I tend to be wary of Early Access games—having been burned by them many times in the past—but when I heard about a game trying to be Super Smash Bros. for the PC, I needed to give it a try. Brawlhalla does a lot of things differently from Smash Bros., which helps it stand on its own two feet, and the fighting is a surprisingly complete experience for an Early Access title. There's a lot of room for Brawlhalla to grow, but it's already a fun—if unpolished—couch beat-em-up. Watch the video for my first impressions.

"This ain t war, but the breaking of seals. The undoing of life itself. BJ Blazkowicz mutters these words or thinks them, it s never quite clear while clearing out a column of Nazi footsoldiers in the trenches outside General Deathshead s Baltic compound.

The first level of Wolfenstein: The New Order is the only part of the game that takes place during the Second World War. It s both a sendoff to the old Wolfenstein and the introduction of the new, stranding the player on a beachhead and forcing them to fight past Nazi robodogs, electrocharged kommando squads, and a building-sized walking Tesla coil called The Stomper .

Beyond the beach is the compound itself, a gothic edifice that riffs on the mossy Teutonic fortresses beloved of the previous games. It s a return to Castle Wolfenstein in all but name, a swansong for the series familiar milieu: a big man in a tan jacket gunning down fascists with a Thompson in hallways full of suits of armour and fading portraits of Nazi field marshals. After this there s a run-in with an old villain, an explosion, and a 14-year coma. After this the game concerns an insurgency operating out of alt- 60s Berlin, becoming a game where a big man in a brown jacket sprays down Nazis with an upgradable lasergun in brutalist concrete megastructures and also on the moon.

This ain t war, but the breaking of seals, BJ thinks, the latest in a series of personal observations that touch upon subjects as varied as the familial bond between doomed soldiers, the family he will never have, the barbecue he will never have, and the revenge he intends to exact, in varying proportions, for all of the above. It s an end and also an introduction. BJ is no longer the matin e hero he was in Raven s 2009 s Wolfenstein. He doesn t crack wise. He s a font of earthy and sometimes even poetic musings on the nature of life and war who also admits his fondness for shootin , stabbin , stranglin Nazis. He s steeped in religious mythology to the extent that he ll say things like breaking of seals , while remaining the good ol boy who just wants some barbecue.

To put a finer point on it, BJ Blazkowicz is, like the world and the game he occupies, absurd. He s a likeable column of meat and nonsense, the kind of man who needs to find an apron and proper eye protection before he even considers threatening a Nazi officer with a chainsaw.

We love the juxtaposition of the grandiose and over the top with intimate moments of domestic reality, MachineGames creative director Jens Matthies tells me. We establish this really early on, when we jump the shark in the first couple of minutes of the game.

We love the juxtaposition of the grandiose and over the top with intimate moments of domestic reality.

Talking to Matthies, it s clear that a lot of consideration was involved in building the gameworld this way. Its discordance isn t an accident. That s something that doesn t always truck with critics so used to dealing with the unconscious absurdities of videogame plots, as MachineGames have experienced in the months since The New Order s release.

On the reviewers side it feels like there s a pretty clear divide among people that get it and people that don t, Matthies says. They can t approach the game for what it is, but what they think it is.

Matthies is an action cinema buff and points to the first generation of id Software shooters including Wolfenstein 3D as the reason he s in the games industry. Wolfenstein: The New Order expresses the urge to bring these things together in a conscious and critical way to celebrate, rather than moderate, each of their excesses. This meant excising outright the 2009 interpretation of BJ Blazkowicz, who Matthies describes as a Nathan Drake-type of character.

We looked to Wolfenstein 3D because it s the source, he says. It s also the freest expression of Wolfenstein because it was just these kids making a game in a basement who weren t hampered by any kind of pretension about true art. It was just the shit they thought was cool, and there s power in that mindset.  

When I reviewed The New Order I wrote that it was beautifully designed, but not the game you d bring up if you wanted to have a discussion about the nature of games as art. Looking back, that s not entirely right. It s an example of games as naive art, rooted in the things that defined the medium s adolescence: guns, bigger guns, big fucking guns, demons and Nazis (these things are more or less gaming s equivalent to a picture of some ferns or a nice lion.)

