Co-op hack-and-slasher Warhammer: Vermintide 2's excellent combat and clever level design are translating into commercial success: the game has generated more revenue in the two weeks since it released than the original Vermintide has made in its lifetime, according to the chief executive of developer Fatshark, Martin Wahlund. 

"Right now, we have outsold, in terms of revenue, the lifetime revenue of the original Vermintide, and on PC only," he told PCGamesInsider.biz (the game is yet to come out on consoles). Wahlund attributed the success to the support of the original's fan base alongside the fact that the sequel is simply a better game.

"If you do a follow-up to a game that was quite successful, which the first one was, you have the old audience, who come back and vouch for it, which gives you a headstart. So word of mouth spreads," he said. "It's also a much better game. We learnt a lot about giving people something to strive for. We have a different system by which players can get stuff. The core of the game is just better."

Whether or not it's a better game than the original is a matter for debate. It's by no means perfect, with bad matchmaking and some questionable design decisions around player progression. But, as Steven wrote in his review, the thrill of its combat more than makes up for those missteps. It will get even better later this month when Steam Workshop support arrives.

It's $30/£23 on Steam and the Humble Store, but you can pick it up for around 20% less in the Fanatical Spring Sale. Remember to enter code 'Spring10' for a further 10% off at checkout.

If you're interested in the first game, then that's cheap on Fanatical, too. Ian's review is this-a-way.

The third and final episode of government surveillance game Orwell: Ignorance is Strength is out now, and might be worth peeking at if you're into text-based puzzlers, or if you like the theme of state overreach and propaganda. The game has you trawl through phone transcripts, computer files, websites and news articles to uncover the truth about Raban Vhart, a dissident journalist. What sets it apart is that by compiling information 'chunks' in particular ways you can bend the truth and influence the story, which has multiple branches.

It's clever, as I wrote in my impressions of the first two episodes. You end up backtracking through previously discovered information, entering newly-uncovered names into old databases to move the story forward. At its best, you feel like a government espionage agent, and the ability to control what your superiors see—and therefore what they act on—gives you a lot of control over the story. Unfortunately, the writing lets the side down, with a few too many clichés, caricatures, and awkward dialogue sequences. 

Still, your ability to influence the narrative has me intrigued enough that I'm going to try out this third episode, called Synthesis, next week. As well as government power, the game is supposed to be about control of the media, particularly social networks. It hasn't quite lived up to that billing yet, but in the third episode you finally unlock the 'influencer' tool, which was greyed out in the first two episodes. Developer Osmotic Studios says it will let you wage an "explosive media war for the control of public perception".

If you fancy playing the game in full, then it's $9.99/£7.19 on Steam, GOG and the Humble Store.

The irritating thing about Sea of Thieves living just on the Windows Store—aside from the process of using the store itself—is that you're bound by the game's price on there. You can't buy Rare's co-op pirate game through Steam or other third-party retailers. In the UK, that means the PC version is a relatively steep £50, more than most major publisher games are priced on Steam. This led to a recent conversation among the PC Gamer staff: how much are you willing to spend on a game? How much have you spent on games in the past? We had wildly different answers, based on our gaming preferences and, er, unhealthy addictions.

In this week's PCG Q&A, it's confession time: what's the most you've ever spent on a game? Let us know your answers in the comments. 

Philippa Warr: £522+

I have spent £522 on Dota 2. Well, sort of. That's the amount the game client has recorded, but it doesn't take into account money spent attending events or on things outside the client. Further complicating the matter is the fact that it doesn't take into account stuff like rare item drops which I sold on the Steam Marketplace and thus which added credit to my account. I'm not sure where gifts to and from friends would factor in either. 

Dota was also significant to my work in that the industry had a lack of regular staff writers who understood Dota when I was playing it a lot and thus this total doesn't factor in payment for writing about a game I had deep knowledge of, or an esports scene I was immersed in. This isn't about justification, it's about how odd it feels seeing a figure next to my account and realising I have no idea what it actually means in terms of what I spent and what I got out of that game. Besides, as a millennial, I guess if I hadn't bought digital hats I'd have only frittered it away on avocados and flat whites.

Tim Clark: £965. You know which game.

