Just Cause 3's official unveiling last week was typically light on details, but solid information is starting to trickle through thanks to a new Game Informer interview. According to Avalanche Studios co-founder Christofer Sundberg, the game will not feature a multiplayer component at launch, despite the PC community having built a convincing case for one in Just Cause 2. 

While it won't boast multiplayer at launch, it's possible the studio will retrofit it later. "Maybe sometime down the line, we'll take Rico into the modern world of multiplaying," Sundberg said. "We don't expect the fans to make the multiplayer for Just Cause 3, but at some point you have to make a choice on where your focus is. Our strength is the sandbox experience, and we want to deliver a great Just Cause 3 experience."

Meanwhile, game director Roland Lesterlin says the game world is unlikely to be bigger than in Just Cause 2, though it will certainly feature more detail.

"Just Cause 2 was already enormous,"Lesterlin said. "We really wanted to focus now on density and the feel of the world itself. So we didn't necessarily just have to do increased land mass. But we have certainly gone a lot bigger when it comes to density of the world and now it's not just on top of the world, we also have caves and tunnels and all sorts of stuff there too."

Just Cause 3 is expected to release in 2015. Check out some fresh screenshots over here.

If A Bird Story were an animated short—and it mostly is—it wouldn t be a very good one. The hour-long game tells the story of a lonely boy who rescues an injured bird, befriends the bird, and eventually learns that if you love something, and it s a bird, your story is probably heading toward a terribly clich d conclusion.

Though it s only an hour, the hour drags. There are sweet little moments—the boy suspiciously peeking out to his balcony as the bird pops in and out of a bush—but most of the scenes are soporific, only superficially interactive, and only occasionally interactive at all. Everything takes far too long to play out, showing me too much to say too little; I don't need to be present as every page of a notebook is torn out, for instance. 

As for control, developer Freebird Games—also responsible for the much acclaimed To the Moon—is honest about what A Bird Story is: an interactive pixel animation with the sole purpose of telling a simple story. It is simple, and it is interactive, in that I got to pointlessly walk around and pick up items on my own for a bit. But it wrested control from me so often it had to flash the arrow keys (not remappable) every time I was supposed to do the moving, otherwise I wouldn t know.

Being such a hands-off experience isn t an instant negative, as holding back interactivity can enhance the moments when it s returned. It doesn t work here. Except in a couple of scenes, my interactions did little to complement the story, or foster empathy toward its characters.

Even so, I was always clawing for those interactive moments, because the time spent watching was so boring and hokey that I just wanted it over. A Benny Hill chase scene and out-of-place Mario reference give you a sense of how banal it is. Perhaps those were attempts to characterize the boy as playful despite his isolation and self-absorption, but they come off more like cute gags. And when it's not being cute, the pixel art animation isn t especially fun to watch. The boy's crude walking animation, for instance, kicks in moments after his sprite starts moving, and watching him slowly plod around is tiring.

For a few minutes out of the hour, I did feel A Bird Story come close to succeeding. I appreciated the lightly surreal world, especially. Other characters are shadows of people, and locations aren t logically connected or constructed; they re more like shorthand for places, a world built out of fading memories. If A Bird Story had used its world to say something interesting about memory or the isolation of a latchkey kid, I d appreciate it a lot more. It does present some sincere childhood feelings—I liked hopping in puddles, the way school drags on, and how loneliness is patched with fantasy—but it just sort of looks at those feelings. And then throws a bird in.

Flying over imaginary landscapes is briefly liberating, and I liked some of the pixel art, especially the grass, foliage, and floating hunks of earth. The backgrounds, however, look sloppy (in an intentional, but not attractive way), and they re all off-perspective with the foreground. They aren t animated, either, so waterfalls are frozen in time. Meanwhile, creator Kan Gao s music may be well-composed, but its neverending plunking of bells and strings is too saccharine for my tastes. All of these things could be defended as stylistic decisions, but I find little to like about them.

As a film, A Bird Story is slow, dull, and sentimental. It s the kind of mawkish story Disney can get away with in shorts such as Feast, because Disney s shorts are A) actually short and B) beautifully crafted. And this isn't a film: it's software that seems to have no interest in being software. There are no options whatsoever. You can hit Alt-Enter to send it to windowed mode, for instance, but it always starts fullscreen.

Many of these criticisms could be made of the much better To the Moon, with its identical engine and very similar style, but it s much better regardless. Clicking through dialogue choices and wandering around make me feel present in its story—something A Bird Story mostly lacks—and it s poignant without being too schmaltzy. It s also much funnier.

