The television ad for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is out, and while it's very brief, it also very handily nails the Witcher mystique, and why the series is so attractive to me and a great many other RPG fans.

"This world doesn't need a hero," the grizzled Geralt growls. "It needs a professional." And then, POW! He murders a gryphon. I'm willing to bet he introduced himself to the distressed damsel afterward, too. That's a professional, and a hero.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is out on May 19.

The best thing about the Kingston HyperX Cloud, our favorite gaming headset, is that it s actually a rebranded Qpad QH-90. Kingston took an already great headset and made it even better. I won't tell you they turned everything up to 11, because I'm not a hi-fi salesman. But if I did, you'd get a decent understanding of the grand plan.

The comfort was already there, thanks to Qpad. Wisely leaving all the building materials and architecture untouched, but for occasional splashes of its own branding, Kingston instead focussed on pushing for a more aggressive, bass-heavy sound that didn't compromise clarity. The HyperX Cloud was—and is—a complete success, and still one of the absolute best gaming headsets available.

Given that nothing was really wrong with it, it's perhaps a bit surprising to see the HyperX Cloud II turn up so soon. The visual differences are null (save for a redesigned inline remote), but there's one key feature to set it apart from its predecessor—surround sound.

7.1 virtual surround sound, driven by 53mm units in each earcup, to be precise. The previous HyperX, like the Qpad QH-90, had a simple two-channel stereo output by contrast. So although it was capable of many things, precise positional audio and cinematic 'sweeping' sound effects were off the menu.

Is it a big deal that the Cloud II offers seven, algorithm-driven sound sources instead of two? The answer's totally dependent on your intended usage. If you're sitting there with the old model clasped to your skull feeling like your hardware's now redundant, don't. You still own the most comfortable cans available, with incredible sound quality whether you re listening to music or bullets and bombs whizzing overhead. Unless you take your online FPS gaming really seriously and want to know exactly where those footsteps are coming from in CS:GO, you can breathe easy—you re not missing out.

Perhaps the more relevant question is whether those who don t own the original HyperX Cloud should consider the Cloud II a no-brainer. In short: no.

Firstly, the release of the Cloud II has pushed down the price of its wonderful predecessor to under $70, some $30 cheaper than the new model. That s pause for thought no matter how interested you are in surround sound.

Secondly, the quality of that surround is good, rather than great. There are clear pros, as you d expect from Kingston: its interface requires a single USB slot rather than the morass of coloured cables required to set up a true surround headset, and it s toggled on or off via the press of a button on the inline remote. That s actually an important feature when listening to audio designed for a 2.1 setup, because you ll want to turn surround mode off in that case for clearer, more precise sound quality. Leave it on—as with any surround headphones—and you ll hear a muddiness when listening to a stereo source.

Turn it on when listening to an audio mix engineered for 7.1 though, and you ll really hear the benefits. The hard work s already done by the Cloud II s fantastic bass response, accentuated by its construction materials and closed cup design, and by the clarity offered higher up the EQ. So when you hear a sound passing from behind and over your head, it s all the more impressive for having that low-end body.

However, if you separate the overall sound quality from the quality of the surround itself, it doesn t stack up against Creative and Turtle Beach s high-end 7.1 offerings. Admittedly, models such as Creative s Tactic 3D Omega and Turtle Beach s Z300 require a more complex setup, both involving a weighty soundcard that ll have to live somewhere on your desk, so the Cloud II s got convenience on its side—but not definitive surround quality.

It s only natural to expect that much of these Kingston cans, given the superlative foundations they re built on and the sky-high standard the memory manufacturer evidently sets for its peripheral offspring, and it s for that reason this updated model deserves such close scrutiny.

The Cloud II might not be the smashing success Kingston hoped for, but it s important to re-emphasise what an incredible package this is for under $100. If the older model wasn t available for $30 less now, we d recommend it unreservedly. As it is, we have to add a few provisos. If you have $100 at your disposal and you re looking for a catch-all headset at home with movies, games, and music—with something extra in the tank to make anything Michael Bay or Treyarch sound a bit more impressive, this is your headset. If you re looking to save a bit of cash and know you ll be happy with a simple stereo setup, hunt down the original Cloud, which is now available at a killer price.