I'm afraid my answer is Hearthstone, again, and it's not even close. I really didn't want to do this, but I just trawled my Blizzard order history and in the years since I've been playing (it looks like I began in February 2014) I've spent [deep breath] £965. Before checking, I assumed the amount was close to a thousand, but seeing all the transactions written down, I still feel slightly shocked. That's £241 per year on a supposedly free to play game. Why, you absolute idiot, you no doubt wonder. Well, I guess the uncomfortable answer is because I can just about afford it—I have a steady job and don't have kids—and because ultimately I want to. 

For the most part Hearthstone has been something I've enjoyed spending time with on a daily basis. Of course off the back of a big losing streak I hate myself and want to die, but that's card games baby. I also fully concede (I also do that often) that if I were coming to the game now I would find the idea of trying to build a competitive collection incredibly intimidating. But I guess I'm okay with keeping my existing one up to speed so that I can play whatever meta deck I fancy. Ultimately I view it as less buying a single game and more investing in my hobby, like I might with fly fishing, or drone flying, or other outdoor things I'm absolutely not going to do. 

It's... it's a sickness, isn't it?

Samuel Roberts: about £80

I don't play MMOs or free-to-play games, but I'm generally down for buying DLC packs for singleplayer games I like. This usually means I can end up spending double the amount of the game on these expansions—BioWare and Bethesda RPGs are good examples of this. Hot damn, those DLC packs are crapshoots, though. You never know if you're going to score a Lair of the Shadow Broker or something that expands on a part of the game you don't like (I can't bring myself to play Inquisition's Deep Roads-themed DLC, for example, as I have no intention of ever returning to the Dragon Age universe's underground caves).

This is a level of financial commitment I can live with. The most I've ever spent on microtransactions is £24 worth of Shark Cards for GTA Online, but since I've played that for over 130 hours, I can justify it to myself. I really wanted to fit missiles to my Batmobile. Sometimes joy has a real-world cost. 

Steven Messner: Around $1260

I'm going to split this into a couple of smaller answers because when it comes to spending money on a game, the reason matters. If we're just looking at gross totals, the answer is undoubtedly World of Warcraft, which I have been playing off-and-on since I was about 14. If we do some rough math and say that, in the 14 years since I've been playing I've only maintained a subscription for half of that time (which is super generous), I'd have sunk about $1,260 USD into it. But that means that WoW has also given me seven years of fun and enjoyment, so in hindsight that seems like a pretty good investment. In fact, I don't regret any of the money I've spent on MMOs—and I used to pay two subscriptions to EVE Online so I could play multiple accounts simultaneously.

But when it comes to spending money on microtransactions, you'll find I have a bit of an illness. I can remember multiple 2AM nights where I sat staring bleary-eyed at Hearthstone's storefront doing mental gymnastics to justify why $70 for 60 packs seems like a good idea. I've done similar with Rocket League, CS:GO—the list goes on. Right now, my current obsession is Path of Exile. I've dumped at least a few hundred into cosmetics because what's the point of being a god-slaying badass if you don't look the part? The one thing I'll say in defense of my bad purchasing habits is that these are all games that have returned my initial investment hundreds of times over. I've played Rocket League for 500+ hours, I think I can spend a little extra on some dumb cosmetics and still count my investment as in the black.

Evan Lahti: $512.94

If you would've asked me how many CS:GO keys I've purchased over the modest 1000 hours I've put into the game, I probably would've said 40 or 50—plenty, but from what I remember from my 2014 heyday, most of the stuff I picked up was in trades, skin gambling, or off the Community Market.

Checking my Steam Account History for the first time, it seems that between August 2013 and February 2017 I bought 206 CS:GO weapon case keys at $2.49 per. That's $512.94. Ho-ly shit. Yow. And out of that, I can't even say that I have anything especially valuable. csgobackpack.net seems to think that my CS:GO inventory's worth $545, but that's including a $106 dollar Huntsman Knife that was gifted to me. The best critique I can offer of CS:GO's loot boxes at this stage—if I can be trusted at all at this point—is that I own maybe three or four skins that I truly love.

Joe Donnelly: £99.94, just this year

Besides a nasty obsession with Habbo Hotel furnishings towards the end of 2001—a perfect if costly distraction from studying for high school prelim exams—I've never really invested real money in a videogame. Well, rather, I hadn't really invested real money in a videogame until my recent foray into GTA Online. At the end of January this year, I splashed for the game's Criminal Enterprise Starter Pack for 40 quid. Then I played for a few weeks without spending a penny. And then I bought a couple of Shark Cards for £11.99 a piece. And then I bought one or two more. And having just checked my Steam account transaction history, I now realise I've actually purchased five of the same premium tokens all told. Which means I've spent £99.94 on GTA Online in the last eight or so weeks. Jeeso. 

