The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim -- Hearthfire Announced

Bethesda has revealed the next major downloadable content for Skyrim, called Hearthfire. Unlike the vampire-hunting focus of the last add-on, Dawnguard, Hearthfire doesn't seem to do much to enhance combat. Instead, with Hearthfire you'll be able to purchase a piece of land in Skyrim and build your own house.

Within the custom living space you'll be able build kitchens, greenhouses, libraries, alchemy labs and trophy rooms to show off your accomplishments. Outside it sounds like you'll be able to set up gardens, fish hatcheries and beehives to make resource collection a little more convenient. You can also hire a steward to help out with household tasks.

Hearthfire will also allow you to adopt children and take care of them while they live at your home. Bethesda has set the price of Hearthfire at 400 Microsoft Points and plans to release it on September 4 on Xbox Live.

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Why Games That Make YOU a Developer Are a Crucial Part of the Future

The level of connectivity we’ve reached this generation has brought with it a lot of undesirable side-effects. Day one patches. On-disc content sold back to us as downloadable content. Multiplayer that empowers and unleashes the biggest jerks mankind has to offer.

But it’s not without its benefits, and the rise and rise of user-generated content is one of them. More and more games are beginning to embrace the power of user-generated content, or UGC.

LittleBigPlanet developer Media Molecule recently announced that a staggering seven million levels had been created by users for the series. LittleBigPlanet players have made the game exponentially larger than any one studio could ever attempt to make, or any one gamer could ever hope to play. The Forza franchise has built on entire online in-game economy on the buying and selling of car designs players create themselves. Forza owners can choose from thousands upon thousands of custom and replica liveries that have been crafted by other fans with no input from developer Turn 10 whatsoever.

If you can think of a famous race car, somebody has probably already recreated it in Forza 4.

However, while UGC that’s basically indistinguishable from similar studio-created content may look like an attractive way to have users help offset the soaring costs of AAA development, there’s far more to it than that.

“It’s definitely a nice add-on to the main game, but it’s also one that has to be thought out carefully right from the start of the game,” says Antti Ilvessuo, creative director at RedLynx and lead designer of Trials Evolution. “It’s no silver bullet that you can just throw in there and think, ‘Hey this will make our game popular.’”

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It’s no silver bullet that you can just throw in there and think, ‘Hey this will make our game popular.’

“Games and how we play them are changing really rapidly nowadays, so how you define user generated content changes also. Letting users create stuff for a game is definitely a big part of the future of games. I think a big part of that will be creating content creation in way that users don’t notice that what they are doing is creating a lot of the game’s content.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Bigpoint’s Rune Vendler, game director on the browser-based free-to-play Gameglobe – a game built entirely around the concept of UGC.

“I don't really think of user-generated content as a shortcut to cheap labour, almost the opposite,” says Vendler. “With Gameglobe, the goal was to design a platform where being creative did not feel like hard work, but an entertaining activity in itself.”

“Putting user-generated content into a product massively changes it. Once it went live, it was obvious that we, the developers, were no longer the sole owners of Gameglobe; it's as if the game itself is now owned just as much by the community, and they get to decide a great deal about how the game evolves. For a lot of AAA games, you can't or won't share that kind of control with the users.”

John Drake, Director of Communications & Brand Management at Harmonix Music Systems, looks at UGC success stories as falling into two groups; games that let users share and/or sell created content (like the Rock Band Network) and games that drive users to create as a fundamental part of the experience. Drake cites games like Minecraft, LittleBigPlanet, and Sound Shapes as great examples of the latter.

“Both approaches have big wins and inherent limitations,” says Drake.

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If you can give players agency to not only engage in a world but actively create within that world, your universe will be infinitely richer.

“I hope we see companies continue to evolve and embrace user-driven content as a strategy. When it's done right, ‘formal UGC’ – as opposed to general modding done outside the structure of a game – embraces the fact that games are inherently an interactive expression. If you can give players agency to not only engage in a world but actively create within that world, your universe will be infinitely richer.

“Though UGC certainly isn't a perfect fit for every title, I think it's a gamble we'll see more games willing to take as the medium evolves. The value UGC adds to a game goes beyond simple monetisation of a mechanic.

“UGC empowers the player, enriches a community, and makes a game come to life with the passion of its fans. I don't think gamers should pin all of our hopes on it, especially since designing these systems can be as time-consuming and expensive as building more assets in studio, but I think it's an exciting area to be optimistic about.”

As John Drake pointed out to us, RBN is most certainly NOT 'Baby's First Rock Band Authoring Toy'.

