Death comes to Morocco on May 31 as Agent 47 heads to Marrakesh for Hitman's third episodic mission. This time he's on the tail of an investment banker (boo, hiss) and an army general.

The former is holed up in the Swedish consulate. I'm envisioning the embassy scene from Casino Royale with better air conditioning. The general has his own headquarters, and an army to back him up. Perks of the job, y'know?

Whereas Sapienza was a sleepy seaside town with a dark underbelly, Marrakesh is a poorly contained panic attack. There's a full-blown riot in progress, the military is mulling over a coup, and the bazaars are packed with pesky civilians trying to go about their lives.

Surely the arrival of 47 will calm the situation.

If you're in the habit of purchasing Hitman's levels individually, Marrakesh is priced $10.

Stellaris' first major patch, 'Clarke', should enter public testing before the week is out. After publishing a wishlist of fixes and features earlier this month, Paradox has confirmed the highlights for the first update.

The biggest changes target sectors and AI. Previously a faff to manage, you'll be able to access sector governance direct from the Outliner. Sectors will also be straight-up better at managing buildings, pops and orbital structures on their own.

When Phil reached his late-game crisis an invasion of void creatures none of his galactic neighbours would let him through their space to handle the problem. No more: AI is becoming more flexible in trade negotiations, particularly over access rights, while late-game crisis AI has simply received 'fixes'. AI-controlled fleets should also behave themselves better.

For fans of diplomacy, detailed notifications will fill you in on rivalries, declarations of war and the like. Warmongers, meanwhile, will be pleased to find more detailed battle reports after action.

Bugfixes have of course been thrown in you can swot up on the patch notes here. After Clarke releases, Asimov aims to enliven the mid-game with diplomatic intrigue and event chains.

How do you improve on a classic? The answer is you don't. If we're talking about a genuine classic, something that not only was created to the very highest standard of its time but has held up well ever since, then that by definition isn't something you can make much better. Even if you fine-tune some of the rough edges or update the presentation or whatever, you're not going to re-capture what it was like to experience that thing in the first place. Yet, folks just keep on trying, and not just with games. It's not hard to understand why. Popular properties and franchises are like seeds that can bear fruit every so often. And Doom for sure was ripe.

The idea of there being a new Doom game at some point was more or less a cosmic certainty. Like many other cosmic certainties, though, it wasn't something I was looking forward to or thinking a lot about. I thought my days of being excited for games from id Software were well behind me. It's nothing against id. It's just that when things I care about a lot are sequeled, reimagined, rebooted, or anything like that, I've come to approach those works with healthy skepticism or plain old indifference. Doom just seemed predictable.

So, like many others from what I can tell, I was taken aback in the best possible way by this latest game. Apart from all the blistering action, it's filled with reverence for the 1993 original. It's not a reboot it's an homage. For all its flash and violence, rendered with the sort of care and attention to detail one would expect from Doom, it shows remarkable restraint and humility in its design. It's so familiar yet feels fresh, the perfect nostalgia piece come at the perfect time. As a former game critic, as a current game developer, and as a lifelong game player and fan of the original classic, I salute this game and the team that had the wherewithal to make it with such thought, skill, and care. When asked to say more about all that here at PC Gamer, you can imagine my response.

At some point that must have happened years ago, I stopped having a great time playing first-person shooters. My rationale was that this style of game was no longer for me. I felt I'd seen all the story beats, the weapons, the bad guys... and the play itself had become rote to me. A genre that was once synonymous with pure action evolved into something more methodical, and less to my taste. For example, a central mechanic of many shooters is that you sit there doing nothing while your wounds magically seal up. I've done this so many thousands of times by now that the tension is lost on me, and my attention soon goes someplace else. The new Doom's promise is to remind people like me of why we fell in love with this style of game to begin with.

