Bossa Studios, the team behind Surgeon Simulator and, more recently (and weirdly), I Am Bread, has announced a new project entitled Worlds Adrift. It's a physics-based multiplayer adventure that will apparently feature great wooden airships that occasionally crash into each other.

"We love physics in our games. Physics is what makes Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread tick," the studio explained on YouTube. "No two game sessions are alike, because a lot of weird and interesting stuff can happen, so gameplay possibilities about."

What will set World Adrift apart, apparently, is its multiplayer focus. Bossa's "Gamer-in-Chief" Henrique Olifiers didn't dig into it very deeply and pointed out that "everything is very rough around the edges [and] the art is all placeholder," but the trailer shows several players swinging around a rocky world, then assembling and riding, and swinging from, on a large airship. The implication would seem to be that the game's physics will enable the open-ended creation and use of unique, and impressively large-scale, objects

Interestingly, despite the announcement, it doesn't sound as though Bossa is fully and completely committed to the game. "We are very eager to hear what you think about our ideas, feedback for the game, and your ideas as well," Olifiers said. "Honestly, we want to know if you think it is worth [it] for us to continue working on this game or not." That's a tough call, given that there's really not much to go on, but if you want to throw some thoughts their way, you may do so at worldsadrift.com.

Each week PC Gamer s writers stumble out of the snow, gather by the fire, and recount tales of the horrors they ve seen. (Plus some nice stuff.)

THE HIGHS

Samuel Roberts: Metal Gear rocks on PC This week I saw Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes running at 4K on Andy Kelly s PC, while he was reviewing the excellent port for us. Look, the framerate might ve been a bit rubbish running on his GTX 970, but just for the detail on Snake and the weather effects it was worth it. Konami s price point for the game at $20/ 17 was very well-judged, I think, and to sell Ground Zeroes for even less as part of the opening of the Steam sale is even better. I picked up Ground Zeroes and Revengeance for under $20 this week. If this is Konami s way of doubling down on its commitment to PC, I commend them. A fantastic port, and the promise of The Phantom Pain next year—all we need now is a simultaneous release with the console versions, as well as ports of the older games, and Metal Gear s home will be on PC from now on. 

Chris Livingston: Farming Stimulator While I suspect Facebook won't buy it for $2 billion, it's still nice to see another niche gaming gizmo appear: plans for a Farming Simulator controller are in the works. It'll feature a steering wheel-turning knob and a side panel with a loader control stick and programmable buttons. Some virtual farmers out there are going to be very excited.

As a fan of oddball sim games, I hope to see more speciality controllers in the future. I definitely could have used a specialized controller when I pretended to be a San Francisco bus driver, maybe something with a ticket dispenser built into the dash and a defogger switch. When I was a tow truck driver it would have been nice to have had a controller with a few levers on it, or at least a dedicated switch for calling my insurance agent. And, when I made the poor decision to to run a circus, I definitely could have used a custom controller with a single button that read "Do Not Run A Circus" on it. Coulda pressed it immediately and played something else.

Wes Fenlon: Durante rules on Final Fantasy XIII Whenever I can get Durante to lend his expert analysis to PC Gamer, I consider it a good week. I loved his critique of Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2, because it highlighted the performance issues of the ports and actually explained what causes those issues. His analysis of Dark Souls 2 earlier this year explained why that game was a great PC port, and it warmed my heart to see From Software learn so much, and so quickly, after the first terrible Dark Souls port. The FFXIII games perform more poorly than Dark Souls 2, and offer far fewer options.

I hope that by pointing out these issues, publishers like Square Enix will see that PC players care about options and performance and expect a certain level of quality that's worth investing a bit more time and effort to achieve. Valkyria Chronicles outperformed Sega's expectations in just a few days on Steam, and you can bet it wouldn't have sold as well if it hadn't been a fantastic PC port.

