Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2. Well, mostly about Dota 2. Image via ESL's Flickr account, credit Helena Kristiansson.

I'm going to try something a little different this week. It might be alarming, and I don't want you to panic. This week's column is not going to be entirely about Dota 2. It's going to be about a related game, Smite, and a recent experience that has helped express something I've been considering about competitive games in general. A lot of the things I've learned and written about while playing Dota could apply to Smite, League of Legends, Counter-Strike, or any other team game: this is simply the furthest I've ever taken that notion.

The Smite pro scene is currently undertaking a run of regional championships to determine which eight teams will earn a place at the $1.3m World Championship in January. Last weekend I attended the European finals in Cologne, a modest event by modern Dota standards but a reminder of how exciting it can be when an e-sport is still finding its feet. The Smite scene is young, and it lacks the history, orthodoxy, and to an extent the politics of professional Dota 2 or League. You should be watching Smite right now because this lack of precedent means that upsets are more likely, bringing the personalities of individual teams and players to the fore.

(It also means that there are a load of UK players in the scene, which was such a novelty I'm still not sure I believe it. I'm so used to encountering my countrymen exclusively as casters and personalities that meeting a British pro player elicits genuine delight and surprise, like seeing a cool dog in the pub.)

Nobody has successfully codified what makes a professional gaming team effective—or an amateur team, for that matter. There's a lot of chaos in the system, and few formalised practices regarding coaching, management, or training. Underprepared teams sometimes win through superlative skill; prepared teams sometimes win through collective discipline. Sometimes there's a little of both, and sometimes there's no pattern at all. I followed Alliance because of the attitude expressed by Loda during this interview; I also understand why old-Na'Vi and their particular swagger drew the approval it did (and does).

E-sports are, I think, a few years away from approaching the kind of stability encountered in traditional sport—and I don't think there's anything to be done to speed up the process of getting there. The only power we do have, as fans and players and managers, is to decide what we're going to focus on: what approaches to play that we'll celebrate, which attitudes we'll try to imitate. It's in this way that it's possible to exert a degree over control over the tone of a game, whether that's just for you or your friends or for the community as a whole.

There is, I think, a natural but problematic imbalance in the kinds of top-level plays that garner attention. Specifically, it tends to be solo players and virtuoso moments that hold the most sway over the minds of the community. It's easier to build narratives around individuals than teams, and it's easier to imagine yourself as the game-winning lone wolf than it is to see yourself as the guy who really knows how to ward. This is the essential root of every drafting disaster that has ever happened to you in ranked matchmaking. It's why people seek other individuals to blame to preserve their own ego. It's why the community flips out about solo MMR in what is fundamentally a team game.

The reason I want to celebrate teams that win the other way is because it sends a message to the community: things do not need to be the way they are. When a team's collective strength is their greatest attribute then it suggests a better way for players to interact with one another. The best recent example of this that I can think of took place in Cologne, in Smite, when Aquila (a Cognitive Gaming team) stormed the regionals through determination, preparation, and teamwork.

Aquila are more or less the dream, as far as e-sports success stories go. They missed out on inclusion in the Smite Pro League by a single game and had to fight their way into the regional championships through the Challenger Cup, also known as the amateur league. They had their own coach and analyst before being picked up by Cognitive but are otherwise fresh to the circuit—Cologne was their first LAN. While certainly underdogs, there was nothing scrappy about their approach to the game.

"I don't think any other teams prepare in quite the same way as we do" team captain Nate 'Ataraxia' Mark told me after their first match. "We're much more formal."

And what a first match. Notable chiefly for featuring the most profound upset in competitive Smite, Aquila vs. Cloud9 turned on a dime when the latter refused to press their advantage in the second game to close out the set 2-0. C9 were maybe two or three auto-attacks from ending the match when they backed off, and while the obvious narrative here is that they threw the game, they were able to throw it because Aquila kept their shit together in the face of first-round elimination.

"No-one was saying anything bad" Ataraxia said. "Everybody kept positive, which is fantastic—especially [support player] KanyeLife. He never gave up. He was always upbeat, always positive."

That ability to keep their heads in the game ultimately turned that game around, and the momentum from the win carried them through the decider. Then they defeated Fnatic 3-2, claiming a spot at the World Championships; finally they beat SK Gaming 2-0, earning the European title. Both of those victories were at the expense of teams that prioritised their star players—Xaliea for Fnatic, Realzx (and increasingly maniaKK) for SK.

