AMD has issued a statement saying that Chief Gaming Scientist Richard Huddy "misspoke" when he said earlier this month that DirectX 12 will not be supported in Windows 7. Huddy's statement was unequivocal—"DX12 is not coming to Windows 7"—but AMD says it was merely "speculative."

"Richard Huddy does not speak for Microsoft, and he was unfortunately speculating from Microsoft s publication of key dates and milestones for Windows 7 lifecycle and mainstream support policy," AMD said in a statement sent to GameSpot. "Richard has no special insight into Microsoft s Windows or DirectX roadmaps. Microsoft is a key, strategic partner for AMD and we re continuously collaborating with them on DirectX 12."

DirectX 12 will be built into Windows 10 and Microsoft has previously confirmed that it will be compatible with Windows 8 as well, but it hasn't said anything about whether or not it will work with Windows 7. Despite AMD's disavowal, I think the greater surprise will be if it is compatible: Microsoft needs to pry users away from Windows 7—most of us are still using it—and has already announced that "mainstream support" for the OS will come to an end in January 2015.

There are many important questions to be asked of Heroes of the Storm. Can Blizzard's attempt to take the rough edges off the lane-pushing genre produce a game able to compete against Dota 2 and League of Legends? Does such a game have any future in an e-sports capacity? Most important of all, though: where did that dance move come from?

Reddit user BratwurstZ is attempting to answer this latter question through a series of videos showing the inspiration for each Hero's moves. See below for the current selection.

Thanks to Owen Hill for pointing us in the direction of this essential news.

By Jon Denton.

Maybe it s my age, but there s a refreshing purity to PES 2015 that reminds me of a time when football games weren t about card packs, microtransactions and screaming YouTubers. The simplicity and complexity of football is the focus of Konami s long-standing series, and never before has it been as convincing or compelling. A killer one-two. A perfectly-timed tackle. A last-minute header. These are the things that should get football gamers screaming. And these are the things PES 2015 gets so, so right.

In truth, Pro Evolution Soccer has been threatening to return to former glories for a while now. As FIFA has stagnated, PES has refound its confidence, delivering a best-in-class effort in 2012, and a promising but sluggish engine refresh last year. This year, though, feels like its coming out party. PES Productions eschewed the next-gen console launches last year in order to refine and polish its debut on new tech, and it shows.

This is the exact same game you ll see on PS4, although you ll need to do a bit of digging to actually get it running that way. For reasons only known to the overworked Japanese dudes at Konami, the PC version of PES 2015 defaults to 720p and a windowed-display, and the only way to change that is to actually launch a settings.exe in the game s folders. Madness, but thankfully only necessary the once.

And when you ve bumped matters up to 1080p, you have a rather handsome looking game. FIFA 15 s lighting model and 3D grass is superior, but PES has world-class payer likenesses, and more importantly, specifically engineered animations for the world s best players. Robben runs with his arms up. Messi appears elastic from the knees down. Ronaldo sprints upright like Michael Johnson and leaps into the sky like Kobe. Welbeck falls over a lot.

It s this attention to detail that elevates PES above its nearest and richest competitor. At face value, the two games look very similar—both offer snappy passing games, a wide variety of shot types and crunching slide tackles. Dig just a little deeper, though, and PES demonstrates a unique understanding of how football actually works. Dribbling isn t reliant on tricks (although they re in there). It s about timing, weight distribution and angles. Beat a man by convincing him you re zigging when you re actually zagging. Use runners to create space. Play the way you face. Simple footballing fundamentals, that when combined with PES 2015 s marvellous simulation physics, creates moments of football drama, without the need to script them.

At its best, PES 2015 captures the PS2 heyday of the series at its best, but does so with the kind of production values our mid-2000 selves could only dream of. This is a game of curling 30 yarders and scuffed tap-ins, of mistimed slide tackles and rounded-keepers. It s the agony and the ecstasy of football, but also the drudgery and frustration. It s really rather good.

