When Doom showed up back in May, I ran a bunch of benchmarks to see how it performed. At the time, we were promised that a patch with support for the Vulkan API would show up "soon after launch," which apparently meant around two months. The good news is that after all this waiting, the public Vulkan patch went live last week; there's also a FAQ on Doom's Vulkan support that has additional information.

So what is Vulkan and why should anyone care? The short summary is that Vulkan is the cross-platform low-level API put out by the Khronos Group, the same group that handles the cross-platform OpenGL API. Alternatively, Vulkan is to OpenGL as DirectX 12 is to DirectX 11. The key element we want to discuss is what it means to be 'low-level' and how that changes the game engine. This gets technical, but it will help set the stage for what we see in the benchmarks.

So, what is an API?

Software developers typically use programming libraries to help make their jobs easier. Imagine you want to create a game for Windows; there's a lot of work involved in doing so, but many common tasks can be handled by a programming library an API, or Application Programming Interface. Rather than reinventing the wheel for each new program, tasks like graphics, audio, window resizing and positioning, reading and writing to storage, and more can simply use an existing library to make life easier.

Focusing specifically on the realm of graphics, the API helps handle things like texturing, lighting, and creating all the amazing visuals we see in modern games. But using a library also involves some level of abstraction, and in the world of graphics it means you have a driver that supports the set of functions in the library, and it maps those to the actual hardware. While AMD and Nvidia GPUs as an example might be similar in many areas, dig deep enough and there are plenty of differences.

In the past decade or two, most graphics APIs have been 'high-level,' meaning there's a larger amount of abstraction. This generally makes the job of the programmers easier, at the cost of some performance optimizations. Some developers have wanted ways to extract more performance from the hardware, however, and they've basically asked for 'low-level' access to the hardware. That means more work in some cases, but it can also improve performance if you know what you're doing. And that brings us to Vulkan and DirectX 12.

There are plenty of differences, just as there are differences between OpenGL and DirectX 11. Microsoft is in charge of the DirectX world, and it only works on Windows platforms; Khronos Group handles OpenGL/Vulkan, and they support multiple platforms including most smartphones and tablets via OpenGL ES. Where Microsoft had pressure from game developers and hardware companies to create DirectX 12, Khronos Group took a different route and leveraged much of AMD's work on their own low-level Mantle API to create Vulkan. Ultimately, the end goal is the same: allow developers to extract more performance from the hardware (if they want to put in the effort).

There's some politics involved with the low-level API discussion as well. The biggest item is that AMD supports a feature called asynchronous compute, which is basically the ability to mix and match graphics and compute instructions in the execution units. AMD has had their Asynchronous Compute Engine (ACE) as part of their core graphics hardware since the very first GCN GPUs (the HD 7970 and 7950 launched in January 2012), but until Mantle, DirectX 12, and Vulkan came around it didn't actually do a lot. That's because DirectX 11 and OpenGL didn't really have a good way to leverage the ACE, but low-level access changes things.

Spec sheets don't tell the whole story

Fundamentally, AMD and Nvidia architectures aren't the same, and this is why we run benchmarks. Otherwise we could just look at the specifications and say, "Oh, it looks like AMD's Fury X does 8601 GFLOPS and has 512GB/s of bandwidth; the GTX 980 Ti has 6054 GFLOPS and 336GB/s bandwidth. That makes the Fury X 40-50 percent faster." The reality is that all processors have a theoretical performance, but actually getting close to that figure can be difficult, and the specifics of the architecture help determine how close the real world is to the theoretical world. And this is where ACE can help AMD quite a bit.

I picked the Fury X and GTX 980 Ti for a good reason: on paper the Fury X should be substantially faster, but in practice the 980 Ti ends up with a small lead of around five percent (the Fury X does lead by five percent at 4K, however). That's about a 40 percent difference from the theoretical performance, due to the ways in which Nvidia's Maxwell and AMD's 3rd generation GCN differ. With a low-level API, AMD's ACE has the potential to help better utilize certain resources, particularly if the developers spend some effort to better optimize their code. Instead of utilizing 60-70 percent of the available execution units, they might be able to get to 80-90 percent utilization, and that could make a big difference when it comes to the end user's experience.

