Half-Life 2 turns 12 this year, and thanks to its powerful, if a bit creaky Source engine it remains as popular with the modding community as ever. Over the years we've seen all manner of excellent mods emerge, adding co-op or competitive multiplayer, shiny graphical updates, new story content, and even full conversions that bear little or no resemblance to the original game.

It's the latter two we're going to focus on today, as we round up the best single-player Half-Life 2 mods. We've chosen mods that stand up as separate adventures, sometimes set in worlds far removed from Combine Earth.

The Stanley Parable

This is the story of a man named Stanley. Or rather, it's the story of the story: a deviously clever, reactive adventure that second-guesses your every move. As Stanley or, perhaps more accurately, as the player controlling Stanley you're free to follow or ignore the various instructions the wonderful narrator bellows over you, resulting in a tangled, branching story that rewards your curiosity, imagination, and defiance. The original Source mod was later expanded into a full game, one our Phil thought extremely highly of in our review.

Download: ModDB, Steam.

Minerva: Metastasis

Adam Foster's Minerva comes close to the quality of Valve's own Half-Life 2 Episodes in fact, Valve was so impressed Foster joined the company. It's a sizeable story, about the length of an official chapter, with considered level design and a high level of polish. You begin the game strapped to the underside of a helicopter, before being dropped on a mysterious island with a sinister secret.

Download: Steam.

The Citizen

Gordon Freeman ends the Half-Life series as a crowbar-wielding superhero, a figure of legend in the Half-Life universe. Two-part mod The Citizen provides a new angle on the world, casting you as an ordinary oppressed citizen of City 17. Obviously, said ordinary man soon acquires a gun and starts killing people, but you might snap too if you called that dystopia home.

Download: ModDB.

Get a Life

This lengthy, ambitious mod swings from horror to all-out action. Occasional cutscenes tell the story of a subway technician suffering from leukaemia, but Get a Life's unlucky hero Alex also has to contend with the mod's new limb damage system, which causes effects like dizziness and limping, depending on where he's hit by enemies.

Download: ModDB.

Mission Improbable

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to step into the sneakers of Gordon Freeman and set off to repair a Resistance listening post. This impressive Episode Two mod begins with Gordon rowing to a distant coastline: a coastline that reminds you just how pretty the venerable Source engine can look in the right hands. The right hands in this instance are a couple of established game devs, and their experience shines through pretty much every crevice of this slick, well-paced adventure.

Download: ModDB.

Research and Development

Thanks to its then-revolutionary ragdoll physics, a lot of time in Half-Life 2 was spent throwing chairs at NPCs, or flinging teacups with the gravity gun. In that spirit, Research and Development does away with offensive weapons altogether, leaving just a couple of secondary tools to let you manipulate gravity or order Antlions about. Puzzles are the order of the day here, and it's surprising just how easily Half-Life 2's toolset translates to this new focus.

Download: ModDB.

Nightmare House 2

Where there are modding tools, horror mods are sure to follow. You don't need to have played the original in fact, it's included as a prologue, giving you the chance to explore both a haunted house and a spooky hospital. The horror on offer here is mainly of the jump scare variety, so if you were hoping for the psychological horror of Silent Hill, move on to the next item in the list. Nightmare House 2 is basically FEAR it even features its own creepy ghost girl but more FEAR is hardly a bad thing.

Download: ModDB.

Silent Hill: Alchemilla

The impressive Alchemilla drops you in the world of Silent Hill, endless fog, Dark World and all. Not only have the developers nailed the grimy aesthetic of Team Silent's classic series, they've matched its colour palette, borrowed its sound effects, and recreated its lonely atmosphere. It's such an uncanny representation that it may take you a while to notice there are no enemies traipsing around, but then those games were hardly known for their satisfying combat.

Download: Alchemilla mod.

Water

Until now everything we've featured has been strictly first-person, but Water bucks that trend. In fact, it bucks a lot of trends, given that it's a third-person puzzley adventure starring a mermaid. Yes, a mermaid. While you're (initially at least) limited to a fantasy city's waterways, this smart mod soon finds ways to get you exploring land too, using a number of innovative systems. The developers of Water went on to make From Earth, another, similarly inventive Source mod.

Download: ModDB.

Black Mesa

Well, we couldn't ignore Black Mesa, could we? For the unaware, this recreates the original Half-Life in its sequel's shinier engine, and it's been in development since dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Much more than a simple port, Black Mesa updates Valve's game with fancier assets, new voice acting, a reworked campaign and more. The team have also excised Half-Life's much-maligned Xen section, albeit only temporarily until it's been remade to be, somehow, good. While the older mod is free, you'll find the newer version on Early Access, accompanied by a price tag.