Andy Chalk: Larian Goes to Canada Larian Studios dropped some unexpected news on Thursday: It's opening a new office in Quebec City. That's a big step for a small studio from Belgium, but one it's able, and in a way forced, to take thanks to the success of Divinity: Original Sin. The hit RPG was an ambitious undertaking but studio boss Swen Vincke has his sights set even higher, saying in a blog post that his goal is to create increasingly "dense, highly interactive worlds" that offer a level of freedom approaching that of pencil-and-paper RPGs.

I've been a Larian fan for years, and so I can't help but feel some amount of sympathetic trepidation at the prospect of such a big, bold move. But I also admire Vincke's determination to seize the opportunity that's presented itself, and to be perfectly honest I love the whole "little guy wins big" angle of its success. Larian is my kind of studio, making my kind of game, so it's exciting on a personal level to see that resonate with such a large audience.

Tom Marks: They see Notch rollin , they hatin I don t care what any of you think, all y all are haters anyway. When I heard that Notch, creator of Minecraft and newly made billionaire after selling to Microsoft, had bought a $70 million dollar mansion in Beverly Hills out from under Jay-Z and Beyonce I was absolutely ecstatic. That s incredible. That s the most amazing and hilarious piece of news I ve possibly ever heard. Who cares if it s over-priced, over-sized, and overseas? The dude has $1.7 billion dollars and, until this moment, has been nothing but humble.

Ok, technically it s $1.63 billion now, but even when he was only a plain ol multimillionaire he wasn t flaunting it. Just look at his rig from four months ago. Notch bottled lightning with the success of Minecraft, and then made all the right decisions to keep that success rolling. He made his own fortune and has actively tried to stay out of the limelight since.

He s only a celebrity because the internet liked him and the character they made him out to be. I, for one, wish him very well and hope he s happy in his giant mansion with his giant candy wall. Do I hope uses some of that money for good? Sure, but it s his money and nobody is allowed to judge him for what he spends it on. Also, now that he s in LA, I am eagerly awaiting Notch photo bombing the paparazzi and the surely inevitable reality show. 

Tim Clark: Is this seat taken? Hopefully you ve been enjoying the hardware guides we ve been posting since the site relaunched. There are plenty more planned for the new year, including some substantial rig-building stuff. In the meantime, though, I ve been testing chairs for a couple of weeks. We ve written about standing desks and why sitting can be pretty bad for you recently, but I ll be damned if my butt is going to go unsupported by conventional furniture. So I ve been looking for the best chairs at a variety of prices, with an emphasis on comfort and support over extended sessions. (Though do try to have an hourly stretch. Yes, yes, I know, I m not the boss of you…) So far one seat feels close to revelatory. Which is to say my back no longer hurts like Satan is trying to insert a USB stick into my spine the wrong way up. The full results will be published in mid-January, but I think it s safe to say the chair isn t over yet.

THE LOWS

Chris Livingston: Witcher switcher In regards to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, CD Projekt Red made an announcement this week about a new playable character, Ciri, which is great news: she looks and sounds like a badass. Still, every time I think about the series, I get focused on the one thing that makes me less interested in playing it: you can't design your own personal version of Geralt. We've heard that you can style his hair and beard a bit in Wild Hunt, but that's not nearly enough for my tastes. Not nearly!

Am I just spoiled by the character customization in other RPGs, like your Dragon Ages and your Elder Scrolls and your Mass Effectseses? Maybe. But being able to put your own personal stamp on your character's looks is an important aspect in role-playing, in my mind nearly as important as tailoring their skills and abilities. I wish The Witcher would finally get on board. On board!

Samuel Roberts: A port in a storm I love Durante s ongoing port analysis work for PCG. This week he took a look at the release for Final Fantasy XIII-2 and the updates made for FFXIII that enabled some pretty basic graphics options, and it s as I suspected—even with the improvements in visuals, the framerates continue to disappoint. Here s why that sucks from my perspective: when I reviewed FFXIII and gave it a fair and low score, I penalised it due to the quality of the port. I want Square Enix to keep releasing Final Fantasy games on PC—but I want them to be better than the console versions, not worse. The Final Fantasy XIII trilogy can t be played on PS4 and Xbox One so these console versions will only collect dust, but on PC they will be around forever. So why not release ports that can stand the test of time? I get the sense the improvements made to the visual options are a gesture of wanting to get things right, but there s still some way to go.

