Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2015 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

For the past few years on PCGamer.com, in the days before the Electronic Entertainment Expo in June, we’ve published a joke article imagining “The E3 Press Conference PC Gamers Deserve.” It’s mostly been an excuse for us to daydream and write things like “...and then, through a fog of theater-grade dry ice, Gabe Newell materialized atop a unicorn to announce Half-Life 3.” E3, despite being a mostly exciting few days of announcements, has never given PC gaming an equal place at the table. We get valuable stories and interviews out of E3, but generally speaking it’s the time of year when Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo jostle for position about who can create the most buzz. We got tired of that. For the past several months, we’ve been working hard to…

“It’s this opening that makes EVE: Valkyrie so memorable” The opening of an EVE: Valkyrie match is already one of the standout VR experiences. My ship is in a claustrophobic tunnel, surrounded by lights and noise. A siren blares and ‘Fly Safe’ flashes on my cockpit’s heads-up display. Then it happens: I’m ejaculated into space. The force is conveyed so well I can’t help but move my body backwards in anticipation. I emerge into a scene of devastation: the metal graveyard of a battle long past. It’s this opening that makes EVE: Valkyrie so memorable. It’s an instant and immediate thrill that plays well to the places Valkyrie has been demoed. Valkyrie started life as EVE-VR, a prototype space dogfighting game created by a small team within CCP. It was…

“Everybody who actually lives in Los Santos hates it there” Need to know What is it? The long-awaited new entry in the world’s most popular open-world crime sim. Influenced by GTA IV, Los Angeles Reviewed on i5 760 CPU, 8GB RAM, 4GB GPU Alternatively GTA IV, 92% Copy protection Steam, Rockstar Social Club There are times when I look at Los Santos and think ‘why would you even think to build that?’ This is, appropriately, a thought that I often have about Los Angeles. In GTA V’s case, the tone is different: baffled wonderment as opposed to baffled, y’know, despair. Rockstar has created one of the most extraordinary game environments you will ever visit. I look at it and I wonder at the vast expense of effort required to render every trash…

Need to know What is it? Tim Schafer’s tale of two worlds, connected yet separate. Influenced by Day of the Tentacle Reviewed on Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM Alternatively The Book of Unwritten Tales 2, not reviewed Copy protection None “Highlights include an easily offended tree” And a year later, Broken Age is finally whole. I don’t think many of us were expecting over a year’s wait for its story to be concluded, for the girl who fought her fate to face the consequences and the boy who wanted an adventure to be given his wish. Talking about the result is tricky, as the nature of a certain key plot reveal at the end of Part 1 makes talking about just about any detail of Part 2 a major spoiler. I say…

Need to know What is it? A new zone and questline intended for high-level players. Influenced by Conan the Barbarian, glow paint raves Reviewed on Intel i5 3.3GHz CPU, 16GB RAM, GTX 970 Alternatively Go back to the Hinterlands. Copy protection Origin “It’s more Hinterlands than Winter Palace” Jaws of Hakkon adds a new open-world region to Inquisition: the Frostback Basin. Despite the name, this isn’t another icy plain: it’s a verdant, autumnal valley that varies from treacherous cliffside pathways to vine-tangled riverbanks and gloomy azure swampland. Your Inquisitor arrives in search of their predecessor, Ameridan, who vanished 800 years ago. This brings you into contact with the Avvar, Thedas’s southern barbarians. Their society is part-Cimmeria, part-Wildling, and they’ve never really been explored until now. One of the main draws…

CHRIS LIVINGSTON This month Panda’d to his basest instincts in a fantasy RPG. Also Played Cities: Skylines, Grand Theft Auto V Can I play Pillars of Eternity as bears? Oddly, I don’t see the answer in Obsidian’s FAQ, so I’ve decided to find out for myself. I replace my entire party with rangers with bear companions, then leave my rangers standing still and proceed into the world as All Bears. Combat-wise, it’s similar to having six different party members, with one tiny difference: instead of strategically selecting different attacks, buffs, and spells, you just click an enemy once and then watch as they die from bears. Spiders don’t stand a chance, skeletons quickly become a pile of bones, and as for Wichts, I don’t even know how to pronounce them,…