The creator of Art of the Catch, the paid Skyrim mod that was removed from Steam earlier today, has posted a lengthy message on Reddit in which he says he didn't "steal content" to make the mod. In fact, while he acknowledged that using content from the Fores New Idles in Skyrim mod without permission was "a bit crappy," he claims that Valve told him specifically that creating a mod dependent on another mod's content would not cause any problems.

The mod maker, going by the name "Chesko," wrote in the post that Valve invited him to take part in the rollout of the paid mods program about a month and a half before it went live. He knew there would be backlash, but he also believed that "there was an opportunity to take modding to 'the next level,' where there are more things like Falskaar in the world because the incentive was there to do it." And while he wasn't happy with the 25 percent cut being offered to modders by Valve/Bethesda, he decided to take part because "it was an experiment I was willing to at least try."

The complexities of modding, compressed by the tight deadline, led to "a lot of questions surrounding the use of tools and contributed assets, like FNIS, SKSE, SkyUI, and so on," he wrote. Because of that, he reached out to Valve to determine what was and wasn't permissible, and was told, "I am not a lawyer, so this does not constitute legal advice. If you are unsure, you should contact a lawyer. That said, I spoke with our lawyer and having mod A depend on mod B is fine—it doesn't matter if mod A is for sale and mod B is free, or if mod A is free or mod B is for sale."

That's where things start to get murky. Instead of contacting a lawyer, as it now seems he should have, Chesko went ahead and and built the Art of the Catch mod, which requires a separate, free animation package that contains an FNIS behavior file.

"Was this a risky, perhaps bold, thing to go ahead with? Yes. Was it a bit crappy of me? Also yes," he wrote. "But it was a risk I took, and the outcome was largely dependent on the FNIS author's reaction to the situation. He was not happy, so I took steps to resolve it. I did not 'steal animations' or 'steal content'." He added that he's been in contact with Fore, the maker of FNIS, and that they've smoothed things out.

But he's also been in contact with a lawyer from Valve, who clarified that, in accordance with policies outlined yesterday, the mod, and Chesko's other work, will be marked as unpurchasable but will not actually be removed from the Workshop, despite his demand that it all be taken down completely.

"He stated that they will not remove the content unless 'legally compelled to do so,' and that they will make the file visible only to currently paid users," he wrote. "I am beside myself with anger right now as they try to tell me what I can do with my own content. The copyright situation with Art of the Catch is shades of grey, but in Arissa 2.0's case, it's black and white; that's 100% mine and Griefmyst's work, and I should be able to dictate its distribution if I so choose."

For now, Chesko's work, minus the Art of the Catch, remains available on the Skyrim Nexus.

Remember to click save a lot, or you'll end up losing a lot of meticulously laid-out space-formations. That's the first bit of advice, of a few, I'm going to offer you for Gratuitous Space Battles 2. And like most of this advice, it's not for a positive reason. This multi-save diktat, for example, is thanks to GSB2's proclivity for crashing when loading a battle, finishing a battle, moving between menus, exiting to another window and entering from another window. Based on some of the Steam user reviews, it would appear I m not alone.

Fortunately it doesn't happen with every mouse click, just more than it should. When it's not busy throwing you out to desktop, Gratuitous Space Battles 2 offers up a second slice of Positech's take on real-time strategy. You choose your lineup of ships, from huge dreadnoughts to one-person fighters, set their tactics and orders, place everyone how you want them and set them loose, and watch the battle unfold.

If you haven't played the first GSB, it will take a few battles before you're really used to the hands-off nature of combat. It can be endlessly frustrating to see your ship persist in targeting the wrong enemy when, with a slight aiming adjustment, they would take out the most dangerous ship on the map. But soon enough you learn you can tweak to make that change—as in Gratuitous Space Battles 2 you live and die by the tactics you choose ahead of time. 

However, sometimes it would be nice if your fleet realised attacking a dreadnought that's being supported by four shield-replenishing gunships isn't as good a tactic as attacking the gunships themselves first to negate their buff. But what can you do?