Andy Chalk: Assassin s Creed: Unity patch delayed It's easy for me to be dismissive of the Assassin's Creed: Unity debacle because I don't actually play it, but the delay of the fourth patch to the troubled game earlier this week was infuriating. Not because of the extra wait—bravo to Ubisoft for not shoving something out the door solely to meet an arbitrary deadline—but because of the statement that led into it: "Rigorous quality control is of paramount importance to us, and your feedback over these past weeks has indicated that it is important to you as well."

It is perhaps the most contemptibly ridiculous thing the publisher could have said at that particular moment in time. If 2014 has taught us anything, it's that quality control is most assuredly not of "paramount importance" to Ubisoft; Unity is obviously the poster child of a launch gone wrong but Watch Dogs, Far Cry 4, and The Crew—that is to say, just about every major game it released this year—suffered from a varying amounts of damaging bugs. We all fall into slumps now and then, and maybe Ubisoft's annus horribilis was just a (long) streak of (incredibly) bad luck. But telling the world how committed you are to quality control when you're struggling to fix the patch to fix the game that's still a mess after three prior patches doesn't make you look conscientious. It makes you look silly.

Wes Fenlon: Sportsfriends, minus Bach Sportsfriends was supposed to arrive on the PC aaaages ago, but it's just squeaking onto the 2014 calendar with a release today. Now we know at least one partial reason for the delay: despite their best efforts, the developers haven't been able to get Johann Sebastian Joust's PlayStation Move controllers to work on the PC. And, according to the devs, they'll never be able to. On the bright side, Joust works on Linux and OS X, which is as good an argument for SteamOS as I've heard yet. But it's a shame that one of the highlights of a really unique local multiplayer package won't be available to the majority of PC players. Ah, well. There's always Hokra.

Tom Marks: Boldy too scared to go I want to play Elite: Dangerous. I really do. I want to get completely sucked into that universe, make my way through the stars, and learn to master the controls of my ship. But I am too scared to do it. Elite just seems so big and imposing that I feel like I d never be able to get a foothold. Its scope is both exciting and intimidating. I d love to take part in that experience, and I don t think I d be bad at it, but there s something about knowing the first 20 hours of a game are going to be learning the basics that scares me away.

I m probably painting the experience with too broad a brush, and I m honestly a little bit ashamed for not steeling myself and diving headfirst into Elite. I ve been watching livestreams of other people playing and it looks simple, but then I ask myself how long it took that person to make it seem easy? Why are they doing that thing they chose to do over any of the other countless options they have? Where would I even begin? I don t doubt Elite will envelop me eventually, but it might take easing into it with my friends to not startle me away.

Tim Clark: Haters The whole now you see it, now you don t… Oh, huh, it s back saga that went on with Hatred on Greenlight this week felt like an unedifying episode for Steam. I also suspect it only stores up a problem for Valve further down the line. Someone initially decided the game s content crossed the lines of taste and decency, and therefore had no place on the service, but later that same day the civilian slaughter sim received a reprieve, seemingly after an intervention from Gabe Newell himself.

My read on this is that Valve doesn t want to position itself as moral arbiters of what s acceptable in terms of violence. Presumably so long as the material doesn t breach any laws, the firm is willing to host it. But isn t it odd, then, to be coy about sexual content? I imagine the developers of the (not especially sexy) intercourse- em-up Seduce Me, which was pulled from Greenlight in 2012, would have something to say.

As for Hatred, I m not sure refusing to host it would have qualified as censorship, as the angrier commenters immediately claimed. Running a publishing platform doesn t oblige you to provide a home for every game in existence, much in the same way as deciding to throw a party doesn t mean you re obliged to invite the neighbourhood nutcase. (Related: I haven t been invited to *any* parties this holiday. QQ.)

I think the real issue, for Valve, is that the idea of taking a zero touch approach to this stuff isn t tenable. It s easy to come up with increasingly extreme game concepts until you arrive at one which no company would rightly want to be associated with distributing. What we saw this week was Valve struggling to decide where that line is going to fall. (Aside: Just me, or does the animation in Hatred actually look quite slick? Pity whoever s doing that couldn t have found something, y know, not vile to work on.)