It's interesting to look at how shooters evolved in response to Doom. At first, most shooters were like Doom. Then, shooters started asking questions. They weren't always deep questions, but still, what if you had to stop and reload your weapons from time to time? Then you couldn't keep firing nonstop and would have to choose your moments to engage. What if you had to take advantage of cover? Then there'd be more to combat than just running and dodging. What if you had very limited health? Combat could feel more dangerous as well it ought. What if there was a story? And so on. Some very good shooters were born of these questions. And now, it's taken more than 20 years for those re-examined assumptions to become the cookie-cutter standard of today, so now it's Doom presenting the alternative to the trend.

Today it's Doom asking the hard-hitting questions about reloading, about cover, about health, and story, and so on. With boldness and restraint, it even asks such questions of the original Doom's design: What if you could jump and climb as quickly as you could run? What if your enemies could navigate the environments about as effortlessly as you yourself? What if you had ways of replenishing your health and ammo on the spot? What if you got Quake II's railgun? Again, these aren't deep questions. But they have everything to do with the experience of playing the new Doom, and when you're in the heat of the moment in the game, you're not there to think deep thoughts. Your mind is racing, to be sure, but it's fully occupied with how you're going to negotiate whichever ridiculous onslaught you happen to be in at the time.

Other aspects of Doom really took me by surprise. I did not expect for the music to be so integral to the game, and was struck by just how strongly it set both the tone and the tempo. I also really did not expect to care so much about the game's silent, anonymous player character. Through a series of very colorful first-person animations, he comes to life and takes on a clear and specific personality. I felt for him as a character, despite him being a stasis-frozen hell-infused space marine, an experience I can't personally relate to. Doom isn't known for its storytelling, but the opening moments of this game were some of the most efficient storytelling in games that I've played in a long time, and there were plenty more great moments still to come. Look, many games have you playing as an angry dude. The new Doom somehow transcends the clich and takes this idea to new heights. The player character's actions, apart from being surprising and fun to watch, are rich with subtext. You're on a mission in this game, but it's not the mission your mission briefer guy is going on about.

Like any classic, the original Doom could be interpreted in many different ways. In its day, it drew no small amount of controversy for its special cocktail of graphic violence, occult subject matter, and straight-up popularity. The new Doom, just by virtue of being derivative of a game from more than 20 years ago, maybe isn't capable of having the same cultural impact. But so what?

Back then, as I saw controversy swirl around one of my favorite games, I felt grateful that I didn't see it that way. Doom was a positive force in my life. I was just another kid for whom games were more than just a hobby. They enriched my understanding of the world and of my own self; they were more than just fun. Doom, for example, was a game about quite literally conquering one's fears you re killing demons! And, in the end, there s nothing they can do to stop you. You can try as many times as it takes until those scary Barons of Hell and whatever else are nothing to you anymore. I wish I always felt as determined in life as I felt playing that game. Of all the things I wouldn't have guessed the new Doom could re-capture, I never would have expected it to get that part so right. You wouldn't think a game called Doom could be so uplifting.

Update: The European Phenotypes and Names mod for Stellaris is back on the Steam Workshop. Its creator, Lord Xel, said he re-uploaded the mod primarily as an experiment to see how far Paradox will lie about banning my other mod. He claimed he's uncertain as to precisely why the original was removed, since Paradox never contacted me and only gave conflicting reports to gaming media about why it was cut.

Nonetheless, he listed three rules to be followed by commenters, including that there can be no use of a certain non-offensive commonly used word. The description of the mod is also less inflammatory as well: Simply makes humans Europeans and adds a name list for European names.

Paradox said it would not comment on the mod beyond the statement released yesterday by COO Susana Meza Graham. We have a few rules of conduct that have been in effect for the better part of a decade where racial slurs, among other things, are not allowed. We interpreted this particular mod as breaking those rules of conduct, however it would appear that the comments surrounding the mod, rather than the mod itself, were the biggest problem, she said. We welcome everyone to create all kind of mods for us as long as they comply with our rules of conduct and we expect our modders to help us keep the comment sections free of any racial slurs or other things that do not comply with these same codes.