All the tactical planning in the world matters little when you realise that 90% of your encounters can be won by strapping a couple of tractor beams to a fleet of dreadnoughts, along with their usual array of lasers and missiles. Tell them to attack fighters and gunships—the ship types dreadnoughts are supposed to be weak against—as well as everyone else, set them in formation and win.

These behemoths of the void aren't supposed to be magical win-boats, but in practice they very much are. There's a mission in the incredibly brief single-player campaign where tractor beams aren't allowed, which means fighters and gunships are a threat, but everywhere else it really is a case of 'send in 12 massive bastards and reap the glorious honour'.

The honour system in Gratuitous Space Battles 2 is also flawed. The less you spend before going into battle, the more honour you maintain and thus earn if victorious. This can then be put toward unlocks—researching new weapons and modules for your ships, unlocking the other three races, accessing new hull designs and gaining access to ship design elements.

It's nice to have these unlocks and it should be something to play towards for most players, but again we're met with a couple of problems. The first being that, with your dreadnought-rush demi-tactic in place, you earn a lot of honour quickly and so can buy most things after just a few missions. Second, most of the unlocks are pretty useless. The other races offer negligible differences in buffs to ship stats, and the selection of weapons and modules is so incredibly samey it often comes down to choosing between a laser/missile that shoots further or a laser/missile that does a bit more damage.

Probably the best addition to Gratuitous Space Battles 2 is the custom ship designer. Just like before you're able to kit your fleet out with the weapons, shields, engines and other such space-trinkets you would expect in order to wage stellar warfare. But this time around you can actually customise what the spaceboats look like, with a robust, simple editing system.

Nothing you do to your ships affects performance in any way—it's purely cosmetic—but there is some fun to be had tinkering with your best/worst/stupidest design ideas. The ability to share your creations with the world is a nice touch, too. In fact, community spirit is clearly of much importance to Positech. Modding is mostly carried out via text editors or Excel, and challenges—GSB2's multiplayer, effectively—can be opened up to the entire player base with a couple of clicks.

So there is hope for Gratuitous Space Battles 2. If Positech fixes the regular crashes, that's step one. Step two, however, would either involve a huge change to the game's core mechanics, or would be down to a dedicated modding community—something that, while very much supported by the developer, isn't something anyone can guarantee either way. But for now, in the state GSB2 is in, it's a difficult game to recommend.

This is a sponsored post presented by Square Enix.

Final Fantasy XIV s Heavensward expansion introduces flying mounts to Square Enix s MMO for the first time, which offers an exciting opportunity for players to see the new worlds of Heavensward in totally different ways. This challenged the developers to think carefully about how they built the sprawling environments for the game s first expansion.

Heavensward introduces a number of new environments to FFXIV, including Coerthas, Dravania and The Floating Continent, with many bigger than the worlds of FFXIV. You can use a flying mount in all of these new locales except Ishgard, one of the two warring sides at the centre of the story in Heavensward. Being able to use a flying mount, like a black chocobo, dragon or even a personal airship, allows players to take to the skies in these larger locales, which conceptually and structurally look quite unlike anything seen in XIV to date.

So until now in A Realm Reborn, all travel was primarily on land and we were thinking in like a flat space, says Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn director and producer Naoki Yoshida. But now in Heavensward, now we're taking to the sky, we have the element of height—we have this space that was never utilised, so that is something that we had to take in consideration in the level design.

You can t take to the skies right away, though—after players obtain a flying mount, they ll need to explore each environment before they can take to the skies. Then, they re free to control their mounts in a 3D space, and they will move around twice as fast as they can walk on land, so there s a significant difference in speed by controlling them, like you're actually taking to the skies.

So, before you can obtain a flying mount, of course, you have to travel further on land, so we had to make sure that the players understand there is going to be content once you obtain a flying mount you can reach a certain point, Yoshida explains. So you have areas floating in the sky, or you'd be able to see that maybe there's an extreme cliff you have to use your flying mount to go over, and we made sure that we visually represented that it's not only a flat surface—that there is something beyond there, so that's one of the considerations that was made.