Download: Official site.

Dark Souls 3's PvP is a uniquely terrifying experience at the best of times. Now imagine rounding a corner in a toxic swamp to find Shrek, Donkey and Puss In Boots (or some bloke who's been at the Sunny Delight) staring you down.

Iron Pineapple and friends take their roleplay seriously, or not at all seriously, depending on how you look at it. Either way, they defend their swamp with vigor. In fairness, invaders were warned they were on private property before being ground into paste.

There's magic in a good character creator, and in this instance the player-made avatars would horrify most bosses.

Since Stardew Valley launched in February 2016, millions of players have given up the harsh daily grind of the city for the peaceful, idyllic farmer lifestyle. But there's a lot to do in Stardew Valley, and without a clear farm plan in mind, it can feel like some goals are a long way off, even when you're progressing steadily and avoiding passing out in the street at 2 am.

For farmers who've taken up hoe and axe for several seasons but still feel like they have a ways to go, here's a clear plan explaining how to transform your farm from a run down mess into fine-tuned operation.

 1. Start with a blank slate

One of the most daunting tasks for new Stardew Valley players is the absolute mess of a farm you start the game with. Left to the wild will of mother nature, your new farm is overgrown with trees, grass, rocks, and all manner of other detritus a far cry from some of the immaculate creations in our gallery of farms. Cleaning the whole thing up not only gives you a great sense of accomplishment, it gives you a nice blank canvas to start with. But cleaning up your farm is not just a good move for new players it's also a good idea for players who haphazardly placed their first few farm buildings and are now left with a disorganized, inefficient system to manage.

As with any large-scale overhaul, it's easier to start fresh and build anew than fix a broken system piece by piece. It might seem like moving backwards, but the best way to start planning out a well-organized farm is to detach from emotion and burn it all to the ground. Chop the trees, bust the rocks, sell off your animals (having to tend to daily feed, love, and milkings is just another distraction), and destroy all the buildings. The fresh slate of an empty farm is now our canvas.

2. Farming things other than crops

Stardew Valley is, quite obviously, a game about farming. But there's quite a few items you're going to need especially for our goal of total domination here a lot of which can't just be planted and grown. Wood and coal are two of the most valuable resources in building the machines than transmute your crops and other items into high-value artisan goods. And since the machines take time to process, having more to run at once is better. Wood okay, that one can be planted and grown, but I suggest doing so with a bit of purpose rather than letting nature run wild. I've found a grid trees with two spaces between them works best. It allows for high tree density while still leaving space for your horse to run in between.

Stumps don't regrow into trees (thanks Emma for pointing that out!) so feel free to chop'm to the ground and plant afresh. You can use any seeds you like for your tree farm, but be sure to dedicate a section of Oak Trees for Tappers. We're going to need a lot of Oak Resin later on, so start collecting it now.

Coal is the next thing you'll need for crafting machines and smelting metal bars (we'll need a lot of those too). But since it drops only sometimes from busting up rocks, it can be tough to farm efficiently. One method, of course, is to simply buy coal in bulk from the blacksmith. But you're going to need a lot, and money might be tight on your farm. Your best bet is to delve into the mines, as the Dust Sprites that appear on levels 41-79 have a 50 percent coal drop rate and they usually appear in swarms.

Take the elevator down to level 50 (if you're not there yet, we'll cover that shortly) and wreck through the next five or ten levels (collect iron ore along the way we need that too) then hop back in the elevator at level 60 or 65 and repeat the process. As an added bonus, the Adventurer's Guild reward for killing 500 Dust Sprites earns you the Burglar's Ring which doubles the drop rate of items from monsters, speeding up the process even further.

3. Digging deep into the mines

Not every farmer is a great swashbuckler, and for some the mines are a vast, untapped land. Fortunately, it's fairly easy to quickly forge a path into their depths. Before you do, though, spend a few days upgrading your pickaxe, as a golden one will help you blow through the early mine levels. Gold ore doesn't appear until level 80, though sounds like a catch-22, right? This is a time when you're going to want to spend a bit of cash now for a long-term payoff. Buy enough ore from the blacksmith for five of each metal bar and use them to upgrade to a golden pickaxe.

The increased rock-destruction power of your shiny new toy will make short work of the rocks in the early mine levels, making it far easier to surge down to the depths where those Dust Sprites and, yes, gold ore itself can be found. Another important thing is that the deeper you go, the better the weapons unlocked in the guild. This is critical for coal farming, as an overpowered weapon helps you shred through those level 50 enemies nice and quick.

4. Becoming a berry baron

We're going to need money to bankroll this farm overhaul, and berries are the place to be. Also, wouldn't it be nice to do some actual farming in this farming game?

