Star Wars Battlefront will not have a server browser. EA community manager Sledgehammer 70 posted the news on the Star Wars Battlefront subreddit, saying that Battlefront will "utilize a new skill based matchmaking system" instead.

The thread is full of disappointed players. The Battlefield games, and most shooters worth their salt, give players the option to join servers of their choosing. Server browsers give you greater control over the maps and modes you want to play, and can offer communities stable spots where they can meet and compete. The alternative, matchmaking, is a good way to quickly jump into a game, but is less likely to foster a community that will stick around on PC.

Server browsers can be inconvenient for developers who want to see the user base spread across all of the available maps and modes. Servers give the community the ability to flock to a limited set of favoured maps, to the exclusion of all others. which can effectively kill maps that fall out of favour. Is this why DICE has decided to go with a matchmaking-only option, or is it because accessibility is more important to the wide-ranging audience that a Star Wars game is likely to attract?

We'll find out how good the matchmaking is the "technical test" launches next month.

Thanks, Eurogamer.

Mobile meets liquid cooling

We expected to see some interesting products based on Intel's unlocked Core i7-6820HK Skylake processor for laptops, but it didn't occur to us that a company would use it as the foundation of a liquid gaming notebook.

Apparently it occurred to Asus. One of the many products it's showing off at IFA is its ROG GX700, which is the "world's first water cooled gaming laptop." Unfortunately Asus is keeping pretty tight lipped about the specifics, saying only that it boasts an overclocked sixth generation Intel K-SKU processor (the only one we know of is the aforementioned Core i7-6820HK) the latest Nvidia graphics processor, and a 17-inch IPS display with a 4K resolution.

Judging by the press photo, an external apparatus provides the system's liquid cooling. It's pretty bulky and negates the mobilty of a laptop, though we suspect (hope, really) it detaches rather easily so that you can still take the GX700 with you without lugging around an external box.

Asus also unveiled the ROG G752, another Skylake laptop but cooled with air. There will be three SKUs available, two with an Intel Core i7-6700HQ processor and one with an optional upgrade to the 6820HK.

According to Anandtech, The lowest end (G752VL) sports up to 64GB of DDR4-2133 RAM, GeForce 965M GPU, 128GB or 256GB NVMe SSD, up to a 2TB HDD, and Windows 10.

Stepping up to the G752VT gets you an upgrade to a GeForce GTX 970M (3GB and 6GB options available), and the G752VY bumps it up to a 4GB or 8GB 980M, along with an option to upgrade to a 4K display.

Pricing for the G752 will start at $1,499.

Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Xing Tian is a deity from Chinese mythology who gets his head chopped off but carries on fighting anyway. Now, you can play as him in Smite, which imagines him with a helmet that presumably has no head in it, with glowing eyes and mouth positioned instead in his muscular chest.

As you'd imagine for someone with no head, Xing Tian is pretty angry. His abilities have names like "Smouldering Rage" and "Furious Roar". His chosen weapon is an axe, which he can use to knock enemies into the air and then slam them down again or spin around in a "Whirlwind of Rage and Steel".

For a full list of what Xing Tian can do, check the Smite website. There are also a few other updates on there, like new skins and voice packs, and some bug fixes.

Reckon we'll see Xing Tian in the Smite World Championship next year?

Warhammer 40,000 ought to be a great setting for a bloody, old-fashioned top-down action RPG. The universe is full of power-armoured individuals cutting swathes through enemies with mad weapons. Chief among these heroes are the Inquisitors: part crazed fanatic, part internal affairs agent, they find corruption everywhere and burn it with flamethrowers. They're judge, jury and executioner in one giant metal suit, with guns that can melt buildings. 

Fresh from completing the Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing trilogy, Neocore reckons it can nail the fantasy with Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr. The focus is on weighty, thoughtful fights with clusters of smart enemies. You can blast them from afar with a bolter or rend them with a chainsword at handshake distance while your foes—mostly Chaos heretics so far—work together to avoid a gory death. "They are going to have AI, which means that they are going to have leaders, they are going to send out alerts" says lead writer Viktor Juhasz.

They're going to take cover, too. Like the grandiose stone masonry of the Imperial battleship you fight through, cover can be blown to chunks with bolter fire. "You can use the cover, monsters can use the cover, and sometimes if you try to jump into the middle of a group behind the cover, the monsters might flee and find refuge behind the cover on the other side". From the footage I've seen so far, this leads to longer encounters than you'd expect from Diablo or Torchlight. It works. The Inquisitor is a clanking, loping figure, locked into a holy sarcophagus that doubles as armour; don't expect any dodging backflips.