That's a lot of money, but, in all honesty, I don't regret it. Please spend your own money wisely, folks, but I found the starter pack to be helpful while raising my character's level, and I've had some great fun over the past several weeks revelling in my spread of frivolous office upgrades, cars and cosmetics. 

James Davenport: Got drunk last night and spent $60 on Fortnite

I’ll keep this brief because I’m tired and hungover, but I woke up to an email stating I dropped $60 in Fortnite for a pile of goddamn V-Bucks. I don’t know how it happened. Saw that pot-of-gold pickaxe and must’ve blacked out. I’m OK, I just might need some time away to think. 

We're spoiled for choice when it comes to Warhammer experts on the PC Gamer staff. As one of definitely the top three local Warhammer nerds it's my job to help you find your way deeper into the Old World if Vermintide has given you an appetite for its particular variety of dark fantasy. 

One of the thing's that's great about Vermintide 2 is that you don't need to know what a poisoned wind globadier or a Clan Moulder packmaster is to play it—someone will just shout "Hookrat!" and you know to look out for one of those rat jerks who tries to grab you with a pole. But there's plenty of references to the wider world of Warhammer in there to make it feel like you really are part of a strange fantasy land—so much so that when I look out the fortress window at the Empire I wish I could climb down there and wander off into it.

Until somebody finally bites the bullet and makes the singleplayer open-world Warhammer RPG of my dreams, reading the books is the next best thing. But which of the vast variety of them should you check out?

If you like Bardin, especially when he's a Slayer 

Bardin Gorekkson is a Warhammer dwarf through and through, in that he knows how to hold a grudge, enjoys a drunken singalong, sounds like he's from Yorkshire, and responds to shame by shaving his head and joining a death cult. 

The Slayers are dwarfs who've done something so dishonorable the only way to atone is to find a noble death in battle, and the iconic dwarf Slayer is Gotrek Gurnisson, star of a series of short stories and later novels. The worst Slayer in history, he's seeking an epic end, but too hard to die and too stubborn to quit. Co-star of the Gotrek stories is a "manling" poet named Felix whose job it is to record Gotrek's doom. Classic odd couple. 

Part of what makes Warhammer interesting is the way it takes relatively low-key or gritty fantasy characters and locations and jams them together with epic high fantasy from the other end of the spectrum. The story of a poet forced to accompany the world's most unkillable dwarf as he throws himself against bigger and bigger foes is a perfect example.

Gotrek and Felix work best in picaresque short stories in collections like Trollslayer, by the duo's original creator Bill King, and Gotrek and Felix: The Anthology, which is by various authors and taken from different parts of their timeline. Gotrek and Felix don't work quite as well in novel-length tales but if you want to try one of those Skavenslayer follows directly from Trollslayer and is the most Vermintide of the bunch.

If you like the Skaven, because who doesn't like cannibal rats? 

The best place to start with Skaven is The Loathsome Ratmen and All Their Vile Kin by Mitchel Scanlon. Written in-character as a scholarly text by an Imperial academic, it explains things like Skaven physiology and the differences between their various clans with plenty of fusty digressions and flavorsome art. Good luck finding it at a decent price though, maybe check the library for that one.

If it's novels you want the author to look for is C L Werner, who has written more books about Skaven than is healthy. A standalone one to start with is Vermintide, which the games borrow their name from although they're not actually connected beyond both being about hordes of Skaven doing very bad things. Written under his pseudonym Bruno Lee, it's another example of the way Warhammer contrasts grounded fantasy with the over-the-top variety—it begins with court politics and an investigation into a museum theft and climaxes with a gyrocopter battle in the sky.

The best of the Warhammer comics is Crown of Destruction, which also deals with Skaven. It's written by former PC Gamer editor Kieron Gillen and has art by Dwayne Harris, who draws everyone so they look appropriately like miniatures on a tabletop in the mid-shots, though I'm not so sure about the effect in close-ups. Over the course of four issues it escalates nicely, turning into a three-way conflict between Skaven, an Imperial army, and the undead. It's also quite funny, off-setting the grimness with black comedy like the best Warhammer fiction does.

