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A video game about war is perhaps the least novel thing you could create in our medium today, which is one reason why Valiant Hearts: The Great War is such a surprising thing. Developed by Ubisoft Montpellier, Valiant Hearts examines the aspects of war that are most often brushed past or ignored altogether in games. This is a game concerned with the human element of war, the stories of the people forced to fight in these terrible conflicts, the people displaced by violence, and the relationships that keep them going in the face of terrible hardship. In some respects, it’s a clumsy effort. Its narrative relies too heavily on situational convenience and generic villainy at times, and its gameplay is rarely the best thing about it. Yet Valiant Hearts remains compelling throughout its half-dozen hours, thanks in no small part to its deft handling of the many emotional highs and lows that make up its small, but wonderful tale.

Set against the backdrop of World War I‘s western front, Valiant Hearts tells the story of four people whose lives are gravely affected by the conflict. Karl is a young, German-born man living in France when the war begins, and despite his protestations, he’s sent from his home back to Germany, forced to fight for a nation he no longer calls home. Emile, Karl’s father-in-law, is forced to take up arms for his home nation of France. Elsewhere we also meet Freddie, a burly American motivated to fight largely by personal vengeance, and Anna, a Belgian medic who moves from battle to battle doing whatever she can to patch up the wounded.

These four protagonists (along with a trusty dog who helps out from time to time) find themselves floating in and out of each other’s lives, reuniting during various battles, only to be torn away from one another by one horrible circumstance or another. At times the plot strains itself to find ways to bring these four people together, given that they’re often spread across such a massive battleground. But those moments of plot convenience are forgivable by virtue of how endearing these characters are. Their stories are fleshed out primarily from collectible diary entries, but they also communicate a great deal wordlessly. Apart from a few bouts of narration and some language-specific grunting, there is little dialogue in Valiant Hearts. Instead, the game’s visuals are tasked with doing the heavy lifting here. Every moment of pain, sacrifice, and (occasionally) joy is communicated using the game’s comic book-inspired artwork, and it works surprisingly well.

It’s not just that Valiant Hearts is a beautiful looking game (it is), but rather that its art is used so effectively to communicate to the player. It’s in each character’s facial expressions, and the small environmental details, that the game’s emotional resonance lives. Valiant Hearts is expressive in a way that big studio games often aren’t, relying on a subtlety of delivery that implies a trust in its players to empathize with its heroes, despite spelling out only the most basic details about each of them. It never yells to the player about what they’re supposed to be feeling; it never shouts about much of anything, actually. There are certainly big, sweeping moments of action within the game, but they’re dwarfed in number by the scenes focused on individual characters and the horrors continually befalling them.

It’s worth noting that Valiant Hearts isn’t looking to be an especially “realistic” portrayal of World War I. The game pulls no punches when portraying the grotesqueries of the battlefield–moments where you’ll find yourself running through hails of machine gun fire, climbing over the bodies of your fallen comrades, are frequent–but the overall tone of the game is a bit lighter than its subject matter lets on. Take, for instance, the near-total lack of combat in the game. In the rare instance that you do have to fight an enemy soldier, you’re never handed a gun and asked to shoot anybody (outside of a lone tank sequence where you blast away enemy artillery and swooping fighter planes). Instead, Emile just conks enemies on the head with a wooden spoon, a nod to his role as a military cook during one period of the war, while other characters never attack at all. Another example is a pair of quickly paced chase sequences. Here you take control of a sputtering cab that mostly propels itself, while you simply dodge and weave between enemy fire and other obstacles while classical music accompanies the rhythms of the action. It’s goofy stuff that would, on paper at least, seem wildly out of place in a game so seemingly dour in tone, but somehow Valiant Hearts pulls it off without coming across as jarring or distracting.

