I had control, and the control I did have was never interesting or tactical.

Around turn 70, Endless Legend began crashing on me every every turn. I tested the same save file on my home and work computers to figure out why. Both computers run AMD graphics cards. When I moved the save file to a computer with an Nvidia card, it didn't crash again, though I experienced a couple non-game breaking error messages and a sidequest that showed a string of code instead of text. For an alpha, those are minor issues, but the driver problems with AMD cards made the game unplayable for me on two computers. If you're on AMD, absolutely don't buy Endless Legend on Early Access.

Beta woes: this quest didn't load properly.

After a couple hundred turns, I was able to sweep two AI enemies off the map with three armies. I was allied with the final AI player, but my domination didn't trigger a military victory. Endless Legend's final two research trees aren't in place yet, so I couldn't win through science. I also couldn't find any sign of economic or political victories. I'm sure those will all be present in the final game. But in early access, my campaign ended with a shrug.
Verdict
I love Endless Legend's gorgeous art direction and RPG elements, but the complete lack of tutorials, sometimes-vague tooltips and shallow combat are all problems for a complex 4X game. I'd recommend waiting for the final release unless you love providing beta feedback on game balance.
Outlook
OK. When Amplitude releases the final version of Endless Legend, I expect tutorials and a completed endgame will solve most of the issues I experienced. If combat remains unchanged, it will be the weakest of the four Xs.
Details
Version reviewed: July 3, 2014 beta update
Reviewed on: 3.5 GHz Intel Core i7 X990, AMD R9 290X, 8GB RAM
Recommended: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.50Ghz, 4GB RAM, nVidia Geforce 460 1GB or ATI Radeon HD 6850 1GB
Price: $31.50/ 24.30
Publisher: Iceberg Interactive
Developer: Amplitude Studios
Multiplayer: 4 player online
Link: http://store.steampowered.com/app/289130

Yesterday, I wrote that I'm disappointed by Cult of the Wind not because it's a bad game, but because I can't play it to find out if it's a good game. It runs fine, but I didn't see anyone in the single official server all day. I was surprised: Cult of the Wind generated a lot of excitement on Steam Greenlight, so where are all the players? In an e-mail correspondence, creator Alex Allen tells me he's also surprised, and expresses concern about the effects of Greenlight and Early Access.

"Greenlight, surprisingly, wasn't challenging," writes Allen. "Maybe that's the problem it's too easy. In fact, Cult of the Wind was well on its way to the top five and was, briefly, the fastest Greenlit game of all time at 72 hours. I spoke with my Valve rep and he said they had their eye on it, and that it seemed 'really solid.' The trailer has 120,000 views on YouTube, and before being Greenlit over a dozen articles were written about the game.

"It was a surprise when all that hype amounted to nothing, especially considering my last game, Omegalodon, had a very slow-trickle release and little publicity yet saw considerably more success thanks to a single YouTube video by NerdCubed. Maybe people viewed CotW as a trailer-worthy novelty, but not much more. Many comments contain sentiments that it 'doesn't seem' like something you could play for long, but those who have actually tried it are begging for more people to join them. I designed it for a community and it can certainly support one long-term."

After Greenlight, Cult of the Wind was briefly available in Steam's Early Access section. Allen isn't sure if Early Access is to blame, but he's worried about how it might have affected perception.

" supplies connotations of 'joke games' that are never finished," writes Allen. "But I updated the game religiously throughout. It's difficult to please the crowd when they're so divided gamers lament the Minecraft-style work-in-progress release method while simultaneously asking for regular updates to finished titles. I'm not sure how you can have both."

Allen isn't giving up. He plans on "doing the usual" to attract more players by advertising and lowering the price. He's already tried to knock Cult of the Wind down to $10, but says Valve wouldn't let him he suspects because it was shortly after the Steam Summer Sale, which "would be seen as a bait-and-switch." He'll try again soon.