So why is it that more studios haven’t quite embraced this model of conscripting fans to create canyons full of content as well as others?  Are there risks in letting users make and share their own content?

“Allowing for user-generated content is limited by your game’s style,” says RedLynx’s Antti Ilvessuo. “For example, a game that is story driven would need new content that somehow fits into the rest of the game. Then there are issues about game balance, and you have to have a way to monitor and check content for stuff that is offensive. So the game style also has to be the right fit for user-generated content.”

“But still, content creation can be made possible in numerous ways. It’s just not an easy thing to do.”

Bigpoint’s Rune Vendler agrees that the process is not a simple one.

“I don't want to speculate about other studios' development plans, but I don't believe you can conscript anyone to create content,” he says. “Users have to want to make it, and have fun doing so.”

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Users have to want to make it, and have fun doing so.

“Creating a game that supports user-generated content well is not trivial. The creative tools in Gameglobe have taken a long time to develop, and are of a completely different quality than what we're used to internally. The infrastructure needed to host and serve the content is substantial, and the technology to drive it all is complex.

"Once we got Gameglobe working, however, it was an amazing experience. We're giving people the freedom to create games and express themselves in a way many didn't think possible. Of course, they can misbehave, but with Gameglobe we've found that almost everyone reacts very positively to being handed this freedom.”

Harmonix’s John Drake also gives us a similar response.

“There are practical realities that keep UGC from being baked into every game,” he says. “Building tools that are accessible to the average player is a massive design challenge, supporting UGC systems for an evolving audience in perpetuity is expensive, curating the excellent from the average can be a struggle, and it's a big gamble that your audience will show up and be excited to create.

Drake points out that crafting a system that truly compels users to create “can't just be about ‘conscripting fans’ and crowdsourcing content.”

“For UGC to really take off, a developer needs to understand what fans love about the game in question, where they'd want to take it if they could, and how to build a pipeline to connect those desires in an accessible and decipherable way.”

“Oh, and then they need to build all those tools and ensure it doesn't absolutely break the core product that it's meant to extend,” adds Drake. “I'm thrilled, for example, that Rock Band Network tracks will work in Rock Band Blitz when it launches this August , but it meant testing for weird edge cases like, ‘What if the song only has drums and guitar?’; cases created by the breadth of content in RBN.”

The payoff for UGC done right, however, can be hugely satisfying.

“It's incredible to see what people have done in the Rock Band Network,” says Drake. “This was a professional suite of tools and standards and, to make it into Rock Band, we expected folks to rise to that level.”

“We had some reservations about whether people would want to invest that amount of time and energy, but all our concerns were silenced when we launched. The enthusiasm was palpable, and the community really self-enforced a quality bar beyond expectations.”

At this point there are over 1,800 tracks available on the RBN, available to Rock Band fans around the world.

“We've had big bands add extra tracks via this system and burgeoning acts find a really passionate audience of rhythm gamers,” says Drake. “It launched us way beyond where we expected, expanding the volume of content we could have ever created for the Rock Band audience at Harmonix.”

“The team who built the Rock Band Network are fans ourselves, so it's infinitely satisfying to see a community form around these creative tools. Harmonix built the system, but the network is really driven and owned by the community of Rock Band authors, and they're doing amazing things.”

It’s tracks of a different sort being built by fans in Trials Evolution, but the RedLynx team are no less amazed at what their biggest fans can put together.

“We as developers are always really surprised at some of the amazing things that our users have created,” says Ilvessuo. “It’s really humbling to see stuff that you never thought possible when making game made by users. It is definitely very satisfying too, to be sure.”

Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can chat to him about games, cars and how Rock Band is a great way to give a four-year-old great taste in music here or find him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.

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Guild Wars 2: The End Game

Right after creating a character and taking your first steps into Guild Wars 2 you’ll be able to participate in what’s essentially end game content. Player versus player arenas can be accessed at any time to hop into short-duration battles between two teams. Or you could drop into the World versus World system, a large, persistent battlefield where armies from three different servers compete for supremacy. You’ll fight for control of numerous types of structures, from lowly supply camps to heavily defended forts, build siege equipment and take part in battles with huge groups of players.

To solve the problem of power imbalance between low level and high level players all in the same combat space, ArenaNet bumps your character to 80 as soon as you enter into WvW. “If you come in at level two we basically adjust you up to what a level eighty would be like stat-wise,” said Mike Ferguson, systems designer at ArenaNet. “It’s not like most games that have PvP is across wide levels where it’s like ‘Oh, I’m five levels above you, I’m just going to smash you and kill you in one hit.’ We’ve tried to make it so that everyone can feel competitive at the same time but still have that kind of on-going progression. We don’t want is for people to feel like you have to be in level eighty for the real game to start.”