Presumably the mod now complies with those rules. They're available in full here.

Original story:

Game mods are great, but sometimes they're used to do not-so-great things. The European Phenotype and Names Only mod for Stellaris is one such example: As the title implies, it changes the game so that all humans are European which is to say, white and have only European names. If that strikes you as a little sketchy, well, you're probably not wrong and Paradox agrees.

"We shipped the game originally with an accurate representation of humans, that is to say diverse in both ethnicity and personality," a Paradox rep told Eurogamer, explaining its decision to remove the mod from the Steam Workshop. "We embrace the idea that players mod the game to best represent how they want to play, we do NOT however wish to enable discriminatory practices."

It wasn't the mod itself that led to its removal, though, but a change to its description that was made after it was posted. We saw the mod, thought it wasn't in very good taste, but let it remain. Then the creator of the mod decided to update the description of the mod to promote an 'agenda' not related to computer games at all, and this was being clearly displayed on our product page, Community Manager Paradoxal Bear wrote on Reddit. We decided it was a step too far and removed it.

In a separate post, Paradoxal Bear acknowledged that other mods allow Stellaris players to role-play the game in just about any way they see fit, and that our job is to make computer games, not push political agendas. But, he continued, this particular mod had several disturbing elements in its public description which we do not want to have clearly displayed on our project page."

Paradox didn't specify how the description had changed, but several Redditors state that it was the addition of No multiculturalism here! that triggered the decision to remove the mod. Interestingly, the description of the mod on ModDB (where it remains available) doesn't contain the phrase. The first comment, however, is a request to eliminate women from the game as well.

I had to double check the date, but yes, here we have the launch trailer for The Witcher 3's massive Blood and Wine expansion. That is, the launch trailer for an expansion that's still a week away. Does that make sense? No. Is the trailer packed with unmentionably horrible monsters? You're darn right it is.

CD Projekt Red has broken out the bestiary for Geralt's trip to Toussaint. I spied the nightmarish giant centipedes of the Witcher 1, a smattering of barghests (the beast!), and something that resembles a Dark Souls boss. Proper witcher's work.

Interesting choice of soundtrack, but I suppose it's hard to conjure primal rage on the lute.

Blood and Wine releases May 31, and Tom has a preview to whet your blade.

Rocket League's long-awaited cross-network play with Xbox One will arrive 3pm PT/11pm BST today. We'll soon be frolicking with our other set of strange console mates.

This update makes Rocket League the first game to allow PC-Xbox cross-play. We've been demolishing PS4 players since release, of course, but it took Microsoft some time to warm to the idea.

Though Microsoft has previously said it's open to cross-play with 'other consoles', Sony is not reciprocating. Don't expect PS4 teammates to face off against Xbox players just yet. Perhaps that's for the best. I picture some sort of devastating antimatter annihilation should the two ever meet.

There's no word on whether we'll be able to form parties with Xbox friends a feature still sorely absent from PS4 cross-play. At least there's not long till we find out.

We've republished this feature to celebrate Morrowind's 15th birthday.

For millions of players, Morrowind was their introduction to the world of The Elder Scrolls, but even Elder Scrolls veterans who cut their teeth on Arena and Daggerfall left Morrowind with an impression that lasted. For some of those players, Morrowind made such an impression that they never wanted to leave at all. Those fans have spent the past years painstakingly updating Morrowind, brick by brick, texture by texture, into Bethesda’s more modern engines.

Even returning to Morrowind 14 years later, it’s easy to see why. Morrowind's island setting of Vvardenfell offsets a few standard fantasy clichés—a villain who lairs in a wasteland of volcanic ash and dwarven ruins full of monsters—but also more visionary ideas. There's a prison inside a moon floating over a city built on a lake, a transport network of giant fleas controlled by riders who directly manipulate their steeds' nervous systems, and a settlement where most of the buildings are the hollowed-out shells of gigantic dead creatures. Vvardenfell is a memorable place, more outlandish than anything seen in the Elder Scrolls games that preceded or followed it.