Now combine the above discussion with AMD's presence in all the current generation of consoles, and AMD has a vested interest in finding ways to improve the performance of their hardware. This is arguably why they created Mantle, and why they're so interested in DirectX 12. But couldn't AMD accomplish something similar by simply spending a lot of resources to optimize their DirectX 11 drivers? Probably not to the same degree, simply because the API isn't designed for things like their ACE.

What about Nvidia don't they have features and hardware elements that are handicapped by high-level APIs? Probably, though Nvidia for their part has been more interested in creating other gaming libraries rather than specifically focusing on low-level APIs. Certainly developers can do stuff with the PhysX API that they can't do using plain DirectX 11 though much of PhysX could almost certainly be done in other ways. They support Vulkan and DirectX too, and helped id Software with the Vulkan port of Doom.

With all of the above out of the way, let's talk expectations. In my view, the goal of any developer using a low-level API should always be to beat the performance they can get via a high-level API; if performance is worse (than OpenGL or DirectX 11), then it represents a lot of wasted effort.

Imagine someone coming to you with a customized sports car; they brag about replacing the engine, tweaking the transition, and doing all sorts of other work. Then you ask them how much better it performs compared to the stock car. If all their changes resulted in less horsepower, worse handling, a lower top speed, and reduced acceleration, you'd probably think they had lost their mind. On the other hand, they might tune for one or two specific areas at the cost of others so a higher top speed, or better acceleration which we also see in software development.

On the next page: Doom Vulkan performance numbers and charts galore.

Doom Vulkan performance comparisons

For the benchmarks, I'm using my standard testbed, which you can see to the right. I didn't do a full set of additional CPU scaling tests this round, due to time constraints, but I did a few quick spot checks that I'll discuss below. I've also retested every single graphics card in the charts, with OpenGL 4.5 and Vulkan, using the AMD Crimson 16.7.2 drivers and the Nvidia 368.69 drivers the exception being the recently launched GTX 1060, where I used the 368.64 drivers. Some of the OpenGL numbers have improved a bit since the initial testing in May, so I wanted to keep things consistent.

For the charts, I've separated each resolution into AMD and Nvidia hardware, and colored Vulkan results red and OpenGL results blue. (Trying to put everything into one chart just resulted in a massive pile of results that ends up not being particularly readable, though if you're interested, here are the full 1080p, 1440p, and 4K results.) I'll discuss each chart in turn, starting at 1080p. I could have also tested at 1080p High or Medium quality, but the gains in performance aren't all that great and at some point I had to draw the line and simply finish the testing.

One thing to note is that my Doom benchmark sequence uses FRAPS for OpenGL and PresentMon for Vulkan, and there is a bit more variance between benchmark runs than some other games. Basically, I play a 150 second sequence (give or take) where I run though a section of the game and fight a bunch of hellspawn. I do my best to run the same path each time, but there are minor variations depending on where the demons show up. Testing the same card at the same settings multiple times gives a variance of around four percent, so anything less than that can be considered equivalent performance not that you'd really notice anything below ten percent anyway.

In case you're new to my testing, I also report minimum frame rates, but these aren't strict minimums. Instead, I calculate the average fps for the bottom three percent of frames. This is done by finding the 97 percentile (the value where 97 percent of frames render faster, using the frame times) and then selecting the remaining three percent of frames and finding their average fps (total number of frames divided by seconds). I do this because sometimes there's a single frame out of thousands of frames that 'glitched' or whatever, and in practice it's far more useful to know what typical minimum fps is like rather than focusing on that one frame.

AMD starts off with an impressive showing at 1080p Ultra, with nearly all of the cards showing around a 30 percent performance improvement compared to OpenGL. That's a massive jump, and what's more it happens even on lower-end hardware like the R9 380 not that any of these are 'slow' GPUs, but it's good to see improvements on more than just the high-end parts. The one exception here is the R9 385 2GB, which is the only AMD card with less than 4GB VRAM that we tested; it improves, but by roughly 10 percent instead of 30 percent. Minimum fps is also up significantly, though the nature of testing creates a lot more variation between runs when talking about minimum fps; the 285 shows almost no change, while the other cards are all 30-40 percent higher on 97 percentile scores.