And from a technology aspect, we were going from a two-dimensional environment—when you're on the ground and you look at a building, you're only seeing it from below and you're looking up at something. So while we're in a 2D environment, we can compensate the performance rate by not rendering all of the aspects, like behind a building, or on top of the building at the time. But because the flying mount is introduced, we had to figure out a way to be able to render everything, depict everything so it makes sense when you're looking down at it from a flying mount, but still not take away from the performance. So we had to break it out into separate layers so we're displaying one segment at a time while players are adjusting the height, and making sure the performance is not lost while they're rendering the different pieces of a 3D object.

You can tell the difference in environmental design just from looking at the screenshots—the way locations are layered, the different ways moving in that 3D space can encourage exploration. Flying is part of Final Fantasy's DNA. That kind of player empowerment and difference in environmental interaction will be an incentive for existing players to pick up A Realm Reborn this June.

It's fair to say that not everyone is happy with yesterday's launch of paid mods on Steam. And so, as is the way of things, there's now a petition demanding that Valve "remove the paid content of the Steam Workshop" on Change.org—and it's attracted more than 34,000 signatures in less than 24 hours.

"The workshop is a place for people to share content with each other they made so all can enjoy it for free," the petition states. "Mods should be a free creation. Creations made by people who wish to add to the game so others can also enjoy said creation with the game. We need to unite and reject this act by Valve. Unite have Valve remove the paid content of the Workshop."

Internet petitions follow internet anger like night follows day, but as Tyler talked about yesterday, some of the concerns about paid mods are perfectly legitimate and understandable. Even so, I'm a little surprised by the intensity of the backlash. The Steam forums are alight with conversation, and of course the news that one paid mod has already been removed because it contained content from another, free mod has only added fuel to the fire.

Of course, Valve is under no obligation to respond to this petition, and so far today there are far more people actually playing Skyrim—48,000—than have called on Valve to end paid Skyrim mods. But the number of signatories is climbing, and eventually, if the growth continues, it's going to get awfully hard to ignore.

Life may be futile, but at least there are free games sometimes, eh?  Life is Feudal: Your Own is a 64-player medieval sandbox with lots of toys: you've got your crafting, your farming, your combat, your building. We enjoyed it last year, though mostly for its promise (it's still in Early Access), and now you have a chance to check it out risk-free. The developer has offered us 500 Steam codes, which we're raffling off.

As usual, rather than a 'first come first serve' giveaway, which would be over in 10 minutes, we're asking that you enter your e-mail below for a chance to be randomly selected for a key. The selection will happen Saturday morning so that there's enough time for lots of people to get in on it. Winners will be emailed their keys. Good luck!

Update: Entries are now closed and keys are being distributed to randomly selected winners.

I just played a sixty-minute solo ranked game of Dota 2. We were winning for a long time. Then, as happens often, we stopped winning—they had Sniper, Veno, and Techies, and fighting uphill was a pain in the ass. Around the fifty-minute mark, we killed Roshan with the intention of giving the Aegis to our Slark. Then, our Axe took it. Then, Axe destroyed the sentry wards that Necrophos had dropped so that I could carry them. Then, Axe blinked blind into their base, died to mines, came back to life, and died again without buyback. They pushed. We couldn't defend. The game ended.

Axe threw, I think, because he was bored and kind of a dick. The latter is a tough fix; the former indicates a problem worth exploring.

Bored players are a bigger problem in this patch than they have been before. This is the era of game-prolonging comeback mechanics, Sniper, and pub teams that can't fight uphill. It won't last forever. There will come a time—hopefully soon—when regular Dota gets faster and snappier. I imagine Valve and IceFrog are looking towards the fifth International with a view to ensuring that matches don't run long and cause the whole thing to overrun (while also, y'know, putting the idea of an eight minute victory to rest.)

Regardless, regular Dota will always be a long, demanding game. I've internalised that side of it, as have most players. When you play, you are committing to a game that is likely to last between thirty and ninety minutes and that you're not allowed to quit. Back when I taught the rest of the PCG team to play, this was one of those things that I had to learn to see from their perspective: the notion of a game that you're not allowed to stop playing is totally alien to most people.

I also play a decent amount of Smite and lately I've been playing Infinite Crisis for review. Both of these games—as with the majority of MOBAs that followed the League model—provide surrender options and a variety of game modes, including those that result in shorter matches (single lane variants, and so on.)