Original webm video above created by NeoGAF poster Havel

The debug version of Dark Souls has found its way online, enabling all sorts of interesting new options: Disable gravity, play as other characters, adjust animation speed, and a whole lot more. It can also be used for less benevolent purposes, so some caution is obviously warranted, but if you want to get in on the fun, Reddit and NeoGAF have you covered.

The Dark Souls subreddit actually takes a relatively cautious approach to the debug, acknowledging that the majority of the community wants to talk about its capabilities but asking that users not post links to the executable. "It's easy enough to find on Google as it is and it would be good if /r/darksouls could maintain a healthy relationship with Namco Bandai," it wrote.

Over on NeoGAF, however, you can find such links, as well as instructions on how to install and use it. I'd still recommend reading through the thread before digging too deeply into the game's hidden recesses: As one poster noted, playing with the "GameData > Change Character Param" option on your main save will overwrite your character. It also runs entirely on the client side, meaning you can't invade other worlds disguised as an NPC or boss, but it will connect with the Steam beta version of Dark Soul as well as other debugs.

Playing as Artorias is just one of the cool things you can do with the debug build, as it lets you cycle through all the game's models, or clip through the game world and see how it was put together.  Or you could play as a freakishly tall mimic. Why not?

The PC version of Titanfall, as you know, is an Origin exclusive. And it seems likely to stay that way, according to Respawn Entertainment co-founder and CEO Vince Zampella—but if he has his way, future games in the series will be available on other platforms as well.

Zampella told Game Informer that Titanfall is closing in on eight million unique players, which he described as pretty successful, especially since it was "an early launch on a limited platform." It wasn't released for either the PlayStation 3 or PlayStation 4, but on PC side it didn't come to Steam, either: It was exclusive to EA's Origin. That obviously did it no good with PC gamers, given how effectively Steam dominates the market, but at this point the situation is unlikely to change.

"At some point you look at it and you say is it even worth now this much later the effort to put it on Steam, when it would be a lot of work and kind of bifurcate the community?" he said. "We would have loved for it to be on Steam from day one, but at some point it just doesn't make sense anymore and you start looking to the future and I think we should not make that same decision again."

Zampella emphasized later in the interview that "future projects will not necessary be exclusive," and noted that the exclusivity deal for Titanfall covered only the first game.

Prismata isn't quite a card game and isn't quite an RTS, but at a certain point I stopped trying to label it and just wanted to keep playing. As Lunarch Studios' first project, it aims to combine the best parts of StarCraft and Hearthstone into something entirely new. Its Kickstarter campaign only managed to hit its goal yesterday, cutting it uncomfortably close before it ends tomorrow. To get a real grasp of how the game plays, watch the video above and watch me play a couple of rounds.

Calling Prismata a card game is fairly misleading. You don't have to collect cards, you don't have a deck, and you don't draw each turn. Instead, it's a card game in pace and appearance only. Both players have access to the same pool of units to build, with 11 choices that stay the same and a separate pool of units that randomly change each time you play. This makes every match take place on an even playing field while forcing you and your opponent to adapt to the available choices. You have to build units that give you basic resources, then use those resources to build attackers and defenders, before eventually overwhelming your opponent. 

A more accurate description of Prismata is StarCraft without the RTS element. A confusing prospect, and one that had me very skeptical, but it does provide strategic depth without the necessity of mechanical skill. Prismata has boiled StarCraft down to its economy and its build orders. Micro and macro as we know them are gone and what matters now is the plan you make, not how well you can execute it. Without fog of war, you can always see what your opponent is doing, encouraging adaptation and flexibility. Honestly, it's everything I admire about competitive StarCraft made accessible to someone not willing to do finger exercises to boost their APM.