To Freebird s credit, it offers no-questions-asked refunds, even if its games just aren't  your cup of tea. I think a cup of tea might have been nicer. I don t enjoy clobbering the work of a spirited independent developer, but A Bird Story isn't a good example of the storytelling I know Freebird is capable of. I enjoyed a few moments of expressive animation and sweetness—playing it wasn't a harrowing experience, just not a good one—but got to the credits feeling disappointed. It ends with a teaser for the upcoming Finding Paradise, and that s what the whole thing feels like: a very bloated teaser for another, possibly better interactive animation. In the meantime, go play To the Moon.

Postal is one of the most famously controversial video game series ever made. It's also not very good, and has actually been in decline since the original was released in 1997: Postal has a Metacritic score of 59, Postal 2 is a flat 50, and Postal 3 is a dismal 24. (We gave it 21 in our review.) But developer Running With Scissors isn't giving up—in fact, it's going back to its roots.

The developer confirmed Postal: Redux on Twitter last week, writing that it will be "Faithful to the original with redrawn HD art & redone character models," and have "many new features such as co-op." It's being developed for Windows, Linux, and Mac, and is expected to be ready sometime in 2015.

To clarify for those who missed this section of game history, Postal 2 and 3 are both shooters—first and third-person, respectively—but the original Postal is an isometric action game. That's the one that's being remade, although RWS hinted that the others could be overhauled as well, tweeting, "We're going back to our darker roots with this for now."

Just to be clear, it's a remake of POSTAL 1, not POSTAL 2. We're going back to our darker roots with this for now.

— RunningWithScissors (@RWSPOSTAL) November 14, 2014

The original Postal is actually still available on Steam, and it's on sale right now for 75 cents. That's a tiny price to give it a try, but even so, I make no promises.

Dragon Age: Inquisition hits the shelves tomorrow, and that means that the Dragon Age: Inquisition launch trailer is here to hit your eyeballs right now.

Another trailer at this point, even a dramatic tour de force like this one, isn't likely to have too much influence over whether or not you're going to buy Dragon Age: Inquisition. But you know what might? A Dragon Age: Inquisition review. Or a definitive, hugely-spoileriffic guide to Dragon Age Keep. And hey, here's some Sex and BioWare while we're at it, because you know that's going to happen.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is out tomorrow in North America, and Friday in the UK.

Early Access has become a very popular method for releasing games, and it's not hard to understand why: Developers can make money on their games while still developing and shaping them based on feedback from their audience. But it's not an unqualified success, as thus far only one-quarter of games put out on Early Access have been given a full release.

The GamesIndustry report, by EEDAR Head of Insights and Analytics Patrick Walker, acknowledges that the percentage could be weighed down by recent Early Access releases that simply haven't had time to be developed into a state of full readiness. But the percentage of Early Access titles from 2013 that have made it to full launch isn't much better, standing at less than 42 percent, and of the first nine games to appear on Early Access when it debuted in March 2013, only three have been released as full games.

"While there are clearly many benefits to an Early Access model, there is also the possibility of a broken promise to the consumer. This is not unlike other models in the games industry, such as crowdfunding through Kickstarter or selling a DLC Season Pass, where the consumer pays up front for promised content," Walker wrote. "A notable difference between those particular models and Steam's Early Access program is the lack of a firm release window; on Early Access, a game could theoretically stay in development and be sold to consumers indefinitely, whereas a Season Pass is rolled out within a specific time frame and all Kickstarter projects are presented with an estimated 'delivery date'."

The report also noted that, on average, Early Access releases on Steam actually cost more than full release games. Walker wrote that Steam hasn't taken any heat for these relatively dismal numbers, and has in fact actually legitimized the idea of paying to beta test games. But it also suggests that it could become an issue if the trend of excessively long Early Access periods, or abandoned Early Access releases, continues.

We like cheap PC components and accessories. But you know what we like even more? Expensive PC components and accessories that are on sale. We ve partnered with the bargainmeisters at TechBargains to bring you a weekly list of the best component, accessory, and software sales for PC gamers.

Some highlights this week: You can get a Dell 22" monitor with a built-in webcam that comes with a $100 Dell gift card for $239.99. Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is $20 off on Amazon, and its DLC season pass is also on sale over at Green Man Gaming. GamersGate is having a huge sale on Warner Bros. games, including the Warner Bros. Action Pack; a bundle that includes Batman: Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, Arkham Origins, Injustice: Gods Among Us, FEAR 3, and Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition all for only $30.

Hardware:

— The Toshiba Q Series 512GB SSD is only $199 on BHPhotoVideo.com, nearly 40% off.

— The Dell UltraSharp UZ2215H 22" Monitor is $239.99 on Dell s site and comes with a $100 Dell gift card.