For the majority of new players, the length of a Dota match in is an obstacle in the way of enjoyment. Developers of new MOBAs treat it as a problem to be solved.

For the majority of Dota players, however, it isn't a problem. It's part of what makes Dota what it is. That the game is demanding and that it asks a lot from you is a bridge you cross over on the way to getting more out of it than you'll get out of other games—and a lot of players are happy to make that journey. Its complex mechanics require room to breathe, and that 'room' is provided by having long matches. As a player, you're asked to respect that. If you don't respect that, you move on to something else.

The issue with this approach is that it divides players up along binary lines. The reality isn't really like that. Everybody who plays the game—even those who play it a lot—has a different amount of time and patience. Some are more willing to commit energy in the lategame than others. Some will play until it starts to get boring or hard, then throw or abandon in order to move onto the next one. This might be the wrong attitude, but it's sustainable for the players who engage in it. That they are sacrificing the enjoyment of nine other people in order to get their way is only a problem if they agree that it's a problem, and from their perspective it probably isn't (see also: 'dicks'.)

The issue with a purist approach to Dota, then, is that it doesn't account for people who play but don't care about spoiling the experience of others if it suits them. In an ideal world, people who didn't like playing Dota 'properly' would get bored with the game and stop playing: in reality, they show up as that guy who costs you a handful of MMR points every now and then. Even if most players never do this, even if some players only do it once and then quit the game forever, enough people play that it will reliably crop up as a problem for those that stick around.

With that in mind, then, I've started to see the value of 'shortform' modes. They don't really exist in Dota at present—1v1 Solo Mid takes less time, sure, but it changes so many of the game's basic systems and victory conditions that its relationship to regular Dota is limited to a few very specific areas. All Random Deathmatch is more lightweight, but can still take a substantial amount of time.

When official custom game modes finally make their debut, I hope that they'll play a role in offering alternatives that help to draw the throw-happy player away from regular matchmaking. Valve could do this themselves, of course—a 2v2 or 3v3 mode on a single lane would be interesting—but it's far more likely that they'll leave it to the community to build. And, honestly, I think it'd be a success for Dota as a whole if somebody does.

While there are many things about the regular MOBA model that I hope stay far away from Dota 2, the provision of more accessible ways to play is a proven good. It's a rare example of a community-dividing design decision that actually divides the community in the right way: not between serious and casual, but between 'willing to play for twenty minutes' and 'willing to play to the end'. I'd rather players declare the limits of their attention span when they choose a game mode, not when they throw at the end of a long match.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

This is, frankly, brilliant — introducing the world of Mechwarrior to that of Kerbal Space Program. First, watch:

While Kerbal already has some of the best planets in gaming, it didn't have the best walking robots of death. Now, thanks to creator of the above Allmhuran, it has.

Pieced together in classic scrap metal fashion from a selection of different mods (BD Armory, Infernal Robotics, Camera Tools, Tweakscale, Steam Guages, KOS and UbioZor Part Welding), the Mechwarrior mod has taken a long time to put together.

But Allmhuran isn't done yet — there's more to come. More mechs. More warriors. More Kerbals.

[Thanks, PCGamesN]

With each passing day it seems more like Fable Legends was always a PC game to begin with. We've found that on playing it, and now the folks at Lionhead are keen to hint that Fable Legends is PC at its core. Lionhead business and strategy director Emmi Kuusikko spoke to MCV, saying:

"When we think of things that have been asked for, PC has had been asked and requested for a long time. We're launching on Windows 10 at the same time as Xbox One, with the ability to play across platforms.

"Launching on both platforms lets us have as many people as possible play the game without the barriers to entry, and that's really important to us."

Part of this move to PC—and the platform being at Fable Legends' core—also comes down to the game's free-to-play nature. We went over how the F2P model in Fable Legends will work here. Basically it borrows ideas from League of Legends, as well as throwing in the ability to purchase creatures, weapons, armour and so on. Pretty standard stuff.

But game director David Eckelberry was clear in pointing out this isn't a pay-to-win situation: "You can get all of our content and there's no pay walls or energy meters," he said, "You can play as much as you want without any kind of gated areas.

"We don't allow the business side to affect the game that's happening in the middle."