In contrast to AMD's hardware, Nvidia's showing with Vulkan is a lot more mixed. The GTX 1080 performance goes up by 20 percent, the 1070 improves by 10 percent, and most of the remaining cards fall within the margin of error. We do see a few performance regressions, and the GTX 950 shows a nearly 10 percent drop with Vulkan. The 2GB 960 also shows a small drop, and interestingly the 1060 does as well perhaps the 368.64 drivers aren't fully baked, or it might just be variance between runs. Vulkan does generally improve minimum frame rates, and only the 950 shows a clear drop in minimum fps. The 1060 has a small drop, while other cards show a 10-20 percent improvement the 1080 even shows a 50 percent improvement, and I should note that the 1080 is frequently hitting the 200 fps frame rate cap that Doom imposes, so potentially it could run faster.

Pulling back to talk about the entire spectrum, Nvidia's 1080 and 1070 still claim the top spots, with the Fury X effectively tying the 1070. The 980 Ti, Fury, and Nano all cluster together, followed by another grouping of the 980, 480, and 390 in that order. Vulkan basically elevates AMD's GPUs from seriously lackluster positioning in Doom to being right in the mix.

Again, AMD delivers some massive improvements at 1440p, showing that Vulkan isn't just a case of reducing CPU bottlenecks but it's also allowing the software to extract additional performance from the hardware. Average frame rates are up by 20-30 percent on everything, this time including the R9 285 2GB. Minimum frame rates show similar and even slightly higher improvements, ranging from 15-35 percent.

Running a game like Doom at 1440p Ultra usually makes the GPU the bottleneck, and that's basically what we're seeing. The GTX 1080 does get a decent 10 percent boost, but all the other cards are pretty much within the margin of error. The 2GB VRAM cards also tend to be a bit more prone to hiccups in testing, or simply have higher variance; here the 960 2GB drops by nearly 10 percent, but the 950 (also 2GB) shows a barely perceptible dip. Minimum frame rates for all of the cards are within the wider margin of error, so basically at 1440p none of Nvidia's cards beyond the GTX 1080 really benefit.

The lack of improvement on the Nvidia side ends up changing overall positioning a bit. The 1080 remains the fastest GPU, but the Fury X now edges past the 1070 this isn't really that unusual, however, as the Fury X has gobs of memory bandwidth and frequently improves relative to the competition at higher resolutions. The Fury edges past the 980 Ti, which is just ahead of the Nano. Similarly, the 390 and 480 edge past the 980, 1060, and 970. At the bottom of the overall standings, things are pretty much in line with what we usually see: 380X beats 380, and both beat the 960 and 950.

Finally, with settings at maximum (more or less we're still not running the Nightmare quality options), AMD continues to show moderate improvements thanks to Vulkan. This time the range is more like 15-25 percent, for both average and minimum fps, but the fact that Vulkan is giving the GPUs any help at all at 4K ultra is frankly astonishing. I'm not sure what bottleneck is being alleviated, and all of the cards still fall below the 'magical' 60 fps mark, but if you have a 4K FreeSync display Doom is definitely playable at these settings on the RX 480 and above.

Nvidia on the other hand ends up with slight drops in performance on nearly all the cards we tested. I'd call it bad luck or margin of error, except it's so consistent that more likely there is a slight performance hit at 4K ultra with Vulkan. Either Nvidia's OpenGL drivers are simply so tuned at this point that it's hard for game developers to match them, or some other factor is at play. Of course, the GTX 1080 is still the only GPU to break 60 fps at 4K ultra, even if Vulkan doesn't help out.

The overall picture once more shifts farther into AMD's court, particularly on the Fiji cards with their HBM VRAM. Under OpenGL, Nvidia was the undisputed champion at Doom, but Vulkan tilts the scales to generally favor AMD hardware at least in terms of a bang for the buck.