Still, Prismata has a lot more work to do if it wants to compete with the likes of Hearthstone. The early-access version I played featured an ugly UI and was still unclear in some of its visual language. One of the things that made Hearthstone such a runaway success was its incredible detail in the art, sound effects, and feedback that makes even the smallest action feel satisfying. Lunarch has done a great job making a complex game concept easier to approach, but a more casual audience might still be overwhelmed. I am genuinely glad that Prismata met its Kickstarter goal; it's a game with a ton of potential and I hope that the funding boost will allow Lunarch to give Prismata the polish it deserves. 

It came to light last week that West Games, the developer behind the dodgy-looking Areal Kickstarter, is taking another run at crowdfunding with an even more blatant trade on the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. name: STALKER Apocalypse. This time seeking $600,000 in funding on a previously-unheard-of platform called World Wide Funder. As if that's not sketchy enough, it's since come to light that West Games and World Wide Funder might be more closely linked than previously thought.

In a statement posted in full on Blue's, World Wide Funder said it's faced considerable controversy over hosting the STALKER Apocalypse project, including allegations that it and West Games are actually the same company. Naturally, it insists they are not. "This confusion came about because Leonid Kovtun is a member of our company. He knows West Games, and showed our platform to them," the statement says. "Unfortunately, some people jumped to conclusions, and wrongfully associated us as one and the same."

World Wide Funder also said that it won't shut the project down, even though it's received numerous requests to do so. "The simple answer is that we won't [shut it down] unless the project creator asks us to do so (in which case all funder contributions will be refunded). We've reached out to West Games, and they have shown us that they have the rights to use that name for their project," the statement continues. "We hope their project is successful, despite the controversy that they've stirred, and we think that people should lighten up on them a little. They look like a passionate team of people who want to make a spectacular game."

Leonid Kovtun was apparently a "partner" on the original Areal Kickstarter, although as Forbes noted in the summer, West Games refused to clarify the specifics of his role. Develop, however, suggested that the relationship between the companies may go beyond that, pointing out that the Nevada business portal SilverFlume lists West Games CEO Eugene Kim as the holder of an expired business reservation for a company called World Wide Funder. An application for a new company of the same name has since been filed by "Animal Book Incorporated DBA World Wide Funder."

We've reached out to World Wide Funder for clarification on the matter, but in the meantime it also bears mentioning that, unlike Kickstarter, World Wide Funder projects keep all the money pledged regardless of whether or not they reach their goal. I'm not here to tell you how to spend your money, but folks: You have been warned.

Grey Goo looks old-fashioned at first. Even after playing and enjoying early preview builds last winter and spring, I worried it would be too much of a throwback to a bygone era. It's one thing to enjoy a game at a hands-on preview, when you're surrounded by a cheerful development team and it's literally the only game on offer. It's harder to predict how well that experience will travel once you're at home, with nothing but time to discover flaws and shortcomings.

Grey Goo comes from Petroglyph Games, probably the most direct descendant of Command & Conquer creators Westwood Studios. The C&C style of RTS has gone out of fashion in recent years, done-in by increasingly underwhelming Command & Conquer sequels coming out of EA, and more complicated designs like Company of Heroes and StarCraft 2. But Grey Goo offers a rousing defense of the old formula, and reminded me what I loved about games like this in the first place.

Weta world

Grey Goo's campaign is a classic RTS campaign, full of cinematic cutscenes and talking-head mission briefings spliced between traditional RTS single-player levels. When the first cinematic started to play, I felt a little gust of dread, worried that once again we would descending into a Command & Conquer-style campfest. Or that it'd be hopelessly self-serious and incompetent, a B-level sci-fi story convinced that it was in Spielberg territory.

Instead, it was just… good. Grey Goo puts its connection to New Zealand's Weta Workshop to good use, with evocative designs for all the game's units, characters, and settings. The little two-minute movies that bookend most levels are always well-done, rapidly developing the plot, defining each faction, and raising the stakes for your missions. It's a little jarring when the aliens open their mouths and thick Australian accents come out, and some of the faces have an uncanny valley effect, but the disorientation passes quickly.