Modders of Cities: Skylines have already blown open Paradox’s game with all manner of structures, tools and welcome tweaks. Do you want to get rid of that annoying chirpy Twitter bird, or add a beloved local restaurant to your teeming metropolis? How about a famous landmark like the Combine Citadel? It’s all waiting in the Workshop. IN-AND-OUT BURGER The industrious Gula, a former Maxis artist, has been making a bunch of high-quality assets, including a replica of the SunTrust tower, a Starbucks coffee emporium, and this, a version of the famous In-N-Out fast-food chain found across much of the United States. It’s growable, meaning it will spring up without needing to be built. www.bit.ly/Skylines1 LOS SANTOS If even Grand Theft Auto V can’t provide you with enough Los Santos, you…

My career as a criminal begins in the little town of Rawl’kha, just after I ‘accidentally’ slam my twohanded sword into a guard’s face. I’m just goofing off in town as I always did before Elder Scrolls Online’s transition to buy-to-play, but today the guard’s not amused. He chases me down and demands 260 gold to let the incident pass. Cheapskate that I am, I run instead to the lonely fields of Reaper’s March, planning to let the bounty dwindle away while offline. But that gets boring, and I succumb to the thrill of crime under ESO’s new justice system. I kill NPCs and steal with abandon. By the time a guard cuts me down in Narsis, my bounty’s up to 15,612 gold, and it all automatically comes out of…

Even I was surprised to see Shadow of Mordor running via this $44 computer, and I’m the one who installed everything. Even when I was finishing off the command line complexities needed to get it running, I was convinced it would never work. And yet there were the orcs and there I was with a big sword slicing them up. Running its own Raspbian OS, the RP2 requires a fair amount of Linux Fu to get game streaming running. The processor is not x86 compatible, so Steam and SteamOS are out, so I had to turn to a recompiled version of the Limelight app I use on the Shield Tablet. That means streaming on the RP2 is limited to an Nvidia host machine. At 1080p/60Hz the input lag is about…

CLICK pcgamer.com LIKE facebook.com /pcgamermagazine SHOOT steamcommunity.com /groups/pcgamer WATCH youtube.com /pcgamer FOLLOW @pcgamer SEND PC Gamer FutureUS 4000 Shoreline Ct. Suite 400 South San Francisco, CA 94080 Milk us for more Riot Games recently announced that it’ll be doing Chroma packs for skins, which is pretty awesome. The kicker? It looks like Chroma packs will cost a cool $5. Now, $5 isn’t an absurd price, but according to modders in the community, changing the colors of a skin takes almost no time at all. Riot has justified the price of the color change by saying it pays for the labor. This is, of course, untrue according to the modders, as the labor is extremely minimal, meaning that Riot is overcharging us for some simple color changes. I’m getting tired of…

Need to know What is it? The sick but slick sequel to the 2011 reboot . Influenced by Street Fighter 4, Gray’s Anatomy (the book, not the show) Reviewed on Intel i5 3.3GHz CPU, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 970 Alternatively Injustice: Gods Among Us, 80% Copy protection Steam Skulls that crack like own-brand Easter eggs Mortal Kombat has always felt brutish when compared to the elegant flow of Street Fighter 4: heavy-fisted, filthy pub-fu, focused not just on defeating your opponent, but destroying them utterly. This is the most elegant incarnation yet. The returning super meter, borrowed from Street Fighter, adds complexity: you can interrupt an opponent’s combo by using up two bars of the meter, creating an opening for a counterattack. X-ray moves are traumatic ultra combos, diverting a fight…

Need to know What is it? Baseball’s most accomplished strategy series, now with real teams for the first time. Influenced by Championship Manager, Eastside Hockey Manager Reviewed on Windows 8, Core i7-4770K, 16GB RAM Alternatively Football Manager 2015, 61% Copy protection Stream “This is a moonshot home run of a sports sim” OotP is the game that puts the ‘pro’ in procrastination; specifically pro baseball, as having just one more match overrides your instinct to do other important things like sleeping or washing up or, er, looking after your two-year-old daughter. (Yes, I’m going to hell.) Matches whizz by in a blur, and can be micromanaged to whatever level you’re content with. Want to throw every pitch and swing every bat, but let your assistant handle nuances such as fielding positions and…

Hopoo’s follow-up to their runaway hit Risk of Rain is shaping up to be something special. You play the grim reaper, who has put away his scythe and cloak in this modern era, in favor of knives, guns and a handsome coat. You’re still shepherding the undead to the afterlife, which of course means fighting hordes of zombie gangsters who occasionally wander around their dens without a head. In the full game you’ll be tasked with dispatching vampires (night-club owners) and other paranormal creatures, but there are more than enough monsters to shoot in this five-level alpha demo in the meantime. It plays like a sideways Hotline Miami, with gallons of claret and a dozen instant restarts, but with a much lighter tone to its cartoon violence. It also mixes…