Aquila's playstyle stood out to me because, unique among the Smite teams I watched, they valued objectives and efficient rotations over raw individual fighting power—something that the game emphasises given its focus on action. They are extremely disciplined (a little like 6.79-era Alliance or recent Virtus Pro, Dota fans) and I wasn't surprised to hear that they're known for how seriously they take match preparation.

"I'm kind of strict on the guys" said Aquila coach Job 'CaptCoach' Hilbers. "Around some of the other teams, there's not really a strict format. I set up a training schedule, make sure that everybody's on time and that they get everything they need. I make sure that they can fully focus on the game."

There's this notion that creeps around the competitive gaming scene that preparing beyond a certain point is trying too hard: that it's better to win without the effort, if you can, and that strat spreadsheets should be the preserve of teams whose shirts are already covered in sponsor logos, rather than the ones that want to get there. CaptCoach sees it differently: preparation is something that comes naturally as a consequence of the team's hunger to win.

"We keep very close track of what other teams are doing" he says. "And something that a lot of teams forget is that you yourself also need to look at what you are doing. We analyse ourselves like we analyse others so we know what they're going to see—what our weak spots are. Then I want to eradicate those."

Self-knowledge is, I think, the difference between a good team and a potentially great one: it's the answer to ego, and ego is pretty much the root of all evil in a competitive context (the caveat here being that evil is fun.) "There are teams where you have star players that get pulled ahead" CaptCoach says. "I try to keep everybody level, make sure that everybody's comfortable. That's my most important job."

I wish that 'comfort' was more highly regarded, as an attitude to competition. Comfortable players don't rage or look for somebody to blame: they don't demand particular heroes or roles or lose their minds when told what to do. It is, inevitably, harder to identify heroes to worship when what makes a team special is the fact that they have no heroes; but it's also important. The community would do well to celebrate the successes of teams that genuinely and seriously treat each other as equals—no matter how cheesy those prematch fist-bumps can be.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

The last few months have featured an endless stream of Ubisoft trailers being pumped into our eyes. The one benefit of this is I can now recognise, purely from the title, whether any individual trailer is worth your time.

For instance, this: the "101 trailer" for The Crew. It's an exhaustive eight minute look at the open world racer, explaining just about everything there is to know about the game. If you have even a passing interest in gunning it through a miniature US continent, it's probably worth a look.

The Crew is due out on 2 December.

We're fast approaching the end of the year and, would you believe it, everyone's releasing games. The biggest both in length and anticipation is Bioware's long awaited return to the Dragon Age series. This month, we've not just got one Inquisition cover, we've got eight. Whether you prefer Blackwall's stoic expression, Cassandra's defiant stance, or Varric's chest hair, we've got you covered. Here, take a look at the full range.

It's not just our review's section that's packed to bursting. We're also bringing you big features on three of our most anticipated games: Hotline Miami 2, Star Citizen and Hyper Light Drifter. Need more? How about our two free gifts: a Planetside 2 anniversary item pack and an exclusive Magicka druid robe.

The issue, which is in shops now, can be ordered through My Favourite Magazines. Digitally, you'll find it on the App Store, Google Play, and Zinio, and you can subscribe to get issues delivered directly to your door. Read on for a look at the subs cover, and a round-up of the features to be found in issue 273.

This month we:

• Talk to Dennaton about the making of Hotline Miami 2.
• Question Chris Roberts about the most successful and controversial crowdfunded game around.
• Test out the neon splendour of Hyper Light Drifter.
• Catch up with Battlefield Hardline, The Magic Circle, This War of Mine, Dirty Bomb, Elegy for a Dead World and Virginia.
• Summon verdicts on Dragon Age: Inquisition, Civilization: Beyond Earth, Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments, Final Fantasy XIII, Styx: Master of Shadows, Ryse: Son of Rome, Endless Legend, Reprisal Universe, Screencheat, Costume Quest 2, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, Legend of Grimrock 2, F1 2014, The Evil Within, NBA 2K15, Legend of Korra, Alien: Isolation DLC.
• Put the latest graphics cards to the test.
• Revisit Kirkwall in our Dragon Age 2 reinstall.
• Return to Planetside 2 for Update.

...And more. Until next month!

Far Cry 4's map editor is a pretty flexible tool. While competitive maps aren't currently supported, you've plenty of options when in comes to challenge map creation. Here's the thing: I'm not a map maker. I'm an idiot. And so, when faced with an infinite world of possibilities, I went straight for the bears.

