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]

MinecraftEdu has been used in classrooms around the world to help with the teaching of children, using a modified version of the original Minecraft game. Now Microsoft have snatched it up and will be re-launching it as Minecraft Education Edition later on this summer.

Originally the product of education software developer TeacherGaming, they combined the popular game of Minecraft with features to aid learning. MinecraftEdu was been designed to help teachers manage their pupils’ in-class gaming sessions and has been used to teach everything from maths to foreign languages so far. Minecraft Education Edition will keep those same core features but will be improving upon them, although Microsoft hasn’t yet given any clues as to how they’re going to do this. For the moment Microsoft have said that MinecraftEdu will be continuing as normal, including the hosting service, until Education Edition is working and ready to go. All existing users of the software at that point will then be given a year’s pass of use for Minecraft Education Edition for free.

TeacherGaming have published an FAQ to spell out differences between the two versions as well as giving assurances that Minecraft Education Edition will be a positive thing for everyone.

“Minecraft: Education Edition builds on the early learnings from MinecraftEdu, while growing and expanding its feature set. Working with the MinecraftEdu creators Joel Levin and Santeri Koivisto, we started with all the learnings from the EDU edition, and built its key features into the Minecraft: Education Edition.  We also added new features including login and personalization, the student portfolio feature, a second screen experience for teachers, and the ability to save student progress.”

Exact details will be released within the next few days.

Rogue Harvest is an indie rogue-like game from Genetix Studios. It challenges you to survive in a procedurally generated world by gathering resources, crafting items, growing and killing food and most importantly making sure that you have shelter for the night.

The game itself has been out in Steam Early Access now for over two months, having released November 5th 2015. The studio’s plan is to keep the game in Early Access for a few months to have people play it and give feedback so that they can improve the game before they do a full release. So, how does it stand up?

Rogue Harvest is actually quite bug-free as I played it, with the only ones I noticed being the popping of 3 achievements just as I was loading in the maps the first two times (the 3 Mushroom Massacre achievements you get for killing certain numbers of the Mushkin enemies) without me having met the conditions. That being said wandering around the world you did often find dropped mushrooms in the midst of blood splatters so maybe the world generation has a thing against Mushkins?

Rogue Harvest is also quite a difficult game. You do start with 3 tools that never wear out, but other tools you craft as well as helmets/hoods all have a durability and so do walls as you’ll find out. You do start the game with a small hut to provide some shelter during the nights, but as monsters can easily chew through walls you’ll find out very quickly that a one layer wall is not enough to keep you safe at night. Although you do get warning that night is falling and have a handy day-night clock in the top-right corner it is easy to get yourself lost in the world and be caught outside, and if that happens you just need to keep running. Outrunning the monsters is possible and when day comes most of them will retreat again, just be very careful where you’re running lest you get jumped from the front. Of course, death is permadeath in this game as it is a rogue-like so if you value your crops and tools you need to be careful what you do.

Resource-wise there’s a fair bit you can do. You’ll find wild carrots, potatoes and other veg that you can bash to gain the vegetable to eat/cook or a seed to plant that crop yourself or potentially both at once. Trees are plentiful and most give a good few logs as well as leaves which I suggest gathering a lot of to snack on and keep your energy (hunger bar) stocked up. Stone ore comes most often in little chunks on the ground but you can find big cliffsides of stone, as well as ores and sometimes big chunks of marble that you can all use for crafting. Charcoal is one of the more important items, as crafting the Oven which makes your food restore more energy needs 4 pieces of it. To get it though you need to burn down trees, and you can’t really craft anything to do it yourself without spending resources on a fire wand that you could use for other things instead. Fire flower enemies are the best way to go about the task, but watch that you don’t get caught in the fireballs instead. Burning damage is a thing in this game, along with poison damage.

However, where it’s let down a little bit is that currently there’s not really a lot to craft or do. There is going to be a story implemented fully into the game upon release, but for the moment the only parts of it come during the intro cutscene, flashbacks you can generate upon touching random strange objects you can come across (like a sign to a hospital, a plane rotor etc.) and the dialogue boxes you seem to get at preset play times during the game. There’s three crafting lists of things to make, but that’s counting the upgraded picks, axes and swords as well as all the helmets/hoods and you can only wear one of those at a time. Speaking of helmets, currently the game doesn’t have any armour slot system which means that equipping your hood/helmet is from your inventory and that takes up a space you could be using for another thing.

The studio did tweet about a week ago that they’re working on end game content for the game though, so soon there will be more things added to the game. More items, more things to craft, more loot and the full story.

Starting work on the end of game sequence for #RogueHarvest if the game doesn’t hit you emotionally, I’ve failed as an #indiedev

— Genetix Studio (@GenetixGames) January 10, 2016

If you’re interested in giving the game a go, you can find it now priced at £4.79 for UK Steam people, and $5.99 for the US. I’d say it was worth that much, because despite the lack of craftable things right now, the rogue-like element does add some replayability to the game which is worth five pounds/six dollars in my opinion.

7.5/10

Having teased on their Twitter yesterday that something new for Cities Skylines was coming, today Paradox have revealed their second expansion to their popular city-building game: Cities Skylines – Snowfall.

As their previous expansion added a day and night cycle to the game, Snowfall will be adding a weather system to the game allowing for rain and snow as well as a new temperature reading that will have residents huddling up for warmth. It’ll add a new mechanic to the game – making sure that your city is able to be kept warm enough during the times when the weather outside is terrible and keeping roads clear when the snow starts to pile up.

The expansion will also add some new transportation options to the game, including trams which were a much demanded fan-favourite to be implemented into the game next. Managing transport routes has also been made easier to do and a snowplow service can be called upon to clear roads that have a build up of snow upon them. There will also be wintery new parks and other attractions added to help draw your residents and tourists from miles around, as well as a new Chirp #yeahthereare.

Some of the cosmetic weathers such as rain and fog will be added to the original game free of charge in an update around the time that Snowfall releases along with other yet-to-be-announced features, and the expansion will be coming to Windows, Mac and Linux computers sometime later this year.