If you like Saltzpyre and his rants about heretics 

The Witch Hunter's Handbook is another book written in-character like The Loathsome Ratmen and All Their Vile Kin, and likewise it's now out-of-print and overpriced, but still worth checking libraries for. Written by Darius Hinks, it's a Warhammer version of medieval witchcraft treatise the Malleus Maleficarum. The Witch Hunter's Handbook covers the finer details of what it's like being a Templar of the Order of Sigmar including sections on swordplay, how to tell the many varieties of witch apart, and how to put the question to them with tools like the Whirligig, the Scold's Bridle, and the Heretic's Fork. With the Sigmar's Blessing free DLC you can get a trinket version of the Witch Hunter's Handbook in the first Vermintide, and carry it into battle on your belt. 

On the fiction side C L Werner is our guy again, with a whole trilogy about a witch hunter named Matthias Thulmann. Like Saltzpyre he's basically Vincent Price when he's angry, and he foils the plots of cultists and sorcerers with help from a filthy mercenary sidekick called Streng.

If you just want to read a real good book 

The best of the Warhammer books unfortunately doesn't feature any hordes of Skaven, but that doesn't mean it's not relevant to Vermintide. Drachenfels by Kim Newman (writing under the pseudonym Jack Yeovil) provided the setting for the first game's DLC of the same name, and in Vermintide 2 Lohner references its protagonist when discussing the vampire who stayed at his inn but whose name he can't remember. That's Genevieve, from a series that are the best of the Warhammer books.

Drachenfels is a story about putting on a play, though the play's being performed in a haunted castle and one of the cast is undead. It's like Singin' in the Rain reimagined as gothic fantasy. A later book in the series, Beasts in Velvet, has new protagonists who are on the hunt for a serial killer in the city of Altdorf. It's the closest thing to Terry Pratchett's City Watch books you'll get outside the Discworld. Hardly anyone just goes on a quest in Warhammer (except in Warhammer Quest), and the Genevieve stories instead borrow their plot structures from other genres, then give them a veneer of dark fantasy as though Warhammer's an Instagram filter that adds grime, cults, rats, and weird British jokes to whatever you run through it. 

There are plenty more good Warhammer books and short stories (anything by James Wallis is a good pick, as are the stories about a Sherlock Holmes analogue named Zavant) and certainly a few worth skipping as well, but that's more than enough to get you started. Shout out your own favorites in the comments.

After giving a talk at GDC about his journey from a DayZ and Arma modder to the creative director of PUBG Corp., Brendan Greene was asked an inevitable question from a member of the audience: "What are your thoughts on Fortnite?"

"I have many thoughts," Greene said. 

"No, it's great," he continued after some laughter from the crowd. "I mean it's great that the battle royale space is expanding, and that Fortnite is getting [the] battle royale game mode into hands of a lot more people. So, you know, it grows the genre. That's it, really."

Greene followed up with some thoughts on how developers are often seen to be pitted against one another in a competition where only one game can come out on top while the others are destroyed—something he thinks is far from accurate.

"I get asked these questions sometimes, like, what do you do to combat this? When [PUBG] came out, we were killing [H1Z1]. When H1 came out it was killing Arma 3. We never set out to kill these games. I don't understand this attitude, like, 'you're dead'. We're all relatively friendly here. We don't have a real life GDC battle royale."

"I've really tried to combat that perception that I want other people's games to die," he continued. "It's great that more people are exploring the space and more people are getting to play games."

The problem with dogs in videogames is that their presence inevitably changes the parameters of the mission. No matter what The Sarge says in the briefing, it's your second priority: Job number one is always—always—ensuring that your canine companion doesn't get smoked.   

This is a problem compounded by the fact that AI-controlled dogs are even dumber and more aggressive than their real-world counterparts. Dogmeat of Fallout fame was notorious for driving players absolutely berserk with his penchant for charging powerful enemies and environmental hazards with great and reckless enthusiasm, usually forcing a quick reload no matter how well the fight was going. 

Digital doggo deaths were so heartbreaking/enraging that Bethesda made Dogmeat unkillable in Fallout 4, and Ubisoft has elected to do the same thing with Boomer, the furry friend of Far Cry 5. He will go down when things get hairy, but PR rep Alex Monney said on Twitter today that a little bit of affection will bring him right back. 

The crusty old man in me wants to make Ned Stark noises about coddled gamers these days—"If they die, you'll bury them yourselves"—but really, it's an elegant way to handle a sticky problem. Animal companions are always going to be more trouble than they're worth, but an awful lot of players just can't seem to leave them behind. The result is a huge, not-at-all-fun headache, especially in shooters, where bullets are flying and tactics rarely extends beyond hiding behind a rock while your health recharges. 