Morrowind was also the first Elder Scrolls game to come with a Creation Kit, a gift from Bethesda that gave players the opportunity to alter that world and make it their own. The best mods tended to leave the setting be and instead tinker with the clunky RPG mechanics it was filtered through, changing the way leveling works and the rate skills improve and so on.

The Morrowind of tomorrow

Bethesda would continue experimenting with those mechanics in later games, alongside making technical improvements like the obvious graphical ones as well as the additon of full voice acting and tweaks to the animations (it took until Skyrim for people to be able to move their legs the right way when running diagonally). Since both Oblivion and Skyrim came with their own Creation Kits, they were just as moddable as Morrowind. While many of Morrowind's mods anticipated future improvements, the most ambitious mods for Oblivion and Skyrim are those that look back, inserting the entirety of Morrowind's setting and story into the newer games. They're called Morroblivion and Skywind, and each is a massive undertaking that has required teams of modders and years of volunteer work.

A modder who posts on the forums at The Elder Scrolls Renewal Project as Brainslasher points me to a Morroblivion History thread that breaks down the timeline. It began with a modder named Galadrielle whose dream was to remake Vvardenfell in Oblivion, but with a new story that would occur during the same time period. Later modders re-imagined Morroblivion as a straight re-telling of the original, unwilling to alter the game they loved beyond some visual and mechanical improvements. As Brainslasher puts it, they were motivated by love for this game and its crazy world with its weird architecture and creatures, the hostile world that you as a player are thrown into without knowing anything about it.

(Someone suggests their next project right there in that history thread: Now let's do it all again with Morroskyrim! )

That crazy world is something that gets brought up again and again in my conversations with people who worked on these overhauls. They talk about its dwarves going beyond beery miner stereotypes to become a culture of Babylonian steampunk objectivists, or Hlormar Wine-Sot, the drunken barbarian who enlists your help in getting his clothes back from a witch. One of them namechecks The Lusty Argonian Maid, a book of in-setting erotic fiction. It s not every RPG that goes so far as to have its own saucy novels, but that level of commitment to detailing every part of the setting is what inspired similar commitment in its fans.

Morroblivion can be played right now, but Skywind is still in development, and has been for four years. Will Jordan, who posts to The Elder Scrolls Renewal Project forum as Smitehammer, has been there for two and a half of those years, joining just as Skywind changed scope from simply porting the old game into a new engine to what he calls a full re-imagining of Morrowind . That means creating a lot of new designs from scratch, guided by the concept art, rather than simply inserting objects from Morrowind and cranking the textures up. It also means creating new quests to fill in gaps and adding new dialogue so that NPCs can chat to each other rather than just the player.

Jordan is both a writer and one of the team leads in the voice acting department alongside Taerkalith, aka Benjamin Iredale, who has been working on Skywind for almost as long, hopping from job to job. I've done a bit of West Gash landscaping, creating the initial river design through the canyons, worked on spells such as Silence and Icarian Flight, and helped jumpstart the music and SFX departments which had slowed down about a year ago, Iredale says. They're now some of our healthiest departments. Also a bit of quest fixing and dialogue implementation, but that overlaps closely with my department so it comes with the territory of voice acting.

Coordinating voice actors is a big job, since Morrowind was very heavy on the text and only a handful of NPC greetings (and one god) were voiced. Early on it entailed acquiring all the text data for the scripts and coming up with a method of identifying appropriate lines by NPC and creating scripts, says Iredale. Now I'm doing implementation of the voicetypes/voicefiles which entails working in the Creation Kit along with third-party supporting applications.

