The Steam Store front page has been overhauled with an makeover Valve is calling Steam Discovery Update Update 2.0.

Obviously you can just, you know, go to Steam to look at it, but Valve has also provided a visual guide to new features.

In the left column you’ll find links to a bunch of useful sections as well as short list of recently-viewed items, which is handy indeed.

The rest of the page is composed of modules like carousels and lists, but what makes them interesting is that every game tile offers quick access to a personalisation menu where you can add a game to your wishlist, mark it as “not interested”, or go off to edit your preferences. This should make it quicker and easier to hone Steam’s recommendations so you see stuff that interests you more often.

The main real estate of the page seems to be devoted to two carousels – one of featured games and another of featured deals. There’s more information on these panels than the old banner ad-style ones. We know Steam front page placement can be vital to the success of PC games so hopefully the new carousels encourage more diverse discovery.

Down below are some big blue buttons – Valve’s description – which give you different ways to browse, and then a section devoted to Steam curators for those who want someone else to help them make purchasing decisions (alas, there’s no “financial advisor” curator who cuts up your credit card and makes you finish doing your budget for the month).

Further down there’s a sub-$10 queue, a second list of deals and offers, and the option to keep browsing recommendations. If you’re logged in, you’ll also see what’s trending among your friends, your personalised discovery queue, and more tailored selections in each module.

Wow, it’s easier than ever to find things to spend your money on. I have very mixed feelings on this. One the one hand, I’ll be so glad to see worthwhile and interesting games getting more love. On the other, I’m desperately going to miss my grocery budget when I start digesting my own organs.

As a lot of you have probably noticed already, there have been some major changes sweeping into Steam overnight. Valve has totally overhauled the Steam store, rejigging just about on the home page in what is presumably an effort to get you all buying more games.

Down on the left column you’ve now got access to a lot more of the most popular Steam pages and game tags, including new releases, VR games, specific genres and tags based on the games you buy and play.

 

Up top the featured section has been rejigged a little. This presents a scrolling selection of 10 games based in a combination of new releases, special offers and genres you may be interested in. Each of the games here now also has a selection of preview screenshots and details on why it was recommended for you. If you head to your account preferences you can actually personalise this to your taste, excluding specific tags or games you’ve marked as ‘not interested’. I’ve already blocked ‘anime titties’ and my life is infinitely better.

Below that you now get the biggest special deals which used to sit in a box on the right-hand side. Rather than scrolling between these they now all sit in a row so you can see them at a glance.

After that it’s an array of curator recommendations, trending among friends, recently updated titles and then, finally, the new releases section. If you’ve been complaining there’s too many releases on Steam you’re now in luck; they’re so far down you’ll probably never get to them.

 

Below this and you can keep scrolling and keep getting recommendations, pretty much forever. It looks like recent Steam sales in this session, presenting an ever changing list based on an algorithm of the games you like / hate but can’t stop playing.

It’s not often I get to bring you news of an ‘un-delay’ but it looks as if Watch Dogs 2 has been brought forward from its November 29th release date on PC, to launch day and date with the PS4 and Xbox One editions on November 15th. That’s two whole more weeks Watch Dogging (ooh er) in the year 2016.

The news, such as it were, comes via a number of sources. Steam, the Ubisoft Store and the US Uplay have all independently been updated to "Available November 15 on PS4, Xbox One & PC". Ubisoft previously said Watch Dogs 2 would be coming to PC on November 29th, saying this was “To ensure that these and other features are polished and optimized to meet the development team’s standards, the PC version of Watch Dogs 2 will now be released on November 29.”

There is no official confirmation from Ubisoft on the matter, but you’d suspect it wouldn’t go changing its release date at the last minute if this wasn’t happening.

Potentially great news for PC players if true. It’s always a little disheartening to see console players jump in early so any parity is good news. What it does also do however is heap pressure on Ubisoft to push out a very capable PC version. If it performs like it could have done with another few weeks in the oven for the some fine-tuning and bug testing, fans are going to question why Ubisoft didn’t stick to the original schedule.

Would you like to see Watch Dogs 2 come out a fortnight earlier than you expected on PC? Or would you like to see Ubisoft give itself more time to optimise PC performance and push out the best version if possibly can? Let us know!

The Division’s 1.5 update and its upcoming Survival expansion have gone live on the PTS (Public Test Server), Ubisoft has announced. This is the first we’ve heard of what Survival actually is, and on the surface it sounds absolutely awesome. 24 players are dropped onto the outskirts of The Division’s city limit and must make it to the centre in order to retrieve life-saving antiviral drugs. Everyone starts in a different spot and with no gear, tasked with making it the centre within two hours.

As you may have guessed, Survival is all about, well, survival. On top of your usual concerns in The Divison, you must also wrap up warm against the cold (all clothing items now have a warmth rating), eat food to keep hunger at bay, drink water to stay hydrated, and take medication to avoid falling sick. Let any of these slip and you’ll face varying effects from slow health regeneration to limited vision and, eventually, death.

Throughout the city you’ll be able to scavenge for these resources along with better gear and loot. In this sense The Division - Survival is a little like a roguelike, each match starting you with nothing and tasking you with making it as far as you can. You start with no skills and only the most basic weapons and clothes.

For those who don’t want to go full Battle Royale, there is a choice between PvP and PvE modes. If you opt for PvE you will get less points, although you are still battling with other players over scarce resources.