For instance, what happens if you stack a bunch of bears on top of each other? You get a Bear Stack, obviously. The map editor's camera is a little awkward to use, hence why it's so lopsided. The smaller stack on the left was to test what would happen to a perfectly aligned column of bears. In other words, it's the control stack.

This, clearly, wasn't working. Could it be that there were too many bears? I decided to redistribute my bears more evenly. Bear Stack 2 was born.

Yes, it's still a bit lopsided, but would you look at that bear latticing effect before it all comes crashing down!

Unfortunately, the Bear Stack has little real-world application. What I needed was something more suited to the mountainous environment of the game. What I needed was the Bearvalanche.

To be honest, this didn't work. Largely, I think, because of my inexperience with the editor. The bears are rooted to their steep incline: unable to roll from their position unless killed. This is not the avalanche as I intended.

Is having a rolling cascade of bears pile on top of you really too much to ask? I hope not, because I'm determined to get this working.

Update: Things have escalated...

Yeesh. It seems like you wait forever for an innovative, team-based shooter with colourful character design to come along and then—bam!—two get announced at once. Well, not quite at once. By now you ll have heard about Blizzard s debut FPS, the vibrant Overwatch, which was revealed at Blizzcon and we had a blast playing. You probably haven t heard about Block N Load, because it s being revealed right now, and which I got to play earlier this week and ended up liking a lot more than I honestly expected to.

You might however have heard of Block N Load s predecessor, Ace of Spades, which it s worth mentioning here because of the surrounding controversy. Short version: Ace of Spades was a free-to-play mash up of Minecraftian block building and class-based competitive FPSing. It was developed by Ben Aksoy and released in beta three years ago, but he departed soon after selling the game to Jagex, who swiftly remade the game and solid it on Steam, which went down incredibly badly with the existing fanbase. So badly, in fact, that many of them stuck with the original, or as they prefer classic , beta version.

We didn t launch it well, admits Alex Horton, Jagex UK s chief creative office, explaining what happened with Ace of Spades. Horton was previously at Rockstar, and his credits include GTA III. When I talk to him after the hands-on session, the Englishman is remarkably candid, (probably dangerously so), and startlingly sweary. He s also keen to explain why he wanted another crack at the format: Even the much maligned, four out of ten, piece of fucking shit that got released in the first year sat [on Steam] and had a pulse, he says. So I turned around to the board, because I m in charge of product, and said I want to go again on this.

The result of that going again is Block N Load, a spiritual sequel. It s still team-based and you still get to build stuff, but the building and shooting elements seem to mesh together in a way that works. Or in other words: it s fun. I found this out playing a series of matches across a couple of maps.

Each team of five players gets around five minutes at the start to build defences around (and under) their base, which houses a Generator Cube that must be protected. Your options here depend on the character and block loadout you ve chosen. You can select five different blocks, each with different properties, plus another block which is bespoke to your character class.

For instance Italian building site foreman Anthony 'Tony' Turretto can, wait for it, place turrets. He can also mend said turrets with a suspicious stream of white spoodge from his secondary glue gun. (Horton grins and admits the visual association was entirely deliberate.) There are six classes currently, which combine standard assault/defence/support roles with various comedy archetypes. So you have O.P. 'Juan' Shinobi the Mexican Ninja, who can place respawn blocks, (handy for sneak attacks), and Cogwheel the evil robot, who fills the tank role. And is evil.

An obvious thing to do while waiting for the match to start is to build enormous walls to prevent easy access to your base. A less obvious, but more enjoyable, thing to do is place speed-up pads in front of jump blocks so that your entire team can go hurtling through the air towards the opposing base.

The five minute build phase might sound potentially boring, but it actually creates a strong sense of anticipation to see what happens when the curtain lifts. I mean this literally: there s a giant curtain separating the two ends of the map, which rises to reveal the Byzantine network of trenches, minefields and tunnels which your opponents have managed to bash together.

From thereon it s chaos. Some players stay back to tend to the barricades. Others trundle off in search of the opposition base and get mown down by turrets or caught in glue traps. More enterprising members band together and begin digging under the map, hoping to surface inside the enemy heartland. Before long the map is an absolute mess of failed grand ideas. The battles feel attritional, and beyond the health meter on each team s Generator Cube, it's a little hard to work out who s winning. But it s also a laugh, particularly when I manage to catapult myself almost entirely across the map to deliver the deathblow to their base.

You think you re playing fucking tactically? Give me a turret.