Backing up the fantastic match engine is a front-end that finally feels like it s from a modern videogame and not patched together by the work experience boy. The typical competitions (including the Champions League license) are joined by a FIFA-apeing online seasons mode, that lets you progress up the ranks by beating the world s PES players in low-latency contests. It s a shame it can t be played cooperatively, but it s still a step up from PES 2014 s broken online mess.

An even more obvious homage to FIFA comes in the form of myClub, a very PES take on Ultimate Team. Very PES, because it appears to have been put together by madmen. Much like the esoteric charms of Master League (itself back and as daft and compulsive as ever), myClub drowns you in the most baffling jargon before letting you go about the business of building a team. If anyone out there understands the instructions about agents (used to sign players in this acid-trip of a mode) then you might need to lay off the prescription meds.

Hilariously, once you figure out the nonsense, myClub is actually a simpler mode than Ultimate Team. Sign players from random draws, build a team that functions better when the players share traits, take on the world. It s the same, but bonkers. I shouldn t be surprised, this is the team that gave players bananas as an unlockable bonus in PES 2013.

As much as PES may try, it can t compete with FIFA off the pitch. Licensing issues are prevalent as always, with only Man United officially included in the Premier League, and no German league at all (Bayern Munich appear as a one-off), and as enjoyable as Master League and myClub are, they re not a match for the all-conquering Ultimate Team. Does it matter, though, when you ve just beaten three men with Ribery, skipped past one lunging challenge in the box, then lifted it over the onrushing keeper with a flick of the right boot?

Of course it doesn't.

Nosgoth offers brutal PvP action in an endless war between vampires and humans. You can join as either side—utilising unique class and race-specific abilities in an asymmetrical fight between the forces of darkness, and the forces of weapon-carrying meat sacks.

The closed beta is currently live, and we can grant you access. We've got 20,000 keys for the beta to give away. All you need to do is enter your email address in the widget below before the deadline on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:30 GMT. After that, we'll email the winners with their key.

As an extra special bonus, key recipients will also get an exclusive skin.

To redeem the key, enter it on the Nosgoth code redemption page and follow the instructions provided. To play the beta, you'll need to have Steam installed on your PC. 

In addition to what's currently in the closed beta, developer Psyonix has teased the game's upcoming features. Most recently, they've provided details on  the Summoner class—a race of immortal, decaying necromancers. They've also provided an early look at The Crucible, a map set deep in vampire-controlled territory. For more details, head to the game's official site.

*If you have any problems redeeming your code, visit the Nosgoth support page.

Dateline: The '80s. Patrick Bateman is terrifying young women with speeches about Phil Collins; a Sinclair C5 is being driven unironically; someone, somewhere, is wearing a pantsuit. Everyone agrees that it will all be better in the '90s.

Dateline: Now. Through electro-synth music, stark, neon colours and the healing effect of 30 years, people are starting to appreciate that not everything in the '80s was completely terrible. And that, if it was, we should probably pretend that it wasn't.

Embracing this philosophy are, presumably, the developers of Crossing Souls—an "old-school action adventure" set in a 1986 version of California. The influence isn't just the setting, but the entire aesthetic, as you can see from this new trailer.

The game is currently on Kickstarter, and seeking $45,000. Despite this, it's already secured publishing support from Devolver Digital.

"The player will be able to control five different characters," explains the Kickstarter page, "mixing each one's unique abilities and weapons to overcome all the challenges and obstacles ahead of them. You will explore lots of places, interact with hundreds of NPC from different periods of time, solve puzzles, look for secret places and treasures, and fight against enemies in order to save your loved ones."

You can see more screenshots below.

By Ian Dransfield.

It's strange that most war games seem to have forgotten that one very famous saying: 'you've won the battle, but you haven't won the war'. A couple of hours into Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault's campaign it becomes clear Relic hasn't forgotten about it. This is very much built from significant individual battles, and a game where you're in for a long, hard slog. Even when you are winning a lot along the way.

This is Relic's second expansion pack for Company of Heroes 2, and both of them—Ardennes Assault and The Western Front Armies—are standalone, so you don't need the original, explosive Eastern Front-'em-up to play. Where the last add-on was multiplayer-focused, Ardennes Assault is very much a single-player campaign, but one that's learned a lot of lessons from the online world.