Jordan actually started as one of the actors, inspired by the performer whose greeting is the first you hear in the game. Jeff Baker came up with a very unique voice for the male Dunmer which few people on the team could match. I learned rudimentary sound editing and recording techniques to improve my audio quality, and began coaching others on how to improve their own sound quality and acting forming ideas on how each race should sound for some internal consistency.

Michael Pewtress, aka SFX team lead Corpus X, is a more recent addition to the team. He's been part of what he calls the Skywind universe for just over seven months, though he'd been following the project for a couple of years before that. When I came in for a visit last September it felt like nothing was happening and I thought I could offer my help to get it going, he said. When I joined I was just an SFX contributor, but the team lead at the time left the project about a month or two into my tenure so we ran team leadless until I took over in December. It's a lot of work for volunteer pay, but I really enjoy the community and almost everyone laughs or plays along with my jokes so I think I'll be staying.

Very few of Skywind's modders worked on Morroblivion and some of them, like Pewtress, have never worked on a game before at all. This has been a fun learning experience, he says. Iredale, on the other hand, worked on personal mods before stepping up to join Skywind. Given how long it's been and the still unfinished state of Skywind though some of the screenshots they've shown and the videos on their YouTube channel make their achievements so far look very impressive I ask if there s some worry that a new Elder Scrolls game will come out before Skywind does.

Iredale isn't bothered, saying, There is a good chance we'll release before the next Elder Scrolls game if they keep to their typical timetable. Even if we released shortly afterward, I think people would still want to play it, as the graphics and gameplay are still faring decently with the assets we've been creating.

Pewtress notes that Skyrim is still plenty popular, even though it's now almost five years old. I'd say we have a least four years before something is released and I want my SFX guys done [with] our job in six months, he says with enthusiasm. Sound Effects Division Rules!

When a new Elder Scrolls game comes out, whether it's set in Valenwood, Hammerfell, Black Marsh or any of the other provinces of Tamriel, it's possible that Morrowind will find itself being recreated by modders yet again in place of the new location. Porting Skywind into Valenwind, Hammerwind, Blackwind, etc. would require a lot of additional asset creation and complicated data wrangling, says Iredale. There's a good chance it may be done, but I don't think the current team largely is interested in doing that.

According to Mewtress, As long as there's a Creation Kit in a new Elder Scrolls game, it'll be used to make Vvardenfell again. He compares their slightly unhinged dedication to the Star Trek fans making fan films. They're even getting sued by Paramount and that's not stopping them!

Jordan agrees. One interesting thing about Skywind is that nearly all the assets are our own. The animation skeletons are taken from Skyrim or modified from Skyrim's, but nearly all the textures, models, and a great deal of the sound effects and music are to be completely fan-made. This means if another Elder Scrolls game comes out using an updated engine, it would be fairly easy (and legal) to port over anything we've made. We're thinking long-haul for this project, laying the groundwork for not only the project in its current form, but planning for its future development. If we do the grunt work now, future TES modders will be able to focus on refining and embellishing without having to remake an entire game from scratch again.

So what is it about Morrowind in particular that makes it worth rebuilding at least twice, if not more? Morrowind, for me, was the first video game that truly realized a D&D world in three dimensions, says Iredale. The bizarre and complicated lore and religious-political hierarchies made it a world you wanted to know more and more about.

Developers like Michael Kirkbride went out if their way to make the world seem as alien as possible, while keeping suspense of disbelief possible, says Jordan. The world has all these fantastic creatures and strange architecture, but none of it looks out of place. For him, an important moment came when he noticed relationships between the different stages in the lifecycle of the humble Kwama, which he calls quadrupedal insecty things that are raised like cattle-chickens by the Dunmer for their eggs.

Their adult forms, the Kwama Foragers, Workers, and Warriors, are encountered frequently by players, and inside the tunnels where they nest you can meet their Queens. But they also have a larval form, called Scribs, which you'll spot both in the wilderness and depicted on the signs that guide you to Vvardenfell's taverns (you can see one outside the South Wall Cornerclub in Balmora, for instance). Their eggs and cuttle turn up as items, and they're mentioned in passing in dreams and conversations, just enough pieces to let your mind puzzle it all together in a way that makes sense.

