Before World of Warcraft there was plain Warcraft, the award-winning, genre-defining real-time strategy trilogy. Many players of the MMO have never experienced those classic stories. The next World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor, is going to fix that.

“What if those dark days could come again?” asked Blizzard’s Chris Metzen on stage at BlizzCon 2013’s opening ceremonies. “To forge a brighter future, sometimes you must confront the ghosts of the past” he continued, whipping the crowd into a frenzy before announcing the next expansion set for World of Warcraft, Warlords of Draenor.

We’re going time-traveling, folks. Old heroes, old villains, and settings familiar to the players of the original Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and the two games and expansion that followed.

The new expansion feature a new world in Draenor, upgradeable player garrisons, new character models, a level cap increased to 100 and much more. Also worth noting from the trailer, the ability to boost to level 90 and play from there.

The Story

At the end of the current World of Warcraft storyline, former Horde Warchief Garrosh Hellscream is taken away in chains, to be put on trial. That trick never works. He escapes trial and meets up with a new friend with the ability to bend time.

Garrosh travels back to when the world made sense of him, his intent is to redeem the Orcish ideal. He wants the Orcs to be proud conquerors again. His most critical mission is to stop the moment when the Orcs of old drank demon blood and fall under the sway of The Burning Legion. He will build an Iron Horde with the Chieftans of Old, empowered with the tech of the present. He will lead his Iron Horde through a time-spanning Dark Portal to conquer the present day.

Orc Clans

Old Draenor was a much more savage place than the Outlands World of Warcraft players are familiar with.

The only real civilization is a number of famous Orc clans.

Frostwolf Clan of Frostfire Ridge — Chieftain is Durotan, the Father of Thrall. Thrall gets to see where he came from, hang with his family. Will Durotan join the Iron Horde?

Entering Old Draenor

Players are sent on a suicide mission through the Dark Portal to stop the Iron Horde invasion. They’re dropped right into the action, much like Mists of Panderia.

The Horde start in Frostfire Ridge, a frozen area with towering volcanoes. They’ll get wrapped up in a conflict between two competing Orc clans, the Frostwolf and Thunderlord. They’ll also battle Ogres to claim the Bladespire Fortress as the Horde’s expansion base.

The Alliance begin in Shadowmoon Valley, changed (or unchanged) drastically from the way it looked in the Burning Crusade expansion. It’s an area always bathed in darkness, filled with rolling, moonlit hills. It’s the home of Karabor (eventually the Black Temple), the holy temple of the Draenei. The Alliance battle the Iron Horde to free the city to use as their base.

The Plot Thickens, Spills Over

From these first steps into old Draenor, players will embark on a quest that culminate in a battle with a big bad. During the panel Chris Metzen stressed that that big bad wasn’t Garrosh. “He’s the guy behind the guy.” That battle will spill over into the next, unannounced expansion, the first of many Blizzard has lined up as World of Warcraft encroaches on ten years of operation.

Broforce is one of those games. Graphically not spectacular and the concept is very simple and borrows heavily from cliches… yet maybe just because it doesn’t take itself seriously and has some interesting gameplay mechanics it just somehow seems to work.

Broforce is a multiplayer side-scrolling indie action game from the studio Free Lives, and its main central theme is… well, simply ‘MERICA! It’s a complete tribute to the 80s action flick, which means all the enemies are obviously very evil, the levels are very obviously set in jungles abroad, blood sprays everywhere upon impact with an enemy and pretty much everything explodes at some point. Even the playable characters are from that era of movie history (with the exception of a few), and all of them have ‘bro’ somewhere in their name (Robrocop, Indiana Brones, Rambro… it goes on). All of this makes for a very fast-paced and quite manic game. Yet the game still requires some skill to play.

The first few levels are easy enough to just blitz your way through with whatever gun/rocket launcher/ridiculous weapon you have as your character. Each playable character has their own attack set and learning how to best play these characters is one of the skills you need to master in order to be very good at this game. And you’d best learn to handle as many as possible because to gain extra lives in this game you rescue ‘prisoners of war’ being held in animal cages, which then changes what character the rescuer is playing as (it also lets a player bring back a dead teammate if playing with others). Oh, and dying brings you back as another random Broforce member so adaptability is a must here. Rescuing enough ‘extra lives’ though will unlock new and more powerful Broforce members though so it’s worth learning how to use each character for the chance to unlock these characters.

Another thing that needs mastering is learning when to blitz forward and when to wait and judge situations. Some later enemies can only be beaten in certain ways and some ‘rooms’ are set up so that you need really quick reflexes in order to escape without becoming a bloodsplatter yourself. Those ‘extra lives’ run out a lot quicker than you’d think they do, especially if you allow yourself to get carried away in the fast-pacing of the levels. Another ability that all Broforce members share but can only be triggered in multiplayer mode is that a high-five somehow triggers… bullet time. It’s ridiculous but also utterly wonderful.

Right now the game is through Steam Greenlight and the developers are attempting to get extra funding before the game is released in Beta by offering pre-orders with the chance to get early access to the game before it comes out, when it will be arpound £4.99 and support up to 4 players. The pre-order money is being spent on further developing the game and recently a trailer showing ‘bro’ versions of characters from the Matrix joining in with the rest of them and making baddies explode into showers of gore. There’s even a demo version of the game available now if you want to experience the madness of this game for yourself.

Further example of this game’s insanity? Getting to the end of the level triggers a cutscene with a flagpole, your character gets carried away by a chopper as the level below you… explodes. Because why would it do anything else in this game?

