By Tamoor Hussain.

I'm watching the final moments of a woman who has lost the will to live.

Katya returned from studying abroad to a war-torn country where people scavenge to stay alive. She wasn't always alone, but a few days ago Anton, formerly a teacher, died of starvation. Before him Pavel, once a star footballer, was wounded when roving bandits besieged them. Without bandages he bled out. Cveta, mother figure of the group, became sick and Katya went out in search of medicine. A nearby house had the medicine she needed, but it was home to an elderly couple. Brandishing a knife she hobbled to their bathroom as the old man desperately pleaded not take his sick wife's medicine. Katya wasn't a bad person, she was desperate.

But it was too late, Cveta died. Depressed and starved she crumbled to her knees. I frantically clicked the tinned food icon hoping she'd eat to regain some strength, but she ignored my commands. I imagine she was coming to terms with the futility of it all. As I quit out, not wanting to see her prolonged, gruelling demise, I certainly was.

This War of Mine explores the harrowing realities of living amid war. Its resource management, life-sim and exploration mechanics are simple but elegantly drive home a message: in modern war you will die like a dog for no good reason. Each day plays out in two phases. In the light snipers confine characters to a musty multi-storey building, displayed through a side-on cross-section and rendered with a hand-drawn crosshatch visual style.

Like a grim version of The Sims, players click around to move characters and on icons to assign tasks such as making food, building, clearing rubble, rifling through resource points or administering aid—either medicinal or moral. All of this is reliant on having the appropriate resources, which are gathered at night when a character can be sent to scavenge while the others sleep or stand guard. Locations include abandoned squallers, schools, hospitals, churches and more. Areas with more valuable resources are either inhabited or defended, while the safer places yield less.

In the scavenging phase inspiration has been taken from Mark of the Ninja. Everything outside line of sight is enveloped in a fog, giving the exploration real tension. Walking is silent but slow, while running comes at the risk of making noise, denoted by emanating circles of sound. Enemies emit these same tells, as do rats scurrying around. NPCs that hear the sounds or spot you in their line of sight will investigate, The defenseless cower, some propose a barter, others respond with deadly force. The slow, deliberate pacing accentuates the languishing, oppressive atmosphere.

Your characters are fragile and ranged weapons difficult to come by, so you never quite feel safe. Whether you're pillaging an abandoned house or risking life and limb in a heavily fortified hotel there's a feeling that it could all go wrong in the blink of an eye. It's almost overbearing. The feeling of desperation is ever-present, you'll never quite have enough food to satiate everyone or the building materials to thrive. Each day is a suffocating struggle.

The morality and bartering systems do not bend to accommodate your worsening conditions. When the trader comes knocking, he doesn't care that you're on the verge of death, your acrid tobacco is worthless to him. When desperate children plead for food, turning them away always negatively impact the mental state of characters, making them sad, depressed and even suicidal. It's common to return from scavenging to find a character has hung him or herself. When approaching inhabited areas you can't initiate a trade yourself. You'll want to cry out that you just need a little bit of food, but either the NPC will offer a deal first or you're an invader. Good deeds can pay off in the future, but it usually feels like too little and is often too late.

Goals like developing a rain filtration system or making moonshine feel like unachievable feats. Instead you have to make do with cobbling together an armchair, finding a book, trading for coffee or stealing a cigarette to raise morale. It quickly becomes a grind; visiting the same locations over and over, expending resources to survive the present instead of building for the future.

This War of Mine is one the most thematically interesting games of the year, but it's also a very difficult to play. Its world always has its boot to your throat, slowly increasing the pressure until the inevitable moment where the life is drained from you. There is no happy ending, and that's the point.

Amplitude has announced Endless Legend's first major free add-on. Visions of the Unseen is due out next week, and will give the excellent fantasy-4X ten new side-quests, special quest weapon effects, and other, as yet unannounced features.

Previously, the game received a "mini add-on", the Halloween themed Shades of Alteration. That release added a new hero, a side-quest and modding support.

Amplitude says that more details are incoming, and will be published to their blog ahead of Visions of the Unseen's release.

In addition, sci-fi predecessor Endless Space is itself receiving an update. Chronicles of the Lost is the seventh such add-on, and is also due out next week.

Thanks, RPS.

7DFPS—the seven-day first-person shooter gamejam—wrapped up last Sunday, and I've started to play through its many, many games. This is the breeding ground that, in past years, gave us Superhot and Catlateral Damage.

Endless Express is not a shooter, which somewhat goes against the spirit of the jam. Instead, it's more a first-person waiting sim—a game about being on a train platform and catching a train. You don't have a gun; you do have a watch.

This in itself is compelling. There's a satisfaction to correctly using a timetable to get the right train. It feels strangely grown up—a familiar action reconstructed in a fantastical space. And that space if full of surreal detail and suggestion. There's a mystery being hinted at through the environment of the game, and it reveals itself as you close in on your destination.