At the beginning of summer, carve out a massive swath of land (be sure to keep any clay you dig up!) and plant as many blueberry seeds as you can afford. Be sure to hit them with fertilizer (use all the sap from your tree farm above) for a higher chance at silver and gold crops, and wait for the money to roll in. Blueberries take 13 days to mature, and keep producing three to four more berries every four days after that (don't be tempted by the quick-growing Tiller skill—you want to be an Artisan for our next step). Plant within the first few days of summer and you're looking at four harvests and a nice payday. (And since they keep growing all season, we don't have to worry about losing time to replanting.

Do the same with Cranberries in Fall, and soon you'll have enough money to fund our plans. For watering, buy (or mine) the ore necessary to craft Quality Sprinklers (toss Quartz you find in the mines into the furnace for the Refined Quartz you need). Since Blueberries don't have a chance to mutate into super-sized crops, there's no need to plan them in 3x3 grids. With the berry operation automated, you can spend all your time in the mines farming coal, copper, and iron ore. 

5. Getting into the alcohol game

By now your farm should be a relatively finely tuned operation, but to really bring in the riches, it's time to get into the wine business. Kegs take around seven days to turn a fruit into wine, but doing so triples the value of the input fruit (even more if you take the Artisan perk). This means we need a lot of kegs to deal with the long turnaround and keep up with our fruit production. Each Keg takes 30 Wood and one Clay, Copper Bar, Iron Bar, and Oak Resin. This is where all that material farming pays off.

You now have a number of options for fruit inputs, depending on your overall game progress and degree of Scrooge McDuckery. The first step is to simply keep with the Berry operation and start cranking out enough Blueberry wine to send Ben Wyatt home in a stupor. But Blueberries shine for their multi-crop harvests and return on investment—not due to a high selling price. Since Kegs take so long to process, using higher-value inputs results in greater overall profits, even if the initial seed is more expensive. If summer is coming soon and you've completed the Community Center bundle to repair the bus to the desert (use some of your berry money for that), Starfruits from the Oasis shop result in an incredible return on investment. The seeds are expensive (400g a pop) but the resulting wine sells for 2400g (3600g with the Artisan perk).

But Starfruits are only good in Summer, and even with the Greenhouse repaired, there's a more efficient option. Ancient Fruit Wine. As soon as you find the Ancient Seed artifact, plant the resulting seed (so long as it's before fall) and wait. It's a long growth period—28 days—but keeps producing fruit each week for all of Spring, Summer, and Fall. The trick here is every time a fruit is produced, toss it in the seed maker and replant. (Deluxe Speed-Gro is your friend here). Soon (okay maybe like months later) you'll have a field of Ancient Fruit crops. The end goal here is to fill your Greenhouse with the lucrative crop (so, y'know, get that done). Ancient Fruit Wine sells for slightly less than Starfruit, but the extended crop cycle means time saved on replanting, as your plants will last forever inside that wonderful glass house.

Each plant produces a fruit every seven days, matching up perfectly with the Keg's long production cycle. There's 120 plots in your greenhouse. Subtracting four for Iridium Sprinklers (layout your crops like this, that's 116 Ancient Fruit Plants. So 116 Kegs is your target goal. (Aren't you glad you farmed all those materials now?)

Once that operation is running smoothly, you can expand with more kegs supported by Fruit Trees. Redditor OrinMacGregor has a nice writeup breaking down how many Kegs per Fruit tree you need.

It's a lot of work, but the result is a self-sustaining money-printing operation. Just don't get so burnt out along the way that you feel the need to quit it all, move to the country, and run your Grandfather's old farm. Oh, wait...

If you're new to Stardew Valley, here's our list of essential Stardew Valley tips you should know. And if you've been playing since day one, check out our list of the best Stardew Valley mods.

With the Mid Season Patch upon us, League of Legends is going through an absolute flurry of changes. Whether it s the new dragon (more like five of them) or the long awaited rework of Taric finally going live, League players are dealing with a whole lot of new content. While it s tempting to claim that all new content is good, the truth is complex. This is especially true when new additions are still being tested, measured, and weighed and in a regularly updated game like League, nearly everything is up to be rebalanced, re-evaluated, found wanting and then completely remade. Let s take a look at the new content in League, because it affects more than just the professional circuit it can have a major impact on everyday players.

 Champion updates and resonance 

Let s start with the latest Champion Update, Taric. Taric is one of the game s earliest champions, and his age showed he waddled around the Rift with a mass of spiky gem armour and triangle feet, his hair was an unmoving mass carved into a swirl, and he only had a minute of dialogue (by contrast, the most recent champion, Aurelion Sol, clocks in at twenty five minutes.) Riot had been open with their plans to bring Taric up to modern standards, and fans waited with bated breath. Sure, they were concerned about balance changes and competitive impact, but a very real portion of players were waiting to see what happened to his, well, fabulous nature.