Wolfenstein isn t entirely naive, however. Something that struck me as I played it was that its depiction of a future Nazi regime specifically derives from Nazi ideology. It s not just a case of having everybody wear hats with skulls on them. You couldn t swap Nazis for aliens or robots as you might be able to do in another kind of shooter. Despite the absurd treatment, the game touches on enough specific points from Aryan dogma to concentration camps to lend it a sense of hyperreal historical commentary.

When you re making a Wolfenstein game you are dealing with Nazis, Matthies says. That is a fundamental fact that nothing is ever going to change. The question then becomes how do you deal with the Nazis in the most powerful way possible? Even though we paint this game on a larger than life canvas, the Nazis in it are propelled by Nazi ideology. We don t want to dial that down that would feel like sugarcoating what that ideology was actually about.

It s possible to take a moral line against the game at this point, a line similar to the objections that were raised against Tarantino s Inglorious Basterds, a film that shares a lot of sensibilities with The New Order. The argument would be that Nazi atrocity is not a resource to draw material for violent entertainment from. Matthies is deeply opposed to creative regulation of this kind on principle, but there is also sense to all this senseless violence.

The New Order s absurd tonal juxtapositions make it a very funny game in addition to being a very violent one, and both of those factors have a role to play in creating a sense of historical catharsis. By placing Nazi ideology at the centre of this ridiculous game its own ridiculousness is exposed: the trappings of action cinema are used to counteract the seriousness with which any fascist ideology demands to be regarded. Just as comedy has done many times before Chaplin s The Dictator, The Producers violence makes Nazism silly. When BJ blasts a Nazi supersoldier s arms off with a pair of huge shotguns, he is figuratively and literally disarming him. 

Matthies points to the Nazi tendency to over-design as the source for much of this humour. Wolfenstein: The New Order s silliest extremes are justified because they carry Nazi ideology further up an absurdity curve that the ideology was already on.

The sequence is about making the player feel powerless in the face of arbitrary and cruel ideology

There s a moment early in the game when BJ and his ally, Anya, have reached the night train to Berlin. While he s getting coffee for both of them, BJ is ordered by Frau Engel, a Nazi officer, to sit with her and her lover, Bubi. Laying a gun on the table, she gives BJ a selection of photographs to choose between as a test of his purity . If the player goes for the gun instead, he dies, mown down by a nearby robo-guard.

The sequence is about making the player feel powerless in the face of arbitrary and cruel ideology, and the way it achieves this is by replacing the thing that would normally be used to give BJ agency his gun with two wobbly cups of coffee.

You re out there on the battlefield shooting Nazis left and right, says Matthies, but sometimes you ve got to carry a fucking tray with coffee on it. I love that. I think that anchors it in reality.

The sequence is Wolfenstein: The New Order in microcosm: interesting but deeply silly, grounded but absurd, intricately constructed but tonally all over the place. It s easy to rush through the game s story without appreciating the energy and thought that goes into creating a moment like this, to fail to note the little wink the game does when you re shown some coffee, a reclining Nazi officer, and a lasertoting guard robot so large it wouldn t fit through any of the doors on the train. It s daft, violent, and oddly personable.

I think Stanley Kubrick said something like comedy can be more realistic than drama because it takes into account the bizarre , Matthies says. We live in a world that is constantly moving between extremes. We have these bullshit problems, things that we really get invested in like a sports team losing, or this thing at home that broke, or this relationship or some reality TV show. These things that we invest in heavily, emotionally. That contrasts with a world that has a tremendous amount of conflict. Outside of this bubble that we live in is real hardship and real terror. It can be absurd to just live. It s not something that only occurs in fiction. It s part of being human.

Star Citizen has raised $63 million. That's not really news, is it? It's just a big, ever-increasing number. It's like if I told you that the world's population is 7.13 billion. It's meaningless as a concept. Just "a lot of that thing".

So here's some news that we can all actually appreciate. The space-'em-up's next stretch goal has been announced. It's pets.