Making this experience comprehensible to a new player has also been a challenge for ArenaNet. “We’ve added some things like instructors right when you get into the World versus World maps,” said Ferguson. “As you load in there’s a guy there with a little chalkboard over his head that you can talk to and he explains how the game works. What we’ve seen is people will just hop in and someone will notice they have a commander mark over their head and everyone will go to it like a moth to a flame. Then they’ll start running around with a group there and people will start learning the tactics. And after a couple of hours, people just kind of understand how to play naturally.”

Though there’s a lot of complexity to the skill system, its intricacies might be drowned out by the chaos of huge groups swarming into each other and using superior numbers overwhelm all else. ArenaNet hopes to curb the effectiveness of this ‘zerging’ tactic through a variety of objectives and methods to alter the tide of battle.  “We have so many objectives on every map,” said Ferguson. “Starting out with the supply camps, they can get flipped with one or two people if they’re really good. Or two or three people if you need a little extra help at lower levels. So sure, you can take sixty people and just run across the map like a mindless horde, but you’re only going to be able to take one point at a time. A team that actually coordinates is going to be able to set up siege weapons at choke points and be like ‘Okay, they’re at that keep, let’s just go take everything around that keep’. So zerging is effective but what we’ve seen is zerging is generally the first step of acceptance into the game. It’s the easiest thing for people to understand. You’re just in a big group, you’re running around, don’t really know what’s going on but [you’re] doing stuff. And then you start picking it up.”

According to ArenaNet, setting up things like siege weapons can have a huge effect on battles, so paying attention to the details of WvW play can really pay off. “One of the things we saw coming out of the [beta weekend events] is we were watching all the videos pop up on YouTube and you would see these guys, they would set up two ballistas on top of a wall or on top of like a ledge looking over a big fight and nobody on the ground was actually paying any attention,” said Ferguson. “These guys were up there just cackling and destroying people. A ballista will two-shot somebody in most cases. So within four or five seconds you’re taking down people and if they don’t come after you, you’re just going to sit there and tear them apart. Siege weapons are our equalizer.”

These weapons can also be effective while trying to break into enemy-controlled structures. “You’ve got flame rams, which set up right on the doors. You can stack a couple of those to bring the doors down really quickly, and they also have a secondary skill of a flame burst. The flame burst applies burning to anyone that hits it and it also gives you fear. So if you set the flame ram up, you can hit that flame burst so the fear chases them away and gives you a better chance to kill them and keep them from reinforcing the location. Trebuchets are kind of the opposite. They’re way far away but they can do a lot of damage to walls and gates so you can set two or three up on a ledge and just keep pounding away at a keep. And eventually [the enemy team is] going to run out of supply to keep repairing stuff so you’re going to knock the wall down.”

On the WvW map you won’t fight only players, but also computer-controlled enemies, which ArenaNet feels could be a good way for newcomers terrified by the idea of purchasing and operating siege equipment to get accustomed to the map and flow of gameplay. “The PvE events act as a little bit of a bridge between the normal PvE game and PvP,” said Ferguson. “There are some ambient creatures running around that you can use to level up or gain loot. And there are also mercenary camps. There’s, say, a camp of ogres and you need to help protect them against the harpies, which involves killing the harpies, destroying their nests and things like that. Once you actually befriend them then they’ll send out NPCs, like ogres, to go to the nearby locations so that they can help attack like supply camps or towers and give you extra reinforcement. So if you’re a single player you can go in there and kind of take that camp over and all of a sudden you’ve got like four or five ogre buddies running with and you can go in and take that camp that’s right next to the ogre camp.”

In case the concept of wide open battles bristling with ballista fire and mobs of kill-crazy players is still too intimidating, Guild Wars 2 also offers dungeons throughout the leveling experience in the level 1 – 80 world. Dungeons are playable in either Story or Explorable modes, and picking one adjusts the degree of challenge and the path from beginning to end. When you first find a dungeon, Story is the best mode to play, because with a somewhat organized you should be able to knock out the end boss and reap the rewards. Explorable mode is meant for more advanced players in more coordinated group.

“The vast majority of our fan base can go through Story if they wish to,” said ArenaNet’s Kevin Millard. “It’s easier, not trivial, but it is easier than the Explorable mode. Explorable mode is designed to be extremely difficult. We expect that a small percentage of our fan base will jump into Explorable dungeons.”

