With its release and beta upcoming at some point soon, more and more information on The Division is being released day by day. Now we’ve been told some specifics about features that will be included with the PC version of the game.

Creative director Magnus Jansén has been talking about the ways that PC players will be able to communicate in-game, with a text chat being available along side voice systems on the console.  In style the text-chat resembles your standard MMO-chat window that you’d see in a game like World of Warcraft or similar – but in The Division it’ll be a safehouse-only function from within hub areas.

“[The safe house is] also a social space where you can easily use your proximity voice, or on PC chat because on PC you obviously have a chat for group or local. [It’s a] classic MMO chat system which you can use to hook up with strangers.”

The idea is to aid the formation of groups in game and to build a community within the game. There’s also the proximity voice chat that can be used if you have a microphone to communicate.

The decision to restrict the text-chat to just the hub’s might be a good one, I don’t know of many people whose first action in an MMO isn’t to switch off the big main chat to stop it constantly scrolling through their chat box.

Bethesda have entered into a partnership with Japanese toymaker ThreeZero to produce a meticulously crafted and detailed Fallout 4 figurine of a player in a Power Armour frame.

However, as you might expect, such things do not come cheap. The price tag is set around $400, or in pounds about £279. Owch. However, compared to other figurines it’s actually quite cheap and international postage is also free. If that softens the blow of the price tag any, let me know…

It stands at 14.5 inches tall and is fully posable with 35 points of articulation, which include the fingers. The head can also swap for a helmet with LED light up function which requires batteries that aren’t included. The outer armour pieces are detachable and will be compatible with other upcoming Fallout 4 figures in power armour. Also an AER-9 Laser Rifle because.

Tempted? Pre-orders open on January 28. There are also loads of pictures over on the official site.

Hello and welcome to your weekly update on what awesome stuff you can find in Kickstarter’s gaming campaigns.

As always, we’ll start with some updates. There’s not much to update with only last week’s campaigns to catch up with, but half of last week’s campaigns were cancelled in the last week. Firstly Code War was cancelled after the developers listened to feedback suggesting they update their page with more content, but they have promised to tell us when they relaunch their campaign page so stay tuned for more. The other game to see cancellation is King of the Hill which has been called off for similar reasons as the developers call a ‘timeout’ to work on their game a bit more before they re-launch the campaign page.

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Ghost Theory

First up is a ghost hunting adventure made for VR, and that’s something I never saw myself writing this week.

Ghost Theory places you into haunted places with ghost hunting gear and challenges you to investigate their hauntings while evading the nasties residing there… and potentially eliminating the ghosties entirely. Stealth aspects are apparent as well as open-world mechanics and each location will have a backstory to discover. Sweet.

Ghost Theory has 27 days to go to make a £100,000 goal of which it has made £4,848 so far.

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Dread Bot Factory

Next up we have a game that take inspiration from two popular games of yesteryear – Megaman and Metroid.

Dread Bot Factory sets you in one big level and challenges you to open up different areas to reach bosses, customising your character AI to fight and for some other mysterious purpose that is not yet clear. It’s also possible with your customisation to play through the game in a number of different ways, so unless you try no two playthroughs should go exactly the same.

Dread Bot Factory has made kr400 SEK of its kr420,000 SEK goal and has 29 days to go.

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#FML

This is my weekly card game and it’s a party game about… tweeting?

#FML can last as many rounds as is decided upon and the point of the game is to have the fewest points at the end. To avoid points, you need to be the fastest to place a white card that matches the colour of the black card that is in play – or failing that use the hashtags on the cards to craft something funny, witty or insulting like you’d see on social media!

#FML has a goal of $13,500 of which it has made $295 with 27 days to go.

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Mission to Mars High Definition 3D Simulation Game

Lastly we have a game that is more about exploring than playing.

Mission to Mars will involve an accurate game-playable replica of the planet Mars in which you can explore. Develop your crew as you explore and make decisions that will lead to survival or death of those under your command as you play. The end goal seems to be terraforming a part of the planet for human life, but obviously that will take a long time and needs a lot more accomplished first!

Mission to Mars has made $2 of its $100,000 goal and has 29 days to go.

The Elder Scrolls Online is due to receive another DLC pack soon with the addition of Thieves Guild, which will feature the organisation in question.

Thieves Guild will come in two parts – the expansion itself as well as a patch for the base game which will add scrolling combat text and a new 64-bit client for PC and Mac users that can support it, among a bunch of other things to update the game.

Coming with the expansion will be a new area – Hew’s Bane – and you’ll find the Guild at Abah’s Landing which is the HQ and where you can start off as a recruit for the thieves and other criminals of the streets. It’ll also bring a whole bunch of other stuff, such as new costumers, motifs, items sets specific to the guild and “hours” of new quests and story. One new 12-player trial in particular will be Maw of Lorkjhaj, but other than the name there’s been no details given on it or much else.

Release date and pricing has also not yet been revealed, although we’ve been told to “be on the lookout for more articles starting next week” which suggests that they’ll be coming out to the public soon.

And in news of things that really should have been gotten around to earlier, Microsoft have made it so that your IP address is now hidden by default on Skype, preventing anyone who had your details from finding it out.

Previously it was possible for gamers online, if they were losing and wanted to use more underhanded tactics to win a game, to look up their rival’s IP address if they had their Skype details; then they’d launch a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack upon them and through it knock them offline, winning by default. It’s also been used to attack livestreamers on Twitch while they were halfway through a stream. Needless to say, there will be a lot of gamers saying “finally!” upon hearing this news.

“Skype is fully committed to delivering as safe and secure of an experience as possible to our customers. We have recently introduced the ability to hide a Skype user’s IP address and we’ve set this as a default status in the latest versions of Skype. Starting with this update to Skype and moving forward, your IP address will be kept hidden from Skype users. This measure will help prevent individuals from obtaining a Skype ID and resolving to an IP address.”

You can get the update from Skype’s site or if you wait long enough, it’ll probably upgrade you to the latest version at some point.

Skype blog “To our gamers: IP will now be hidden by default in latest update”: [x]