I have to say from what I’m hearing this sounds all sorts of cool. Dropping players in with next to nothing levels the playing field so it should also be great for newcomers as well. Ubisoft has said there’s going to be no level requirements for accessing Survival.

It feels like the last six days since the Mass Effect: Andromeda N7 teaser trailer was revealed have been an eternity, but rejoice dear companions, the reveal has finally happened upon us. It turns out that what we were waiting for in the Andromeda Initiative was in fact, as some of you might of guessed, a brand spanking new cinematic trailer. With the right amount of tease, right amount of info and the perfect amount of loud foreboding music, this trailer made our hairs stand on end here at GD.

Before we get into it, why don't you check it out yourself, headphones recommended:

Everything We Can get From The Trailer So Far

So first off we’re told of the initial situation our spacey chums find themselves. After hundreds of years of being suspended in time they finally arrive at our neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy, it seems, in the hope of starting a new life. What, will this entail for the characters that will accompany us? Maybe looking to escape their pasts or possibly just with pious intent? While also, having been frozen for hundreds of years, could this possibly mean that we could see some crossovers from the previous trilogy? Having been set at least 400 years before this one definitely gives it a possibility.
We find out that we will likely be playing as the character dubbed the pathfinder in ME: Andromeda, or at least someone who finds paths at some point, not much can be learnt from this (other than it just kinda sounds badass) but could maybe hint into some form of destiny your character is apart of. The Alien voice stating “Now I know what makes you… special” definitely seem to imply this. While the characters confusion during many parts might be telling us that there is something well beyond their knowledge going on.
We got confirmation of your new ship, The Tempest, and your new planetary rover, the Nomad (the new incarnation of the original Mako) here’s hoping it’ll control a little better than its ancestor.
Everyone we see who isn't part of the group doesn’t appear to be any type of alien that we’ve seen before, maybe this means we’ll get a whole new roster of alieny chums, or in fact there maybe a complete galaxy baron of anyone you can chill out and chat about things with.
There seems to be some big old beasties you can tangle with, like an alien gorilla bear near the start of the trailer and an absolutely massive flying sand snake you can hopefully have a pop at some point. Following off the last two bullet points, maybe this Mass Effect will be more about planet exploration in your Nomad and going toe to toe with slobbering alien beasts than its mostly corridor based shooting shenanigans, who knows?

Well for now that's all the speculation we can come up with right now for the elusive Mass effect 4 based off this trailer. Sadly, there’s no official release date announced #jonwasright, but hopefully we should see it rear it’s head at some point, our guess is the game probably still has quite a way to go and so the folks over at BioWare don’t want to make any promises just yet.

 

Bethesda has pushed out a beta 1.1 patch for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Special Edition, tackling a number of key performance issues and quashing the sound quality problem which managed to slip through Bethesda’s notoriously creaky bug testing process.

In terms of the latter, Skyrim - Special Edition had sound quality lower than the 2011 original on both PC and Xbox One. This was down to over-compressing the audio rather than an attempt from Bethesda to de-master Skyrim, so you should now notice a boost in sound quality. Unless you’re gaming with a pair of tinny speakers that sound like they're submerged in the Mariana Trench.

Onto performance and Bethesda promises a general boost in frame rates and performance across a variety of hardware setups. In our Skyrim - Special Edition benchmarks we found it performed pretty great anyway though, and can even be pushed to 4K with comparative ease by some of Nvidia’s more powerful GeForce GTX 10 Series graphics cards.

Skyrim - Special Edition 1.1.51 Patch Notes

FIXES
General performance and optimization improvements
Fixed rare issue with NPCs not appearing in proper locations
Fixed issue with saves erroneously being marked as Moddded, even though no mods are active
Updated some sound files to not use compression

To grab this update you will have opt into the beta branch of Skyrim - Special Edition.

To do this, right click Skyrim Special Edition in your Steam library and select ‘Settings’.

Select the ‘Betas’ tab.

In the drop down menu select ‘beta - 1.1.51 Beta Update’

Close the window and the Skyrim beta patch will download. It’s approximately 945MB.

How have you found your first week with the Skyrim Special Edition? Have you got lost in Tamriel all over again?

Have you been sat there wondering if your PC has what it takes to be able to whisk you off to the world of Virtual Reality? Is your PC VR ready? It’s an expensive gamble to buy a headset and just find out the hard way, but not to worry Futuremarks’s on the horizon. Futuremark has recently released VRMark, their new and improved benchmarker for VR, complete with two tests that can be done on monitor or on a connected VR set so you can find out with ease if your rig cuts the mustard headset or without. And hey, guess what, there’s a free version! We couldn't help but let you know.

Featuring two rooms, imaginatively called the Blue Room and Orange Room (see if you can guess why from the video below) the orange tests to see if your computer can handle the recommended requirements for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, while the Blue Room cranks it up to 11 with all the bells and whistles turned on. Passing the Blue Room means that your rig can handle the highest settings at 60FPS on VR games out today.

With an easy to digest yay or nay to VR after each test and genuinely just a beautiful experience regardless, this benchmark is well worth a look. You can get the Free version which allows you to use the Orange Room, allowing you to test your rig without any of the hassle of actually having a headset as well as being able to enjoy the Orange Experience Mode that allows you to wander around for fun. While if you want entrance into the Blue Room, to really put your PC through it’s paces ,it currently cost $19.99, this version also comes with the Blue Experience mode as well as access to custom settings.