This weekend Evan and I popped our BlizzCon cherries, (steady now), and we couldn't have picked a much better year to do it at. This year's show featured major announcements for StarCraft II and Hearthstone, plus the excitement of an entirely new game in the shape of Overwatch, a riotous competitive FPS. Whilst I was 'busy' watching Firebat win $100,000 on the Hearthstone stage, Evan was off patrolling the show floor trying to find out what makes BlizzCon different to other gaming events. One lucky chap also snags himself some pretty sweet loot…

Call of Duty: Kevin Spacey has been out for a week now, which is long enough for the cracks in its shiny, futuristic veneer to show. Sledgehammer Games has kept an eye on player feedback and will patch the game in the near future, with a list of incoming changes released at the weekend. These range from bug fixes through to balancing issues identified by the community, as per below.

- Prestige reset issues, including emblems and challenges- Adjustment to the in-game chat names notifications placement- Fix for weapon reloads counting as speed reloads in certain circumstances- Connectivity optimizations- Fix for stats accumulating towards leaderboards after prestiging- Adjustment to challenges to unlock Camos for weapons- Fix for round-based game modes, affecting Win/Loss ratios- Implementing ability to unlock eSports Rule options in Private Match

Meanwhile, Activision has addressed queries regarding dedicated servers. "Advanced Warfare employs game servers hosted at data centers globally on all platforms and listen servers as part of our proprietary matchmaking system. Our goal is to ensure the best possible connection and greatest gameplay experience regardless of location and time of day."

Tyler Wilde reviewed Advanced Warfare last week, and the good news is that it's a vast improvement over Ghosts. "The campaign is mostly predictable, dumb fun, and the multiplayer is some of Call of Duty s best—but still subject to every existing criticism of CoD."

As Blizzcon 2014 winds down amid a flurry of exciting announcements and general goodwill, we're now forced to confront the reality of a post-Blizzcon 2014 world. Sure, you can keep rewatching the Overwatch gameplay footage and you can gape at the promise of new Starcraft 2 content, but where to go for warm and fuzzy feelings? Thankfully Blizzard has you covered with this hour long documentary on the history of World of Warcraft. 

Entitled World of Warcraft: Looking For Group, the documentary traces the game from its early, pre-release days into the here and now. Originally aired at Blizzcon at the weekend, the documentary is a bit of a love in, but there are some interesting tidbits for folk less invested in the MMO (did you know the studio wanted to operate with a team of merely 20 developers after the game's release? Unheard of in 2014).

Check out the full documentary below, and be sure to catch up on all our Blizzcon 2014 coverage, as well as our interview with Ion Hazzikostas.

Ten years after its release, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has been updated on Steam. Ordinarily this would be good news, suggesting that changes had been made to make accommodations for new operating systems or hardware, but this new version of San Andreas takes far more away from the game than it adds. While it now boasts native support for the 360 controller, 17 songs have been removed from Rockstar's open world crime-'em-up, along with a few of the bigger resolution options (1080p included). Saves from the old version will no longer work, so if you have San Andreas installed and you haven't accepted the update yet, don't.

Why would a game be updated so long after release, and in a way that seems to intentionally make it worse? It's likely something to do with the recently released 'HD' version for the Xbox 360, which turned out to be a port of the mobile game. Xbox 360 owners were shafted there too, with the original Xbox version of San Andreas removed from Xbox Live to make room for the not exactly improved new one. Seemingly due to expired song licenses, Rockstar had to remove 17 tracks from the mobile version—and they've now updated the Steam game to bring it in line.

Rockstar Nexus noted the update, which doesn't appear to be bring any positives other than native support for Xinput controllers. The missing songs are detailed in this NeoGAF post.

This isn't the first time Rockstar has removed songs from the Steam version of one of their games. A couple of years ago, they did the same thing with GTA: Vice City, temporarily taking the game off Steam in order to take out several tracks. Licensing issues were the cause there too, but Rockstar went about it in a slightly different way. People who bought the game before its temporary removal were allowed to keep the offending songs, and that doesn't appear to be the case here.