Endless Express is free, and can be played in-browser here.

Ah, wondrous comeuppance. Far Cry 4 does have an FOV slider. Look, see, here's a picture of it:

See? You can slide that FOV all up about the place.

Far Cry 4 didn't have an FOV slider before it was released. It was part of a day one patch, distributed to all owners of the game. So what does it mean when some Far Cry 4 players start complaining about the lack of such an option? The game's creative director, Alex Hutchinson, summarises it succinctly:

PC players! If you're online complaining about the lack of FOV control ... You pirated the game.

— Alex Hutchinson (@BangBangClick) November 18, 2014

Thanks, Joystiq.

We don't have a Hammer Simulator yet because, well, that's basically what Rust is sometimes. Facepunch Studios is aware that many players spend a lot of time, maybe too much time, hammering their abodes together in the survival adventure, so a forthcoming update with streamline the process. This means you'll probably spend more time exploring and gathering resources than, y'know, hammering. Apparently some people aren't happy about the changes though. Not enough hammering.

"I ve seen a few people comment that they don t understand why we re changing the build system," Garry Newman writes in a new devblog. "They loved it, it was miles better than legacy, don t change it, please god don t change it. Well you probably should have said something before because all I ve heard is moaning."

Once the changes are live, players will have a lot less hammering to do. According to Newman, resources rather than time should be the payment for building, and as a result exploration and gathering will be a stronger focus. "Anything we can do to encourage players to explore, we should," Newman writes.

Another reason is that the art cost was too high. "Every component needed 7 different stage models (wood, wood2, stone, stone2 etc), this is a lot of art especially when you consider that things like stairs don t need that. The new system keeps these requirements low while allowing for the maximum customizations."

The full notes are over here. 

Wherein a tenacious speed runner completes Doom 2's Ultra-Violence mode (that's the second hardest difficulty) in a smidgeon over 23 minutes. The work of YouTuber Zero Master, it beats the previous record holder by an impressive 22 seconds. "This is the second improvement in the last 10 years," Zero Master writes on his YouTube page, "though I don't think we will have to wait that long before we see the 23 minute mark broken."

That's because there's a handful of easily correctable errors in the run, according to Zero Master in the Doomworld forums. Reading over his notes, it's hard to believe the previous record holder managed to keep the throne for as long as he did, especially considering the enduring popularity of the game. 

Cheers Eurogamer. 

Far Cry 4 came out today and while we don't have our full review quite yet, we do have a reprehensibly powerful computer with a hunger for gorgeous games at high frame rates. We loaded it onto the LPC, cranked all the settings to max—which in this case was the "Nvidia" setting—and recorded some sweet, 1080p 60 fps goodness straight from the hills of Kyrat. 

It's worth noting that, even on a monster like the Large Pixel Collider, we were only able to record a consistent 60 frames per second at 1920x1080 resolution and with anti-aliasing set to SMAA. 

Want to see more from the LPC archive? Check out some of our other recent videos: Middle-earth: Shadow of Morder, Fifa 15, Ryse: Son Of Rome, Metro 2033 Redux, Deus Ex, Watch Dogs, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and Arma 3. There's a lot more where that came from. Have a game in mind you'd like to see the LPC take on at ultra settings? Tell the LPC directly on Twitter.

John Watson is the Technical Director and Co-Owner of Stoic Games, developers of The Banner Saga. Sporting an iMac (with Bootcamp) and a standing desk, John's rig and work space are fine tuned for a minimal footprint. I can only assume he wanted the extra room to store all of the different keyboards he uses. John was kind enough to take some time and tell us about his setup, including why he uses a Mac and how "What's your favorite game?" isn't such a simple question.

What's in your PC?

It s a 2013 iMac 27 :

• Model: iMac14,2
• CPU: Intel i7 3.5GHz Quad Core
• RAM: 32GB
• Video: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M, 4GB VRAM
• Pixels: 2560x1440
• Keyboard: Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic
• Desk: UpDesk

What's the most interesting/unique part of your setup?

The ergonomics are pretty good. This Sculpt keyboard is overall the best thing out there, and I ve tried a lot of ergonomic keyboards. The downside is that they aren t very durable. I ve already killed one within a year of purchase. The standing desk can be raised and lowered, so I spend about half of each day standing, to break the physiological monotony of sitting.

I have several keyboards around, one for main use, one as a backup Mac keyboard to access the bootloader and restore menus if needed, and one as a bluetooth keyboard for my various mobile devices.

The iMac is fantastic for development. Extremely performant and,more importantly compact and elegant. Most importantly silent. I cannot stand the hums, buzzes, moans, and screeches of poorly designed computers with low tech brute force cooling systems. I allocate half of the fusion drive for Windows via Bootcamp, and the other half for Mac OS X, which I spend most of my time in. I used to run Windows under VMWare, but these modern hard drives are so fast that it s not a problem to reboot into a different OS from time to time.