Millard explained how that difference in challenge level was designed, in terms of boss encounters in particular. “In story mode, what we’re going for is making the players think and discover a neat strategy. So for example, it might be as simple as when [the boss is] holding his sword above his head, you need to be far away from him. When he’s not holding his sword above his head you need to be close to him. That’d be a very simple boss mechanic that we would use in an early dungeon, or possible for a lesser boss. Another example is there’s the Story dungeon boss that has little wolves all around that you can’t normally fight, and the boss occasionally turns one of the characters into a cat. And you’re stuck as a cat until you hunt down one of the wolves and kill it, and when you do you transform back. So there’s strategy there, being a cat means the boss isn’t hitting you, right? So maybe this is an opportunity to heal up. So we want you to think and have strategy but we don’t want it to be overwhelmingly difficult.”

“When we move onto Explorable, we want to keep that same strategy but we want it to sort of be razor thin. If you don’t do everything in exactly the right order at exactly the right time, you’re going to die. So you need to develop a much tighter group. We expect that if you’re in Explorable you’re communicating with voice communication, you’re probably in a guild together and that you know each other, and this isn’t the first time you’ve gone through this. It is theoretically possible to pick up group through an Explorable. In fact, I assume lots of people will. But you probably need to wait until other groups have pioneered through it, you know, written strategy guides and such.”

“Our goal is when you approach especially the major boss fights in the dungeon, we want you to stop and we want you to think.”

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Ghost Recon: Future Soldier Raven Strike DLC Announced

Ubisoft has announced new single-player downloadable content for Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. Called Raven Strike, the pack will add three new missions and one new Guerilla Mode map, each playable by up to four players.

One new mission, Secure Dawn, will take place in “a foggy marsh in Kazakhstan” and will block use of advanced technology (meaning no optical camouflage, drones or sensor grenades). Other missions include Cold Walker, set in “a train depot on the Russian countryside” and Argent Thunder, “a night time urban setting in Moscow.” The new Guerilla Mode map, Sawmill, will have players facing off against 50 waves of enemies “on a foggy Russian countryside.”

Raven Strike will be available for $14.99 (1200 Microsoft Points) on September 11th for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A PC version will be available “at a later date.” For a closer look, check out four new screenshots in our Ghost Recon: Future Soldier image gallery.

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier received multiplayer downloadable content called Arctic Strike last month. Ubisoft notes that “the Ghost Recon: Future Soldier development team is hard at work on further DLC content planned for release later this fall.”

Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s associate news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following him on Twitter or IGN.

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On the Brink of a New World of Warcraft

To prepare World of Warcraft players for the new content in Mists of Pandaria, patch 5.0.4 will be deployed before the expansion’s September 25 launch date and change around many major systems. This includes a dramatic overhaul of each class’ talent tree, condensing the current branching system into what Blizzard hopes is a better alternative, where every 15 levels you pick one of three talents to customize your class.

“Say I’m a fire Mage online today,” said Ion Hazzikostas, lead encounter designer. “I probably spent thirty-three points in the fire tree and twenty-eight or twenty-nine of those points are being spent on things like ‘oh, your fireball hits harder,’ ‘oh, you have pyroblast now.’ Those weren’t very interesting choices. Those weren’t really choices at all. They were just the things you were expected to spend. If you somehow managed to not take those, you were just hurting yourself. So we got rid of those, but we actually just gave them to you for free. So the player who logs in as a fire Mage is still going to be a fire Mage, is still going to have pyroblast. It’s not going to be a foreign, unsettling experience.”

The new talents are meant to let players make decisions without really hurting their combat efficiency. “I think they’re going to find some interesting choices that really let them set themselves apart and differentiate themselves from other players of the same class and spec in the game. If they want to be more mobile, if they want to be more defensive, if they want to have more offensive crowd control. They can customize themselves in a way that layers on top of what’s already in place.”

Changes to many of the classes, some of which are significant, will be rolled in with the patch as well to let players get familiar with the altered mechanics before Pandaria is released. “Some have really just had balance adjustments, got a couple new abilities, had some streamlining,” said Hazzikostas. “Others, such as the Warlock, have been more heavily overhauled. In all cases we take efforts to preserve a lot of the core that players expect and are used to with the classes.”

“I wonder about the Hunters and the removal of the ranged slot,” said John Lagrave, lead producer. “The bow is now the main hand. Whether the Hunters go, ‘what the hell, I need my polearm too.’ We’ll see.”