There's persistence in your companies Dog (support), Able (airborne) and Baker (mechanical)—meaning they accrue veterancy and, equally, casualties. As you make your way around the meta-map of your conflict zones in the Belgian region, you soon realise this is as much a part of the game as the more traditional 'click on the baddies to make them die' bit.

As you're free to move your companies how you want while navigating the next 18 missions, you can employ some high-level strategy as you go. Ignore it at your peril, because that's where these won: battle, lost: war scenarios come into play, as I will briefly explain now.

A skirmish popped up that required me to defeat a small German outpost in a picturesque village by capturing command points and intercepting regular supply drops in order to outlast the enemy. I made a beeline straight for this mission on the meta-map and, a matter of 20 minutes later, had successfully routed the defending Nazis.

Those who had lost the battle retreated across the map through territory I had ignored—and could have blocked off with other companies—before meeting up with, and reinforcing, another German position. When I moved on to the next mission, which was already more difficult, the Germans were in a much stronger position than they had been before.

I had won the battle, but it had a hugely negative effect on my overall war.

Frankly, that's fantastic and I'm delighted to see Relic—one of the few big-name developers still making real-time strategy games on a grand scale—upping the strategy quota rather than watering it down for the mass market. The fact you're playing this wider game of cat-and-mouse on the meta-map before you've even jumped into the main game, while not a new idea, gives valuable context to battles, and creates a sense of ebb and flow across a vast conflict.

This filters down to your companies. Each has its own skill tree to upgrade as you choose—make the paratroopers cheaper to call in, or have your aerial bombardment arrive a bit faster, for example. Focusing on just one company's power is viable, but striking a balance is obviously the far more sensible option. War isn't sensible, though.

As well as manually selected upgrades, units can gain ability through veterancy. In short, you want to keep your troops alive as long as possible—the more combat they see, the better they are. But all the same, you can operate a distinctly Stalinist approach to war and send unfathomable numbers of young men into the grinder. If you're a bastard, at least.

On the battlefield it's pretty much Company of Heroes as you know and love it—intense, harrowing real-time strategy with an emphasis on small squads and tactics over tank rushes and superweapons. You're expected to make good use of your surroundings and make tactical decisions on the fly, or you will end up with your backside being handed to you repeatedly. And it will be repeatedly, because Ardennes Assault's emphasis on persistence means a loss isn't game over, it's a 'try again with weakened forces'.

These on-the-fly tactics are made all the more necessary by AA's emergent elements—randomly selected objectives and sub-objectives; an opponent of varying power and ability; a change in approach necessitated by both the company you choose to enter a conflict with and its veterancy level. It all adds up, and you have to keep on top of all of it to be successful.

It can be difficult to keep your concentration when all hell is breaking loose, and I found myself pausing the game a fair bit just to get some bearing on what in the name of zombie jeebus was going on. But once the smoke, literally, clears and you come out the other side victorious, there's little more satisfying.

Just so long as you've remembered to cut off the German's escape route beforehand.

The first Smite World Championship takes place in Atlanta in early January. Two teams qualified from the EU Regionals this weekend; six more will join them from North America, China, Latin America and Brazil. The community-supported prize pool just topped $1.3m and is still climbing. It's looking like the first major international tournament for Hi-Rez's god brawler will match the prize pool for the third Dota 2 International, an impressive sum for a relatively young e-sport.

Hi-Rez revealed the distribution of the prize pool today, along with some new information on the rewards that fans will receive for contributing to the growing total. The breakdown is as follows:

• 1st place: 50%
• 2nd place: 20%
• 3rd place: 15%
• 4th place: 10%
• 5th-8th place: 1.25%

An important distinction to note, here, is that despite having a prize pool on par with other major MOBA tournaments there are only eight teams in contention for that sum. That allows the winner to take away a substantial prize while still ensuring that bottom-place finishers get something (unlike The International, where frequently the bottom eight get nothing at all.) This is something I've heard requested by pro players in various games: guaranteed prizes, even relatively small ones, provide a financial incentive to keep going that helps a scene's stability.