In the meantime, Allen says his concerns with Greenlight and Early Access aren't a cop out, and he'll maintain Cult of the Wind as he has been. "Either way, it's my responsibility and I don't want anyone to think I'm looking for a scapegoat," he writes. "I'll continue running the dedicated server and providing updates as needed, even if it's only for a handful of players per week."

Every Friday we gaze into the PC Gamer palant r and seek out the key moments of the past week, both good and bad. These are those

THE HIGHS

Cory: We re doomed, again
id Software finally finally! showed off the new version of Doom Thursday night at QuakeCon 2014 (running on a PC, natch), and it sounds exactly like what I want from the franchise. Ian s eyes-on report described some vicious, frantic combat with lots of demons. Massive weapons will return, and there are even some welcome changes, like more verticality. Double-jumps and jetpacks? Hell yes. Doom s new engine, id Tech 6, looked fantastic as well, according to Ian. Here s hoping it feels smoother than id Tech 5 does in Wolfenstein: The New Order. I m ready for more Doom it was my first love on the PC, and it s a franchise I m dying to see return to glory.

Ben Griffin: Through the 4K looking glass
My eyes are stinging as I write this because I've been up all night trying to make Braid work at 4K. Any irreversible vision damage will be totally worth it, though, because with tears currently rolling down my cheeks I'm happy to confirm we have resolution lift off. I tend to spend more time taking pictures of games than playing them these days, and that's because I've found SRWE. Better known to its friends as simple runtime window editor, it essentially lets me run any game at any resolution. I simply boot up my chosen game in window mode, enter my desired width and height in the programme, and like a particularly nerdy magic trick, it becomes that size in realtime. From there it's a matter of pressing print screen, copying the file into paint, and saving it as a mahoosive 4K png.

Whereas before my options were limited to blockbusters with built-in 4K support games like Elite: Dangerous and Project CARS now I snap anything, from Fez to Phantasmagoria. Want to see Clive Barker's Jericho in 3840x2160p? Give me an evening and some eye drops. Thanks, wizards of the Internet.



Evan Lahti: Counter-Strike should GO for it as an e-sport
I passed the 500-hour mark in CS:GO this week, and I couldn t be more excited about the possibility of a massive, International-style tournament for the game, as one Valve employee hinted at the possibility of. One of the reasons it s been tough, historically, for FPS games to gain traction as e-sports is that the perspective they re played from, unlike lane-pushers such as Dota 2, doesn t provide an omniscient spectating experience. If any game in recent history has a real shot at it, though, it s GO. The current tournament CS:GO scene isn t bad, but it d obviously benefit from Valve s direct involvement and investment. Oceanic Qualifiers leading up to the ESL Championship in Cologne start tomorrow.

Tyler Wilde: Dota 2 on ESPN 3
The International is being shown on ESPN 3. I ve never done more than timidly dip my toes into Dota 2 (we leave the deep end to Chris Thursten, who explained everything we need to know about the tournament), but I love this news. OK, sure, ESPN 3 is the sports network s online streaming service, not a cable television channel, but Valve cozying up to a global sports network is a big deal. I want to be clear about why, though. It s not about elevating e-sports or being legitimized by outsiders we don t need to see ourselves as underdogs trying to gain exposure among mainstream sports. It s a big deal because it might expose more eyeballs to something really cool, and I hope it makes them curious. And maybe soon I ll be ragging on ESPN s Counter-Strike commentators while gesturing at the TV with a pint of beer, and not just all their baseball commentators.



Andy Kelly: Minecraft x DayZ = Indie breakout
This week a survival game called Unturned became the fourth most-played game on Steam, toppling giants like Skyrim and Football Manager and it was developed by a teenager. It s a remarkable story, and the kind you only find in PC gaming. The game isn t particularly imaginative or inspiring a DayZ clone with Minecraft visuals but I love that developer Nelson Sexton was able to make a game in his spare time in Unity and become one of Steam s big hitters. A large community is growing around the game, with Twitch streams attracting thousands of viewers, and I expect its popularity to grow rapidly over the coming months. It helps, of course, that the game is free, with the option to spend $5 on a gold upgrade. I m no fan of the free-to-play model, but if Sexton is making a tidy profit from it, more power to him. There s no shortage of inspiring indie success stories, but this is one of the best. You can read my Early Access review of Unturned here.