The only time Valiant Hearts really lost me was when it opted to drum up some artificial conflict. So much of the game is about the kind of faceless evil that makes up war, the constant charging into certain death against an enemy you know almost nothing about. That changes after a point, when an evil Baron from the German side starts appearing just to put a face to what you’re fighting against. He’s a pointless character, a twirling mustache there to sneer and drop bombs on you when the gameplay demands a more specific threat, and it’s the only part of the game that feels out of place. How the game chooses to pay off the Baron’s plotline is ultimately of little consequence to the bigger, more interesting stories at play, which makes his inclusion seem all the weirder.

Valiant Hearts also lost my attention during a few particular gameplay sequences. All of Valiant Hearts’ campaign consists of lightweight puzzle solving, peppered with the aforementioned minor combat bits and even some light rhythm gaming. In each stage, you are presented with some maze of problems to solve–an injured civilian is trapped behind a pile of debris you must navigate your way to, a prison camp can only be escaped after you perform tasks for various people, a detonator must be found and recovered before you can blow up a German fortress, and the like. These simple navigation puzzles are rarely of the sort that will stump any experienced player, but there’s mostly just enough challenge there to keep you from feeling like you’re just mindlessly doing chores before getting to the next story beat. Mostly. A few stages are outright dull, while others seem like neat ideas that never feel fully fleshed out–the minigame that accompanies Anna’s patching up of injured folk is particularly pointless. Even when the puzzles are better, Valiant Hearts is never particularly thrilling. Given its more contemplative tone, that’s not surprising, but it does highlight the challenge of trying to turn something so decidedly graphic novel-like into a game. While Valiant Hearts has numerous poignant moments, few of those are during the most interactive portions of the game.

Fortunately, one of those few great interactive moments closes out Valiant Hearts, demonstrating definitively that there was value in turning this story into a game after all. It’s a simple thing, something you won’t even realize until the consequences are staring you right in the face, and it serves as a perfectly heartrending conclusion to a sad, but beautiful little story. Sometimes the most important thing a game can do is just stick the landing, and Valiant Hearts does exactly that.

Valiant Hearts isn’t going to challenge many players’ abilities, but it may challenge any preconceived notions about how video games are meant to tackle subjects like war. There are certainly faults to be found with its underlying game design, but in a game that cares this much for its own characters–arguably as much as it cares about the history of the war itself, which is quite a lot–I found it difficult to get hung up on the occasional uninteresting fetch quest or rhythmic minigame. Its rewards are far more emotional in nature, the kind you find in any good story, regardless of medium. Seek this one out, and see it through to its conclusion. It’s worth it.

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Landmark, a Minecraft-style MMO that’s part of the EverQuest series, has become available on Steam Early Access.

Formerly known as EverQuest Next: Landmark, the free-to-play building-based MMO is still in closed beta, but gamers can gain access by purchasing a Founder’s Pack via Steam. The base pack costs $20, but there are also $60 and $100 packs available that include extra in-game items, a mention in the credits, and additional beta keys to share with friends.

This might be the only chance you’ll have to play Landmark for awhile, as open beta and launch dates have still not been announced.

Landmark is a Minecraft-esque social experience that acts as a precursor to the full-fledged MMO EverQuest Next. Sony Online Entertainment is embracing free-to-play with its current MMOs, recently detailing Landmark’s planned monetisation model rollout.

Check out the launch of the beta in this latest trailer for Divinity: Original Sin.

DayZ creator Dean Hall is not the only developer who is not terribly pleased with Microsoft and Windows 8. Speaking with Polygon, Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney said he’s concerned about the “closed” nature of Microsoft’s latest operating system.

“I genuinely worry about the future of Microsoft,” Sweeney said. “They’ve locked down this Windows 8. They say future app developers should focus there, but you can only ship that with Microsoft’s permission and Microsoft’s approval through Microsoft’s store. And that sucks compared to the open nature of the PC platform before…”

On the other hand, Sweeney praised Valve’s line of Steam Machines, describing the product line as the “most open high-end gaming platform ever.”