"We have repair bots, we have fish… but we haven t implemented a traditional pet system in Star Citizen yet," writes Chris Roberts. "At $64 million, that changes. 

"From Jones the Cat in Alien to the Battlestar Galactica s Daggit, pets have a place onboard starships… and we want to give you that option in Star Citizen. Expect traditional terrestrial options, plus anything exotic we can dream up in the Star Citizen universe!"

The pets will only happen if Star Citizen can make it to $64 million. Basically, then, the pets will happen unless, in the next month or so, demons pour fourth from the heart of the Earth, plunging us into millennia of darkness and suffering.

Remember last week, when I was all like, "Endless Legend is getting a free add-on next week"? Well now it is next week, or "this week" as we've decided to call it. Did Endless Legend get a free add-on? Yup.

Called Visions of the Unseen, it adds a new minor faction, the unseeing Eyeless Ones. They are literally eyeless, hence how they got the name, but possess a sixth sense—"kanjwe"—that lets them "feel all that is visible, and some that is not"." As with other minor factions, they can be pacified and assimilated—allowing you to build their units.

There's other stuff, too. Here's the major additions and changes of the add-on:

• Added a new minor faction: the Eyeless Ones.
• Added new 10 side quests.
• Added Faction-related diplomatic interactions.
• Added loading tips.
• Added the Vaulters' outgame view.
• Added VFX to the unique quest weapons.
• Added more data to the save files, in order to allow parsing for league/stats database.

You can peruse the full patch notes here.

Endless Space got some love, too. Chronicles of the Lost adds a bunch more events for the Disharmony expansion. Here's the big stuff:

• Added 24 colonisation events: these events can now be triggered when colonizing a new planet
• Added 8 exploration events
• Added the Vaulters introduction cinematic
• Added the Vaulters Victory and Defeat screen

And again, full patch notes are through this link.

It's hard waiting for The Witcher 3 to arrive. There are Steam Sales to pillage and other games to play, but none of them are The Witcher 3. Damn, if only time were a flat circle we could just roll over to February, but it's not. It's oppressively linear. We must wait.

Here's good news though: The Witcher now has its own board game, available in both physical and digital versions. Imaginatively titled The Witcher Adventure Game, the board game is the work of Ignacy Trzewiczek. The physical version was created by Fantasy Flight Games, while studio Can Explode handled the digital version, which you can purchase over here.  

Check out trailers for both versions below:

At the beginning of the year we listed Tengami, a slow-paced, visually stunning adventure that unfolds in the pages of a virtual pop-up book, as one of the best PC games of 2014. "Best" in this case was based on expectations rather than experience, since it (along with several others in the list) hadn't actually been released. The mobile version came out in February, however, and it was magical, and so I've really been looking forward to the PC edition. But developer Nyamyam announced today that I'm going to have to wait a little longer.

In an unusual twist for a delayed game, Steam preorders will still be fulfilled within the next few days, and if you want to buy it now, you can drop the studio a line and they'll happily take your money. That's because the game is actually finished—but for pragmatic reasons, it won't be put out to the public until January 15, 2015.

"With Christmas coming up, a lot of big titles are being released and most of the big publishers are fighting over the big Christmas business . This also means that the gaming press is very busy with covering these big releases," Nyamyam's Jennifer Schneidereit wrote in a pleasantly frank blog post. "We worry releasing Tengami into this situation, will result in greatly decreased attention by press and players alike. Visibility is nowadays one of the key factors for a game s success on any platform and frankly we don t think that we will be able to create enough awareness for the game s launch during the festive season."

It's a fair take on the situation: Tengami, as far as I know, did quite well for itself on mobile platforms, but the PC milieu is much more crowded, and it's easy for non-triple-A releases to get buried at this time of year. So even though it may be disappointing, holding it back is probably a good idea.

It would be generous to say that Telltale Games has been trickling out information about its upcoming Game of Thrones series. It's really been more akin to a slow, gentle drip: what it's about, how many episodes, who will appear in it, and so forth. And today, the final drop has fallen.