— Get the Logitech G502 Proteus Gaming Mouse together with the G240 Mouse Pad for $79.99 on Dell s site, which also comes with a $25 Dell gift card. 

— Get the EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX760 4GB Video Card for $229.99 on Newegg after a $20 rebate.

— Get the MSI Z97 U3 Plus Intel Z97 LGA1150 ATX Intel Motherboard for $69.99 on Newegg after a $20 rebate.

— The Seagate STBP100 Diskless 4-Bay NAS is a massive 65% off, now $139 on Newegg.

— The Lenovo Y40 14" Laptop is currently $400 off, $699 on Lenovo s site.

Games:

— GOG.com is having a big Fall sale with new 24-hour deals each day until the 25th. As of Monday morning, SimCity 4, Mount & Blade: Warband, Dust: an Elysian Tale, and many more are on sale.

— Get Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel for $20 off, $39.99 on Amazon.

— Additionally, the Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel Season Pass is available for $24 on GreenManGaming.com with the code NOVEMB-ERGMGX-20XOFF

— South Park: The Stick of Truth is 50% off, only $20 on GamersGate.com, along with all its DLC being at least 50% off as well.

— Pre-order Final Fantasy XIII-2 for $13.50 on GreenManGaming.com with the code FINALF-ANTASY-25OFFX

— Lego Batman 3 is 20% off for $21.60 on GreenManGaming.com with the code NOVEMB-ERGMGX-20XOFF

— GamersGate.com is having Warner Bros. sale, including Injustice: Gods Among Us, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Bastion, and a lot more.

For more tech deals, visit techbargains.com.

A note on affiliates: some of our stories, like this one, include affiliate links to online stores. These online stores share a small amount of revenue with us if you buy something through one of these links, which help support our work evaluating components and games.

It's fair to say the launch of Assassin's Creed: Unity has not gone smoothly, but Ubisoft is continuing to plug away at it. The publisher says the third patch, (third time, of course being the charm), previewed over the weekend will be "larger in scope" than the previous update, but that also means it will take a little longer to be ready.

The specific fix list hasn't been nailed down yet, but Ubisoft is focusing on the following "categories":

• Gameplay: This includes bugs like Arno getting stuck on certain areas of the map (including a few more hay carts), problems with getting into/out of cover, character animation bugs, and general camera problems
• AI & Crowd: In this category are problems with NPC animations, crowd events, and crowd stations, NPC navigation issues, as well as bugs related to NPCs detecting Arno s activities in various situations
• Matchmaking & Connectivity: This covers a number of issues related to co-op play, including bugs with joining games in-progress and problems that happen during host migration
• Menus & HUD: Fixes in this category will address missing details in certain menus, problems with some of the mission objective and co-op update pop-ups, localization inconsistencies, as well as some of the issues with menus and pop-ups overlapping each other
• General Stability: This includes fixes for a number of crash situations we've identified in both campaign and co-op modes.

"Part of what we want to do at this point is balance the competing desires to get as much as we can into the patch with getting it out quickly," Ubisoft wrote in the patch preview, noting that it's also looking into performance issues like framerate drops. "This next patch won't solve every problem, but we're expecting that it will dramatically improve your experience."

Ubisoft also posted a follow-up Q&A on the status of its game updates, which can essentially be broken down to, "We're working on it." The Q&A also includes links to the Uplay and Ubisoft Support Twitter accounts, as well as a direct link to Ubisoft customer support, for those who need them.

On November 15, god-on-god MOBA brawler Smite starts barreling towards the end of its first year of competitive play. Back in March, I watched Smite s best European and American teams compete in the game s big coming-out-of-beta launch tournament. Since then, Hi-Rez Studios has implemented a competitive season with miniature weekend tournaments pitting pro teams against one another, culminating in two big tournaments this month: the European and American regional finals, held over the next two weekends. In January, those finalists will go up against teams from Asia and South America for Smite s first world championship, with over $1.3 million on the line.

To dig into the significant changes to Smite since launch, and find out more about the regional championships, I talked to Hi-Rez COO Todd Harris. I came away impressed with the way Hi-Rez has set up its competitive league, and how that feeds into the tournaments taking place this November.

In most competitive games, be they shooters or lane-pushers, there s a clear divide between pro teams and everyday players. Pro teams are sponsored organizations like Cognitive Gaming and Team Solo Mid. Everyone else is, well, everyone else. Recently, that s started to change. League of Legends Challenger Series pits the best amateur teams against one another, with a shot at making it to the pro-level LCS, the League of Legends Championship Series. On a smaller scale, Hi-Rez is doing the same thing.