But Sweeney isn’t ready to write Microsoft off entirely in the PC gaming space. He said he’s hopeful, due in part to the recent senior management shakeup, that Microsoft will become more “open” as it relates to developing for the Windows platform. If they don’t, Linux and Steam OS are a good backup plan, he said.

“I sense kind of a renaissance at MS in the last six months,” Sweeney said. “Talking to the DirectX team for example, they’re making some brilliant decisions on DirectX 12 to make it more efficient and more open than ever before. You just generally sense a momentum to be more open with the community and more broad with their Windows strategy. I’m hoping that takes root.”

Also in Polygon’s interview, Sweeney said the virtual reality market is going to explode in popularity and prominence over time. “We’re doing a huge amount of research in VR, working with Oculus kits,” he said. “We see this as a technology that will influence every game and every platform.”

Sweeney went as far to say that virtual reality technology, like the Facebook-owned Oculus Rift or Sony’s Project Morpheus, are going to revolutionize the world in a more meaningful way than smartphones did.

“It’s technology that I think will completely change the world,” Sweeney said. “I think It’s going to be a bigger phenomenon than smartphones. You have to put it in perspective and realize we’re in maybe the [first-generation] iPhone stage right now where you have this really cool device, but it has some real flaws that prevents it from being a pervasive device for everyone. There might be an audience for 10 million users of the current tech, but as it improves with each generation, the audience is going to keep growing until eventually you’re going to reach a critical point where you can put on one of these devices and have an experience that is effectively indistinguishable from reality.”

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When you play a game with a title like Dragons and Titans, you seek fire, brimstone, and battles of epic proportions that rattle the very foundations of the Earth. The reality of the latest addition to the ever-expanding MOBA genre, however, is a bland and clumsy game that relies on its theme as a crutch to make up for its gameplay having no longevity of its own. Dragons and Titans may feature the juggernauts of fantasy lore, but the game itself is too frail to make so much as a whimper.

Dragons and Titans is yet another free-to-play game following in the footsteps of the likes of Dota 2 and League of Legends. You select a dragon and a legendary weapon, and then join a team with the focus of annihilating the equally voracious opposing team. As has become a staple of the genre, you may do so in any of three game variants, the central of which has you focusing on freeing your team’s titan by destroying the enemy’s titan cage in the center of the base. The titan cage is shielded, however, and destroying the various structures surrounding the enemy base serves to take a chunk out of the enemy’s shield or speed up the shield’s natural decay. The other options are a domination variant, which requires your team to destroy the enemy titan cage, and the familiar all-random, all-mid offering for a more relaxed experience. Matches are much shorter than in most similar games, clocking in at around 20 minutes for a long game, compared to the daunting hour-long matches that often appear in League of Legends.

The dragons in Dragons and Titans rely on special cone-based skills focused in the direction the dragon is facing. Such skills pertain to the element the dragon represents, whether it be poison, fire, light, sand, mist, or so forth. That the basic attack is tied to the direction you face is the cause of untold frustration. Once you use up your other spells and abilities or run out of mana, you and your opponents have nothing but basic attacks left, and battles play out in one of three equally exasperating ways: you chasing down someone who’s too low to stay and fight and just flies in a zigzag pattern to reduce your damage; you chasing an enemy fighter who is waiting on cooldowns and simply flies backward; or you and an enemy dragon rider attempting to fly directly at one another, only to end up chasing each other’s tail in a circle. The resulting chaos is never fun.

Basic attack complaints aside, dragons are inherently equipped with one other ability to give them their unique identities. The paper dragon has a bonus health shield to bolster its literally paper-thin defenses, the bone dragon gains some close-range combat ability, and the magma dragon sends chunks of flaming rock flying at foes. These abilities, and a dragon’s appearance and base stats, are the only aspects of the game lending identity to the different selectable characters, apart from the game’s legendary weapon system.

