Wildstar's long-awaited third content drop is nearly here. Mystery of the Genesis Prime is a big chunk of new Nexus, with an additional zone and a new series of episodic solo missions. It's out next week, on 11 November.

Here's the update's micro-site; which gives a run-down of what you can expect. The main draw is the new zone, The Defile, which hides a "monumental new boss" and a new public event that, supposedly, ends in "the most pivotal reveal in the history of world stories".

The other part of the update, Journey to Onmicore-1, may be of interest to solo players. Where much of Wildstar's end-game focuses on "hardcore" group players, this will be a series of missions designed for those who like to go it alone. Carbine describes it as featuring "pivotal cinematics, memorable characters, branching content, and unique gameplay mechanics".

See below for two trailers, showing off both sides of next week's update.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2. Art by biggreenpepper.

Imagine the Power Rangers. Not the Dota 2 pro team—but we'll get to the game in a minute—but the actual, cornerstone-of-my-childhood Power Rangers. Now imagine that instead of assembling a team of Earth-defending teens with attitude, Zordon pulled together five strangers who mostly didn't speak the same language and were predisposed to loathe one another. Imagine those five shitty Power Rangers attempting to form a Megazord where nobody wants to be the legs or left arm: everybody that wants to be the head or hold the giant sword. Three different guys decide that they're the Red Ranger. Midway through the finale, the Megazord's torso declares that life's too short and abruptly vanishes.

This is solo ranked matchmaking, and for whatever reason, I still play it. The notion that your solo MMR is your 'real' MMR is a compelling one: it represents you individually, the argument goes, whereas your party rating (or organised team rating) is skewed by the undoubtedly more talented people that you play with. I've written about the problems with this idea a few times before, without ever really shaking the assumption that to be better at Dota you've got to be better at solo Dota.

This notion has to be offset against the fact the solo ranked matchmaking queue is the single weirdest place to hang out in the Dota community. Trying to play seriously in this mode is like going to a club and expecting to have a real conversation—maybe, one time in five, you'll get what you want. The rest of the time you're going to be running up against people who're really just there to follow their id for a couple of hours, who can't hear you, and in any case don't care what you think. It's a grab-bag of crazy: the equation for calculating your solo MMR is your technical skill divided by the universe's willingness to match you with actual full-on circus clowns. Like these.

Commited singleplayer RPG fan

I met one of these recently. He picked Spectre and demanded the safelane—a legitimate call, in its own right—and farmed slowly for the first five minutes of the game, which was also the only time he spoke. When pressured he moved full-time into the jungle, and then into the enemy jungle. He finished his Radiance around the thirty minute mark, but only used Haunt to try to escape when the enemy team caught him stealing their camps. Otherwise, he'd run down his mana using Spectral Dagger to last-hit and had almost no presence in teamfights as a result.

A few of the other members of my team weren't happy about this, and told him so. The word 'report' was used, as it often is. Spectre didn't care. Spectre kept farming. Spectre farmed for sixty minutes, then seventy, and then the game ended. He had scored two kills, and I suspect one of them was an accident—a consquence of using Haunt with a Radiance while an enemy support happened to be low on health.

His silent, implacable farming could be interpreted as an attempt to mimic Arteezy-style efficiency, but I'm not sure that was what was going on here. If he wanted to play like Arteezy, he'd probably also demonstrate some desire to win the game. But he didn't. He just farmed, farmed, farmed. If we won a teamfight and asked him to push, and all three lanes were available, he'd take the jungle instead. It was clear that he didn't want to foreshorten a game that he was enjoying. He wanted to right click creeps and collect the money forever.

Who were you, mysterious singleplayer Dota fan? I would like to find you, and maybe buy you a World of Warcraft subscription, or something. I'd also like my 25 MMR back.

Captain metagame and the world of yesterday

I've met this individual in a few different guises over the years, but the parameters are always the same. This is always someone vocal, someone with ideas about team composition and strategy, and somebody who has watched a few professional matches. This experience has armed them with the confidence to tell everybody else what to pick and how to play, and to point out staggering mistakes in other peoples' interpretations of the game. What makes these people special is that they watched those few professional matches months ago, and haven't adjusted their thinking since. These people see the metagame as a document to be read once and internalised, not a process that requires continual work to understand.

Now is a very good time to seek out these guys in the wild, because (a) The International was a few months ago and (b) there's been a very significant patch since then. This is fertile ground for strangers to angrily demand, for example, that Tinker is an essential hero that games can't be won without. To cite Newbee's 8 minute victory over ViCi as proof that eight minute deathball Dota is how you win, noob.