As this is a PC game we're talking about, an unofficial patch has already been released that appears to fix some of the nonsense introduced by the official one. The missing songs, meanwhile, can be added back in with San Andreas' custom music station.

Rather than answering a single reader question this week, I'm responding to a series of them. Just about every time we post a 4k or 8k screenshot gallery, we're asked: "What's the point? Why post 4k screenshots if so few people have 4k displays, and why post 8k screens at all?"

It's a reasonable question. Everyone knows their display has a resolution—say, 1920x1080—so it follows that one might have no use for a 7680x4320 image on such a screen. And true enough, if we actually had a display with 73.2 million pixels, the games featured in our Pixel Boost series would probably look pretty damn nice on it. We don't, but there's still a good reason to take super high-res screenshots: supersampling.

As I explained in my article on graphics options, supersampling is the process of rendering an image at a greater resolution than the display is capable of, then shrinking it back down to the size of the screen. The 'shrinking' process is the important bit. When an image is downsampled, each pixel in the final image is composed of data from several pixels in the higher-resolution original. So where there was, say, a jagged transition between a character's nose and the sky, we've now blended multiple nose and sky pixels together in the smaller image, smoothing it out. That's a simple explanation, at least, and in this way, supersampling cuts down aliasing and gives us very clean and detailed images.

So, when we post 8k images, they're not meant to be viewed by zooming in to the full resolution and panning around them, and you'll actually see some ugly, jagged edges doing that. You want your browser or image viewer to downsample the screenshot, so that those jagged edges become smooth and clean. Alternatively, we could just resize the screenshots ourselves before posting them, but we like to offer the full resolution screens for you to view as you please.

There are lots of ways to experiment with supersampling yourself. It's available as a setting in a few games, either as 'rendering resolution' or simply labeled 'supersampling,' and you can also use tools like Durante's GeDoSaTo. Every week in Pixel Boost, we describe the process for a new or old game, and I highly recommend trying your hand at some videogame photography. It's a lot of fun to compose these screens—aside from our column, Dead End Thrills is a great place to look for inspiration.

I played Blizzard's new FPS Overwatch at BlizzCon five times, the basis for my impressions on the game that I wrote over the weekend. But BlizzCon attendees also had a chance to play a game, and I was curious what they thought of Blizzard's first crack at a multiplayer FPS.

Every year, the month of November is notable for two events. The beginning of the month is marked by people muttering to themselves "Oh my God, it's November already?" and the end, in the U.S. at least, is celebrated by surrounding ourselves with cousins whose kids' names we can't remember and eating food until we explode.

This particular November is also notable for a milestone in PC gaming: the 10th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2. This will no doubt inspire many nostalgic replays of Valve's landmark FPS, and Mod of the Week is here to make a suggestion about how best to walk another mile in Gordon Freeman's boots.

There's no shortage of full-conversion mods for HL2, and many of them are great and well worth your time, but today we're looking at mods that keep the original story intact as opposed to providing an entirely new experience. Enhancement mods, in other words. What's actually out there to improve the game?

Our first stop was to pay a visit to the simply named "Update" mod. Half-Life 2: Episodes One and Two provided a bit of a graphical upgrade over the original game, mostly in the form of better textures and slicker effects, but Valve never bothered to retrofit HL2 with these improvements. Modder Filip Victor took it on himself, but unfortunately, when HL2 was moved over to SteamPipe, it wound up breaking the mod. A fix, while promised in 2014, has yet to materialize. 

There were also rumblings about an ENB for HL2 that was sadly never released by the modder who did the same for the original Half-Life. No luck there. I also installed this ENB that purports to add depth-of-field and SSAO, but despite following the instructions I wasn't able to activate it in-game. Hurm. I'm zero for three.