Some games simulate worlds, economies, or life as a long-haul truck driver—Prowl simulates the back seat of a limousine. Not in a Limo Seat Simulator way, but locking you in place as a shadowy night-time city passes by your rain-slicked window. You might not be able to open the car door or even switch seats in Nate Gallardo and Danny Gallagher’s experiential indie game, but you can roll down the electric window, flick a light on or off, or open a nearby briefcase. These actions ultimately achieve nothing— they don’t change the outcome or reveal more about your situation—but having a bunch of stuff to interact with does help to anchor your body into a convincing virtual world. As you might have guessed, there’s an Oculus Rift version, but the…

Zeroes comes to mind I’d really like to see game reviews that also feature low- or mid-range rigs. There are a lot of us playing on older hardware who can’t pay, or who don’t want to pay, for high-end cards, CPUs and plenty of RAM, but it’s hard to judge what the performance of a game will be on the low end before you buy it. I’ve found the minimum given specs aren’t always accurate and they tend not to detail what kind of resolution, settings, or FPS you’d get playing with the bare minimum. I’d have pre-ordered GTA V if I knew I could get even 30fps on low settings at 1080p, but I’m just waiting for someone with similar hardware to post online about their experience. It would…

It’s a point of pride for The Spy that he finds two sources for everything. Not just information: food, water, even friendship and personal values. There’s no better way to confuse a would-be hitman than to live two contradictory lives, arbitrarily flipping between them on a whim. This protective reflex either makes The Spy uniquely suited or uniquely unsuited for political office; appropriately, he has never been able to choose. It’s with a certain amount of trepidation, then, that The Spy presents leaked Mass Effect 4 details so unverified, so reliant on a single source, that they might well be total nonsense. They don’t sound like nonsense, however. The rumor goes that the new game will be set in the future of the Mass Effect universe, as humanity sets out…

Mike Simpson Job title Creative director Credits Total War: Attila, Shogun 2, et al Bio Mike’s first game, Swords and Sorcery, was released in 1985 for the ZX Spectrum. He’s spent the last 15 years growing the Total War series at The Creative Assembly. He likes Orks. Is Total War: Warhammer a turning point for the series, or will you continue the historic war games? No, we’re absolutely going to make historic war games. That’s still the core of what we do. The only reason we haven’t done a fantasy game earlier is because we couldn’t do it earlier without slowing down or impacting in some way on the historic stuff. We’ve finally got to the point where there are enough of us to do that. That’s why we’re doing it now and…

Need to know What is it? A colossal Kickstarter-funded fantasy RPG. Influenced by Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale Reviewed on GeForce GTX 970, Intel i5-3570K @ 3.4GHz, 16GB RAM Alternatively Divinity: Original Sin, 87% Copy protection Steam I’ve fallen in love with this richly painted world Almost an hour had passed, and I was still on the character creation screen. That’s how I knew, before I’d even started, that this homage to classic computer roleplaying games like Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment was authentic. Created with the help of 77,000 Kickstarter backers, Pillars of Eternity is Obsidian’s love letter to those beloved Infinity Engine RPGs that have come to represent the best of the genre. It would have been easy to create a cynical nostalgia trip, dining out on the…

Need to know What is it? A survival game set on an alien ocean-planet. Influenced by Minecraft Reviewed on GeForce GTX 970, Intel i5-3570K @ 3.4GHz, 16GB RAM Alternatively DayZ, alpha Copy protection Steam “You don’t belong in this ecology, and it feels like it” Your starship has crashed on a distant planet, stranding you in the middle of a vast alien ocean. All you have is a life pod with a machine that creates objects from raw materials. Yes, this is another Early Access survival game. It’s from Unknown Worlds, developer of the Natural Selection series, and it’s an interesting underwater twist on the crowded open-world survival genre. Dive off your pod into the water below and you find yourself in a beautiful undersea landscape similar to our own ocean…

You’ve finished Infinifactory, but you don’t want your brain to relax just yet. Let these user levels put it through its paces.…