On the next page: What this tells us about the current state of low-level APIs.

Does your CPU matter?

One of the things I've been interested in testing is whether low-level APIs will reduce the CPU requirements. That's what I thought they would do back when DX12 was first being discussed after all, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 both get by with CPUs that are downright pathetic compared to a modern Intel Core processor.

I did some limited testing and found that while the GTX 1080 still showed good 1080p scaling, Doom simply doesn't hit the CPU that hard. Performance with a simulated Core i3-4350 (dual-core with Hyper-Threading at 3.6GHz) in most cases is within spitting distance of our standard i7-5930K OC (six-core with Hyper-Threading at 4.2GHz). Even slower CPUs might change things a bit, but an i3-4350 is reaching pretty far down the totem pole.

Welcome to the low-level API future

Doom + Vulkan doesn't really change the overall perspective on the market; it's just one game, and there are plenty of games that continue to favor Nvidia's hardware. But if every game started to support DX12 or Vulkan, we're now reaching the point where the pattern is becoming pretty clear.

Doom is about as close to a vendor agnostic game as I expect to see, given both AMD and Nvidia have previously touted the performance improvements Vulkan brings to the table. Hell, Nvidia even had Doom come to their GTX 1080 preview party to show off Vulkan support. It's interesting that 1080p ended up being the only place where Nvidia showed major gains, and even then it was mostly on the 1080.

I talked earlier about theoretical GFLOPS (billions of floating point operations per second). GFLOPS is a good indication of theoretical performance, and many compute-oriented GPU calculations tend to scale well with these figures. Gaming performance on the other hand often ends up being quite a bit different. You can't usually sustain the peak GFLOPS of an architecture (it's the number of cores times the clock speed times two for both AMD and Nvidia GPUs right now, if you're wondering), but high-level APIs often don't extract maximum performance from the hardware, and certain architectural design decisions can exacerbate that problem. Vulkan in the case of Doom, as well as some other DX12 titles like Ashes of the Singularity and Hitman, seem to be moving AMD's performance closer to their theoretical level.

There's still the possibility that AMD helped id Software optimize for Vulkan more/better than Nvidia did, but I think it's equally likely that Nvidia's DX11 and OpenGL drivers are simply really good at utilizing most of the hardware resources and are perhaps hitting memory bandwidth bottlenecks at higher resolutions. Until we see a DX12 or Vulkan game where Nvidia hardware shows across the board performance improvements, that's my conclusion. That doesn't mean I think the Fury X is going to surpass the GTX 1080 in gaming performance, but if future games that utilize low-level APIs continue down this path, the positions of some other GPUs may change.

Of course by then, we might all be running Nvidia 'Volta' and AMD 'Navi' GPUs. And we still need developers to work on eliminating the 2-3 month lag time between launch and good DX12/Vulkan patches.

Grand Theft Auto 5 has an abundance of neat official add-ons, but its huge collection of user-made mods are what sets it apart from just about every other game in my eyes. Modder State_of_Mind s Gang Hideouts is the latest to catch my eye, which brings Red Dead Redemption s raidable enemy HQs to the sprawling open world Los Santos sandbox.

It s a real shame that GTA s wild west cousin remains a console-exclusive, as it s a fantastic game in both single and multiplayer with a story that s far more engaging than anything the Grand Theft Auto series has ever offered. Gang Hideouts, for those unaware, feature in Red Dead Redemption as areas inhabited by outlaw gangs that players can confront and face-off against. Besides snagging bonuses, clearing these bastions of their bad guys is great fun, which is why it s nice to see the idea implemented in GTA 5.

State_of_Mind s GTA-oriented slant on Gang Hideouts requires both the Build a Mission mod by Aimless and the OpenInteriors mod by NewTheft to work, and lets players seek out gang s quarters as they lie strewn across the Los Santos map just like in Red Dead Redemption.

Each hideout is home to a different group of enemies, and State_of_Mind has added over ten new hideouts and a handful of antagonists such as Corrupt Cops and Dam Hippies since the mod was first created less than a month ago, as he or she ensures the mod "expands over time."

