After a week-long break, the Hero of the Storm’s alpha servers are back up, bringing with it a load of new features that have been added during the downtime. Of course, Blizzard want players to put them through their paces so the bugs can be spotted and stamped out in a timely manner, and the three biggest features are custom games, observer mode and replays.

Custom games are in a fairly early form, but they are basically the game mode that allows players to set up their own games with their friends rather than entering into the matchmaking pool of players currently looking for a match at that moment. The mode and battleground can be selected and the teams and their heroes are displayed in the lobby along with any observers. Empty slots will have an invite button to allow for the the invitation of those who might be observing the match, or if you fancy just filled with AI heroes. The host of the game also has other controls, such as being able to swap people around between teams, kick a player or make them an observer and some customisation for the AI players too.

Observers can see all the information that players can, as well as cycling between the POVs of all the players so they can see all the action of the matches.

Replays allow for you to relive victories and losses and have a bunch of commands such as slow down, pause and speed up for use. Clicking ‘Watch’ in the menu will bring up the replays from recently played matches to view.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is going to get a new expansion in a few months time. And it’ll be centered around Revan, a character from Knights of the Old Republic.

The expansion will be called Shadow of Revan and will add story-based content to the game about Revan going rogue and starting his own army to oppose both Imperial and Republic forces and the goal of demolishing both sides among other things.

Priced at around $19.99/£13, Shadow of Revan will include five new stages, two new worlds the pirate paradise of Rishi and the jungle world of Yavin 4, an increased level cap of 69 and a whole bunch of new multiplayer Flashpoints and Operations challenges.

There’s also some pre-order bonuses as well as a special subscriber pre-order bonus. If ordered before November 2nd, non-subs will receive one week of Early Access before the grand opening of the new expansion parts to all, the digital expansion: Rise of the Hutt Cartel, and an exclusive grand statue of Revan to display in their Player Stronghold. Subscribers get all this and a 12x experience boost in class story missions up to Level 55 until the day before release. If pre-ordered after November 2nd, Early Access won’t be included but everything else will be.

Shadow of Revan will release on December 2nd for the PC-based MMO.

Today on their special site for The Crew game, Ubisoft announced the release date for all platforms as well as outlining the plans for another console closed beta before then.

The Crew will be officially released on December 2nd it seems across all platforms. This they say will give extra time to “allow for a second closed console beta to be held, giving even more players the opportunity to experience the game”. This will give time for them to collect more user feedback like they have done with previous betas before the full release of the game.

The Crew’s release was originally set for a November 11th date, but feedback from the last three Betas means that Ubisoft have decided to take the time to make some changes based on what users said they would like to see. Among the changes are the ability to remove the HUD if wanted, some tweaks to enemy AI and enhancements to voice-chat.

Crusader Kings 2 is about to get an expansion, and it’s coming quite soon.

The Charlemagne expansion will give you 100 more years to play with, as well as new kingdoms, characters and events. The assassination button has been removed which means now that plotting another’s demise is somewhat harder to do. On the bright side if you;’re on the wrong end of a plot to murder yourself, you’ve more defensive options including going into hiding to reduce the success rate. That means appointing a regent to rule in your stead though and obviously that brings its own issues with it.

The expansion will release October 14th.

A recent update to Blizzard’s Battle.net launcher seems to hint that talk at last year’s Blizzcon of tweaking the older Warcraft games to work better on newer computers might actually finally be about to offer up the games in question.

Added into the launcher are a bunch of icons, backgrounds and logos for Warcraft III, currently locked but looking pretty much ready for use. It was mentioned at Blizzcon 2013 that Blizzard had a small team working on updates to help the games run on present day Windows. Currently while it is possible to get Warcraft III and the previous two games to run on a modern computer, there is a lot of fiddling around with settings and tweaking to get it to run properly. There’s also a lack of support for the native resolutions too.

It is currently unknown when Warcraft III will become available through the launcher, and in what form. Just the game, tweaked to enable smooth running without the faff or will there be some TLC applied in the form of HD graphics and some extra content? Blizzcon 2014 is drawing closer so expect to hear something about it there.