Far Cry 5 comes out on March 27, and along with an unkillable dog and cow sex will also have a pee tape. And in case you haven't met him yet, this is Boomer.

Correction: The post originally listed Alex Monney as a designer, but he is in fact a PR rep.

Reports that Donald Trump allegedly hired Russian prostitutes to urinate on a bed that President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama once slept in at the Moscow Ritz Carlton first surfaced in 2017 as part of a dossier collated by a British ex-intelligence officer called Christoper Steele. Now there's a sentence I hoped I'd never have to write on a videogame website. Unfortunately, Far Cry 5 appears to have a side-mission in which you recover the tape for a government handler. So here I am, writing about it. Spoilers follow, I guess.

Polygon today discovered the side-quest, called Patriot Acts, and posted video of the mission's inception and completion. At no point in the mission is Trump specifically named, but the special agent who gives you the mission says it's for the "Big Man" and there are multiple, not very subtle references to the alleged Trump 'pee tape'.

The tape (in the game) was brought to America by a hotel worker and is a recording of something that happened in a luxury hotel suite in a country the agent refers to as "Kremlandia". When speaking to the tape's owner over a radio, the agent uses the code phrase "The bed has been wet" and later refers to "wet work" and "the yellow brick road." Whatever is on the tape, the agent says, could make the Big Man look bad to the public, hence your assignment.

So, a secret agent trying to protect a "Big Man" from being embarrassed by a tape from a luxury hotel suite in Russia, with multiple references to wet beds and urine. You don't need a decoder ring to sort this one out.

Thanks (sort of), Polygon.

Harassment and toxicity are once again hot topics at this year's Game Developers Conference, but I didn't expect to come face to face with my own cyber bully. During a talk entitled "Helping Players Hate (or Love) Their Nemesis", Chris Hoge pulled up a slide with a screenshot of my 'F*** This One Particular Orc' article. And there he was in all his rancid glory: Mozû the Blight. My green whale. The ultimate nemesis. "I actually wrote that," I spluttered, to a light ripple of applause because they knew my pain. Hoge just laughed at me.

Hoge, who previously worked on the software for F-16 fighter planes, is now lead systems designer at Monolith Productions, and therefore supremely placed to explain what's going on under the hoods of Shadow of War's green-skinned antagonists. He explained that the best player relationships with orcs are like rollercoasters with lots of ups and downs. "We want the ride to be really long, because it gets better," says Hoge. From it's work on the first game, the Monolith team discovered that the more stress and frustration an orc induced, the more satisfaction and jubilation resulted when the player finally got the upper hand.

The key to a good nemesis, as I know only too well, is therefore finding yourself caught in something Hoge calls the "Revenge Loop". This is the process whereby you keep struggling and failing to kill an orc, during which time its abilities improve and your unhealthy codependency deepens. For the player, the fun part comes from working out how to break the loop, which usually means by taking advantage of one of the orc's weaknesses—whether that be to stealth, beasts, or in Mozû's case the poison that had left him looking like a two-week old pizza left in the Kalahari sun.

In order to ensure no orc became truly unconquerable, Hoge explained that one of their weakness is secretly baked in, meaning that it won't be removed no matter how much the orc levels up. If you've played the game you'll know that even the lowliest orc can potentially become a captain if it lands a killing blow on the player, for which it's rewarded with a promotion. Aside from a few hand-crafted storylines involving orcs like Bruz, which orcs go on to become your nemeses is handled entirely systemically. 

Brilliantly, one of the main determining factors is an index called PIS, which stands for player interaction score. This measures your relationship with every orc in the game. If you have a high PIS rating with a particular orc, it's more likely that it will be able to 'cheat death'. "We need cheating death to be an exception," explained Hoge. "It can’t happen to every orc, it has to be an amazing thing." Orcs with good PIS also have their chance to be on the receiving end of a random decapitation removed, which otherwise would guarantee a true death. They're only safe a few times, though. Eventually the immunity is removed behind the scenes, and Talion can add that noggin to his sizeable collection.