Here's a few stills that accompany the mod's download link.

Fallout 4 s Vault-Tec Workshop expansion is almost upon us, which means we ll soon become clandestine lair-building overseers. Come July 26, this Tuesday, we ll get the chance to build a brighter future underground , craft massive vaults , and run Vault-Tec approved experiments on whoever dares let us. We ll also get treated to a new quest, Bethesda has now revealed, making it the forthcoming DLC the first Workshop add-on to do so.

Assuming you re above level 20, a distress beacon, which can be heard anywhere in the Commonwealth, will sound alerting you to attend an emergency at Vault 88. Once there, you ll lay waste to a group of unpleasant raiders and will then happen upon the vault s charming yet distinctly odd ghoul-transformed overseer. She s into weird experiments, you learn, and that s where your quest kicks off.

You ll start off by interviewing some potential new settlers, searching for the perfect subject for all your nefarious tests, explains a blog post on the Bethesda site. From there you will be tasked with running a series of experiments, each with different outcomes, depending on the choices you make. Will you be a benevolent leader? Or a cruel tyrant? Or maybe somewhere in the middle?

Your choice of test parameters will affect the final version of each experimental object, so think carefully. Whatever you end up crafting for your experiment will be permanently added to the Workshop, allowing you to build it whenever you want.

If that all sounds a bit too gross for your liking, you don t actually need to complete the quest, says Bethesda the pure Workshop experience can be had by offing the vault keeper or by dismissing her upon arrival. If you do choose to kill her or force her out, you ll still be able to build a basic version of each experiment item, adds the blog post.

The Vault-Tec Workshop expansion also brings with it a host of nifty tools and items, such as clean furniture, new Vault-themed decorations including a Vault Boy and Vault Girl statue, the experiment-related items you create during the quest part of the add-on, and the newly added Barber and Surgeon chairs the latter of which means you can now change your look without making the trek to Diamond City.

Fallout 4's Vault-Tec Workshop DLC is due July 26.

Me and my travelling robot are a regular odd couple, he with hammers for fists and me with human-sized fists, he grappling with the quandaries of existence, me fairly comfortable in my sentience. Oh how we laugh when poison gas from his rear-mounted toxic canisters suffocates a group of super mutants, HA. HA. HA. That s actually what I ve named him, the tip of the silicone mastication module taking a trip of three steps down the platinum palate to tap, at three, on the bone fangs. After playing through Fallout 4 s Automaton, an expansion that lets you create companions from the building blocks of life ie, oil, screws, plastic I can t imagine the Commonwealth without this bucket of bolts.

I can customise HA. HA. HA s appearance at my workbench in Sanctuary. First, I arm him with weed-whackers, give him a grinning skull through which to communicate using beeps and boops, and paint him jet black, but I m finding him hard to like. A bit inaccessible. I want a companion both charming and despicable the boundless enthusiasm of a dog mixed with the deadliness of a tank so I embark on Automaton s questline.

It sends us hunting a mysterious figure called the Mechanist, whose merciless machine army is causing havoc. Where is he hiding? A brain in a jar of liquid promises to reveal all if we build her a body.

It isn t quite what I had envisioned, Jezebel remarks of her new vacuum cleaner arms and squat refrigerator torso, but I suppose it will have to suffice. Rude. And she kills people, too.

Assisting a human to the best of my abilities only affords a 25% survival rate, she says. Therefore it s better to hasten the human s death and put them out of their likely chance of misery than to deplete my limited time. Once she tells me the Mechanist s location, I use my new arsenal of toys to blow her up. This DLC gives me a hollowed-out eyebot to wear on my head, Tesla T-60 power armour that decorates my pauldrons with hissing electrodes, and the laser-pulse-emitting head of a salvaged assaultron bot I hold by the spinal cabling.