There are issues though. Respawning takes too long and matches currently aren t on a timer, so only end when a base is destroyed, which can lead to long stalemates. Those are easily fixable though. More work will be required to give the core shooting a greater sense of impact and drama. Right now, regardless of whichever weapon you re armed with, attacks feel insubstantial and unsatisfying. I mention this to Horton and he agrees enthusiastically.

We re not trying to be super hardcore as you can tell, he says, when I ask him who the game s aimed at. As for the spectre of Overwatch, he says the announcement only made him feel: "Completely validated". He s also not worried about whether teams of strangers will be able to cooperate effectively during the build phase and beyond. I think it s a social experiment, isn t it? Let s see what happens. There are elements of the [development] team who are like yeah, it s tactical team play, and I m like You think you re playing fucking tactically? Give me a turret. It s almost built for fucking mental, online trolling. Go smash shit up… It s all part of the flavour. See what emerges out of it.

We ll see what emerges when the game enters beta in December, which you can register for now at blocknload.com. Assuming that's a success, the full game will be released next year for $19.99, with a $29.99 special edition set to include an undisclosed raft of extras. So, no free-to-play model this time either, which means Block N Load may struggle to win back those angry Ace of Spades fans. The price sounds a little steep for something that's likely, at least initially, to be perceived as throwaway. But if they can tighten up the feel of the combat, there s a lot of potential fun here. And, if nothing else, you won t see a more startling animation than that glue gun in 2015.

Elite: Dangerous is dropping its planned offline support. While the space sim will feature a singleplayer mode, that mode also needs an internet connection. It's a decision that Frontier made because, according to founder David Braben, "the work needed to deliver a rich online nature of the game diverged from the requirements of a fully offline game."

You response to this news will depend largely on your circumstances. I was planning to play Elite online anyway my experiences with the beta having shown the benefit of playing around others. But some won't be able to do this. Others won't want to. 

Given an offline mode was both planned and advertised, Frontier recognise that there are now people who have paid for a game that no longer suits their purpose. As such, in the latest Elite newsletter, the team have laid out a refunds policy of sorts.

"We have started responding to requests where there is a clear outcome," Braben says. "Those who have pre-ordered an Elite: Dangerous release version from our online store and have therefore not yet played the game are eligible for a refund.

"Those who have already been playing the game online in the Alpha and/or Beta phases, regardless of whether they backed the project via Kickstarter or purchased access to Alpha and/or Beta through our online store, are not eligible for a refund."

That's pretty clear, albeit likely disappointing to anybody who both wanted offline support and spent the considerable money on alpha or beta access. For everybody outside of those two examples, the policy is rather more vague:

"We want to make sure we treat each person's situation with the thoroughness it deserves, and have contacted each of them to ask that they bear with us over the next few working days if their circumstances do not fit either criteria above as we look into individual requests."

I dock my ship at a nearby space station—with the press of one button, not the careful precision of a surgeon—and go straight to the bar. The bluesy strums of acoustic guitar take me to a familiar space setting as I ask the bartender if there s anybody he needs taken care of. I check the latest galactic news, then head back out into space. As I m flying warp speed towards my first mission, I m suddenly pulled to a stop and greeted by nearly a dozen bandit ships. They proceed to lay into me with every laser cannon they have.

Is this supposed to happen? I ask developer Travis Baldree, who tells me the encounter occurred completely by chance. As the acoustic guitar turns electric, a set of drums joins it, and I prepare for the impending battle, Baldree turns to me and says, You should probably run.

Rebel Galaxy is the debut project from Double Damage Games, a studio started earlier this year by Runic Games co-founders Travis Baldree and Erich Schaefer. An open world, third-person, space combat game, Rebel Galaxy fills a mostly uninhabited niche in the increasingly popular spaceships shooting other spaceships while flying around in space genre. It doesn t take itself as seriously as sims like Elite: Dangerous or Star Citizen, but still maintains a huge sense of scale and gives the player a lot to do.

Limited to horizontal movement, the combat in Rebel Galaxy is frantic but strategic. I often found myself outnumbered and outgunned, relying on my auto-firing turrets and boosters to make sure I only took on a few ships at a time. My main weapon was a laser cannon broadside, meaning my spaceship felt more like a war galleon than an X-Wing. The lack of vertical movement was initially disappointing, but if it were included I think that combat would be too confusing to navigate. There s already an immense amount of information being expressed through Rebel Galaxy s impressively minimal UI. With a large number of ships possible in a fight and an even larger solar system—and eventually galaxy—to explore, Double Damage has done a great job making the inherent complexity of space manageable.