Wes Fenlon: Different ways to skin an FPS
Nothing I've seen from Battlefield Hardline has interested me so far. I gave Battlefield 3 a shot and had some fun squadding up with friends, but I spent far too much time trudging across oversized maps or being sniped from someone perched on a rock half a mile away. Hardline was an opportunity to do something really creative and asymmetrical with cops and robbers, but it just looks like a skinned BF4. I'm pleasantly surprised, then, that Visceral seems to be taking some of the community's criticism to heart. The devs are toning down explosions, adding more interactive elements to environments, and even tweaking the HUD to distinguish it from BF4. Hardline may well be a reskinned Battlefield, but at least it's going to be thoroughly reskinned.





THE LOWS

Evan: Yog's game goes down the tubes
The failure of any crowdfunded project high-profile or not is depressing because it erodes the trust for Kickstarter and similar platforms in general. It makes it more difficult, even for a time, for legitimate projects to get the support they deserve. Yogventures, the collaboration between Winterkewl Games and YouTube group Yogscast, was officially cancelled this week after two years of meager updates and a beta period that the game never fully escaped from.

With hindsight, we can see that the original KS pitch made lofty, sweeping promises about the scope of the game: You'll have control over everything from buildings and dungeons to the NPCs and mobs. Yogventures will be the ultimate modder's game where even the rules of winning and losing can be tweaked. Think adventure maps in Minecraft, only now you aren t limited to just blocks! The 2012 pitch didn t, of course, mention that this would be Winterkewl s first game, instead describing the studio as a team of talented indie developers based in and around Hollywood, California. Their artists and programmers are long-time veterans of film and game companies - working at the highest levels of production.

Backers threw $567,665 at Yogventures, and now they re getting TUG as an apology. What s maybe most upsetting, though, is the lack of responsibility taken by Yogscast. "As you may have heard, Winterkewl Games have stopped work on Yogventures but this is actually a good thing, Yogscast co-founder said in an email to the game s backers. Although we're under no obligation to do anything, instead we're going to do our best to make this right, and make you really glad you backed the project!" Except it may not be quite so clear cut judging from Gamasutra s interesting investigation into who s legally culpable for the Kickstarter s failure.

Tyler Wilde: Where s the rest of the cult?
Cult of the Wind was rushed through the Steam Greenlight process by eager voters who, like me, loved the idea of human dogfights. It launched in Early Access not long after it was greenlit, then left Early Access for full release a few weeks ago because the developer wanted to shake off the Early Access stigma. Regardless of how it came about, it s released, and on sale, and I thought I d find out if it s as fun as it looked back on Greenlight. It might be! I wouldn t know: I spent an hour yesterday sitting in the only official server, alone. There s no one playing Cult of the Wind, or if they are, it must be organized anyone who buys the game now and jumps in expecting to find a full server will be disappointed. I followed up with the creator, and today he shared a few thoughts on the Greenlight and Early Access process.



Cory Banks: Scammers force Riot to react
One of the coolest parts of League of Legends especially for a guy like me who rushes towers way too early is the huge assortment of skins available. There have always been a lot of codes floating around for these new looks, especially as promos for fan conventions and whatnot. But scammers tend to gobble these up, charging jacked up prices for codes they may not even deliver on. In response, Riot has deactivated all skin codes, effectively killing the secondary market. That in itself isn t bad it s Riot s right, after all but it sucks to see code scalpers ruining a good thing. I ve watched crowds of young kids swarm at PAX East for a hot new skin, and it s a cool thing for Riot to give away. If that s going away because a few people thought they could make a quick buck, it s a shame.