All this I bring on my exploits with companion 2.0, Robot de Niro. He is the smiley emoji taken to its frightening natural conclusion: an expression of joy carved into rusted sheet metal, with a drill on one hand and a flamethrower on the other, and sleek people-shaped legs for that much-needed form factor. Bless him, he often brings me gifts, like lightbulbs and dishrags and broken toasters. Thankfully his carrying capabilities dwarf mine due to the extra packs and pockets I ve strapped onto him, so I immediately give it all back, and he s glad of the work. My dog-tank dream is a reality.

We finish Automatron in an hour or two, but with hordes of rogue robots still out there, the adventure is just beginning. I ve found a friend in this cold, calculating, and endlessly configurable robot.

As promised earlier this week, Gary Busey is now live as Hitman s seventh Elusive Target. For the next seven days, the Hollywood legend and so-called infamous loose cannon will be wandering the sun-kissed streets of Sapienza after a falling out with advertisement organisers. You ll never find me, Busey is reported to have said following the dispute. I have the power of invisibility.

Whether or not that s true remains to be seen, however one thing is certain: his ex-clients want him gone and it s on you to make that happen.

In case you missed it, Hitman's developers IO Interactive launched a poll back in March that asked players which famous actor they d like to see catch a bullet as one of the game's Elusive Targets: Gary Cole or Gary Busey. The latter won, which is why we ve ended up in this, um, strange situation. To confuse things further still, Gary Cole is apparently also roaming Sapienza an "angered co-star" who may lead you straight to your target reckons contract-handler Diana.

Again, you ve got seven days to make Busey The Wild Card meet his match. You've also got just one shot, so make it count.

The YouTuber known as Limit Breakers may have a little too much time on his hands a judgment I make because, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he used the iGP11 texture replacement utility to change every texture in Dark Souls 3 to a crab.

It's crabs and nothing but, as far as the eye can see. Crab on the shield, crab on the cape, crabs on the ground, crabs in the sky, crab on the face, crabs in the... well, you get the idea. It's like a Red Lobster expansion into the Kingdom of Lothric gone seriously (seriously!) wrong.

I can't even begin to fathom what leads a person to do something like this. Maybe it's some kind of psychological payback for a bad encounter with a Great Crab at some point in the past? The video ends in an encounter with one a crab wearing a crab, naturally and it doesn't go well. It's all very strange, isn't it?

Weirdness notwithstanding, Dark Souls 3 is really good good enough to ensnare even Andy Kelly, who didn't care much for the first two games in the series. Find out why here (it wasn't because of the crabs).

There s no denying that Riot has come a long way since their original forty champions. While there have been countless hiccups along the way from launch to today, including horrors like release Xin Zhao, the multiple Ryze reworks, and a few artistic fumbles, Riot has grown creatively. The process of making a champion, which lasts for months on end, is fascinating to explore. While Riot is often critiqued for having many arms, each carrying out their own task, and little communication between those departments, this falls away when it comes to the recent champion releases. Art, design, balance, spell graphics, voice acting there are so many components that go into each release, and it s obvious that Riot are pushing themselves with each new character.

There s more than just the surface to look at, however. While the artistic and balance sides of new champion releases are worth applauding (even if it took a while for Taliyah to find her footing on the Rift), what I find most interesting is how Riot s new champion designs unify their visuals with the fantasy of playing them.

 Starting from the bottom

In order to fully appreciate some of the modern designs, let s take a look at two of the original forty champions (both of whom are in sore need of a rework): Kayle and Morgana. Kayle and Morgana both have kits that work and basic visual fantasies that are easily understandable. One is an angel paladin, one is a fallen succubus, and they re sisters who hate each other.

While Kayle and Morgana are both cool characters at first glance, their kits don t interact with each other. Kayle sits in the backlines and does a bit of healing and protection, but mostly pumps out damage with her E.

Morgana snares and farms with her W. While her shield and ult have given her more modern prominence as a support, they re both flat characters compared to the modern cast, in both gameplay and theme. Sure, the core ideas of vengeful angel , fallen sister , and eternal war are cool, but they don t come through in play or execution at all.