The cinematics help establish and emphasize the three distinctive faction designs that make Grey Goo so interesting. The Beta are the most conventional faction and, ironically, more humanized than the humans in the early part of the story. The campaign opens on the Beta as they stand on the verge of a major breakthrough after an implied exile from their homeworld, on the run from "the Silent Ones." But no sooner have they activated an interstellar portal then their old enemies come through it, and they instantly find themselves in a fight for their survival. Things go from terrible to apocalyptic at a breakneck pace, and the missions themselves likewise get you up to speed and playing with the full range of units and weapons as quicky as possible.

The Beta's humanized, industrial characterization echoes their faction design. They have to expand onto the map and call down power hubs to which their buildings can attach. The more they expand, the more territory they have to defend and the more decentralized their network becomes.

Meanwhile, the human faction is super high-tech. They use teleportation to produce buildings and can even reconfigure their base at-will, but the trade-off is that everything has to be connected to a central hub, so they can't really pop expansions onto the map. Their harvesters have to travel farther to reach resources, and their new units have to choose between marching a long way across the map or filing into teleporters with limited space and long cooldowns.

In the end, then, the humans feel like an old 18th or 19th century colonial settlement deep inside hostile country. Inside the perimeter is safety and security and theoretically limitless defensive power. Beyond those walls, however, is a hard-to-control countryside that can swallow up an army that strays too far from aid.

The Goo are strangest faction of the bunch, and the one I'm struggling to get the hang-of. If the Beta expand onto the map and build lots of little bases, and the humans operate at a distance from one mega-base, the Goo don't have a base of any kind. The globs of nanomechanical goop, the Mother Goos, swarm around the map, vacuuming up resources and using them to spawn units. They're probably the most interesting faction, from a thematic and design perspective, but they're a nightmare for a dedicated turtler like me.

Playing the Goo is partly a shell-game as you try to keep your Mother Goos hidden from the enemy, but it's also a bit like being the Mongol horde sweeping out of the plains to level everything in your path. The Goo are wildly vulnerable and utterly devastating, all the same time. But controlling them requires some kind of Sun Tzu formlessness that I have yet to master.

It's this completely different relationship to the map and to the resources on it that makes Grey Goo so instantly and intuitively engaging. The same map feels like a completely different space depending on you are playing, and who you are playing against.

The armies themselves don't seem particularly different, unfortunately, and they all seem to have versions of the same core set of units. If those differences are important, I haven't been able to discern how. There are little differences, like the way that Beta bombers behave more like carpet-bombing aircraft, while the humans launch pinpoint, high-damage airstrikes. Or how Goo artillery launches huge, slow-moving projectiles that explode into huge area-of-effect, damage-over-time puddles of goop. But overall, artillery is artillery, anti-air is anti-air, and so on.

Easy to play

But that simplicity might actually work in Grey Goo's favor. It's an enormously accessible game. Not just because of a forward-thinking interface design that routes almost every important command through the QWERTY row, but because it's really less about micro-management and positioning than it is about resource optimization and denial.

This is the other thing that's fascinating in Grey Goo: there's one resource, Catalyst, that's used for everything. It is available at nodes on the map, but it really behaves more like well-water. If you tap a "vein" of Catalyst, you are slowly depleting that entire vein, not just the area you're harvesting. The faster you use it, the faster the supply becomes exhausted. However, once a vein is exhausted, it slowly replenishes.

So a "greedy" build really will feel greedy, generating a resource boom while sucking the map dry. But this can be used aggressively as well: some maps feature long, river-like veins of Catalyst that are available to both players. Aggressively mining from that means that your opponent, on the other end, will see his own refineries start to dry-up. I've had entire games that turned into a shoving-match over shared resource patches, as raid and counter-raid tried to deny the enemy mining time.

Grey Goo is a very different kind of RTS from StarCraft 2 or Company of Heroes. It lacks the former's emphasis on unit micro and hard-counters, and the latter's emphasis on terrain. In many ways, it is a return to the 1990s RTS games where the developers of Petroglyph made their fame. But this is a very modern, expert preparation of these familiar ingredients, and it is one of the most instantly-enjoyable RTS games I've played in ages.