I was surprised by how intimate it felt to fly around Rebel Galaxy s humongous solar system. Even at warp speed, it took a few minutes to get to my mission waypoints, but I never went from one place to another without some sort of interesting random encounter along the way. Once, I was attacked by a fleet of outlaws and forced to boost out of range of their gunfire before I could warp to safety. Another time I passed a trader, also going at warp, and slowed slightly to match their speed before we drifted off our separate ways. These experiences were quick but made the solar system feel busy and alive.

The more I played Rebel Galaxy the more I noticed my discussions with Baldree beginning with it s sort of like… and this part is kind of similar to… in a slew of analogies ranging from Assassin s Creed to Firefly to motorcycle gangs. I almost wanted to apologize; my comparisons felt like I was implying the game seemed unoriginal, but they really meant just the opposite. Rebel Galaxy has a lot of moments and mechanics that feel familiar to those who ve played other space or ship battle games, but the way all those different mechanics come together mean it s not quite like any game before it.

If anything, it s most easily compared to Sid Meier s Pirates!, a game I would definitely not mind seeing more of. I traveled from space station to space station while trading goods, going to the bar for info, and attacking (or avoiding) other ships along the way. While the space setting and trading system are reminiscent of Elite: Dangerous, Rebel Galaxy is no more a space sim than Pirates! is a sailing sim. The focus is on quicker missions in a sandbox world and, over everything else, combat. I played through the beginning of Rebel s storyline, but nothing was stopping me from running away from it to complete randomly-generated side missions or take on bounties. Even the story missions had an element of procedural generation, and this is where I found my main concern with Rebel Galaxy.

The version I played was an early one, but I could see the experience wearing thin quickly without the addition of more varied missions and modes. One of the things that made Pirates! such a lasting experience was how much it had to do outside of sailing from port to port. Its minigames, swordfighting, and other small distractions weren t the highlight of the game, but they were refreshing breaks from sailing and broke up the pace. Rebel Galaxy has opted to try for variation and breadth of content within the battles themselves over distinct game modes—a choice that could very well work out, even if my experience with it didn't fully communicate how.

Considering Double Damage has such a small team, the amount of detail and content already in this early build—including the fantastic soundtrack which Baldree described as bikers in space —is absolutely impressive. Rebel Galaxy doesn t yet have a release date, though Baldree told me he s aiming for 2015. I hope he takes his time to really flesh out everything the player can do. As it stands now, Rebel Galaxy is already a unique entry into a rapidly re-emerging genre.

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes releases for PC on December 8, and now you can make sure your system is up to scratch. The system requirements were published recently on the game's Steam Community page, and the minimum specs are pretty forgiving. Not surprising since this game also released for last-gen consoles. 

Here they are:

Minimum Specifications:

OS: Windows Vista 64-Bit or later Processor: Core i5 SandyBridge 4Core (4 Thread) 2.7GHz or above Memory: 4 GB RAM or above Graphics: GeForce GTX 650 or above DirectX: Version 11 or above

Recommended Specifications:

OS: Windows Vista 64-Bit or later Processor: Core i5 SandyBridge 4Core (4 Thread) 2.7GHz or above Memory: 8 GB RAM or above Graphics: GeForce GTX 760 or above DirectX: Version 11 or above 

Ground Zeroes releases ahead of next year's main course in the form of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Both will boast 4K support, as well as improved lighting and shadow resolution.  

We reported back in October that the World of Warcraft subscriber base was sitting at 7.4 million, but with the arrival of the Warlords of Draenor expansion last week that number has surpassed 10 million. 

It's a familiar pattern with expansion releases: indeed, the same thing happened when Mists of Pandaria released, pointing to the logic behind Blizzard's desire to annualise expansion roll-outs. Still, the pattern indicates that World of Warcraft isn't going away any time soon. The expansion pack itself has sold a whooping 3.3 million copies already.

While the numbers are impressive, the Warlords of Draenor expansion was beset with launch difficulties fairly uncommon to Blizzard. Widespread problems accessing overcrowded servers has prompted the studio to reward players with five days of free access. 

We published our Warlords of Draenor review in progress last week, with a final verdict arriving soon. I spoke to designer Ion Hazzikostas last month to coincide with the MMO's tenth anniversary. He thinks the game has another ten years in it.