Boiling your PIS

There's more to making a memorable nemesis than a PIS score though. Appearance is key, and though the orcs are generated procedurally, those systems are designed to ensure they have the most chance to grab the player's attention. So for instance if an orc gets given the name Blarg Fireguzzler, there's a good chance he'll get a flaming sword, or wear a burning brazier for a helmet. Hoge noted that what really mattered was how the orc looked from the head and shoulders up. Players wouldn't even notice sweet design lower down, like jars of eyeballs hanging from a belt.

Orcs are also taught to remember their individual history, even if the player doesn't. For example, it might say: "You ran away last time, manthing!" Again, having certain rare traits helps to make individual orcs stick in the memory. Only around 6% of orcs will get the 'Humiliator' perk, which they use to shame Talion after each victory. When it first happens you're both amazed and immediately enraged. There are also a handful of unique orc archetypes, each of which can appear just once per playthrough. An orc with "the Claw" title will be one whose arm you hacked off and has come back with a metal replacement, while "the Uncatchable" is an Orc that escaped your blade three times.

Unsurprisingly, Mozû was one of these orcs. His "the Blight" title meant he'd been transformed by poison, which in a delicious piece of irony also proved his eventual undoing. In a Q&A session after the talk I asked Hoge if Monolith keeps data on the most amount of times a player has been killed by the same orc. He told me they do, but that it's hard to parse what's genuine because some players allow themselves to be killed by one orc 100s of times to level it up, and then painstakingly use the 'shame' mechanic to reduce that orc back to a gibbering level 1 dolt. I deeply hope the identity of these players is being passed to the authorities. Or at the very least PETA.

These rare encounters are key to making a system-driven game feel fresh. It's important that the player isn't able to see how things are being manipulated under the surface, because that would rob Shadow of War of its mystery, and thus some of the drive to explore. Indeed, I agree with this idea that one of the main themes at this year's GDC has been how good narrative is increasingly being generated by systems rather than hand-crafted storylines. It was also prevalent in this Assassin's Creed: Origins session I attended. The blur between story created by systemic vs bespoke content is only likely to keep blurring further.

Tantalisingly, Hoge mentioned a couple of possible interactions that I didn't see at all in my full playthrough. He gave the example of an Olog-Hai titled "the Sword Breaker", who will snap your prized weapon if he wins in combat. Hoge said they were frightened some players would rage quit on the spot and never come back, so they added a feature that enabled players to get their weapon back by killing the orc that had broken it. The weapon would even be leveled up as a reward.

Another cool encounter which I didn't experience was a special sort of ambush in which the enemy orc turns up with one of your followers held hostage at knifepoint. At the start of the fight he slashes' your buddy's throat, and you have to juggle trying to heal him up and handling the bad guy's ministrations. But the ultimate peak on the rollercoaster, according to Hoge, is when one of your favorite orc followers turns heel.

Hoge noted that players learn to love their best orcs in a way that Talion and Celebrimbor never do. We level up our favorites and give them their own fortresses, and in response sometimes they even turn up to give us gifts or even, very occasionally, save us from a killing blow by instakilling an enemy captain at the last second. Or they betray you, because hey they're orcs and that's what they do. Either way Hoge is happy, because it helps extend your personal story with that orc. "Now you've got another hill on the rollercoaster, and more emotions to express." 

Hoge even says that Monolith wrote all the words in Shadow of War—both dialogue and in-game text—with a mind to making it as natural and shareable as possible, because they wanted players to tell their friends these incredible stories. They even began assessing features based on whether players would be likely to blog about them. Which I guess is exactly what I ended up doing. If only I could have recruited Mozû, we could have ruled Mordor together. Instead I had to gank him in a back alley with a bunch of poison-daggered orcs, one of whom was riding a warg. Which, in some ways, is how all great love stories should end.

There's good news and better news for Kingdom Come: Deliverance players looking forward to the arrival of some much-needed fixes. First up, a new 1.3.4 patch hit Steam and GOG today, which fixes a random encounters bug and adds support for Nvidia Ansel and Shadowplay so, as creative director Daniel Vavra said, "you can take cool screenshots on GeForce." 

Unfortunately, that's all it does. Behold the full patch notes:   

• Fixed random encounters bug.
• Adds support for Nvidia Ansel and Shadowplay.

The reaction to the patch is what you might call lukewarm, as many fans were expecting a much more substantial update. That's where the better news comes in:

Vavra said Warhorse hopes to have the patch out next week. That one should be much more substantial: Vavra tweeted last week that the 1.4 patch will have "lots of bug fixes and cool new stuff." 