It's this sense of interconnectedness, from the lowly Kwama and their eggs all the way up to the legends of ascended gods Vivec, Almalexia, and Sotha Sil that makes Morrowind special. The individual pieces fit together like they would in a real culture, and the longer you spend inside the game, the more of those pieces assemble into something greater.

The Skywind team are doing impressive work on making Morrowind look and sound better, while also helping it become a little less frustrating to play thanks to Skyrim's mechanical improvements, all to allow the Morrowind we built up inside our heads as we first played it to live again. To some degree, though, no matter which game's variety of combat and leveling are applied to it, no matter which level of fidelity it's polished to, that version that will always live inside our imaginations.

We gave Homeworld Remastered a glowing 92 score in our review last year, which is as it should be. The original Homeworld was a brilliant piece of space opera, and so Homeworld, but prettier is about as close to a sure thing as you're going to get in this business. But it turns out that Gearbox isn't done with it yet: An in-depth Fists of Heaven report says a team at the studio has spent the past six months working on a major update, which is now close to completion.

The update will address one of the biggest player complaints by completely reworking formations to allow them to be more intelligent, especially in large groups. Different mixes of ships will form up in different ways based on a number of factors, including race: The ion cannons on Kushan destroyers require line-of-sight while the missiles fired by their Vaygr counterparts do not, and their formations will reflect that difference. Some existing formations are being changed to improve their firing arcs, and modders will be able to create their own unique formations for different ship classes, races, and tactics.

Projectile weapons are also being changed to use true ballistic behavior rather than relying on the vagaries of RNG. Weapons will sometimes (presumably very rarely) misfire, and missed shots will continue along their path and could even strike other ships, both enemy and friendly: One way or another, as the man said, if you pull the trigger, you are ruining someone's day. Targeting behavior is being overhauled and will better prioritize targets, and tactics settings will have a much more visible impact on combat.

Beyond that, there will be plenty of bug fixes and tweaks, major changes to gameplay balance, and even some graphical improvements. There's no indication of a release date, but the Fists of Heaven report says it appears to be just about there.

Thanks, PCGamesN.

Remember when that guy Lavonicus charted nearly all of Fallout 4's hidden underwater realm, and posted a ton of pictures of his submerged journeys on Imgur? With the DLC expansion Far Harbor now out, he's at it again, and this time around there's a quite a bit more to see.

There doesn't appear to be any great, watery adventures to be had, but there's definitely some weirdness going on beneath the waves. The audience of garden gnomes staring is one obviously example, as are all the bizarrely posed mannequins. The teddy bear on the cannon is mighty strange too, but also cute, so I'll let that one slide.

This new bit of exploration resulted in more than 70 screens , plus a few videos you can catch on Lavonicus' YouTube channel. He also created a helpful map of chests, safes, and points of interest, so you can cut right to the highlights if you want to check them out for yourself. Speaking of which, here's our Far Harbor review.

Thanks, Kotaku.

Two more Dark Souls 3 players have discovered ways to brighten our day, presuming you're not one of the poor sods to invade them.

Foster or Buffalo Bill, as he prefers to be known put his own spin on the iconic well scenes from The Silence of the Lambs. Luring invaders into an inescapable pit with dropped items, he proceeds to spam the Hello Carving until his victims break and disappear back to their own world. If only Catherine Martin had the same luxury in the film. The uncanny similarity of the 'hellos' to Ted Levine's Buffalo Bill makes it.

Then we have Lil Yim and his new meta letting dodgy collision detection do the work. Hunkered down on a ledge just past the Undead Settlement graveyard, Yim and friends discovered that anyone attempting to jump to them wouldn't fit. Neither did they slip off and fall. Instead, the invader hangs in a perpetual fall animation before being slain automatically in a form of in-built mercy killing.