While teams are limited to one of each type of dragon per team, they are also limited to one of each type of legendary weapon. Legendary weapons grant you two additional abilities, and any weapon can be attached to any dragon, so you can customize half of a dragon’s skill set on a game-to-game basis. This offers some interesting customization options, such as the ability to turn a back-line poker into an equally devastating threat in melee range, or to simply increase your firepower from afar, but it also drains the identity of each class of dragon and makes them all bleed into one.

That the basic attack is tied to the direction you face is the cause of untold frustration.

The game offers a single-player campaign for those who aren’t interested in, or who want a break from, playing against other players. The campaign consists of three acts, two of which you must pay for to unlock, and is merely a gauntlet of “kill this, kill those, collect these, and kill that,” with forgettable bits of dialogue to link each bit together. There are three difficulty levels, and the game offers an additional “star” for beating the level with additional parameters, such as within a certain time or with a certain dragon.

Much like League of Legends, Dragons and Titans features a rune system for customizing your stats for a battle by collecting and purchasing runes to power up your dragon. Unlike in League of Legends, the runes can be purchased with real money, leading to a red flag for those opposed to “pay for power” mechanics in games. Further in this insidious vein is the ability to forge your legendary weapons to reduce mana costs or cooldowns or to increase their damage. To forge, you expend forge materials and wait four hours, or use an ingot to finish the forging instantly. Once again, ingots can be purchased with real money, so players who pay can power up their characters more quickly than those who simply attempt to acquire them by grinding. You can make pretty substantial progress on a weapon’s forging for as little as $4, with those 1 percent boosts all adding up to a noticeable decrease in mana consumption. And again, I stress that mana goes away fast in this game. You want mana. You want things to not cost a lot of mana. You want to forge that weapon you’re using.

One of the few areas where Dragons and Titans succeeds and others have failed is in its method of mitigating champion select arguments over who gets to play which champion, because prior to queuing, you can preselect your dragon or legendary weapon. It comes with a warning that it will increase queue times, since running into anyone else preselecting your dragon or titan prevents you from being matched, but in my experience, the queue time didn’t noticeably increase. I was guaranteed to get the weapon I wanted every game, which meant more to me than what dragon I selected. The mechanic is a brave one, especially given the meager player base, but it succeeds in its purpose.

It’s a shame that a game featuring colossal lizards would look and sound so drab. Dragon fire-breath sounds are nigh indistinguishable from the sound of static when your TV’s cable has gone out. The only graphics options available to adjust are resolution, full-screen mode, vertical sync, and a single slider allowing you to choose between fast or pretty graphics; the best I could reckon the slider did was adjust the brightness from “morning-drive road glare” to “moderate corneal incineration.” You may wish to wear sunglasses when playing the game, or turn down your monitor’s brightness and contrast settings to comfortable levels.

Dragons and Titans is a mere shadow of other, richer MOBAs, and while its significantly shorter average game time may give it some initial appeal, that appeal comes at the cost of almost any enjoyment of the time invested. Dragons and Titans could have been a gateway game to the genre, but weighed against the game’s counterparts, neither dragon nor titan can tip the scales in its favor.

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The key to understanding Hearthstone lies in its very name. Not only does it refer to the white-and-turquoise rock that has sent the World of Warcraft faithful back to inns since 2004; it also suggests friendly competition far removed from the battles and weighty stratagems of other collectible card games. Its cozy syllables evoke not laborious campaigns lasting hours, but quick matches that take no longer than it takes to gulp down a mug of ale. If World of Warcraft is the everyman’s massively multiplayer online game, this is the everyman’s collectible card game, and for the most part, Blizzard has justified the fanfare that erupted when it first appeared last March.

Few other card games rival its personality, which reveals itself in the little things, such as the way you can tap iron gongs and fiddle with water mills on the board in the 90 seconds when you’re awaiting a challenger’s next move, or in the way a chorus of rough-and-tumble dwarves and orcs erupts in cheers when you’ve made a good move. You find it in the flashier details as well, such as the way the mage’s arcane missiles pelt enemy heroes with sound files yanked from World of Warcraft, or in the way some of Warcraft’s most exaggerated figures guide through a tutorial that’s as helpful as it is fun. The emo night elf Illidan from Warcraft III and WOW’s Burning Crusade expansion wraps up the swift campaign, still spouting his convictions that we’re unprepared.