The important thing to recognize about a champion like Taric is that amidst serial killers, ancient gods of war, the undead, and patriotic generals, you had a guy covered with gems who had a soft voice. The fan base took these scant character traits and turned them into a meme, which influenced how people saw him to many League players, Taric wasn t just a gem paladin, he was a refreshing take on masculinity.

Taric s rework completely leans into these themes, to the point where his pectoral muscles are bare and his hair is constantly flowing, even when he stands still. Riot Games have always been seeking to one up their previous releases from a pure quality standpoint (I mean, consider Ashe before and after her 2014 relaunch), but they ve recently been focusing on creating champions that fulfill a distinct identity. By rolling with the memes about Taric without turning him into a joke to be laughed at, Riot have shown that they re trying to make an identity for everyone to appreciate in their game. Taric is just the latest example of this philosophy Illaoi is a visual breath of fresh air as an enormous priestess, Rek sai is an inhuman hunter, Ekko is a scrappy street kid relying on his wits. Each example subverts expectations and create a clear, distinct identity.

This is a welcome standpoint from a visual and creative perspective, but let s take a look at how it affects the game itself.

Mid-season magic (or a muddle?)

When you take a look at the list of changes for the Mid-Season Update, it s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content. Mage items got reworked, and so did six mages! There are eight more mini reworks to the mage roster! Every mage can get a powerful item with a unique active that changes their play patterns! Oh, and Dragon got completely overhauled with a RNG element. Feeling dizzy yet?

Mass updates do two things to the game:

• They ignite interest by overhauling old content and making things (hopefully) more balanced.
• They force players to dedicate time to learn all of these changes and figure out what happened to their old favourites or their new mains.

The first goal is objectively a noble one; bad content shouldn t stay in a game for legacy reasons, and chain-nerfing champions without addressing their core problems just feels terrible for everyone.

The second goal is where things get muddy, and there s a lot at stake here sure, it s frustrating for someone who s a Silver II player to log on and frown at the new recommended items and perhaps feed for a game or two out of confusion. The real issue lies with competitive play, something that players rely on for their income and is essential to Riot s growth and market dominance.

Meta changes can seriously shake teams up, even though they currently dedicate hours every day to scrimming and practicing. Take a look at SKTelecom T1 s jungler Bengi, a two time World Champion and a player currently on the bench, as current jungler Blank suits the meta more. Even small shifts can change up series. The Immortals were knocked out of the NA LCS Semifinals, and many lay the blame at Huni s pick of Lucian top in a tank-dominated meta.

If even a single patch can change the fortunes of a team, what will the Mid-Season Update do? It s tempting to paint a dystopian picture of a future where Zyra mid and Malzahar jungle rampage over us all, but chances are that this will go like every other major update. Some teams will sink, other teams will thrive in the chaos. The question is: how many more radical updates and changes are left in League? Are the developers striving towards an elusive balanced state, or is the game on a constant tilt-a-whirl to keep things from getting too stale? In the constant stream of changes to give champions their own unique draw, will League lose its own identity?

Don t get me wrong as a Vel koz main, I m delighted to shred opponents with a laser beam. However, Riot themselves have said they re taking the long view on growing League. They ll eventually need to question whether they ve perfected certain systems, or whether they need to keep the constant stream of changes incoming. On the other hand, it s hard to take too sour a view on League s changes and evolution. After all, the new Shield of Valoran came from this process, and he is a sight for sore eyes. Only time will tell how the future will pan out for Riot s approach to evolution and design. Perhaps the most radical thing Riot can do is announce that some of their features are finally set in stone.

I m bad at Dark Souls, and that s why I ve always avoided co-op. If anyone summoned me into their game, it would probably be a waste of time. But after fifteen hours with Dark Souls 3, the longest I ve ever lasted in a Souls game, I m starting to feel like I might be of use to someone. I still suck, but I can kill most things, and I know the High Wall of Lothric inside out.

The first real boss, Vordt of the Boreal Valley, is pretty easy once you learn its attack pattern. And I know it well enough to beat it without taking a hit, so I thought, why not help some players who are having trouble? Dark Souls is a game filled with misery, death, and despair. If I can provide just one faint ray of sunshine for someone, surely it s worth a shot?