The irony here is that at the level of most pub players it doesn't matter. Yesterday's pro meta may as well be today's pro meta, because the technical skill necessary to differentiate between them isn't present. That Tinker picker wasn't stacking and farming ancients before, and they're not doing it now, so not only would you not make any progress if you tried to talk them out of their misunderstanding but you wouldn't necessarily even be right to do so. There are, functionally, as many metagames as there are people willing to earnestly believe in them. Many of them are dumb.

Friendly neighbourhood spider guy

This is an old story—it happened a couple of years ago, now—but it's probably my favourite, and I've nothing but respect for the person involved. Solo All Pick, in the days before MMR was a thing. Somebody auto-locks Pudge. Another guy picks Dark Seer. Then Juggernaut, so I take Crystal Maiden. There's a long wait. We need a second support, maybe, or a jungler.

Ten seconds to go. Click! Broodmother.

Instant rage from the rest of the team. Report, GG, noob brood, etc. Then Broodmother wanders towards mid before the horn and Pudge loses his shit, as pub Pudge players are wont to do. Broodmother is in the middle of the lane, scuttling in little circles. He types in chat for the first time.

"hey man. im really high."

"just wanna make the spider do things"

He hovers around in mid for a while but lets Pudge take the actual lane. Then he goes to the jungle and places all of his webs. Then he goes to the safelane for a bit and, with that experience under his belt, returns to the jungle to make spiderlings out of the little satyrs and has them run around in the webs for a while. He goes top, for a bit, at which point I lose track of him. I catch sight of him a while later, back in mid, running back and forth. Level four or something. Then, he disconnects and we never see him again.

Now I don't want to glorify his lifestyle or anything but this guy is my hero. I think about him all of the time. Here is somebody who knew exactly what he wanted to achieve in his game of solo Dota 2. He knew the experience he wanted to have, and did this without doubt or remorse. He booted up the clicky-man wizard game because he wanted to make the giant spider do things, and god damn it that is exactly what he did. He had fun, on his own terms, and made no apologies for it.

He had fun. In solo ranked matchmaking! Can you imagine it? Baked spider guy has so much to teach us.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Last year I played Football Manager 14 in classic mode , the faster, more streamlined version of the game. Going straight from that to a full game of Football Manager 15 is like sprinting headlong into a wall of molasses.

Football Manager is often billed as the football RPG : selling the feeling of a manager s life as much as the strategy game built around it. It s one of those ideas that sounds fantastic on paper, but every time Sports Interactive try and embrace the idea, they just end up adding more press conferences.

Press conferences are to Football Manager what Desmond is to Assassin s Creed. No-one likes them, no-one wants them, but SI keep trying to make them work. Now there are also tunnel interviews and lots more player conversations, all of which involve answering a series of questions and selecting a tone (assertively, calmly, passionately) and all of which take far too long.

Things taking too long is a theme the theme of this year s Football Manager. Scouting players now takes several attempts, during which their attributes are displayed as a range (eg: 10-15) that you gradually narrow down. It s a totally unnecessary time sink. I spent two solid months researching duff right wingers before eventually giving up and googling for one, which lead me to the excellent looking Andrija Zivkovic in a fraction of the time. This is how most FM fans actually play, but instead of embracing this level of meta-knowledge, SI are acting like it doesn t exist.

But it s hard to condemn the game for these irritations, because they all disappear the moment you flip over to good old classic mode. Scouting is instant, press conferences are kept to a minimum and unimportant matches can be resolved instantly. Classic values your time and gives you the tools to shortcut to the fun stuff. Of course if you do play that way then you ll find the game is almost identical to last year s edition, bar two crucial changes: the UI and the match engine.

The UI is a genuine improvement. It s not only pretty, but includes some smart decisions. Some changes are clear reactions to how players use the game, like moving the much used quicksearch bar front and centre, while others try subtly influence them, like combining the player search and scout sections to encourage you to use your staff. Veteran players may chafe at having to unlearn years of bad habits but trust me, it s worth it.

The bigger problem is the match engine. Criticising it is a dicey business. The way it works is so deliberately, wonderfully opaque that players tend to treat it like a force of nature rather than something that has ever actually been designed. But there s a significant pattern to this year s efforts: crosses are everything. Target men and traditional wingers are in vogue in a way not seen since the early 2000s. Get enough balls into the box and you will probably win. I d say two thirds of my goals came from crosses, and the rest from long balls over the top. Short passing got me absolutely nowhere.