Andy Kelly: Survey scepticism
I love Mass Effect, and I m worried BioWare will screw it up. There, I said it. They probably won t, but that s the kind of paranoia that comes with loving a series. This week the studio ran a survey asking fans what they want from the next game, and this concerns me. One of the biggest mistakes BioWare ever made was pandering to the mob and fixing the ending of Mass Effect 3. That showed a disappointing lack of faith in their own writers, and they should have had the conviction to say no, this is the ending, and you can like it or sod off. I don t want BioWare to ask people what Mass Effect 4 should be: I want them to decide what it should be. I want them to have a clear vision and realise it. The worst-case scenario is that the new game will be an endless parade of wink-at-the-screen callbacks and have no personality of its own. Don t ruin Mass Effect, BioWare.



Wes Fenlon: Gaiman's game proves too wayward
When I heard that Neil Gaiman wrote Wayward Manor, I didn't have high hopes a great game written by one of my favorite authors sounded too good to be true. Chris Livingston's review confirms that the game is, sadly, not much good, but the real bummer is that Wayward Manor was developed by the team behind The Misadventures Of P.B. Winterbottom. I adored Winterbottom it was endlessly clever and funny and had a lyrical quality to its writing that felt very Gaiman. Winterbottom was such a fantastic puzzle game. What went wrong?

Ben Griffin: Conventional balls up
The week's various cooked-up controversies did their darndest to make my already tired eyes twitch, but when I read about the Dashcon, the now legendarily panhandled fan-directed Tumblr convention that Silly Walked into Illinois on July 11, my overriding emotion was empathy. The organisers were clearly in over their heads. They probably went to a few cons in the past and thought, ''Hey, this looks pretty easy. Let's rent out a 500-room hotel. What could possibly go wrong?" Everything, as it turns out.

Don't get me wrong, I feel for the special guests who weren't paid their fees. I feel for the hundreds of attendees pressured into donating on day one in order to keep the show running, and who were offered a paltry hour in a ball pit as compensation. (At least give them two you monsters!) But at least they had a go, and I hope they learned something from the episode. Try again next year, guys, but do it in a basement.

The space combat sim EVE: Valkyrie is a particularly exciting addition to the genre because it's being built from the ground-up to use the Oculus Rift VR headset. Assuming it lives up to the hype, that will make it one of the most uniquely immersive gaming experiences available, as players will have complete freedom of view through their cockpit windows as they yank-and-bank across the galaxy. But despite that great potential, executive producer Owen O'Brien doesn't believe it will herald a new generation of similarly engaging FPSes.

"Virtual reality for everything!" may well be where the videogame industry ends up, but it's got a long way to go to get there, according to O'Brien. The trouble is that while VR headsets bring your eyes into a virtual world, the rest of your body is stuck in the real one.

"The basic problem is Simulator Sickness. In Valkyrie or any cockpit game or driving game, what you're doing in the real world, assuming you're sitting down, more or less mimics what your brain is telling you you're doing in the game. So you don't get that disconnect, and it's that disconnect that causes sickness," he said in an interview with Red Bull. "The problem with first-person shooters is that you're running or crouching or jumping in the game but not in the real world, and because it's so realistic it can make some people (not everybody) feel nauseated if they start doing it for extended periods of time."

The other problem, he continued, is that gamers are "kind of hard-wired" to the idea of looking, moving and shooting in the same direction at the same time. "None of this is unsolvable these are just the challenges ," he said. "And it's not just FPSes: It's anywhere where you're doing something in the game that deviates dramatically from what your body is telling you you're doing."

A more detailed breakdown of "simulator sickness" is available on Wikipedia, which describes it as a sort of reverse motion sickness caused by "perceived discrepancies between the motion of the simulator and that of the vehicle," or, in the case of FPSes, the individual. Piling on more peripherals could help eliminate the perceptual gap but of course that would add complexity and expense, too. O'Brien said he's "sure there's an interesting solution that nobody's thought of yet," but until someone figures out what it is, VR shooters will remain a long way off.

Speaking to PC Gamer about yesterday s Doom reveal at QuakeCon, Bethesda Softworks VP of PR and Marketing Pete Hines explained that the livestream cut out because Doom isn t ready for a formal announcement." Only QuakeCon attendees in the room were allowed to see the gameplay demonstration, and unless video of it leaks, we probably won t see anything else about Doom until next year.