With so much changing, Blizzard also looked back at existing systems and in some cases made cuts in order to keep everything from spiraling into chaos. “We removed resistances from the game. There’s no elemental resists any more,” said Hazzikostas. “Years ago, you crafted resistance gear and that was part of the progression. You needed to get a full set of shadow resist gear before you could fight Mother Shahraz in Black Temple, but we haven’t made that type of gear in a while and it was just a buff that players cast. So we just assumed that you have Blessing of Kings and Mark of the Wild that gives you resist all. So you’re taking less damage from all these attacks, but you also have these five numbers on your character sheet that are adding to noise and really potentially confusing. So we took that out. That also means, though, if nothing else changes, you’re going to take about fifteen percent more damage from every elemental attack in the game, which means we go through and adjust those elemental attacks so we’re not making the game harder for players.”

“Suddenly you’re not just dead,” said Lagrave.

“That’s one of the great challenges of a game as expansive as World of Warcraft,” continued Hazzikostas. “It’s very difficult to just touch one thing without their being ripple effects that you have to take into account across the entire game.”

Also in the patch will be a Scenario, a new type of story-focused dungeon that doesn’t require the standard healer / tank / DPS group composition to complete.  Lagrave explained the Scenario will link the events in the existing world to the events of the soon to be added continent of Pandaria. “There’s a version for both the Horde and the Alliance, that starts the story of what has happened since the Destroyer’s end. After Deathwing’s fall, what does the world turn back to? Of course, the world turns back to hating each other. The Horde and the Alliance start fighting again.”

Then moving into Pandaria and beyond launch, Blizzard sees Scenarios as a better way to deliver focused stories. “As a vehicle it allows us to further along whatever plotline we want to go with,” said Lagrave. “We know that everyone will have a chance to see it because any three of us can queue up for a scenario and boom, we’re in. Three tanks can do it, three healers can do it, it doesn’t matter what your group composition is.”

“In many cases they occupy and expand upon a niche that previously might have been filled by some of our more involved outdoor quest experiences, events that were kind of multi-stage things,” said Hazzikostas. “Those can be very tricky to do in the open world where you have player interactions. In an instanced version of that, we can really set up a multi-stage quest event where this village is going to be attacked and you’re setting up defenses. We’ve done things like that in the open world before, we can give players a better experience when it’s an instanced version. Once we move away from the DPS, healer trinity as it’s called, players suddenly use all kinds of abilities they would never find an occasion to use in instances. You’re suddenly using CC [crowd control] all the time, because as a Rogue there isn’t someone to tank for you and something’s actually hitting you. So you stun it, you gouge it or you fear it. That gives the combat a very unique feel. We’re looking forward to expanding on the system in the future.”

Lagrave provided more detail. “The big challenge we had in outdoor events like that was, when those things go live you have fifty, a hundred people trying to do that event. So everybody’s trying to click on the NPC to get up the dialogue to get it started. It really is a cluster***. You don’t really have a sense of what’s going on because it’s more important for you to step through the process rather than enjoy the experience. Because if I don’t get going on this, all these people are going to stop me from progressing. [Scenarios] allow you, the player, to spend the time to go through the content at a reasonable pace and get what we’re trying to tell you.”

Blizzard has been making changes large and small over the course of the Mists of Pandaria closed beta testing period, which started up this past March. Blizzard found that the starting experience on the new continent of Pandaria, home to the Pandaren race and all the level 85 through 90 questing content, wasn’t quite up to the proper quality level. So during testing the beginning sections on Pandaria were closed off and Blizzard took one month to alter the experience to better reflect the growing animosity between Alliance and Horde. “Previously you just landed on the shore. Now you come in, depending on your faction, as part of a massive assault. Whether you’re in a gunship bombarding an Alliance encampment or you’re doing a strafing run in an Alliance gyrocopter on a Horde fleet, and you really get that feel of conflict between factions. You see one of the main themes of Pandaria is war, the consequences of war.”

Outside of the main questing content, Blizzard is adding plenty of extras into the game, such as a Pokemon-like pet battle system, which lets players create teams of pets and battle others. It’s a system build just for fun – battling with pets will not serve as a method of progression for your character – but even so, Blizzard has been balancing the gameplay to try and ensure it remains interesting for those excited to try it. “Our players are great about sitting there and hammering on a system and letting us know ‘this is broken’ or ‘this is way OP [overpowerd]. They love to tell us what’s OP,” said Lagrave.

