Oh LucasFilms. The company that loves to tinker with it’s own franchise until it resembles a 70 year old celebrity thats gone through so many plastic surgeries her face no longer moves. In it’s latest move all Star Wars games have been declared non-canon. This means that some great games, such as Knights Of The Old Republic have been removed from the timeline, as well as some not so stellar entries such as Super Bombad Racing.

While I might not be a huge fan of all the Star Wars games, this does remove a lot of the punch of certain story moments from the older games. And, of course, it causes concern for the future games that may be tied to the series. LucasFilms has set up a “story group” that will oversee all entries into the expanded universe in the future to ensure it fits into the canon. A prime example of this would be the new Battlefront game being developed by DICE. While it’s nice that this will mean all titles will have LucasFilm’s seal of approval, it also means that game developers are going to be more limited. What makes for a great movie, or great canon may not necessarily be what makes for a great game.

On another note, even though the games are no longer canon, some of them are now considered part of the ‘Legends’ content, meaning that they could potentially be used in some facet later on. In the end, it remains to be seen what the ‘story group’ will do, but part of me isn’t convinced that it will be a good thing. Then again, neither was Jar-Jar Binks, and we still haven’t managed to get him retconned.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments!

Microsoft’s got a lot of hype going behind the release of Windows 10. One of the major selling points is that for a lot of users they’ll be able to upgrade free of charge to the new OS, which if you’ve ever paid for the installation of an OS you’ll know is a very attractive selling point to push it with. They’ve been saying that they plan to release it towards the end of 2015, but sources are now saying that it’s now been confirmed that it’ll be releasing much earlier than that.

Supposedly the CEO of AMD Lisa Su let slip the detail during a call with financial investors last week, saying that the new OS was due out “at the end of July”. AMD are apparently holding off on the marketing of their Carrizo technology to factor in “the Winsow 10 launch at the end of July.”

It’s not known whether or not this is legitimate information but AMD would have to had been working with Microsoft on DirectX 12 as well as other OS compatibility issues with their hardware, so it’s not out of the question that this is true. Alternatively it could just be that another more complete beta version will be released at the time, replacing the current technical beta.

Stay tuned for details as they emerge.

Blizzard’s big MOBA Heroes of the Storm has been in various stages of completeness now for a while. Thankfully for all those still unable to play it, that is soon about to change. Blizzard’s given the game a proper release date.

The full version of the game will be released to the public on June 2nd, 2015. However if you can’t wait that long, they’re going to change the current closed beta to an open beta on May 19th which means you’ll be able to log in and play at last even if it’s not guaranteed that everything will bug-free.

In a press release Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said: “With its focus on team play and fast-paced fun, Heroes of the Storm is a fresh take on a very popular genre. We’ve built Heroes of the Storm in a way that makes it accessible to new players, but also challenging enough for veterans who really want to put their skills to the test. We can’t wait to see what Heroes brings to the co-op and competitive scenes once the Nexus opens up to everyone.”

Recent updates to Heroes’ closed beta has seen the addition of new maps and new characters such as Sylvanas Windrunner.

And so, in today’s gaming news I didn’t expect to read about…

GTA V has finally released onto PC at long last (woooooo!) and while there were some teething issues on launch, people are now logged in and playing. The game even allowed you to export across your console characters if you wished and… well, it didn’t always go smoothly. Some characters had some changes to their faces which were quite strange, seemingly with the facial hair often going wrong. And this included the eyebrows…

Today has introduced the PC versions’ first patch and thankfully this bug is now being fixed, along with some other ones such as the technically important one of the Launcher no longer using a high amount of CPU and other smaller ones such as birds now being visible again in the Rockstar editor.

The full patch notes are listed below:

• Fixed an issue where the GTAV Launcher would use an abnormally high percentage of CPU and sometimes crash

• Fixed an issue where frame rate would drop when left-clicking the mouse while driving

• Added a grid to the Golf mini-game to show the topology of the green while putting

• Fixed an issue where a character’s eyebrows or other facial features could change erroneously when transferred to PC

• Fixed an issue where a some players were asked to transfer their GTA Online character while a transfer was already in progress

• YouTube uploads via the Rockstar Editor will now correctly resume if Internet connection is lost during the upload and later restored

• Fixed a rare issue where the game could crash while using the Rockstar Editor

• Projects containing deleted clips will now load properly in the Rockstar Editor and warn the player of the missing clips

• Fixed an issue where birds were not recorded correctly in Rockstar Editor clips

• Corrected an issue where certain characters in Windows usernames would cause the Launcher to fail to load or other undesired game behavior. For details, see this page.

• Fixed an issue where players with one garage would not be able to replace an existing vehicle if the garage was full and the new vehicle was purchased from an in-game website

• Additional fixes to prepare for iFruit support

• Crew Tire Smoke can no longer be purchased if you are not in a Crew

In an attempt to combat the creation of new accounts for phishing and spamming on Steam, Valve are changing the requirements for fully ‘activating’ a new account. Now in order to get access to things like the sending of friend requests and voting on Greenlight the account in question will need to have have purchases of about $5.

Before then all accounts are created as ‘limited’ accounts barring them from sending friend requests, chatting with other players, voting on Greenlight and Steam reviews and more. The $5 barrier can be passed in a few ways though, the most simple being the straight purchase of a game worth that much or more. Other ways include gifting a game of that value or more to another player or by adding $5 to their Steam Wallet.

In a recent post on the ruleset change, Valve wrote: “We’ve chosen to limit access to these features as a means of protecting our customers from those who abuse Steam for purposes such as spamming and phishing. Malicious users often operate in the community on accounts which have not spent any money, reducing the individual risk of performing the actions they do. One of the best pieces of information we can compare between regular users and malicious users are their spending habits as typically the accounts being used have no investment in their longevity. Due to this being a common scenario we have decided to restrict certain community features until an account has met or exceeded $5.00 USD in Steam.”