Multi-layered design 

Consider, for a moment, a more modern duo (although we re still not sure whether they re sisters): Vi and Jinx. None of their abilities necessarily interact with each other, but consider how they play out:

Jinx sits in the backlines, dancing back and throwing out volleys of carnage while laughing maniacally. The more damage she causes, the easier it is for her to get away thanks to the speed boost on Get Excited! If she performs her role correctly, she should be untouched and a complete menace, and annoying to boot.

Vi, on the other hand, desperately wants to catch Jinx and shut her down. She should be charging through the backlines, smashing into Jinx and pummeling her. If the carry manages to evade her Q, it s time to bring down the long arm of the law and use her ult.

In short, their gameplay dynamics are fun, exciting to watch, and directly reflect their relationship in game.

 Avoiding pitfalls

Vi and Jinx are a great example, but not every release has gone so smoothly. It s worth noting that Vi and Jinx share a designer: August Gypsylord Browning (Gypsylord has also been behind Gnar, Ekko, and Jhin). Different designers are behind different champions, and each one leaves their mark. There are also multiple other factors that have to be considered during a champion s design.

Like: will this be unique? Part of the recent mid season mage update was to make the mages distinct from one another. Vel koz, Lux, Xerath, and Ziggs all had significant overlap, and if one was successful in competitive play, it was because it was superior to the other choices. However, they all fulfilled the same role. Future updates and redesigns will be likely keeping this in mind does a champion have an unique niche that stands out? This is no small task, with such an enormous roster.

Plus: are the design and visuals aligned? Shen is a ninja, but he looks like a tank. Katarina has long steel blades but does magic damage. While many of the older cast are likely stuck with these discrepancies (hence Shen s rework leaving him as a tank, and Katarina s future rework unlikely to turn her into an AD assassin), it s important to avoid this with new releases.

 What comes next?

Ryze s rework stripped away his steroid ult and gave him a mass teleport. The next champion will be even crazier . Taliyah has a long ranged wall that allows her to slide into fights and begin dishing out damage. As Riot works to create thematically appropriate and narratively consistent characters, they re also going to be stretching the limits of what is possible. Even scrapped abilities, like Taliyah s ability to destroy an entire piece of terrain for a limited amount of time, could come back for future champions.

There will likely be patterns of repetition (three hit combos! Gimmick passives!) as well as champions who come out undertuned or overpowered, and occasionally champions who just need to be re-tuned as the years tick by. However, Riot has clearly put a lot of love into not just their champions, but the very process that builds them up from a basic concept. The end result is that the future remains bright for League. If they can continue to create champions that are fun to play for casuals and exciting to watch in competitive, the League machine can keep chugging along for a long while yet. It s been a wild ride since those first forty champions, but there s no disputing Riot has seriously stepped up their game in creating a cohesive offering across the board.

The CS:GO skin gambling saga continues. After declaring it would start taking action against a list of alleged guilty parties last week, Valve has now cemented its intentions by issuing cease and desist orders to over 20 different gambling sites (including one Dota2 site) for using their Steam accounts for commercial purposes. In turn, this breaches the terms and conditions of the alleged offenders' Steam Subscriber Agreements.

This has been a tricky story to follow, so allow me to recap: although skin gambling in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has existed for about three years, the topic was thrust into the spotlight just over two weeks ago when it emerged betting site CSGO Lotto was in fact owned by two YouTube personalities who d previously promoted the site without obviously declaring their involvement.

If you re unfamiliar with how CS:GO betting works, I d suggest checking out Evan s detailed overview. As players play the game, they earn cases which, when opened, grants them randomised skins for their weapons. In order to open said cases, you ll need to cough up actual money, and once acquired you can trade with other players. Ultimately the websites in question allow users to bet their skins against match outcomes, or use them to gamble in a variety of casino-style, browser-based games.

The short version is that Valve wants to stop this from happening, however to confuse matters further there s also a concurrent case running against Valve where one Michael John McLeod believes the blame lies not with the many CS:GO betting sites, but with Valve for enabling and supporting their existence. Whether this comes to anything is a matter of debate. Regardless, Valve has since denied any connection to gambling sites and last week announced plans to shut them down. (Evan also explored the impact this had on CS:GO skin prices.)