“There was a cockroach that had an ability, I think it was called Apocalypse,” said Hazzikostas, “that basically killed everything after X turns. Everything that’s not a cockroach dies. And it’s like, ‘yeah ok, multi-target death touch is maybe not the most balanced ability,’ even if there’s a delay of a few turns. Sometimes, some our more creative ideas, that’s what play testing iteration is for.”

The cockroach Apocalypse ability has since been removed. “We have a ton of new pets in the game as well,” said Lagrave. “We want people to go out there and explore and  trap new pets and not just run after one thing.”

In case you’d rather take on something a little more grand in scale than a pet battle, Blizzard is also adding two outdoor world bosses to Pandaria. “They fill slightly different niches,” said Hazzikostas. “The Sha of Anger in Kun-Lai Summit is this massive, towering Sha. Whenever it’s up, you can see it from pretty much anywhere in the zone. It’s the size of a mountain.  That one actually respawns every two hours. It drops from a large random pool of raid loot and PvP loot, so it’s going to be attractive to all players regardless of play style, but it’s designed to be accessible because it respawns so frequently. You can only actually loot it once per week.”

“The other boss is Salyis’s Warband. It’s a band of saurok lizardmen that are riding on the back of a gigantic mushan. A mushan is a beast that’s unique to Pandaria, it’s kind of like a green lizard kodo. That is also pretty much the size of a small town. It has about a dozen lizardmen on its back and huge cannons that it uses to bombard villages in the Valley of the Four Winds. That respawns every three to five days. It has unique loot. We expect it to be very hotly contested. We look forward to seeing, particularly on PvP servers, how that’s going to play out.”

So what kind of group will you need to successfully take out the Warband? “It’s designed for a group somewhere around in the teens,” said Hazzikostas. But you’re going to want to bring more people because you want to kill it faster before someone else comes to gank you. You can have ten people fighting off the gankers while the rest of the people actually kill the boss. For the world bosses we’re also using our new loot system. That is personalized loot. Your chances of getting a reward for the target are independent of the number of people in the raid and class compositions. So if I’m a Paladin, it doesn’t matter if there are six other Paladins in this raid group with me. When I kill the boss, I get my own personal roll. If it’s a success, then I will get an item that’s usable by my spec. That means there isn’t an incentive to keep the boss to yourselves with the fewest number of people possible.”

Are you looking forward to pet battles and world bosses, or have you moved on from World of Warcraft?

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Steam Updates Groups, Enhances Content Management

Valve has announced more new updates to the Steam Community, making changes to group pages as well as how users manager their uploaded content. Valve says that over 2.5 million groups have been created, and their pages will now receive an entirely new layout, adding a group overview, friend showcase and new group discussions.

Discussions can be public or private and users will have “complete moderator control” over their own groups, including the ability to create sub-forums, add moderators and delete posts. Groups can also list their favorite games and a default language can be set.

Valve has also added a new way to keep track of screenshots, replays, videos linked from YouTube, workshop Items and Workshops on your profile page. All content will be available for users to display or manage, with an image wall that will offer multiple ways to view your uploaded screenshots. Players will also be able to favorite screenshots in order to find them later or share them with friends.

Today is the third day of a week’s worth of Community updates that Valve is rolling out this week. The first update came on Monday with the introduction of Game Hubs. For more details about all of the new features, check out the Steam Community’s official site.

Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s associate news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following him on Twitter or IGN.

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Mass Effect 3: Leviathan DLC Announced, Wii U Launch Title

During its summer showcase today, EA officially announced Mass Effect 3’s Leviathan downloadable content. According to EA, the content allows players to “discover more about the origins of the Reapers as they race across the galaxy to unravel the mystery that surrounds the fabled Leviathan.” It'll pack new planets and characters, but you'll still play as Commander Shepard.

Leviathan was originally revealed by leaked files extracted from the Extended Cut endings. Later, the content was confirmed by voice actor Anthony Skordi (who plays Leviathan). BioWare also hinted at new Mass Effect 3 content during Comic-Con, showing a teaser that included a red Atlas Mech underwater.

Specific details about Leviathan haven’t been announced, but we know it follows the search for Leviathan, a rogue reaper who has indoctrinated a mining colony. Look for it this summer on 360, PS3 and PC.

It was also revealed that Mass Effect 3 will be a launch title for the Wii U and pack a digital motion comic (similar to the Mass Effect 2 one for PS3) that allows Wii U players to make choices and build their Shepard's history.

Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s associate news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following him on Twitter or IGN.

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