I drop my soapstone at the entrance to Vordt s chamber. This makes a white sign appear in other people s games, giving them the option to invite me in. Seconds later a message tells me I m being summoned. A burly knight is waiting for me, and bows as my shimmering phantom form materialises in front of him. He passes through the white fog, alerting the boss to his presence, and soon we re in combat with the beast.

Dark Souls has, until this point, been a rather lonely experience. But sharing the world with another player, it doesn t seem so dark. Vordt doesn t stand a chance against our combined might. It falls, and as its body disappears and the game prepares to transport me back to my own world, we bow again. It s the first time Dark Souls hasn t felt utterly oppressive to me.

And that s it. I m hooked. I must have fought Vordt 20 times today. I like how the battle is slightly different each time depending on how many players are summoned and what their particular skills are. But mostly I just like the idea of helping someone who s finding the boss too challenging. This will be a lot of people s first Dark Souls experience, and even though veterans will breeze through Vordt, it s a trial by fire for some.

And, of course, the fact that I m earning souls for each victory sweetens the deal. This is a much more enjoyable way of farming souls than running solo through the same areas over and over again. I ve levelled up several times and stockpiled a decent amount of embers, which are awarded every time you successfully vanquish a boss in co-op.

I m sure people have had much more interesting, challenging co-op experiences than this across the Souls series. But this is my very first experience with it, and it s a nice change of pace. As well as the practical benefits like souls and embers, I find the ability to bring some positivity to the gloomy world of Dark Souls equally rewarding.

It s also a great opportunity to experiment with the game s expressive, often hilarious gesture system, which Tom wrote about last week. I love communicating with players using this, and you can tell a lot about the person who s summoned you by their in-game body language. Anyone who bows is, in my limited experience, a decent sort.

As I get better at the game and master more boss battles, I ll be making it my sworn duty to place my soapstone and help struggling players. It makes me feel like an armour-clad superhero, spriting between worlds, lending a helping hand to those in need. I m glad I gave co-op a chance in Dark Souls 3, and it s made me appreciate the game on a whole new level.

The looming Manila Major is on course to be classic Dota with a twist. Valve has announced the 12 invitees who will be joined by four victors from the regional qualifiers. Among them are stalwarts like Alliance and Na Vi, joined by the power-players of South East Asia in Fnatic and MVP.

This year s selection process has been enigmatically described as a more holistic approach . Valve considered a history of greatness in addition to recent success in making its picks. Consideration was also given to the outcomes of third-party LAN tournaments to reduce emphasis on the qualifiers.

In full, the teams who made the cut are:

• Team Secret
• Team Liquid
• Evil Geniuses
• MVP
• Wings Gaming
• Vici Gaming
• Fnatic
• OG
• Complexity
• Alliance
• Na'Vi
• LGD

The Manila Major kicks off June 7, with qualifiers for all regions taking place May 3-6.

From its origins as a modest World War II-based shooter, Call of Duty has gradually reached for the stars. Ghosts was set in the near future, while Advanced Warfare and last year's Black Ops 3 opted for a more far-reaching future setting. According to reports last month, the annualised shooter will likely be set in space this year.

Now, according to an image posted on Reddit which depicts a prematurely posted promotion on the PS4 dashboard, the name of this year's Infinity Ward-developed instalment has been revealed. That name is Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.

It's a rumour at this stage: the listing was reportedly removed soon after appearing, and for all we know it's a mock-up – I wasn't able to recreate it on the office PS4. Still, it seems like a fairly plausible name, and if it isn't this year's new instalment, could it possibly be a remaster of Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare games? That seems less plausible.

According to reports in March, this year's instalment will take place in a "full on sci-fi" setting in the "very far future". There's no lack of shooters based in those environments nowadays but, the Call of Duty series has recently made a habit of inheriting zeitgeist-y elements from other shooters (namely, Titanfall). Whatever the case we'll likely find out soon: April has traditionally been the month Activision starts talking about a new Call of Duty.

Gif by Gunpoint/Heat Signature artist John Roberts

Dota doesn't evolve by increments. There are adjustments and hotfixes from time to time, sure, but this is a game of dramatic shifts. Even after all these years, Dota patch notes have retained their power to shock—perhaps because this is such a complex game, requiring thousands of hours of slowly-acquired knowledge with little hand-holding. When the underlying rules of this complex competitive sandbox get changed, years of ingrained intuition get thrown out and need to be replaced.

That is what has happened over the course of the last 24 hours with the release of the 6.87 update. It'd be hyperbole to call this 'the biggest patch ever', or anything like that—after all, I felt that way when they moved Roshan, when they introduced magic lifesteal, and so on. New patches are always the biggest patch ever. 6.87 feels like a particularly big one, however. We'll be figuring out its ramifications for a while, and there's loads left to be discovered.