That may well be true for card gaming tenderfeet, but it rarely matters. One of the great strengths of Hearthstone is that it embraces players who shied from the know-it-alls at Magic: The Gathering events in comic shops or missed the heydays of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh. What’s more, it caters to players burned by the caustic personalities in multiplayer games like League of Legends and Dota 2 by limiting communication with random players to preset responses. (Friends can chat with and battle each other, but to prevent exploits, these matches offer no form of reward or advancement.) In true Blizzard form, Hearthstone shatters barriers to entry while supplying the means to access greater challenges if you seek them.

Indeed, card gaming veterans will find much to love beyond the cheesy puns and happy aesthetic. Hearthstone adopts the familiar model of whittling down the opposing player’s hit points with attack points from cards, but it simplifies the often cumbersome resource mechanics of other games for a mana bar that automatically expands with the passing of each turn. It’s a system geared toward speed, and hero abilities that don’t depend on cards–like the mage’s fireball–act as wild cards that can keep you in the fight even when surrounded by minions. It’s a lunch breaker’s game, and indeed, the toughest matches rarely last more than 15 minutes.

Blizzard manages to bless Hearthstone with significant depth in spite of such nods to speed. There’s a wide assortment of cards with specific abilities in play here, some of which are part of the nine unlockable decks modeled on familiar World of Warcraft classes, and others of which come with the massive bundle of cards that you can use with all the decks. Using the hunter deck, you might spring a trap by unleashing three weak snake cards after an enemy attacks his or her minions; your opponent might fend off the attacks by tossing down a tanky card with “taunt,” thereby forcing the snakes to attack the taunting card instead of the main hero. But still further strategies await: your mage could incapacitate the taunting card with a frost nova, thereby letting you have a go at your opponent’s hero.

All this worked well when beta invites shot out a year ago, but Hearthstone now enjoys a commendable degree of balance in the wake of months of tweaks and player suggestions. It’s more apparent in the early levels, when most challengers you meet haven’t built powerful decks through their winnings from daily quests and simple leveling, but flashes of it remain at higher levels when players start slapping down legendary cards with alarming frequency. Hearthstone’s class decks perform a little of the same service as alts in an online role-playing game; once you get tired of one class, you can jump on another and start leveling it from scratch for a varied experience.

Over time, perhaps inevitably, the process of leveling and building killer decks devolves into a grind. Blizzard gives you the option to craft your own cards to counter it, although it’s here that the veterans enjoy a significant advantage over card-gaming rookies. Hearthstone simplifies many of the necessary actions, such as destroying excess cards and neatly arranging the available cards in a flipbook of sorts, but the uninitiated get few clues as to what to focus on. In the worst cases, you might waste your material on a worthless card or (the horror) accidentally disintegrate one of the best in your deck. Nevertheless, card crafting is a good way to fill in the gaps for the unlucky. If you can’t get a card to appear from the packs you buy through your winnings (or indeed, real-world money), you can usually make it if you have the materials.

The best way to break this tedium is to break into the Arena mode. Arenas come with an entry fee, although it’s usually negligible if you manage to complete the daily quests, which have you doing things like winning matches with a specific deck or dealing 100 damage to enemy heroes. The allure of Arena lies in the leveling of the playing field. Rather than bringing your own decks into the battle, you’re only allowed to choose from one of three classes, and then you need to build your deck by choosing one of the random cards Hearthstone throws at you until you complete a full deck of 30 cards. The outcome can still be outrageously imbalanced. Some schmuck might swim in legendary cards, while the one you have never gets drawn from the deck. Of course, it works both ways. The next Arena match could shower you with legendaries like Ragnaros instead.