Your Inquisitor can be upgraded throughout the story campaign. "Well, we are going to use the traditional level-up system, and we are going to use a crafting system, which will be smoothly tied into the 40K lore, and we are going to have various skills tied to various weapons, and we are going to have some skills which are tied to the different classes," Juhasz explains. At one point in the video the Inquisitor picks up a plasma cannon and the skills on his taskbar shift to a new set of abilities. It fires powerful blasts of luminous blue flame, but can overheat when used too often.

The story is largely set aboard an ancient drifting spaceship monastery that "belonged to a very obscure sect of he Inquisition a very, very long time ago". The developers want it to feel like a horror scenario akin to Alien, which is the reason the campaign will only be playable alone. "The sense of exploration, the sense of claustrophobia, is very important, which could be ruined a bit by having, I don t know, three of your friends swarming all over the place and jumping through the same cutscenes and dialogues."

You will still get to visit open areas set on moons and planets, and there are contained vehicle sections that let you requisition some of the Empire's finest war machines. If you're keen to play with others and explore more open environments Martyr contains an immediately-accessible Inquisitorial Campaign mode. This randomly generates missions spread across an entire sector of space, and is designed to give some context to your crusading. There are various factions to impress, and the sector can suddenly find itself beset by invasion from some of the meaner villains of the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

"These events will pretty much just introduce a conflict and it s up to the players to decide which side they re going to take. So, for example, one of the sub-sectors is attacked by the Dark Eldar and the other one is attacked by the Orks, and the player is, on a metagame level, going to decide which chains of missions they re going to embark on, and based on what the majority of the players decided, that s going to determine what the next event will be."

In addition you can build fortresses that can be invaded by other Inquisitors, adding an indirect PvP element to the sector-wide metagame. As your Inquisitor becomes more powerful, you can fly to new subsectors swarming with fiercer enemies. The Inquisitor Campaign will provide a gradual drip-feed of progress that will hook players for a long time, or so Neocore hopes.

The metagame will be irrelevant if Martyr's core combat isn't up to standard, and it faces some serious competition from Diablo 3. However, it's good to see the game pursuing its own style and pace, which carries right through to boss fights. At the end of the video the Inquisitor fights a towering demon of Nurgle. Large monsters have locational damage systems, which the Inquisitor exploits to blow both of its arms off before putting it out of its misery. It's gory, tactical, and suitably over-the-top. If the combat becomes stompy and satisfying enough, this could be a neat addition to the ever-growing roster of Warhammer games. It's due out next year.

Skylake arrives in full force

Intel formally introduced its sixth generation Core processor family, codenamed Skylake, at the IFA event in Berlin. You might be thinking, "Wait, didn't Intel already launch Skylake?" The answer is yes, kind-of-sort-of. What we saw from Intel (and reviewed) a month ago were its Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K processors for enthusiast desktop users.

This larger launch is the full Skylake lineup consisting of Intel's "best processors ever." Most of the newly introduced CPUs are aimed at mobile computing form factors like 2-in-1 devices, laptops, and even compute sticks, though there are a few desktop offerings in the mix as well.

We'll kick off this slideshow with Intel's 45W mobile Skylake chips.

These are Intel's Skylake-H processors. All except for one are quad-core CPUs. Arguably the most interesting chip of the bunch is the Core i7-6820HK. Yes, there's a "K" on the end, meaning it's an unlocked part. And yes, it's intended for laptops -- fancy that!

Here we have a look at Intel's 28W Skylake-U lineup. These are all dual-core processors with Hyper Threading support and GT3e (Iris Pro Graphics 550) graphics.

Skylake-U also consists of 15W processors. You can expect to see these CPUs in Ultrabooks and ultra-thins, along with NUCs and NUC-like PCs that are small in size with limited cooling potential.

For even smaller and thinner devices, like tablets and compute sticks, there's the Core M line. According to Intel, Core M offers twice the performance of "leading premium tablets," a claim it made based on some benchmarks using Apple's iPad Air 2.

Intel's mobile Skylake lineup also includes a pair of Xeon processors with ECC support. These are the first ever Xeon CPUs to be built specifically for laptops -- up to this point, laptops with Xeon hardware inside used desktop processors.