There are an enormous amount of changes in this update. Many heroes have been changed in variously subtle and dramatic ways, and it'd take an extensive essay to go through the impact of every subtle mechanical change (like the alterations to creep aggro), the changes to the map, and the impact of every new item. If you'd like a thorough overview, put aside a couple of hours and check out this reddit thread. You'll find a bunch of long Twitch analysis sessions by professional and high-ranked players, which is a good way to get a sense of the patch as a whole.

In this article, then, I'm going to run through a couple of specific changes to highlight notable buffs, nerfs, and silly sideways shifts. It's too early to say what 6.87 is going to do to the top-level meta, but here's a taste of Dota 2 in the immediate aftermath of this huge update.

Strength is stronger, intelligence is... different

There are a lot of top-level changes in this patch, but here's one you need to be aware of. Hitpoints now scale more from strength, and a hero's basic health pool is larger. It's not enough to make a huge difference in the opening minutes of the game, unless you end up in one of those close-fought early teamfights around a bounty rune: expect most characters to be one or two auto-attacks tankier.

Later on, though, it amounts to a chunky buff to strength heroes. Given that the previous metagame was dominated by intelligence and agility, this is the start of a shift back towards Dota's beefy frontliners that will continue elsewhere in the patch. If 6.87 had a theme song, it would be this.

People who declared that 'we LoL now' when Octarine Core and Aether Lens introduced scaling damage and utility for spells might need to hold on to something, because spell damage scales with intelligence now. Not a huge amount, mind, but enough to keep spellcasters competitive for longer into a match. This is a profound philosophical shift for Dota 2, which for years was about the tension between powerful spells and scaling auto-attacks. Now, those lines are fuzzier—expect perceptions about roles to change, particularly when it comes to intelligence heroes.

Even so, the amount of mana gained per point of intelligence has been reduced. This is a big part of the nerf to previous pubstompers Outworld Devourer and Invoker, who have both, in various ways, had their mana pool axed: Invoker has undergone a flat intelligence reduction, while OD has had his costs increased and intelligence steal nerfed. Magic scales better but heroes that rely on it need to be more careful with their usage, at least until they pick up a big item or two.

This is offset a little by the boost in hero base mana from 0 to 50, but I'd argue that this is a bigger buff to strength heroes anyway. On average they gain more proportionally from the change, and the way their spells fit into their playstyle means that this extra mana opens up their options more. Dragon Knight has jumped from 195 to 230 base mana, for example, allowing him to get more use out of his freshly-buffed laning skill Breathe Fire.

With these buffs to strength heroes in mind, let's address the big red elephant in the room:

Axe is an extremely good Dota guy

With a 7.46% positive winrate swing in the first hours of the patch, I'm both happy and sad to report that my most played and probably favourite Dota hero is now flavour of the month. He's been made competitive, particularly in pubs, by two sets of changes in addition to the general strength buffs outlined above.

The first regards him directly. Counter Helix, his passive, now does pure damage and as such isn't mitigated by armour. It has had its damage slightly reduced to compensate, but in effect this makes him scale much better: level 4 Helix will now always do 180 damage, whereas previously it would steadily decrease as enemies stacked up their defenses.

Axe hits harder, scales better, and is one of the few heroes to be unaffected by the armour aura that has been added to towers. These punish dives by characters that rely on physical damage, but Axe isn't one of those characters any more. Axe doesn't care.

The second factor responsible for the rise of Axe is the change to Blade Mail, which now returns damage before Axe's damage mitigation is applied (meaning it stays effective even if Axe is tanked-up) and goes through spell immunity (meaning that it synergises brilliantly with Berserker's Call, which also goes through spell immunity.)

Blade Mail is one of those Dota mechanics, like Undying's Tombstone and the entire character of Omniknight, that requires enemies to play around it. As such, it is the bane of pubs and anywhere where coordination is in short supply. Axe is now the best carrier of an item that is uniquely able to turn a player's own farm against them, and this is what I'd attribute his spike in winrate to.

It's worth mentioning that the Blade Mail buff is also a big help to characters like Centaur Warrunner, who has also had a couple of nice buffs in this patch. It remains to be seen just how big an impact it has, but I wouldn't surprised to see Blade Mail tuned back down fairly shortly.

Arc Warden is an actual hero now

There are a bunch of nerfs in this patch—Invoker, Outworld Devourer, Death Prophet, Earth Spirit, Enchantress, etc—but Arc Warden feels like the one that has come closest to a proper rethink. Dota 2's newest hero didn't make a great first impression thanks to a cheese strat that is now well and truly dead. Having been stripped of his ability to teleport around the map with a Divine Rapier that he has no danger of losing, he has to actually use his abilities in synergy with one another.