Steam had Iron From Ice, the first episode in the Game of Thrones sextet, still listed as coming in the vaguely-defined "December" at the time this was written, but Telltale dropped the dime earlier this afternoon with a disappointingly mundane tweet. "#GameOfThrones A @TelltaleGames Series Ep 1 #IronFromIce 12/2 PC/Mac; PS4 SCEA 12/3 Xbox One & 360; PS4 SCEE 12/4 iOS," it wrote.

The one we care about, of course, is top of the list: December 2 is the day that the adventures of House Forrester will begin in earnest. As previously revealed, the game will follow five members of the House as they struggle to prevent its destruction during the War of the Five Kings. It will also feature appearances by several members of the HBO cast, including Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister, Lena Heady as Cersei Lannister, Natalie Dormer as Margaery Tyrell, and Iwan Rheon as Ramsay Snow.

Game of Thrones may be pre-purchased now on Steam.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2.

There's a certain kind of comment I see below these Dota 2 columns that has always made me think. They show up every other week or so, and usually run along the lines of 'I don't get it', 'boring game', or 'who even plays this?' Standard anonymous point-scoring, for the most part. Comments by people who have an opinion and don't care if it's true or relevant. These are bad-faith lines of enquiry: the commenter doesn't care for an explanation, they just want to be seen asking the question.

It's an interesting question, though, and one that has stuck with me. How has this genre of game, unfriendly, competitive, complex, time-consuming as it is, become so dominant? It feels like we've skipped a step: gone straight from 'check this out' to 'I'm sick of cash-in MOBAs' without the exploratory middle-period in the genre's life. That this is the most popular form in PC gaming at present goes largely unquestioned: the reasons why—and the lessons we might learn from interrogating them—have been more elusive.

This, also, from a genre of game that on the surface lacks any of the game mechanics that you might think of when you consider compulsive loops or systems designed for player retention. Your progress in a given game of Dota 2 is reset when the ancient explodes. Any collecting or levelling you might do in the game is purely cosmetic and entirely optional. Your 'score'—your matchmaking rating—fluctuates based on performance and is not intended to be grown beyond the level suitable for you. Indeed, popular as trying to game the MMR system might be, doing so is totally contrary to the system's purpose—unless you genuinely are improving as a player, in which case the system is working as intended.

MMOs are popular because the entertainment value of moment-to-moment play is matched by tangible, measurable progress in areas that are visible to other players: your character's level, their gear, your guild's progress through a series of raid bosses, whatever form it takes. Your play serves a greater purpose, and it's this purpose that keeps you coming back. The same is true for Farmville, for Fallen London, for any other example you might pick: persistent progress brings you back.

I don't believe that the potential to jury-rig a progression system within Dota 2's existing structure accounts for its popularity. Collecting cosmetics, gambling on professional matches and grinding out MMR are marginal pursuits within the hobby, not intrinsic to its appeal. That appeal, then, is something fundamental to the act of play itself—the simple (or not so simple) reality of the game, divorced from whatever hunter-gatherer instinct it might otherwise be tickling.

There are, I think, two principles at work here. The first is what I'd call the genre's 'emotional efficiency'. Dota 2 is, functionally, a competitive micro-RPG that provides opportunities for individual and collective heroism. The emotional 'payout', here, is the feeling that you or your friends have achieved something genuinely noteworthy; that you are special, powerful, skilled, fortunate.

The previous best example of a publisher-popular 'cash-in' genre, the MMO, chases the same feeling across years of player commitment. In this example, the feeling of power comes from toppling a raid boss following weeks of preparation. The problem that MMOs face is that this feeling is ultimately an illusion. The same boss will be defeated in the same way by many other people. The only players for whom genuine heroism is an option are those who achieve world-first raid wins, a tiny fragment of the population equivalent to the number of people who play Dota 2 professionally.

Even though the vast majority of people will never become pro players, each Dota 2 match (or League match, or Smite match) is its own competitive space, distinct from every other instance of that competition that has ever taken place. You will never encounter the same combination of players, characters, items, scenarios twice. Acts of skill or power are legitimate, in this context, because they are unrepeatable. Your heroism is not an illusion because you only get one shot at it.