Desktop Lineup

That's a total of 26 mobile Skylake processor SKUs, but what about the desktop? Let's have a look.

There are two versions of Skylake-S for the desktop. Shown above are the 65W and 47W models.

The lower power 35W desktop parts are also sometimes referred to (unofficially) as Skylake-T. Like the 65W versions, they all use HD 530 graphics.

This is just the beginning. Intel says it plans to deliver more than 48 Skylake processors in the coming months, which will feature Iris and Iris Pro graphics, as well as more Xeon E3-1500M processors for mobile workstations and vPro CPUs for businesses and enterprises.

Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Set during a near-future war, Act of Aggression is, nonetheless, a throwback—to Act of War, the mid-noughties RTS series that it succeeds, and to old-school base-building strategy games in general. Three factions—the UN-sponsored Chimera, the US Army, and a coalition of PMCs called the Cartel—battle over large maps to secure resources and assert military dominance. If you've missed heavy tanks and noodly electric guitar soundtracks—welcome home.

Command & Conquer: Generals is the obvious reference point, here, but Act of Aggression is very much its own game. Resources are distributed randomly across notably expansive maps, adding a speculative scouting phase to the start of every match that shapes your overall strategy. During this phase you construct refineries and set up supply lines, with each faction offering a slightly different set of parameters for handling conveyance, base expansion, power generation, and so on. It's a lot to take in, but if you've lamented the absence of this kind of RTS over the last few years then it's a difficulty curve you'll enjoy surmounting.

What follows is the drama of the match proper. An infantry battle might break out between garrisoned buildings for control of a bank which generates resources over time for the side that holds it. You might send a platoon of soldiers to capture downed enemy combatants for a bounty, or engage in a daring medivac mission to prevent the same from happening to your own troops. Tank columns roll through the countryside, helicopters clash in the air, jets soar in from off-map as each player approaches the point where they can deploy match-ending superweapons like nukes and long-range artillery. If you've played these types of games before you'll have an immediate sense of what units to expect and how they feel in combat: Act of Aggression doesn't offer anything particularly new in that regard, but there's pleasure in familiarity.

The campaign is a limp introduction to all of this, however. There are two sets of missions—one for Chimera, another for the Cartel—set in a homebrew Clancyverse that offers nothing you haven't seen in dozens of other modern warfare games. The writing and acting is poor and the game uses photography, news-report style visual effects and stock footage in place of cutscenes. Plot isn't very important to a game like this, but there's no C&C-style FMV scenery-chewing to motivate you, either.

The missions themselves follow an old, well-worn pattern. You start out ordering a gaggle of troops along a linear set of waypoints to learn the basics. The amount of freedom you're given increases with every mission until you start to approach full control. The issue is that, like in many older RTSes, your most dangerous foes are the scripted moments planned to occur as you hit checkpoints along the way. If you don't have the right force composition at these moments, you'll probably fail. This creates a frustrating trial-and-error dynamic where your first attempt is disproportionately hard (because you don't know what's coming) and your second is disproportionately easy (because you do.)

The game is at its best when every player adheres to the same set of rules and all of its systems are in play at once. For this reason I found skirmish matches to be a more entertaining way to learn Act of Aggression than the campaign. There are plenty of maps, varied options for AI difficulty and team composition, and lots of potential value in discovering all of these over time.

After several hours of one-on-one skirmishes, I thought I'd try something more challenging—a four player free-for-all. I wanted to see how the large maps and random placement of resources affected a more dynamic style of game. The match was interesting from the start: my initial location had lots of oil but little aluminium, so I opted for a low-tech build. Pushing out with large amounts of US infantry, I was able to cap a run of banks and fortify them with cheap MG emplacements. I waited for the moment when I'd run into resistance, fearing the high-tech arms that my missing aluminium supply might provide an enemy.

It wasn't to be. Eventually, I pushed out far enough to bump into my first enemy base. Three basic buildings were surrounded by a clump of infantry and light tanks, and that was it. As I was wiping them out, I realised that they hadn't built any resource extraction buildings. Then, as I encountered the other two factions, I discovered that they hadn't either. All of my early preparation was a complete waste of time, as none of the AI factions had done anything at all after their initial resources had run out. I like Act of Aggression and I'd be inclined to recommend it on the strength of skirmishes alone, but bugs like this mean I can't. I tried another FFA match without encountering the issue again, but the fact that it can happen at all is a disappointment.