I'm not an Arc Warden player and I don't feel fully qualified to explain how his playstyle will change, but its clear that the patch raises his skill ceiling and potentially increases his utility a great deal. His Spark Wraith ghost-mines are much easier to spam and now purge, which is a big buff, while Magnetic Field needs to be used more thoughtfully—it's not enough to just stick it down on top of whatever you're trying to kill.

He's now more interesting than cheesy, which will probably devastate his popularity but makes him a much more positive presence in the game. Whether or not you believe he's been dumpstered or rescued from the dumpster is down to your definition of trash.

Earthshaker is the hero Dota deserves

There's no Dota 2 update party like a Dota 2 crazy Aghanim's Scepter changes update party. There a few notable ones in this patch—Mirana and Gyrocopter, Winter Wyvern and Oracle—but none of them do this:

That's from my first post-patch ranked game. Mirana believed that she had survived the Rosh fight. Mirana was wrong. You can try to run from the slam; the slam does not care. The slam will find you. I've had a lot of reactions to solo Dota, but laughing maniacally in the office has never been one of them. Aghanim's Scepter, Aether Lens, Octarine Core Earthshaker is the most fun I have had in this game in years.

To explain: Aghanim's Scepter now enhances Enchant Totem rather than Echo Slam, giving it the ability to be cast anywhere within a 900 AoE. This causes Earthshaker to leap into the air and cast Enchant Totem at the target location, which never stops being funny. It's an initiation and an escape, as well as an 'I must go, my people need me' button to be used during slow moments.

I'm 90% sure this got added first and foremost because it is funny. Earthshaker's itemisation was a little set in stone before, sure, but he wasn't necessarily broken. He didn't need this—but I'm delighted that he got it.

Let's all celebrate the age of Jumpshaker with another round of this amazing gif:

This change is also, incidentally, a nice little buff to Rubick (who otherwise got a bit of love this patch.) Rubick loves stealing Earthshaker's stuff, and Enchant Totem was previously the spell of choice for preventing the Grand Magus from getting Echo Slam. If you're using it to initiate, that's harder. And if Rubick has his own Scepter, then getting Enchant Totem is its own kind of reward.

Icefrog is a Markov Chain

There's a lot more I could say about this patch, and a lot more I want to experiment with. Storm Spirit's Aghanim's upgrade, for one—a 450-range AoE Electric Vortex! Plus: Skywrath Mage's 12-second ultimate! You'll see a lot more Skywrath/Clockwerk, Skywrath/Axe, and Skywrath/Legion Commander in the days to come. And I'll do my best to cover the best/silliest/worst new combos as they emerge.

To wrap up, however, I'd like to address 6.87's dumbest change:

Puck

Illusory Orb speed increased by 1

If you don't play Dota 2, a speed increase of 1 is not very much—at all. This is this update's joke change, a reference to a Reddit thread from last week which generated Dota 2 patch notes by feeding previous updates into a Markov chain text generator to create a machine's idea of what a Dota 2 patch might look like. There were a lot of brilliant and impossible things in that post ('Lone Druid dies', 'Torrent now give less experience with all heroes in the Forest') and one that was funny because it was so inconsequential—increasing Puck's Orb speed by 1. So that's what Valve and Icefrog have done: implemented an idea that comes directly from a joke. They definitely read reddit, is the takeaway here.

I love the idea that in a few months we'll see yet another International won by a hairs-breadth Puck play, and we'll wonder: did a a Markov chain text generator just win somebody millions of dollars?

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The Fallout 4 Creation Kit and built-in mod support through Bethesda.net are now live as part of the 1.5 beta update.

“For Fallout 4, our goal was to make Mods easier and more accessible than ever before—for both the creators and the players. By building an all-new system with Bethesda.net we’ve made a huge leap forward in achieving that,” Bethesda said. “You can now browse and search for the latest and greatest Mods, choose your favorites, post feedback, and install them—all within the game. Simply select Mods from the main menu, and start browsing.”

For those who aspire to making those mods, the Creation Kit is available as a free download through the Bethesda.net launcher. “It allows you to touch almost anything you can imagine, from how game systems work to the creatures, the dialog, and level design,” Lead Level Designer Joel Burgess explained. “It's something that's been important to us as a studio, to make sure we support our community in this way.”

The built-in mod support is available through the 1.5 update, which is still in beta, so you'll need to be opted in if you want to leap into it right now. To do that, just right-click Fallout 4 in your Steam library, select Settings, then Betas, and then “beta” from the drop-down menu. It'll take a bit for the game to update but when it does, it'll appear as “Fallout 4 [Beta]” in your library.