I attached my second monitor to a mounting arm to clear up desk space. I got a pretty small desk because I m trying to take up less space geometrically in general, and I didn t want a sprawling desk taking up half the room.

What's always within arm's reach on your desk?

Stuff required for getting up and taking a walk: keys, shades, wallet, phone. I try not to answer the phone unless it is clearly important, but I keep my phone nearby anyway. There is usually a coffee in arms reach as well. Love that stuff. I m a big fan of indirect lighting so I have several lamps nearby that are pointed at the adjacent walls to give me a nice flood without getting blinded or washed out.

What are you playing right now?

I recently went on quite a tear playing Banished, which is right up my alley. Lately I ve been enjoying LUFTRAUSERS and I can t wait to dig into the next act of Kentucky Route Zero. I ve also been enjoying a bit of a StarCraft 2 playing resurgence as well, now that I finally got Heart of the Swarm. Frankly I stay pretty busy programming The Banner Saga and I really savor those precious moments when I m able to sit down enjoy a good game.

What's your favorite game and why?

It's really hard to pick a favorite, because I have many favorites, for different reasons. Some games were revolutionary for their time, evoked an unforgettable atmosphere, made me laugh, made me think, were visually beautiful, sounded great, or represent some other memory or experience. So any favorite that I pick is going to be totally dependent upon its context, and omission of other games will necessarily omit the contexts by which they are judged and remembered. By what metric out of many do I measure and choose my favorite game? If I consider the game that is most indelibly burned into my memory, it would have to be the original Quake. The countless hours of running, jumping, navigating, shooting, and hunting were a transformative experience. I can clearly remember more of that game than any other. I had played many unforgettable games before, and have played many since, but it stands above the crowd in certain ways that are impossible to deny.

Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick have an enviable list of game credits to their names: Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Loom, The Secret of Monkey Island, Zack McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, and a pile of others. And now the old-time LucasArts veterans have got together on Kickstarter, where they're whipping up support for an "all-new classic adventure game" called Thimbleweed Park.

Thimbleweed Park is "the true spiritual successor to Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island," according to the Kickstarter pitch, and it certainly looks the part, not just through its pixel-art graphics but its interface as well, which is very reminiscent of the old LucasArts style. It's promised to feature five playable characters who can be switched between at any time, multiple endings, hundreds of locations, and two levels of difficulty to ensure that novices aren't left out in the cold.

"We want Thimbleweed Park to be like an undiscovered classic LucasArts' adventure game you'd never played before," they wrote. "A game discovered in a dusty old desk that puts a smile on your face and sends a wave of nostalgia through you in the same way it does for us."

The process of developing the game is being kept as Lucas-like as possible. Gilbert and Winnick will share design and writing duties; Gilbert will handle the majority of the programming, while Winnick will do the art. Six months into development, another programmer and artist will be hired, along with a part-time musician, while testers will be brought in as the game approaches completion.

The Kickstarter is seeking $375,000, enough to fund development of the game as a "serious, full-time project." The estimated delivery date is August 2016, although they acknowledge in the "risks and challenges" section that "we probably will be late, but not by a lot and the game will be better for it. That's just the reality of making a game and we're going to be honest about that." So far, people don't seem too put off by the prospect: Just a few hours after the Kickstarter went live, it's already raised more than $71,000.

The World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor release didn't go as smoothly as anyone would have liked. Players had trouble accessing overcrowded servers, a situation exacerbated by a DDoS attack launched the day the expansion came out. The situation is apparently better now, although it's still not perfect, but Blizzard is continuing to work on it, and Executive Producer J. Allen Brack is doing everyone a solid to make up for the hassle.

"I know how much everyone was looking forward to this expansion, and once you were able to get in and start having fun, all the comments I've seen indicate that this is one of our best yet," Brack wrote in message posted on the World of Warcraft forums. "But the quality of the content does not excuse the subpar launch experience we delivered, and I apologize for that."

Blizzard is expanding its use of new instancing technology that helped improve server queues over the past weekend, which Brack said will roughly double the pre-launch capacity of each game realm, enough to greatly reduce queues or even eliminate them altogether. It's also extending every subscription in the Americas, Oceania, and Europe that was active as of November 14 by five days to make up for the aggravation players experienced during the first few days of release.

"The support voiced by many of you as we worked through the challenges was immensely appreciated," Brack wrote. "We're extremely grateful to be part of such a passionate community. We love World of Warcraft, and we're very proud of this expansion, so stumbling out of the gates like this was very disappointing for all of us."

Technical issues notwithstanding, the Warlords of Draenor expansion seems pretty good: Our review-in-progress (which remains in progress) says it's "a good start for this new, old world."