Hi-Rez's approach to e-sports sits neatly between Valve's fondness for crowdsourcing and Riot's fondness for centralised control. If you're interested in either League of Legends or Dota 2 it's worth paying attention to the growth of Smite as an example of a middle-ground approach that could potentially yield some lessons for pro scenes elsewhere.

The Smite World Championship prize pool is inflated by community participation in an event called The Odyssey, which is still ongoing. The final reward for supporters will be a community-designed angelic theme for Thanatos that changes as the match goes on. Here's a pic.

Crossing Souls is an "action-adventure with RPG touches" about a group of five friends who discover a magical stone that enables them to cross the boundary between the worlds of life and death. The project has been kicking around on TIGSource for a while and now the developers have taken it to Kickstarter, but in an unusual twist, Devolver Digital has guaranteed that it will be made regardless of whether or not the campaign is successful.

The game is set in a small town in California in 1986, a period chosen very specifically for its nostalgic impact. Developer Fourattic described movies like Teen Wolf, Weird Science, E.T. and Back to the Future as "pure magic," and said it wants to revive the feeling they had when they watched them as children. The visual style of the cutscenes, which will be a "mainstay" of the game, are also straight out of an 80s cartoon.

What makes this particular project different from most is the certainty that it will be made. Devolver Digital is handling marketing, PR, and other such business-related matters, but the funding for development will, hopefully, come from Kickstarter. It's an arrangement that gives Fourattic more flexibility in how it goes about making the game, and it's more financially lucrative, too—always a good thing for an indie studio. But if the Kickstarter fails, Devolver will step in and make things happen anyway.

Fourattic said that even with that safety net, the Kickstarter remains important because it allows the studio to connect directly with supporters who will help shape the game. "Our first priority was to prepare and launch a Kickstarter campaign to, first, create a community around it, and second, to get an idea of the viability of the project," a rep explained. "That community is the one that will help us build the perfect 80s-feeling game we are after."

As is typical with Kickstarters, backers will be given access to a forum where they can interact with the team and offer feedback and suggestions. "Feedback, at this stage, is everything for us," the rep said. "Like other developers have done before us, our most important rewards are focused on [backers] working together with the Fourattic team, like the chance to design enemies, new locations, secret rooms and other important aspects of the plot. For that purpose alone, the Kickstarter campaign is priceless!"

Crossing Souls is Fourattic's first game, but the rep said he hopes Devolver's involvement demonstrates that it's a serious project. It's also the first time Devolver has picked up a game prior to the launch of its crowdfunding campaign, but the company said it's open to the possibility of doing it again in the future. "We prefer to get out of the way and let them take the reigns, so if that means raising their own development funds, then sure," Devolver's Nigel Lowrie said. "We're happy to work however best suits them and be transparent with their community along the way so it's clear how they're contributing."

Maybe go and make a cup of tea before sitting down with this trailer. It's a lengthy look at Lost Ark—over eight minutes of footage from the upcoming Korean ARPG. Just be sure to carefully time when you take sips from your beverage. You don't want to do a spit-take as its ostentatious attack animations start to play.

Ultimately, it looks familiarly Diablo-a-like, but moreso. Some of its attacks look absurd in the best possible way. And that's just with a single player. The trailer also shows some brief co-op action.

As yet, I'm unable to divine a possible release date. This is because the game's official site is a) limited in its information, and b) in Korean.

Still, one to look out for.

Thanks, Marsh.

I'd say that releasing an MMO-themed expansion in the aftermath of Warlords of Draenor's release made sense. But this is Goat Simulator, so none of it really makes sense.

Later this week, patch 1.2 will go live for the... er... what genre is Goat Simulator, anyway? Goat-'em-up? It adds a fantasy-themed RPG-like world that comes complete with quests and classes, such as Warrior, Rogue, Magician and Microwave.

The Goat MMO Simulator update is released, for free, on 20 November.