Now you, dear reader, may love long ball football, you may delight in old fashioned wing play. If you do, you ll probably like FM15 s decidedly retro approach. But it does seem a bit strange in a world where all the major teams are all using inverted wingers and diamond formations for old fashioned touchline hugging wingers to be so dominant. I started the game fantasising about being Brendan Rodgers or Joachim Low, but I ended up playing like Tony Pulis. At its best, Football Manager reflects the state of modern football, but these tactics are straight out of 1998.

Contrast this to FM14, where players were playing gorgeous passing football and experimenting with avante-garde strikerless formations while holding discussions about verticality . FM14 was the football of coffee house intellectuals, FM15 plays like a lager lout. Football de-arte isn t everything, but after a few hours of FM15 s muscular physicality I found myself longing for the silky skills of my old Everton team.

This all might sound overwhelmingly negative, so it s important to stress that the basics of Football Manager are still there and working as well as ever. Football Manager 15 is still a good game, especially when played on classic, and you won t go far wrong if this is your first game in the series. But for existing fans there aren t a lot of compelling reasons to upgrade from last year s edition, unless you re really nostalgic for the Graham Taylor approach to football. Of course it s entirely possible the traditional mid-season patch will change the tone of the match engine completely, at which point I d heartily recommend it. But for now at least, this is a year to miss.

A sailor pinned to a wall with a whaling harpoon. A train mysteriously vanishing in the night. An archaeologist killed in a sauna that was locked from the inside. These are just a few of the mysteries you ll be investigating in Crimes and Punishments, a surprisingly brilliant detective adventure with, like its hero, a very silly name.

You are, naturally, Sherlock Holmes, the legendary Baker Street-dwelling detective who can suss out your entire life history with a glance. You might be wondering where the challenge lies in playing as the world s greatest sleuth, but that s what makes the game so great. You might have all the evidence, and it might all make sense, but you could still be wrong—and even pin the crime on the wrong person.

You can move freely around each case s setting—usually the streets of Victorian London—via a map. This is a stunning-looking game, and its environments are dizzyingly detailed. From Sherlock s home at Baker Street and foggy railway platforms in the English countryside to ornate Roman baths and the cells of Scotland Yard, everything is rich with handcrafted detail and drenched in atmosphere.

When you interrogate someone you can freeze time and study their body language and clothing, picking out clues to form questions. This shows off the insane detail of the character models and visualises Holmes s knack for figuring someone out by just looking at them—a neat visual trick borrowed from the recent BBC reboot.

Built in the Unreal engine, the game boasts ludicrously high-resolution textures and dense, cluttered levels, and as a result, weaker PCs might struggle to run it. The mouse and keyboard controls work fine, but I ended up playing with an Xbox controller. It s a slow-burning adventure that you ll want to sink into a chair and enjoy. Flipping between menus and moving around the world feels nicely intuitive with a gamepad—a result, no doubt, of it being simultaneously developed for PS4 and Xbox One.

It s no open world game. There are, sometimes annoyingly lengthy, loading breaks between areas. But being able to choose where and when you travel gives you a nice feeling of freedom. You ll visit the crime scene, gather evidence, then travel back to Baker Street to conduct science experiments, or to Scotland Yard to grill a suspect. Then you might visit a dingy pub or an archaeological dig site to chase more leads.

Once you ve compiled your evidence, you can enter the deduction space , which is like peering inside Holmes s amazing brain. Clues will usually offer two possible outcomes, and by selecting the right (or wrong) ones, they ll connect and give you a likely conclusion—and you ll have to decide if it s accurate or not. This gives you some genuine agency over each case, which detective games rarely offer. Interestingly, Holmes can choose to convict or absolve who he thinks the guilty party is.

Cases are self-contained, however, which means the choices you make won t carry over into later crimes. You aren t shaping a dynamic narrative here. It s all about the per-case satisfaction of piecing the evidence together and choosing the right suspect.

There are six in total, and each one can take a couple of hours, depending on how thorough you are. Crimes range from gruesome murders with links to the occult, to mysteries with seemingly paranormal leanings. Every case grabbed me from the very start, and I was always compelled to find the answers, which is surely the driving motivation of any good detective story.