Click here for the Demo

Game can be pre-ordered here

Where to start? That must be the big question facing DICE right now as they try and wrangle Battlefield 4 into a stable state. Players have been reporting disconnection errors, freezes, crashes and a smattering of bugs. DICE have tabled a list of fixes they’re working on on the Battlefield 4 forums, which includes a bug that stops server queues from working and various client instability problems.

Players have also been finding some odd errors, YouTubers TeamTooHeavy have posted a video that apparently shows the silencer on the QBU88 muting sound on a server. More worryingly, many players have been reporting netcode issues, which cause a discrepancy between the game logic that denotes where shots are going and when they hit, and what you’re actually seeing on-screen. If netcode’s laggy the game might tell you that you’ve just git a soldier seven times in the chest and been suddenly killed, while from your killer’s perspective he’s rounded the corner and shot you fair and square. Redditor Hickery123 has rounded up some pretty blatant video examples of this happening here.

DICE are patching speedily, thankfully, which marks a change from Battlefield 3 when every patch had to go through Microsoft and Sony bureaucracy. A lot of Battlefield 4’s multiplayer component operates server-side, so they no longer have to deploy updates and downloads to every player’s PC to deal with issues. Battlefield 3 also had some major problems on release, and ended up okay, but it’s a particularly frustrating situation when a big open beta event happened just weeks ago.

The connection issues seem to be affecting 64 player servers more frequently, so you might want to steer clear of those for a while. If the server runs into an error, all of the levelling progress you made during the match will be lost, but reportedly this will suck up XP boost time regardless, so it’s best to save those until the server issues are fixed.

So Path of Exile. A free-to-play MMORPG made by Grinding Gear Games and set in a land of exiles, criminals and morally ambiguous types of all sorts. It’s been out for a little while in Beta and became available on Steam a little while ago and so I thought I’d give it a try.

Before I start, I’ll say that I’m not greatly experienced in this genre of game. MMORPGs to me were always about being really damn good in parties of players and I just never had the time or attention span to grind high enough. However PoE, with its dark world and touches of lore scattered about the world, has me hooked.

The character creation screen is the first bit of the game a new player will see, and immediately it sets up the scene with a voice-over announcement reminding all passengers that they’re on a one-way trip to the exile’s land of Wraeclast to reflect on their crimes against whatever rulers or gods are worshipped back home. There are six different class choices to choose from originally, aligned around three attributes: Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence. The classes to be chosen from are Ranger (Dex), Marauder (Str), Witch (Int), Duellist (Str/Dex), Shadow (Dex/Int) and Templar (Str/Int) with there being a quest-unlockable seventh class called the Scion that has equal ability in all three attributes. However, besides being able to change the League you play your character in (which has an effect on mob levels and who you play with) there isn’t a lot more customisation you can do at this point; although this can be excused as the game is still in Beta at time of writing.

However there is customisation available to you by way of items, skill gems you can fit into the sockets on items and through choosing to spend the skill points you acquire through leveling-up on one of the largest skill trees I’ve seen. As you level up, you can choose to unlock bonuses such as more life or dex which will in turn unlock better, stronger skills higher up the tree. I’ve only played to a few levels with my Ranger character, but I’ve seen other more experienced players talking about the best ‘builds’ of classes. Whether to go for speed or for health, or maybe both equally. Forward planning to build a character skill-wise is certainly something I could get interested in.

Items as well will be different from character to character because mobs don’t always drop something and when they do, it’s random what they drop. If you pick up armour too and don’t already have an item of that sort equipped already it will auto-equip your character too, which is useful in the midst of battle with seven cannibals at once. However you won’t have better stuff equipped if you’ve already got something in that slot so it does pay to check your stuff against your Inventory every now and then. The other thing about items in this game is that given the environment of Wraeclast, gold and silver coins are not available. You can instead trade things with other players and certain NPCs for other items that can do everything from revealing unknown properties of some items to refining them to transforming them into something else random (not that I was ever brave enough to try that last one). You can also ‘Stash’ items in a special chest that you want to keep but don’t want taking up room in your limited inventory space. Extra stash space is one of the few micro-transactions I’m aware of in this game, and from what I can tell, probably the most popular of them.

Like most MMORPGs you can choose to form parties and guilds in-game, with guilds coming with their own Stash chests for items to be shared about. I joined Lone in game for about an hour or so and while I do wish we’d had voice options in-game (there might be some, I just didn’t find them) it was quite fun to team up and have a health bar so I could see how my team-mate was doing. Especially as we were on equal footing, with Lone being melee and myself being range we had a good monster fighting balance.

Overall then, PoE is quite a good game, especially as being a free-to-play means it’s good value. If nothing else, it’s made me who usually avoids this game genre want to keep on playing. And that’s got to mean something.

Along with many other popular and easily accessible multiplayer games, Minecraft is a commonly chosen medium in which many smaller video makers and players in general will make videos with. This can take the more traditional form of screen captured footage being edited into videos which are then uploaded the the video sharing website of choice or live events can be held in which the footage is broadcast to an audience ‘live’ with a few seconds delay. Both generally require the ‘camera person’ to own and be able to use additional programs that run alongside the game, and this can eat up a computer’s memory. However there might be a solution, for the livestreamers among us as well as the video makers in an indirect fashion.

Today Mojang announced that they are working with popular gaming livestream site, Twitch, to get “native livestreaming support” for both the Mac and PC versions of the game. Twitch has said that it will be a standard implementation with chat and both companies say that the relevant updates should be available to users sometime ‘soon’.

More details should hopefully be emerging soon, but as a video maker I think this could turn out to be a very useful tool. Provided any bugs can be sorted out quickly.