As is the case with any collectible card game, a degree of randomness affects each action in Hearthstone. It’s possible you’ll end up with nothing but sorry cards beyond the capable starter decks–I suffered the same fate after I lost my godly deck in a planned wipe halfway through the beta–but there’s always the chance of scoring big as well. Still, that randomness might drive players to toss some cash at Blizzard for new card packs (priced at $1.50 each), but the beauty of Hearthstone is that you never feel much if any need to fork out cash. It’s a free-to-play game in the best sense of the word, and even the interface for unloading your cash is more stylish than it normally is in such ventures.

Hearthstone features no built-in spectator mode, nor does it offer a replay mode, which could have been helpful in learning from your mistakes. Features such as team battles that make Magic’s digital duel games so fun make no appearances here, and the daily quests take long enough to complete that you’ll sometimes want to spend cash if you want to play in the Arena. But such objections are minor in light of the breezy but brainy experience Blizzard delivers here, particularly for the massive segment of the populace that’s never played a collectible card game. If it’s dumbed down, then it’s in good hands. If any developer’s good at weeding out the chaff of more robust games in a particular genre, surely it’s Blizzard.

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Richard Garriott created the beloved Ultima role-playing game series. He traveled to the International Space Station and dove to the depths of the ocean to see the Titanic wreckage first-hand. He owns a stately castle-style home in Texas called Britannia Manor. Now he can add another accomplishment to his resume.

Garriott’s crowdfunding campaign for his “ultimate RPG” Shroud of the Avatar has now reached $3.5 million from more than 30,000 total backers.

The Shroud of the Avatar Kickstarter campaign went live in March 2013 and ended in April that year with $1.9 million, well above its $1 million target. Since then, Garriott and developer Portalarium have kept donations open at the game’s website, where more than $1.58 million has come through so far.

“Thank you!!! We will deliver the best game we can!!!,” Garriott said on Twitter about the funding accomplishment.

Episode One of Shroud of the Avatar, called Forsaken Virtues, is expected to launch later this year for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

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Much has changed since we reviewed Diablo III at its launch in May of 2012, both in the game itself and in the PC gaming landscape. Now, those looking for great multiplayer hack-and-slash dungeon crawls have more options, like the colorful and appealing Torchlight II and the deep, grim, free-to-play Path of Exile. With these great games on the market that scratch the same itch, Diablo III is less essential. However, thanks largely to significant changes made in a recent patch in advance of the upcoming Reaper of Souls expansion, Diablo III is a better game now than it’s ever been, and is a worthy contender for your time if you’re looking to kill legions of monsters and score some sweet loot.

The recent changes to Diablo III are dramatic and immediately noticeable. After patch 2.0.1 was released on February 25, I took my level 44 witch doctor out for a spin for the first time in ages, and after playing for about an hour, I’d already collected rare and legendary weapons and armor that far outstripped anything I’d been using before. Gear is better now not only in terms of its base stats, but also in terms of its other characteristics. Whereas before, I tended to stick with the same few skills throughout the game, now, gear encourages me to switch things up periodically by offering hefty percentage bonuses to the damage done by a specific skill.

Some characteristics aren’t about increasing an item’s power but about doing other nifty things; a colleague of mine was able to equip a powerful level 60 weapon at level 47 because one of its attributes reduced its level requirement by 13. You find cool, useful stuff a lot more frequently now, which makes the whole process of collecting loot more exciting and rewarding, and the smart ways in which this loot sometimes encourages you to change up your build make for a more varied game. And with the controversial auction house now offline and with restrictions on trading legendary gear, you have to earn the best stuff yourself, which is the way it always should have been.