Blanket statements made about statistics are dangerous. How any set of data is interpreted can lead to wildly different conclusions being drawn, and trust me, things are about to get wild. Yesterday, at the Games Developers Conference in San Francisco, Yauheni Hladki told his audience that: “The result that we’ve come with is that all the esports far surpass traditional sports in terms of skill”. And yes, that raised some eyebrows clean off their foreheads. “Why?” he thankfully went on to ask. The answer: "Because the sample size is huge and tremendous. For every single team, for every single player in esports, they play far more games than professional athletes." 

It still sounds like an outlandish claim, but in his GDC talk entitled “Why It's So Much Harder to Predict Winners in Esports”, Hladki seemed extremely confident. He’s certainly well-qualified to speak on the subject, having built up plenty of esports experience in his role as the StarSeries commissioner at StarLadder. He’s been involved with running leagues for games across the entire spectrum of esports, from mainstream favourites CS:GO, Dota 2 and Hearthstone to the somewhat less well-known World of Tanks scene. Hladki also boasts an impressive academic background, having studied both theoretical physics and political science, both fields in which you need to know your way around an equation.

Hladki explained that his study was inspired by the work of Michael J. Maboussin, whose book The Success Equation sought to place traditional sports on a continuum between pure luck and skill. According to Hladki, these are the two components which determine the outcome of any competitive game. (If you’re mathematically inclined, F(x) and F(y)). Examining the luck factor first, Hladki notes that some games contain more of it than others. Chess, for example, features a lot less luck than ice hockey, which Hladki says is actually one of the most random professional sports. We should note also that as the sample size gets bigger (read: the number of games played increases) this factor becomes less significant as the luck evens out. Similarly, the extent to which players can demonstrate their skill will vary between games.

Hladki thinks the larger sample size we see in esports mean that luck is less of a factor. "By the sheer amount of games, the sample size becomes so big that the possibility for randomness almost goes to infinity". I'm a little skeptical at this claim. After all, is the number of games teams play in an esports league really all that different from, say, the number of games in a Premier League football season? It might be fairer to assume that here Hladki is talking about the online ranking systems you’d find in games like League of Legends or Overwatch, where players can grind away at the ladder all day in pursuit of the top ranks. There is no analogue to these in conventional sports. Players do train outside of competition, of course, but they are not formally ranked for doing so.

Perhaps even more controversially, Hladki says that esports are inherently more skillful. "To score one try in American football is very difficult." he says, "Whereas in CS:GO, the guy just comes and sprays. So every single bullet is potentially considered a try." Again, this raises some obvious questions. Perhaps he’s just simplifying things for the sake of clarity, but it’s hardly difficult to conceive of equivalent actions in sports that increase the chance of winning without the scoreboard actually being altered. A defence-splitting through-ball in soccer, for example, or perhaps a dominant first serve in tennis that puts the opponent on the back foot.

Along similar lines: why does this have to be true of all esports? Take Hearthstone, for example, a game frequently criticised for its use of random effects. This is a game where a professional player can lose to a rank 25 (the game’s lowest rank) playing a budget deck. Faced with a question about RNG from our Hearthstone-obsessed global editor, Tim Clark, Hladki said this: "The RNG is one of the challenges that I think in an esports game we have to add one more variable than what we’re basing it on right now, which is RNG factor." Which seems a little confusing, as one would assume that’s already accounted for in any model that factors luck in the first place.

With all that said, Hladki’s thesis does still ring true to a certain extent. The idea that esports games have more opportunities to show skill than conventional sports (well, maybe not Hearthstone) does have some degree of truth to it. Think about how many variables there are in a game like Dota 2—hero choices, item builds, team compositions, etc—it’s clear that there are a huge number of decisions to make, and with each of those comes an opportunity for a player to demonstrate skill. The argument Hladki may also be making is that the sheer number of people playing these competitive videogames means that those who reach a level good enough to turn pro must have inherently displayed more skill over their peers than, say, a kid who makes a college football team.

While some of Hladski’s conclusions might seem a little far-fetched, it is important to emphasise that they are all based on data, and he actively encouraged the audience to debunk his work, arguing that what esports needs is more peer-review analysis based on data. And even though his data is not publicly available yet, he promises it will be up on his Linkedin page once he has permission from the relevant game publishers. So we should exercise some caution before tearing down his conclusions. In any case, it’s great to see this kind of research into variance and skill being done for esports. It might take a few more studies before you can convince me that Pavel is more skillful than Messi, though.