"I try really, really hard for this to be a dev first, dev-lead thing," said Hines, and id Software isn't ready for a worldwide reveal of Doom. "We re working with them to say, How does this work? What do we want to show? And they re like, Look, we don t want a stream to go up for a game that isn t at the point where we would formally show it to the world, and now that thing is getting picked apart, and digested, and gone through frame-by-frame and getting nitpicked to death, when normally we wouldn t be showing this to anybody at all.

If it normally wouldn t be shown to anybody, why show it at all? Aside from not wanting yet another QuakeCon without Doom, Hines says he wanted to quell doubts about Doom and the id Software team, which bothered the hell out of him. At the same time, he didn't want to "deal with the repercussions" of a formal announcement, which would come with too many expectations.

"I really wanted to put something out there that, in a strong way, said, id is working on something that we think is really cool, " said Hines. "And we wanted ... to show something to that gives them the confidence that it is still a viable studio that s doing really cool stuff, that is making a game you want to play, and is treating Doom with the care and respect that you want.

"And now we re going to go away and go back to making the game, but to be able to counter other people talking about us and we re sort of just sitting here staying silent, or operating from this negative space of like, Oh, it got rebooted, oh it s in trouble. All of that stuff just bothered the hell out of me."

As for the fans who couldn t make it to QuakeCon, Hines says there was no perfect version for the reveal. Trying to get Doom ready to bring a bunch of press guys in would have meant missing QuakeCon again. The private showing was a compromise: id Software earns renewed confidence, QuakeCon attendees aren't disappointed, and Bethesda can go back to being quiet about Doom until it's ready.

Next year is normally when I think we would ve started, said Hines, so Doom will likely be revealed publicly then. He went on to express that plans can change, and it s even possible he ll be asked to post the stream, but then clarified, I don t think there s any way that happens. 2015 it is.

Ian Birnbaum contributed to this story.

What have they done? For years the Duels of the Planeswalker series has produced limited but satisfactory versions of the classic card duelling game, Magic: The Gathering. The ballooning success of Hearthstone makes this a great time to introduce new players to the complex, highly competitive king of the genre. Instead we get Magic 2015, a clunky, under-featured sequel compromised by microtransactions.

The underlying Magic: The Gathering ruleset is still great. As a wizard, you summon monsters to engage in proxy combat with other wizards. Each turn, you place land cards that serve as resources for spells, summons and enchantments, and must use them to disassemble your opponent's fantasy zoo of zombies, drakes, horse-fishes and centaurs to strike directly at their 20-point damage pool.

Cards are divided into five colours, which represent elemental and mechanical themes. Black death cards steal life and curse enemy creatures, holy white cards summon angels and heal you. Red cards zap your opponent's life-pool with bolts of lightning and fire. Magic: The Gathering lets you merge these colours into hybrid decks that allow for an extraordinary range of builds and strategies. Magic 2015 locks that potential away behind a huge grind, which you can pay money to circumvent.

Formerly, you'd beat bosses to unlock themed decks to play with, that you could then tweak with additional cards. In 2015 the game locks you into playing with a hybrid starter deck after the tutorial. As you progress through the campaign linear strings of AI battles divided into five 'planes' you receive booster packs that slowly grow your card collection. Eventually, you'll have enough to enter the deck creator and build something new.

This is overkill, but that Hydra had it coming.

The deck builder allows for an encouraging amount of customisation and, theoretically, a level of freedom that the series has never quite offered before, but amassing enough cards to make interesting use of it takes far too long. Each section of the campaign has a 'explore' option that lets you play apparently endless AI battles to win booster packs. Expect to use this a lot, and expect to unwrap boosters full of duplicates, weak cards, and cards of a colour you don't necessarily want.

The format removes any sense of satisfying progression from the campaign, and seems designed to push players into picking up card collections, for 3 / $5 per plane, or 14 / $24 for the whole bunch. In addition, there's a special range of cards included in Magic 2015's 'premium' booster packs, sold at 1.50 / $2.50 a pop. These include "10 powerful cards" which you can use in single player and multiplayer. If you want full access to the variety and depth of Magic 2015's card pool, you'll need to put up a lot more than the 7 / $10 initial price to get it.