Correction: A previous version of this article placed Weta Workshop in Australia. We apologize for the mistake and will eat our weights in Marlborough green-lipped mussels in penance. 

Blizzard has revealed some of its World of Warcraft plans for 2015, including an expansion of the Legendary quest line (complete with Legendary follower), improvements and additions to Garrisons, more focus on eSports via War Games skirmishes, and ongoing upgrades to character models. Perhaps the most interesting idea, however, is the possible addition of tradable tokens that can be used to pay for game time.

It's still in the exploratory stage, but the system sounds like it would function very similarly to EVE Online's "plex," an in-game item representing 30 days of game time that can be purchased or traded, and that makes large-scale EVE battles so wonderfully interesting by introducing an element of risk beyond that of normal games: A player with a hold full of plex faces potentially significant real-money losses if his ship is destroyed. It's doubtful that Blizzard would let things go that far, but it said players have expressed an interest in seeing something similar in WoW.

"Our current thought on this is that it would give players a way to use their surplus gold to cover some of their subscription cost, while giving players who might have less play time an option for acquiring gold from other players through a legit and secure system," Community Manager Micah "Bashiok" Whipple wrote. "We agree it could be a good fit for the game, and we look forward to any feedback you have as we continue to look into this feature."

Bashiok also noted that the World of Warcraft 6.1 patch, which will include some of the changes listed in the post, will be up on the Public Test Realm soon.

Check out our game of the year awards 2014 page to find out how the awards were decided.

Phil Savage: It s a story about Thedas, and about reshaping the structures and politics that define a world. It s also a story about people, and how they respond to tragedy, hope and faith. Inquisition is a proper roleplaying game: one that asks you to not just create a character, but to let their motivations and investments grow over time.

And if that was a little abstract, here s something more specific: dragons are cool. This is no big revelation, but they re particularly cool in Inquisition. Their animations are impeccable. They re not haughty mystical conduits, they re big, deadly animals. Fighting them requires that you hack away at various limbs, and when you do, they flinch in response. They look annoyed and pained and a little bit arrogant. There are things about Inquisition s combat system that I think are flawed, but all of it comes together when you re fight these massive angry lizards. 

Chris Thursten: I made a decision in Inquisition that was so painful I had to go back and undo it, breaking a rule that I ve held myself to since the first Mass Effect. When its narrative engine kicks into gear, Dragon Age: Inquisition is among the best work BioWare has ever done.

Like every BioWare sequel, this is a game that will mean more to you the more you have invested in its predecessors—its callbacks and plot thread resolutions are labyrinthine, and if references to sidecharacters from tie-in novels are the kinds of thing that gives you goosebumps then you ll spend your time with Inquisition tingling like a Christmas tree. Despite the extensive backmatter, however, this is a game with substantial value as an introduction to the series. Unlike Mass Effect, which followed the life of a single character, Dragon Age s multiple protagonists are reintroduced to the same themes and conflicts with each new iteration. You don t need to have been Hawke or the Warden to become the Inquisitor, and so you ve really got no excuse not to go on an adventure in this incredible world.

For our full verdict, read our Dragon Age: Inquisition review.

It's Christmas. Would you like a free game? Of course you would! Thanks to our friends at Playfire, you can get a free Steam key right now. Follow the link for full details.

Nominated for over 40 E3 Awards, Sega s latest and by far greatest foray into the Alien franchise is without doubt, Alien: Isolation.

Not only can you grab the DLC for this critically acclaimed wonder for free, courtesy of Sega, if you head over to Green Man Gaming now, you can pick up the base game HALF PRICE as part of their Christmas Monster Deals! The word on the street is you ll have only 24hrs to take advantage of this bargain, which goes live at some point today [Friday 19th] - whilst stocks last.

And if that wasn t sweet enough, there ll be several Playfire Rewards up for Alien: Isolation over the next week. So you can play your way to even cheaper games.

Whilst you re having fun, please spare a thought for poor, old Amanda. Or rather young Amanda. Like mother like daughter it seems. Sometimes it s just worth staying at home. Maybe playing a game or two.