Bethesda asked users to provide feedback in the Fallout 4 Creation Kit forum, so it can "update and evolve Mods and the Creation Kit based on your experiences." More information, including a range of tutorials on how to actually use the thing, can be found in the official Creation Kit Wiki.

The Human Protein Atlas is a scientific research program whose goal is to map the human proteome. With this information medical science can better explain the biological and molecular function of the body, improving the diagnosis and treatment of diseases as a result. It’s an important venture, but there’s just one problem: computers are terrible at identifying proteins.

There are over 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome, which means a lot of proteins need to be mapped and categorised. But without computers to rely on, scientists need find other ways to chart them. This is where citizen science comes in, a type of crowd-sourced research conducted by large groups of people. And where do large groups of people with computers frequently congregate? Online games.

Massively Multiplayer Online Science is a new citizen science platform whose mission is to connect scientific research and videogames. “Research tasks completely integrated with game mechanics, narrative, and visuals can open up a new channel between the gamer and scientific community,” they say. “Converting a small fraction of the billions of hours spent playing games will bring an enormous contribution to scientific research.”

EVE Online, CCP’s space MMO, is the first game to team up with Massively Multiplayer Online Science. Project Discovery is a game within a game, and sees EVE players collaborating to help chart the human proteome. You do so by studying images from the Human Protein Atlas and categorising them based on a set of examples. If enough players come to the same conclusion, the identified protein is then sent back to the HPA.

I was in Reykjavik last week for EVE Fanfest, CCP’s annual fan convention, and got the chance to speak with Linzi Campbell, also known as CCP Affinity, about her work on the project. “Massively Multiplayer Online Science approached CCP and wanted to know if we were interested in collaborating on a citizen science project,” she says. “We thought it sounded like something our players would love, and we were super excited about it.”

CCP looked at several projects and chose the HPA. “They have a database of hundreds of thousands of images,” says Campbell. “And we needed that, because our players quickly go through things. In fact, the HPA has since told us that EVE players have been through their entire image database once already. I was stunned by the level of participation.”

Project Discovery was talked about at the EVE Fanfest keynote, which was also being streamed live on Twitch. I had Twitch chat running on my laptop as I watched the talk, just to see what people thought of each segment, and when Discovery was mentioned the chat was flooded with people shouting ‘CYTOPLASM!’ Confused, I ask Campbell about this.

“Citizen science works by player consensus,” she says. “And cytoplasm was the most popular, because that was what they were most easily able to recognise.” In response they changed the way points were awarded, implementing a grading system. “Every ten or fifteen samples you get a training one, and depending on how you do, your level going forward is determined.”

As well as the noble pursuit of helping science, there’s also an in-game reward for taking part in Project Discovery. Every player has an accuracy rating, which dictates the rewards they get. And if your rating gets too low, you won’t receive anything. This is a way of encouraging people to take their time and submit accurate data. “EVE players are helping science,” says Campbell. “But they also earn Analysis Credits. This is a new currency we’ve introduced, and players can use them in the Sisters of Eve loyalty points store.”

When Campbell was determining the Analysis Credits required to buy some of the more exotic items in the LP store, including armour sets, she thought it would take weeks. “We released at about midday, and by 2am someone who had been playing solidly had unlocked everything, which is amazing.” But whether you’re someone as dedicated as this, or only play Project Discovery for a few minutes, every contribution helps.

“This is the only example of a player base this size being used for a citizen science project,” says Campbell. “Massively Multiplayer Online Science is definitely onto something unique here. If every gamer devotes just a few minutes of their time, that’s a huge help to science.” But, cleverly, Project Discovery’s inclusion in EVE isn’t completely arbitrary. There’s an in-universe reason for the work being done, and people in New Eden are collaborating to help both a real-world and a fictional cause.

A major event in the game’s fiction last year was the murder of Amarr Empress Jamyl Sarum. She was killed by a powerful new NPC force called the Drifters, whose origins and motives are shrouded in mystery. “The Sisters of Eve are researching Drifter DNA,” says Campbell. “Through Project Discovery our players are, as well as helping science, helping discover the mystery of who the Drifters are, why they’re so powerful, and where their technology comes from. Players may even be able to use Drifter tech themselves.”

EVE Online players have a certain reputation, largely based on the stories of piracy and espionage that make the headlines. But Project Discovery is an example of capsuleers working together for a worthy cause. Even if they’re only doing it for the rewards, they’re still helping further our knowledge of the human body. It’s amazing, really, that internet spaceships and medical science share a connection like this. But what’s next for the project? “Proteins won’t last forever,” says Campbell. “So we have to think about other ways to help science. There are so many exciting opportunities out there.”