And then there's the state of the game itself. Menu screens hiccup during long transitions between pages. In matches, button-clicks sometimes go unregistered, the 'continue' button has frozen up in multiplayer, mid-match, forcing me to concede. Cards hover ponderously over the bland new game board, which still positions the play-space miles from your view, rendering card titles and artwork unreadable without regular zooming. It's still Magic: The Gathering underneath, so occasionally I'll have fun buffing a zombie with angel wings and punching the enemy to within an inch of death, but the quality of Magic's systems struggle against this implementation, and these annoyances are only compounded by the weakness of the starting deck you're given. It's a slog.

No thanks.

A few of these presentation problems have dogged the Planeswalker series for years, and the pauses between each phase of play are necessary to allow opponents to interrupt the action with Magic: The Gathering's 'instant' cards, but where have all the game modes gone? Three and four-player free-for-all games are included but The competitive team mode Two-Headed Giant is nowhere to be found, Sealed play from 2014 has also been thrown out, and there's no replacement or iteration on 2013's Planechase mode or 2012's team vs. boss Archenemy mode.

At best it's a frustrating, poorly paced experience with fewer features than its predecessors, at worst, Magic 2015 is a cynical redesign that wants to suck more money out of players. As such, I'm unable to recommend Magic 2015 to anyone at all. If you want to play Magic, any edition prior to this one is more fun. If you're looking for some satisfying competitive card-duelling, you'll get oodles more out of Hearthstone without paying any money at all.

Details
Expect to pay: $10/ 7 for the base game, $24/ 14 to instantly unlock single player cards, more for premium boosters beyond that.
Release: Out now
Developer: Stainless Games
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Multiplayer: 2-4 players online
Link: Magic 2015: Duels of the Planeswalkers

Tiago Sousa, a longtime Crytek employee who served as the R&D Principal Graphics Engineer in the company's Frankfurt studio, has announced that he's left the company to become the Lead Rendering Programmer at Doom developer id Software.

The stories of trouble at Crytek have been persistent but unverified, and it's impossible to know to what extent Sousa's move to id Software is connected to it, if at all. But at least his departure is confirmed.

Happy to announce i'll be helping the amazingly talented id Software team with Doom and idTech 6. Very excited :)— Tiago Sousa (@idSoftwareTiago) July 18, 2014


Sousa has been with Crytek since the original Far Cry and has been the Principal Graphics Engineer on the Frankfurt R&D team since Crysis 2. That may not be the most glamorous development job ever, but given Crytek's well-deserved reputation for developing cutting-edge game engines, it's hardly insignificant. Sousa's move is good news for id and anyone looking forward to big things from Doom (and, maybe someday, Quake), but for Crytek, it has to hurt.

Released yesterday to commemorate the start of QuakeCon 2014, the Quake 4 mod False Dawn is a non-linear, multiple-goal mission with up-to-date graphics, overhauled health and damage systems and even a story that actually has some meat on the bone.

I can't vouch for any of these claims because I haven't actually played it, but False Dawn does sound promising. It takes place an unspecified number of years after Quake 4 and puts players in the role of a Stroggified Marine, perhaps not the most creative twist ever but presumably necessary to the story, which involves intercepting Strogg communications as a significant plot device.

False Dawn updates its visual elements through the use of the Sikkmod and also offers original, if maybe a bit dodgy, voice acting. More intriguingly, it promises a "meaningful story" about a plot to destroy humanity "that is not as black and white as it may first appear."

The trailer playing above was actually released in December 2012 so how much similarity there is to the final release is hard to say, but it looks pretty cool anyway and, more the point, the developers haven't seen fit to release a newer one. There are an estimated 90 to 120 minutes of fresh Strogg-shooting action in the mod, which of course requires Quake 4 to play, and while that's not a huge amount of gameplay, it's free, and it's not like you're at QuakeCon, right? Pick it up at ModDB.com.