Furthermore, these games achieve this feeling with a relatively small number of tools—a pool of characters, a set of game mechanics, a single environment—and each instance of the game takes a manageable amount of time to play out before the board is reset. Contrast with the MMO, where offering new opportunities for heroism requires constant work by the game's developers: new areas, monsters, missions, narratives. A lane pushing game can achieve the same thing with a single new character, or with a balance patch. The format is efficient, which makes it manageable for players to consume in vast amounts and practical for developers to create and maintain.

The MOBA is the emotional payout of an MMO in tablet form; minus the years-long social investment, plus the compelling quality of an experience that can be repeated over and over and over in the space of a single day.

The second key principle is that persistent progression mechanics and compulsive loops are not entirely absent—their expression simply takes a different form. You might talk of World of Warcraft being addictive because it combines fixed ratio reward schedules (reliable gold and experience from quests, exploration and farming) with variable ratio schedules (the chance for random loot or lucky wins on the auction house.) The casino analogy feels more applicable here than it does with Dota because the rewards being offered are analogous to the physical rewards most associated with gambling: gold, coveted items. The fixed ratio schedule gives people an incentive to keep investing their time, and the variable ratio convinces them that they'll one day win big. The result is a traditional compulsive loop.

This same combination is present in almost any other game with loot, and that's where you'll find it talked about most often with regard to games—my friend Matt Lees discussed the same subject in this interesting video about the console MMO Destiny. These principles are equally applicable, however, to the psychological processes operating within players themselves. 'Reward' need not necessarily mean gold or items: it can refer to more nebulous things, like the satisfaction of learning or the accolades that follow skilful or imaginative play.

Dota 2 combines fixed and variable ratio schedules in the way it distributes information. Every time you play, you are steadily learning new things about heroes, items, combos, techniques and so on. The amount that the game asks you to learn is vast, but manageably so: there is always the sense that there is more to learn, but not so much that you can't play right away. For the WoW player, their experience is a bar that runs along the bottom of the screen, steadily growing; for the Dota player, it is a feeling—also steadily growing.

All competitive games have this aspect, but the Dota formula is distinctive because of the amount of creative space it provides. It is possible, at every level of play, to be the one exceptional mind that comes up with a silly combo, a play, a draft that wins a game and earns you a story to tell. These aren't high-level or professionally legitimate expressions of skill, but chance wins that make for good YouTube nonetheless. This is how a variable ratio reward schedule can manifest within a competitive context: not in terms of an epic item from a trash mob, but in the eureka moment that produces Blink Armlet Dagon Terrorblade, or the Five Man Bird Bomb.

No other competitive game, I would argue, provides this balance between steady progress and the chance for creative triumph. Only the very best StarCraft players will ever earn the right to define their own meta and win; Counter-Strike players are judged by extreme degrees of finesse within the binary framework of a gunfight. There is absolutely skill and beauty in both of these examples, but they lack the aspirational quality that comes with creative space—space created by Dota's lack of structural grace, by the sheer volume of rules and exceptions that make it so daunting on paper. Its complexity isn't just a ladder that you climb: it's a sandbox for you to make your name in.

These games are interesting because they fall far outside of the format that we'd associate with accessible or addictive games while operating, I'd argue, on many of the same principles. In offering an emotional payout in place of an ultimately-thin sense of progress, they suggest that it's possible for 'compulsive' to be divorced from 'unhealthy'; 'time-consuming' from 'a waste of time'. There an awful lot of people playing these games, and I find it heartening to think that the majority of them are getting something out of it beyond a few numbers on a character sheet.

You might not get why these games are as popular as they are, and you might be justified in sighing next time another major publisher announces that they've bought a studio you like and set them to work trying to beat LoL: but there is a message communicated by this popularity, and it's one that says better things about gamers than any essay on compulsive mechanics or player retention ever will. It's that true emotional payout is everything: deliver the feeling, earn the player.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here. Thanks to Eskil Steenberg for the discussion that helped to flesh out a few parts of this article.