When a case is done, you can reveal if you were wrong or not, but this spoils the fun and is only worth doing after you ve finished the game. You can go back and replay the last part of a case if you don t like a choice you ve made, but this feels like a bit of a cop-out and cheapens your efforts. It s better to live with your decisions, then look back at the end and see how right, or wrong, you were. The game also compares your solutions to other players if you re connected to the internet, Walking Dead-style.

Sherlock himself is the weak link. He isn t particularly likeable, and has a snooty self-regard that makes it difficult to empathise with him. Watson is always on hand, but is rarely useful, and feels more like an adoring fan than a right-hand man. The voice acting is decent, though, if not exactly the stuff of an HBO drama. There are some colourful, well-written supporting characters in the game s impressively large cast, but I would have liked to see a little more humanity from Holmes.

The puzzles are hit-and-miss, and it s telling that I skipped a lot of them. But it depends on what you want from the game. I was in it for the story, atmosphere, and crime-solving. But if you re into logic puzzles and brainteasers, you ll find an abundance of them here. It s just nice to have the choice. If you want Crimes and Punishments to be a puzzle game, it can be. If it s a story-led adventure game you re after, it can be that too. Or both!

This is the detective game L.A. Noire claimed to be. It doesn t have the inflated budget of Rockstar s game, but it makes up for its rough edges with quality detecting, compelling cases, beautiful world-building, and endearing gusto. Frogwares have been making Sherlock Holmes adventures for ten thousand years, but this is their best yet, and improves on its predecessors in almost every regard.

[Update, part deux: All three of the missing games have now returned to Steam in North America. At last check, however, they were still not available through Steam in the UK. Ubisoft has not commented on either their removal from Steam, or their reappearance.]

[Update: It seems that Far Cry 4, Assassin's Creed: Unity, and The Crew won't be available via Steam from anywhere, as the listings for all three games have been pulled from the service entirely. We've reached out to Ubisoft for more information and will update if and when we receive a reply.]

Original story:

Are you staring intently at the Steam store, waiting for the release of Far Cry 4, Assassin's Creed: Unity and The Crew? Stop! You're looking in the wrong place. At least, you are if you live in the UK. Ubisoft has confirmed that their upcoming titles won't be available on the UK version of Valve's digital store.

We ve been in discussions with Valve about Assassin s Creed Unity but for the time being the game is not available via Steam in the UK, a Ubisoft representative told PCGamesN.

In the meantime, UK customers wishing to purchase the game digitally can do so by visiting the Uplay store, our retail partners or other digital distributors.

Those other digi-game distributors include GreenManGaming and GamersGate.

The reaction to the news has been interesting. I've been idly following people's response on Twitter this morning, and overwhelmingly, it's been negatively received. And I get it—Uplay is an awful stain upon any hard-drive it touches. It's as much dirty protest as distribution client.

But, Uplay would be part of the package whether it had been bought through Steam or not. I bought Splinter Cell: Conviction on Steam; but that didn't stop Uplay being the thing that deleted my save games. Twice.

Is the convenience of having a game listed in your Steam library that big of a deal? Seemingly, for many, it could be.

Martin Hultberg, head of communications at The Division developer Massive Entertainment, has dismissed suggestions that the studio is downgrading the game's graphics from PC to console. Instead, he said that each version is being developed to maximize the capabilities of its respective platform, and that means that the PC version will simply be able to do more.

"Downgrading is a weird term to use," Hultberg said in an interview with Open World Games. "Obviously, we want to make a game that looks the best it can on its respective format, so Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. So I think the term downgrade is a bit confusing and weird because we're trying to get the utmost out of every machine we use. So Xbox gets its attention, PlayStation gets its attention, and PC, of course, we'll be able to cram it up a bit more depending on the hardware you have."

"We address every console, every platform, as its own version, so we try to stay away from the thing where you go for the least common denominator, and everybody suffers for it," he continued, responding to a question about aiming for consistent performance—1080p, 60 FPS—across all platforms. "We want to make a good experience on all respective formats."

Interestingly, The Division wasn't even confirmed for the PC until just over a year ago, after an online petition attracted nearly 140,000 signatures. To find out more about the game, which is currently expected to be ready for launch sometime next year, hit up our E3 preview from June.

The trouble with online DRM in videogames is that if and when a publisher stops supporting it for one reason or another, owners of the game in question are hosed. The game phones home, can't connect to an authentication server, and everything comes to a sudden, unhappy halt. Unofficial cracks can circumvent said DRM, but they're illegal, and more to the point, not always immediately at hand from reputable sources. 

