Frontier, creators of popular space ship sim Elite Dangerous have been working on their theme park builder game Planet Coaster for a bit now, and they have announced that the game will be removed from their own store and moved onto Steam for pre-orders as soon as they update the game to the next Alpha stage.

Alpha 3 will be released on August 23rd onto Steam and the early access alpha pass which has been available for purchase through Frontier’s store will be removed a few days later on the 25th. It will instead be replaced with two pre-order options on Steam, meaning that if you want early access you will lose your chance very soon.

If you do want to pre-order though, the standard edition of the game will be available for £26.99/€33.99/$40.99, while the Thrillseeker Edition will contain the game, a golden hat and King Coaster mascot for your in-game avatar, a digital sketchbook and the game’s soundtrack for £29.99/€37.99/$44.99 which isn’t really that much more for a special edition of a game. It will also grant you access to the beta, which is really good.

If you do already have the early access pass, you’ll need a Steam account to continue to play and more information can be found at the FAQ.

It has recently been announced by Creative Assembly that one of their older well received strategy games is about to be ported over to iOS so the game can be played on your iPad.

Rome: Total War will come over the the iPad with most if not all features complete, trading in the PC controls of its PC version in for touchscreen control. The game will come with a full grand campaign and all eleven of the game’s factions will be included and playable. The press release put out says that “Rome: Total War for iPad comes without compromise,” and apparently will be able to handle thousands of on-screen units thanks to “upgraded graphics that take advantage of the iPad’s high-resolution Retina screen.”

Release dates have yet to be announced, but we do know that it will be playable on the first generation iPad Air and iPad mini 2 models, as well as every unit that was released after that. The expansions will also be released for the iPad too but separately in the future at some point.

The world can always use more strategy games, even if they’re re-releases with updated graphics. Nostalgia!

Those who were waiting for No Man’s Sky to release on PC already had to wait a few days more than their Playstation 4-owning fellows, after the game’s release was pushed back only for the PC version but not for the PS4 version. It was only a few days though, so not that bad. What was bad though, was that upon release an awful lot of people were reporting performance issues.

A lot of negative reviews seemed to state the same issues, and sharing of debug logs in the forums seemed to point to the problem being with older CPU architectures. Even those who could get past the title screen seemed to be having some issues with the game’s framerate, leading people to dread that No Man’s Sky was going to be yet another entry into the long list of “games with shitty PC versions.”

Today however the founder of Hello Games Sean Murray has issued a list of fixes for some of the common problems people have been having in the game.

Whilst many people are enjoying No Man’s Sky PC, we are tracking several issues, and working hard to resolve them:https://t.co/LfLWv6qwEC

— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) August 13, 2016

Murray also stated that the team had been working through the night to try and address the older CPU issues, working on a fix for some older AMD Phenoms. He also stated that most issues stemmed from not having Visual C++ Redist 2010 installed, as well as drivers and graphics cards being out of date. He also states that your GPU should support OpenGL 4.5 at least or else you won’t be able to run the game.

As fixes are ongoing, you should check out the dedicated support thread on Steam for any other issues you might be experiencing.

A few were a bit surprised when a sequel to RTS spin off Halo Wars was announced, but for once not a lot of fuss has been made about it. One beta has always been and come, and now another one has been announced for early 2017, which this time will include PC users within it.

The announcement came over Xbox Wire from Dan Ayoub of 343 Industries and said that the test would be for both Xbox One players as last time, but also PC users. The previous test ran during June and gave both 343 and Creative Assembly some feedback that they’re incorporated into this beta test this time around.

“Probably the biggest criticism we heard about the beta was issues with connectivity, de-synchs, etc.  I’m happy to say that, thanks to you, we’ve already addressed these issues in the final game,” said Ayoub in the post. “There are a significant number of individual changes and adjustments being made, including unit tuning, game mode pacing, UI improvements, stability, and flow improvements based on the data we received from the beta.”

When Overwatch launched it’s competitive mode earlier this summer, Blizzard set it up to be a season based mode with rewards for each season. Now, they have revealed the rewards for the first season, as well as details on when that season will end. As posted on the official Overwatch forum,

“Season 1 will officially end on Wednesday, August 17 at 5:00 p.m. PT (August 18 at 12:00 a.m. UTC). For time zone assistance, and to see when Season 1 will end in your region, visit thetimezoneconverter.com.

Season 2 is currently scheduled to launch on September 6, but this could shift as we continue to work on system improvements. We will be sure to share the exact date and time as we get closer to its release.”

While we do know when the season will end, it seems that the start of Season 2 is still up in the air as Blizzard works to make the mode better. Many players (myself included) are anxious to see what they do to replace the “coin flip” sudden death system. Widely panned by players, Blizzard has confirmed it will be removed but have made no comment on what they will replace it with.

Season 1Rewards

The forum post also detailed rewards for Season 1.

“If you completed your placement matches during Season 1, you will eligible to receive a special spray and player icon. These will be unlocked automatically when you log into your account the first time after the season ends. If at any point during the season you managed to break into the Top 500 players on your platform (and in your region), you’ll receive an extra player icon and animated spray on top of the other seasonal rewards.”

It remains to be seen how many players will receive the animated spray and other Top 500 rewards, as you only needed to break into the Top 500 during the season. This means that the pool of players would have been fluid and constantly in flux. It is nice, however, to have some exclusive rewards if you performed in the top percentile of players. In addition to sprays and icons, players will also receive a number of Competitive Points (CP) based on their skill rating (SR) from the season. Skill rating can rise and fall depending on wins and losses, so Blizzard have based the number of CP to be award based on the maximum SR  achieved during the season. The breakdown is as follows:

• SR 0-30: 10 CPs
• SR 40-45: 20 CPs
• SR 46-49: 40 CPs
• SR 50-52: 60 CPs
• SR 53-55: 80 CPs
• SR 56-59: 120 CPs
• SR 60-64: 200 CPs
• SR 65+: 300 CPs

Competitive points are the  currency used to buy golden weapon skins, with each skin costing 300 CPs. Higher tier players will obviously be getting more CPs, with those rank 65 and up basically being able to buy a skin with their season rewards CPs. Lower ranked players can supplement their CP reward with the normal points earned from winning a match: 1 CP per win.  It seems Blizzard is serious about keeping golden weapon skins as exclusive as they can, with only top tier players or those willing to grind able to afford them. That being said, you still have a few days to rank up, so if you’r on the cusp of SR 60, those 80 extra CPs might well be worth the grind.