Anyway, the list of guilty websites noted above in its entirety was tweeted out by esports person Wykrhm Reddy last night, and appeared to be corroborated hours later by one of the sites listed CSGOBig who attached Valve s formal complaint. The letter is signed by Valve s general councel Karl Quackenbush and reads as follows:

We are aware that you are operating one of the gambling sites listed below. You are using Steam accounts to conduct this business. Your use of Steam is subject to the terms of the Steam Subscriber Agreement ("SSA"). Under the SSA Steam and Steam services are licensed for personal, non-commercial use only.

Your commercial use of Steam accounts is unlicensed and in violation of the SSA. You should immediately cease and desist further use of your Steam accounts for any commercial purpose. If you fail to do this within ten (10) days Valve will pursue all available remedies including without limitation terminating your accounts.

In response, CSGOBig suggests it is only shutting down temporarily and that it ll definitely be back soon." The wording of Valve s pretty explicit order, though, might suggest otherwise.

We ve contacted Valve for further comment and will update as and when we hear back.

Space Marine is a third person fighting game from Relic Entertainment, a studio best known for their fine RTS games. Space Marine was an attempt to break into new genres and find new audiences. Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 universe was the vehicle, and the opportunity to paste dozens of rampaging space Orks was the primary draw.

Space Marine commits completely to the core mission, and its realisation of 40K's exaggerated close combat weapons is unexpectedly good. The chain sword feels like a low-fi counterpoint to the common lightsaber archetype. Instead of the warm 'vrwooom' of plasma, the chain sword's gears roar with every swipe a brutal weapon for an uncivilised age.

The glowing power axe seems to deal damage more efficiently, but lacks the mechanical ferocity of the chain sword. You have to wait until you find a thunder hammer to access the full force of the Adeptus Astartes armoury. This two-handed electric war hammer tenderises enemies with sweeping blows and overhead strikes. The latter emit a thunderous shockwaves that leaves enemies open to execution attacks, which provide some of Space Marine's most violent and satisfying moments.

Weapon impacts are improved by the addition of slow motion, judicious particle effects and some outstanding weapon noises. But let's not underestimate the role that your dance partners play. Orks lope towards you in swarms and pop explosively on death, charging with the misguided enthusiasm you'd expect of creatures that love to fight and barely feel pain. In defeat, as a chain sword grinds through various important bits, their primary emotion is surprise and outrage. It's telling that the game slumps in the final chapters, when another force usurps the Orks as your primary foe.

I mention these details because Space Marine demonstrates how careful attention to combat audiovisual can mitigate wider problems. Space Marine's environments are grey and samey, struggling to realise spectacle that the story demands, and that 40K fans expect. Thunder hammers rare and mighty tools of the Emperor's finest can frequently be found resting on small crates in cramped rooms. Fans of the universe can take pleasure in some authentically modelled vehicles and units, but many lie static and unused in the background.

Nonetheless, I can't stop myself going back to pick up a thunder hammer, strap on an assault jetpack and take it to the Greenskins. Space Marine isn't a classic but it does hammers, chain swords and exploding enemies very well indeed and that's good enough for a Why I Love in my book. Well done, Space Marine, the primarchs would be proud.

The first episode of Dontnod s multi-award winning adventure game Life Is Strange will be available to download for free tomorrow, publisher Square Enix has announced.

From July 21 onwards, the episodic tale of love, friendship and coming of age is set to offer players a complimentary trip to Arcadia Bay where they ll join Chloe and Max in the game s premier episode Chrysalis. To mark the occasion, Dontnod has released the following trailer:

Although perhaps not for everyone, one of the most impressive things about Life Is Strange is its propensity to affect people in so many different ways. It was Chris s Personal Pick of last year; whereas Phil described it as unfocused but earnest , but nevertheless found it to be one of his favourite games of 2015. Jody MacGregor discussed why a bad ending needn t ruin a great game after finishing Chloe and Max s tale; and Andy shared his thoughts on how it channels Twin Peaks.

If you re yet to try it, you can begin to craft your own slant when Life Is Strange s episode one launches for free tomorrow via its official website.