Rainbow Six Siege looked incredible at E3 good enough to be our favorite game of the show. Awkwardly, though, the footage that Ubisoft had released of the game was pretty choreographed to showcase mechanics and features. That was the case until yesterday, when Ubisoft livestreamed two matches of Rainbow Six Siege the same demo I played at E3. It was the first live, public demonstration of the multiplayer shooter.

No new information was revealed (other than the tiny detail that players can simultaneously kill one another in the current build, which is interesting to me as a CS:GO player), but the footage, ripped to the YouTube channel above, certainly serves as a more accurate representation of gameplay. Check out our hands-on and this interview for more hard details on the game's systems and design.

In response to an open letter written by a group of developers and "concerned citizens" criticizing the company for its inconsistent handling of security issues on Steam, Valve has created a new security web page explaining its processes for handling reports but says there are no plans to introduce a "bug bounty program."

The letter begins by noting that Valve does not have a formalized system for rewarding bug reports, but will instead sometimes offer "rare economy items" to people who dig them up. It states that this is actually more harmful to the system than helpful, as it encourages casual players to report "questionable or entirely fabricated" bugs in the hopes of getting a new Team Fortress 2 hat, while minimizing interest among serious security researchers.

It also expresses concern over the lack of a clear system for reporting issues, and how Valve acknowledges and acts on those reports. Citing the Heartbleed bug, it says Valve took 24 hours to patch its servers, an unacceptable amount of time for a company "whose systems process sensitive data for millions of customers and partners." It also noted that Valve did not require password changes for all users, which led to further trouble a few days later and proved that Steam Partner credentials were "exposed and abused" as a result of the flaw.

Even so, "Valve have never made an announcement to partners or customers with regards to what data may have been exposed via Heartbleed," the letter states. "We believe Valve's response to Heartbleed was and remains unsatisfactory."

"We believe Valve are putting themselves, their customers, and their partners at risk by not having a well defined bug bounty policy; not having any clear instructions on how users can report bugs; and not being transparent with the various parties involved when serious bugs arise," the letter concludes. "We re all fans of Valve, and our ultimate goal is not to be an inconvenience, but to help make Valve s products and customers more secure."

In a response posted yesterday, Valve said it takes Steam security "very seriously" and believes its system is robust, but acknowledged that it hasn't always been entirely open about how it handles things. The new security page is meant to address that shortcoming by providing a clear method for reporting bugs encrypted, if necessary and a promise that all such reports will be acknowledged.

It also revealed that the inconsistency in its handling of bug reports in the past is the result of different teams within the company handling them individually and in different ways. "For Steam we have chosen to thankfully accept reports but otherwise offer no formal incentives," it says. "Other teams, in particular the Team Fortress 2 team, have slightly different processes and have chosen to offer small rewards for certain valuable reports."

Valve also emphasized that while its policy is not to "ban or admonish" people who report bugs or security flaws, it will take steps to protect its users from abuse of the system. "In cases where we determine someone to be causing harm we may take action to prevent further abuse," it wrote. "We expect partners and security researchers to be careful and responsible in both their research and disclosure of issues and when that happens we work closely with them and encourage their work."

It brings to mind the tale of Euro Truck Simulator 2 developer Tomas Duda, who was banned from Steam for one year for "reporting" a security flaw in community announcements by exploiting it to redirect users to a Harlem Shake video. He claimed he did so out of frustration that his initial report of the problem, made a few months prior, went ignored.

"I was talking about the script tag vulnerability multiple times. No one fixed it. Now I did Harlem Shake for fun (yay for #steamdb)," Duda explained in the wake of his ban. "Imagine if someone used the vulnerability to steal users' session IDs? Redirected to a phishing site?"

Duda has since had his ban removed which, while a happy ending, also serves to highlight the inconsistency in Valve's approach. And based on Valve's response, not much has changed beyond a link and a promise to do better. The authors of the letter describe it as a "step in the right direction" but note that some points remain unaddressed, and said the post will be updated with future communications with Valve as it becomes available.