This is where the Electronic Frontier Foundation's petition comes into play. It seeks to establish legal DMCA exemptions for, among other things, "videogames that are no longer supported by the developer, and that require communication with a server." The exemption would apply not just to games with online checks, but also to those that use "matchmaking servers" for multiplayer, such as Civilization V or Mario Kart Wii. However, persistent worlds "in which the game's audiovisual content is primarily stored on the developer's server and not in the client," which would mean MMOs, are not included in the suggested exemption.

The EFF noted that 53 percent of game sales in 2013 were digital and said that while platforms like Steam offer many advantages to consumers, they also "introduce additional failure points" by making another layer of remote servers necessary to a game's functionality.

"As games deactivate and servers shut down, the ability to modify authentication controls and start new servers is vital to preserving player communities. Communities can disperse quickly once gameplay becomes impossible," the petition states. "Removing the barriers of the anti-circumvention provision will allow players to continue to explore and play games they already own, and help preservationists remove authentication mechanisms in order to format shift games so that future gamers may enjoy and learn from them."

The exemption requests are being filed as "part of the elaborate, every-three-year process to right the wrongs put in place by the Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act," the EFF said in a statement. It described the process as "burdensome and confusing, with high hurdles to success," but also noted that it's the only avenue of redress currently available. The EFF's DMCA Gaming Exemption Petition is available in full here.

Bioware has released what I have to assume is the start of a series of short videos introducing players to the companion characters of Dragon Age: Inquisition. First up is Vivienne, the gloriously sardonic Orlesian mage. I only managed to collect four companions in my recent five-hour hands-on, but she was comfortably my favourite. Read the piece to find out why. (Clue: It involves enchanted choking.)

The accompanying blurb reads: She is the official enchanter to the Imperial court, of which she is a respected, and sometimes feared, member. Any mage can destroy their enemies with fire and ice, but Vivienne can rip apart her opponents verbally, politically, socially—and make ice seem like the gentlest option.

I can confirm being ripped apart socially is the worst option. Judging from the final few frames of the video (and this Wikia page) there will be nine potential companions in total, so it might well be that I ll ultimately come to like one of the others more. But they have their work cut out for them.

Our own Phil Savage has played considerably more hours already, and his review will be going live on 11 November. The game comes out a week later on the 18th. We ll soon have some extended thoughts on it before then though, in the form of moving pictures and audible words, which I understand the youth are calling a videograph. So keep an eye out for that. Meanwhile, here s a plug for our round-up of the best and worst Bioware companions. 

[Edit: fixed the game release date which had become muddled with the review embargo date.]

Stardock's Galactic Civilizations III Ship Designer Contest is pretty simple as these things go. It's open to everyone of legal age in their country of residence, with the exception of Stardock employees. Entries must be original, must not be "vulgar or harassing," (so that's the Good Ship Spacepeen ruled out), and have to be submitted by 11:59 pm EST on November 16. A panel of judges at Stardock will select the top eight entries, all of which will be included in the game; after that, fans will vote to select the best overall design from the eight finalists. The winner gets a $1000 prize.

Simple or not, I would urge any and all aspiring shipbuilders to check out the rules at the Galactic Civilizations III Ship Designer Contest page. More information and a really brief FAQ are up on the Stardock forums, and if inspiration is what you need, have a look at our Galactic Civilizations III Early Access review—bearing in mind that since it ran, Stardock has added the missing trade and diplomacy functions, which you can read about here. 

Galactic Civilizations III is slated to come out in early 2015.

If you've somehow managed to miss all of the great many Assassin's Creed: Unity trailers that Ubisoft has been throwing around lately (like this one, and this one, and this one), fear not: The new Assassin's Creed: Unity 101 trailer covers it all.

At a little over seven minutes in length, the new video touches on just about everything, from the huge Parisian crowds enabled by next-gen technology to the improved, more "nuanced" combat, appearances by famous historical characters like Napoleon and the Marquis de Sade, and of course the new co-op multiplayer mode. And since we're way beyond worrying about spoilers at this point, it's safe to say that it also highlights Arno's surprise trip through a "time anomaly" to Paris during the Second World War, where he'll climb the Eiffel Tower and blast away at German fighters.

As promotional videos go, this one is pretty comprehensive, but I wouldn't expect it to be the last: Assassin's Creed: Unity doesn't come out for another week—November 11, to be precise—and that's plenty of time to squeeze in at least one more.