The heart and future of the game will ultimately lie in multiplayer, which provides all of the options you remember: you can play against the AI, against each other, configure teams as you like and there's a ranked ladder if you'd like to take things more seriously. There's no LAN support, however, as all multiplayer is handled through online lobbies. Playing prior to the game's official release, it's tough to get a sense of how the scene will shake out—I had matches that came down to cheesy minute-zero building rushes (disappointing) and matches that played out over a full forty minutes with plenty of dramatic moments. As with any competitive game, I fully expect these experiences to shift as I become more experienced: these initial impressions represent the bottom of a long and often-unforgiving climb.

In order to get the most out of Act of Aggression you need to be able to put up with the campaign and the sometimes-severe rough edges. This isn't the complete package in the way that the old Westwood games were, or the way Blizzard's strategy games are. But moment to moment, in the little things that matter, it's a worthy successor to the games that inspired it.

Indie developer Harry Tuffs, whose one-man studio is called Pixel Trickery, describes A House of Many Doors as a "2D exploration RPG" with an "atypical setting". Sound familiar? Tuffs openly admits that it draws inspiration from Sunless Sea, but there are some key differences.

For one, where Sunless Sea is set in Failbetter's world of "Fallen London", A House of Many Doors is set in a "parasite dimension" called, well, the House. It is procedurally generated, but it's not a roguelike. Its combat draws inspiration not from the ship battles of Sunless Sea but from the likes of FTL, with screenshots showing two of the kinetopedes (steam engines with lots of legs) with which you travel through the House squaring off against each other.

What jumped out at me was the idea of playing as a sort of poet-journalist who levels up by writing procedurally generated poetry, so I asked Tuffs what exactly he meant by that. He told me that one of the best ways to improve your stats in the game is to collect experiences—the examples he gave were the wonderful-sounding "Moments of Melancholy" and "Romantic Encounters"—and use them to write poems, which will have procedurally generated titles.

It's early stages yet, but the game obviously shows enough promise to interest Failbetter, as not only have they let Tuffs work in their office as part of their incubation scheme but they're also partially funding the game.

To make up the rest of what he needs, Tuffs launched a Kickstarter today. He wants 4,000 to pay his artist and get some music, and at the time of writing he's already made nearly 800. If you want to help, then 5 gets you a copy of the game and your name in the credits, with higher tiers to get you things like soundtracks and sketches and even a copy of a novel Tuffs wrote when he was 16. That's bold, Tuffs, bolder than I am.

Ark: Survival Evolved is a survival game set on an island filled with creatures that are now extinct, so it makes sense that the developers would add a mesopithecus, a breed of monkey ("pithecus" means ape) that's no longer around.

In the game, these monkeys are useful for throwing poo at people, which is apparently harmful, or even attacking them more directly. You can also throw them over walls, which they don't seem to mind as much as they probably should, so that they can open doors for you. And they can ride around on your shoulder. All while wearing a fetching hat! I kind of wish I had one in real life. I predict they'd be much easier to train than a dinosaur.

Those who've been watching the "Survival of the Fittest" tournament would probably also like to know that the final takes place today. You can watch that on Twitch.

Thanks, RPS.

Real-time strategy game Act of Aggression launches today (it'll be available on Steam this evening in the UK), so Focus Home has released one of those launch trailers to try to convince you to pick it up when it does go live.

The trailer claims that "the golden age of the RTS is back", so I guess it's for those who don't like the way the RTS genre is going these days. It's a spiritual successor to the ten-year-old Act of War, from the same developer, so if you played that and enjoyed it you might want to check it out.

Act of Aggression is set in the near future, with weapons and vehicles to reflect that: see the tanks and planes going kind of invisible in the video. You get to play as one of three global super-powers and fight battles in different environments across the world in a single-player campaign or in online multiplayer.

Not sure if it's for you? Don't worry, our review is coming soon.

In Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, you can call an extraction chopper to get you out of certain situations, and as it flies in music plays. You can choose what music in the options menu, or even better, as Andy points out, you can import your own audio files to use instead.

To try this out for yourself, just drop your audio files into the "CustomSoundtrack" folder in the game directory. Got any imaginative ideas for how you'd mark your chopper's arrival? Let us know, or even make a video so we can see it for ourselves.

The Metal Gear Solid games have a fondness for the absurd, so why not have your chopper arrive to the intro music from your favourite childhood television show (I'm thinking Budgie the Little Helicopter), or that oft-mimicked clip of Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Get to the chopper"?