That leaves us with pretty much a single option for souping up HL2 graphically: FakeFactory's Cinematic Mod. The name probably sounds familiar: it's been around for a while and there were a lot of complaints that it went too far: not just adding higher resolution textures, advanced HDR, new props, and dynamic shadows, but replacing the game's character models with new, completely different looking HD versions and adding music from the new Batman films.

While I agree that most of the new character models are tremendously off-putting and the music is a baffling choice, it's important to point out that Cinematic Mod is almost ridiculously customizable. You can run the mod without the replacement character models, leave out the new music, and tailor the look and even the difficulty of the mod to a high degree.

In fact, I'd recommend turning off a few things. The enhanced bloom is a bit much, and the head-bob made me nauseous (and I can't ever recall getting motion-sick from an FPS before). I enjoyed playing with the new weapons: a laser-dot pistol and some meatier machine-guns are fun, and iron sights and weapon recoil adds a bit more of a shooty feeling to the shooting (again, you can choose to play with the standard weapons as well). As far as the new models go, I actually liked the new Combine metrocops and soldiers the mod adds: they're bulkier and more dangerous looking without being a major departure from the originals.

As for the overall look of the mod, I liked a lot of it. It's slicker and shinier, and many of the new textures are fantastic. It does still go a bit far: I don't really need video screens flashing the word OBEY to get the idea that I'm in a dystopia, and some of the new graffiti textures are hardly subtle. Still, for the most part, it's very impressively done.

If you decide to use it, be prepared for a hefty 10 gig file, and torrent it or else you'll have to download it as sixteen separate .rar files (ugh). You can find it here, and here's a video detailing installation and configuration.

What else can you do to spice up your visit to City 17? Well, if you don't mind going full-on wacky, you can always try two previous Mod of the Week picks. There's Crylife (actually a submod for the high-octane SMOD), which gives Gordon Freeman the nanosuit from the Crysis games, and there's also gmDoom (actually an addon for Garry's Mod) that lets you play HL2 with weapons and monsters from Doom. You'll still be able to enjoy the story beats of the original game while spawning cyberdemons or running around with your cloak engaged.

Ultimately, though -- and I realize this is an odd conclusion for a mod column to reach -- I'd recommend replaying Half-Life 2 without any mods whatsoever. Yes, it's been ten years, and sure, the game is definitely beginning to show its age. But this mod enthusiast is happy to admit that some games just don't need improvement. 

World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor is out next week. On the eve of WoW's fifth expansion, I chatted with Blizzard at BlizzCon about what MMOs should do to innovate and remain relevant in the next five years, what's new in Draenor, and what Blizzard's long-term plan is for World of Warcraft.

Jump to 4:10 to hear Lead Game Designer Luis Barriga's response to "What do MMOs have to do to remain relevant and exciting to people in the next five years?"

See that guy up there? That's a Qunari wearing an eyepatch, which is something you don't see every day. Admittedly I don't see Qunari most days, but I'd be more inclined to remember one featuring a beard and a shiny eyepiece.

BioWare are introducing us to The Iron Bull in the second of their 'meet the cast' trailers (the first one said 'howdy' to mage Vivienne). Where Viv relied on a big stick and her magical talents to best enemies, iron butterfly makes use of a giant greataxe, which is definitely a solid Plan B. The YouTube blurb describes The Iron Bull as "a powerful Qunari warrior, and leader of the Bull s Chargers, a famous network of mercenaries. With his immense strength, and enthusiasm for crushing enemies, he provides necessary muscle to the Inquisition".

It's a safe bet that we can expect a trailer for most, if not all of Dragon Age: Inquisition's companions. After you're done with this one, have a watch of this video where Phil and Tom talk about their impressions of the game's first few hours.

Phil's review will be going live on the 11th of November, while Inquisition will release a week later on the 18th.

Blizzard revealed a bunch of new changes coming to StarCraft 2 at BlizzCon this weekend. I sat down with Legacy of the Void's Tim Morten, lead producer on the game, to talk about what's new and how it'll affect SC2.