After advancing a few levels on the normal difficulty and never breaking a sweat, I upped things to hard to take advantage of the 75 percent bonus to experience and gold that comes with the increased challenge. This made for a more involving experience; on normal I could mindlessly slaughter most foes, but on hard I had to focus on what I was doing and use my skills in concert with each other to overcome some of the tougher encounters, marking enemies for death, setting up my sentry turret, and vaulting out of the way of enemy attacks. The difficulty system has been tweaked significantly since the game’s release, with monsters now scaling to your character’s level. As you get better at the game and improve your character’s equipment, you’re incentivized to up the difficulty to reap greater rewards in terms of gold, experience, and gear, and for the satisfaction of overcoming greater and greater challenges. I’m now facing the still-tougher enemies of the expert level.

After once again vanquishing Diablo and starting over from act one, I hit the current level cap of 60 (which Reaper of Souls will increase to 70) and started earning paragon experience. Though the paragon system was introduced way back in patch 1.0.4, this was my first experience with it. I’m not usually much of an endgame player; once I’ve completed the story in a game, there’s not much appeal for me in continuing to play purely for the sake of earning better loot or increasing my character’s power. But I can see the appeal in earning paragon levels. With each level you earn, you get a point to spend on one of four tiers: improving your core attributes, your offensive or defensive abilities, or matters of utility, like resource costs and the amount of gold you find. Though you can earn paragon experience with a character only once that character has hit level 60, the paragon points you earn are given to each of your characters. Previously, Diablo III offered little in the way of opportunities to continue improving your character after a certain point, but now paragon levels, along with the prospect of better and better loot on harder difficulties, give you concrete benefits for continued play.

Fundamentally, Diablo III is still the same experience it’s always been. You click on monsters and press a few keys on your keyboard to unleash attacks to kill tons of monsters to collect heaps of gold and loot to become more effective at killing tons of monsters, and while the loot system has gotten a major overhaul, skills and runes work like they always have. The offensive skills of each class look powerful and feel empowering, movement is fluid, and the action is fast and responsive. Though its core mechanics are commonplace, Diablo III creates a sense of drama that helps it stand out. In the third act setting of Bastion’s Keep, massive demons claw their way onto the battlements, and as towering statues crumble around you in the high heavens, the turmoil supports the aim of the halfhearted narrative to make you feel like an eternal conflict between the angels and the legions of hell is culminating and that you’re right in the middle of it.

And of course, Diablo III is still at its best when you join forces with other players, combining close-quarters abilities and ranged attacks, crowd control abilities, and area-of-effect damage. Unfortunately, Diablo III still requires you to be online at all times, even if you’re content to play by your lonesome, and this sometimes causes problems. I’ve run into severe latency issues on a few occasions when playing the game recently, and though my character hasn’t perished, combat in these instances has been completely unmanageable.

But this has been a rare occurrence throughout the 20 hours or so that I’ve spent playing the game since picking it back up after the recent patch, and because loot is such a central part of the Diablo experience, the significant improvements to Diablo III’s loot system have resulted in a significantly better game. If you played Diablo III when it was first released and haven’t been back to it in a while, you’ll immediately be pleased to find that the loot you’re collecting is consistently better and consistently more suited to your chosen class. If you haven’t played Diablo III before but you’re thinking of diving in before the expansion is released, you’re in luck: taking on the minions of hell has never been more rewarding.

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DICE has delayed the PC launch of Battlefield 4‘s Naval Strike DLC due to a technical issue.

“We’ve detected an issue and it needs to be solved,” wrote DICE on the Battlefield site.

The developer is not saying when it expects to be able to launch Naval Strike on PC. The DLC will still hit Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4 today.

“Quality is our number one priority and we will not release Battlefield 4 Naval Strike on PC until we feel it meets the highest quality level possible,” adds DICE. “Once we have a confirmed date for PC, we’ll be sure to update those players on our official channels. We appreciate your patience and look forward to seeing everyone on the Battlefield.”

Naval Strike contains four new maps which revolve around fighting at sea, and a swishy hovercraft vehicle to zip about in. There’s also the new Carrier Assault mode, which revives the Titan mode from Battlefield 2142.

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