In late summer, Hi-Rez introduced the Smite Pro League and the Challenger Cup, which last seven weeks. The challenger cup is open to anyone, and feeds into a wildcard tournament, which gives amateur teams the chance to make it to the regional finals. So far, two teams have. They re longshots, but it s possible one or both will make it to the world championship in January and walk away with a big chunk of the million-plus dollar prize pool.

Harris told me that Hi-Rez put $600,000 into the world championship prize pool to start, and the rest—it s at $1,353,293 as of this writing—has come from the community, buying special in-game items that go towards the pool.

We re super pleased with that: we re fans of having an element of crowd-supported prize pools, Harris said. And I think with this, Smite will be the fastest new game franchise to exceed the one million dollar mark for an e-sports event. The fact we ve been able to do that in the first year since launch is cool, and humbling.

Smite s $1.3 million pool, which still has time to grow before the January tournament, isn t exactly the $10 million Dota 2 raised earlier this year. But Smite is still growing fast, and it wasn t so long ago that the very first gaming tournament passed $1 million in prize money. The game has more than five million registered players, and according to Harris, their daily player count would earn them a regular spot in Steam s top ten most played games list. (Of course, that number could be anywhere between 10,000 and a million).

The game itself continues to grow, too. Hi-Rez has consistently added a new god to Smite every two weeks, filling out the existing pantheons and raising the current god count to 59. Harris said that would continue into the first few months of 2015, and sometime next year Hi-Rez will introduce a new pantheon to the mix. Next year will also see an update to Smite s Conquest map, the standard 5v5 battlefield that can trace its lineage back to the original Dota. The specific changes are still under wraps, but Harris did mention that Hi-Rez will be making some adjustments to the map design or layout in addition to aesthetic tweaks.

Popular gods have gotten their own visual changes, as well. I asked Harris why Ao Kuang, the Chinese dragon god, had his kit and character model reworked to become the Mayan god Kukulkan, while Smite s next god release will be a new humanoid Ao Kuang with a new ability kit. Hi-Rez did the same thing with Sun Wukong and Hun Batz earlier this year.

We take feedback from the community, and don t listen to all of it but try to pay attention when it seems relevant, Harris said. Particularly after being in beta in the Chinese market, we have a better understanding of how Chinese gamers perceive the visual representation of these characters. In the case of Sun Wukong, we were pretty transparent saying we didn t do a good job nailing the visual design of Sun Wukong that matched player expectations and similarly with Ao Kuang. In both cases it s to try to have a visual depiction that will resonate with today s gamers.

I asked Harris if Hi-Rez is moving towards more humanoid depictions of gods in general, but he said these were specific cases. Modern depictions of Sun Wukong and Ao Kuang typically show them anthropomorphized and walking upright, said Harris.

At the beginning of 2014, Smite was the third-biggest lane-pusher on the PC behind League of Legends and Dota. As 2014 comes to a close, it s still the third-biggest, but the competitive scene is clearly swelling. The launch tournament prize pool was a total of $200,365, with $100,000 put in by Hi-Rez. The community has already raised triple that amount for the world championship. 2015 may be a very big year for Smite, because the game will launch out of beta in China, where it could easily pick up a million new players.

We ll be following along with the regional finals and the world championship in the next two months—and rooting for at least one of the underdog Challenger Cup teams to make it to the championship.

Mike Maulbeck drew the worst possible kind of attention to himself and his game, Paranautical Activity, when he threatened to kill Gabe Newell last month followed a botched launch on Steam. That, naturally, led to the game being dropped from Steam entirely—serious or not, you can't be threatening to murder the Gaben—and shortly thereafter, Maulbeck resigned from Code Avarice, the studio he'd co-founded with Travis Pfenning. But now he's back.

"First off, Mike is back. This is probably not hugely surprising to some of you, but Mike couldn't commit to his decision to leave Code Avarice," the studio revealed last week. "Travis publicly denounced his departure, and in the weeks following his official stepping down Mike had second thoughts. Looking for a new source of income was extremely overwhelming and when it finally came time to put pen to paper, Mike and Travis agreed the best thing to do would be to have Mike return to Code Avarice."

The studio also announced that it's "taking steps to make Code Avarice more about the games and less about the people making them." To that end, an official Code Avarice Twitter account has been created (previously, tweets came from either Maulbeck's or Pfenning's personal accounts) and all blog posts will be attributed to the studio, rather than an individual developer. It also confirmed the development of its next project, Spinal Destination, which it described as "Left 4 Dead meets Timesplitters meets Painkiller."

Maulbeck said when he announced his resignation that he hoped it would open the door for Paranautical Activity's return to Steam. Unfortunately for Code Avarice, it's still not there.