Set in a glorious sunset world at the tail-end of 2002 for some reason, this two-day jam game asks you to make a choice, over and over, putting your reputation on the line. Or rather, Mark Ellis’s reputation. That choice is whether to approve a wonky physics bridge for use on a working railway line, or to declare it unsafe for public travel. A cute little choo-choo train will then traverse the teetering trackway, with jittery physics hilariously proving you right or wrong. Either way, disastrous crash or no crash, the game will continue, and you’ll play on tomorrow to try and redeem Mark’s reputation. It’s not always easy to tell whether a bridge is safe just by looking at it, and that’s where the fun lies in this beautifully…

They gave that whole ‘co-existing mostly peacefully’ thing a go, but now it’s time for the races of Tamriel to settle their differences once and for all. This mod for the statesmanlike (ie, old) Medieval 2: Total War plugs 20 Elder Scrolls factions into Creative Assembly’s strategy game, taken from Skyrim, Daggerfall, Cyrodiil, Morrowind and so on, and with many of the great houses and evil entities represented too. Control a horde of Daedra, be some reanimated skeletons or a clowder of Khajit, vow to wipe the Empire and Patrick Stewart from the face of the Earth. Between battles, there’s a giant campaign map of Tamriel for you to attempt to conquer. There are a few problems with this in-development mod, notably that it’s in Russian, so the English language…

This somehow spins a story from the simple act of splattering villagers and sheep. After peasants appeal to a just king for liberation from the tyrannical Queen Wynnfrith, he constructs a series of machines and messily invade her turf. www.bit.ly/BattleForIpsilon 1 Lockking Moved by the peasants’ appeal for help, the unnamed monarch ponders how to respond to their urgent plight. For years, his best engineers have been building war machines, but they’ve yet to be tested in battle. 2 Bulldozing Heavily outnumbered, the King uses scouts to scope out the Queen’s domain, before swooping in with a coordinated aerial attack. These airships are particularly impressive, leveling her vicious bulldozer machine. 3 Queen takes king Queenie responds, building anti-air cannons that make short work of the King’s flying machines. She also…

This came as something of a pleasant surprise, as the old range of Wind Box mini-PCs never really set the world alight. Now that Microsoft is supplying Windows 8.1 to manufacturers essentially for free, however, MSI is able to offer this much more impressive device at a great price. Like the Zotac Pico this is a miniPC, but a far larger machine. That enables this stormtrooperwhite box to contain 4GB DDR3 RAM and a 500GB hard drive, which gives you a huge amount of storage for any local media content you want to throw its way. You also get four USB 3.0 ports on the rear along with the necessary HDMI connection, and a pair of USB 2.0 ports on the front. So that’s the hardware, but how well does…

For a lot of people the fact that the Doko is resolutely stuck rendering all its streamed content at 30Hz is a complete dealbreaker. It may be one of the cheapest devices in this test, but for it not to be able to cope with streamed games running at 60Hz means it can’t really stake a claim for that special place between your TV and the desktop gaming behemoth you want to stream from. The problem is the ARM 11 SoC chip at its heart: it simply doesn’t have the processing power to decode at the speed games need. I can forgive the Raspberry Pi 2 because it’s got a cute name and costs less than some of the games I’m trying to stream through it. It’s a real shame…

It’s getting increasingly difficult to justify a buildyour-own-PC philosophy. The manufacturers of prebuild machines can buy components in bulk, so it no longer guarantees any saving, for a start. Arguably, you’re also better off going for a pre-built PC because you’ll still have complete warranty if it’s overclocked, if that’s how you bought it. Once you’ve got your PC you still get to upgrade it to your heart’s content, so don’t think of it as giving up on DIY builds, just a good starting point. Hardware Editor WHAT ’S IN THE BOX The components that make up the PCG Rig CPU Intel Core i5 4690K The Devil’s Canyon i5 is in the PCG Rig. Overclocking fun ahoy! FITTED October 2014 MOTHERBOARD Asus Z97-P Some fantastic value Z97 motherboards have arrived…

A toast to lost friends, side-plots that went nowhere, and the moon that crushed a Wookiee BELOVED HAN SOLO ANALOGUE #1 RIP Dash Rendar, bog-standard roguish archetype, who ably pretended to be Han Solo while the real Han Solo was frozen in carbonite. Last seen destroying Prince Xizor’s unconvincing Death Star-like side project, Skyhook. BROADLY UNLOVED SITH APPRENTICE The little-k nown Galen Marek, better known as canon-breaking heathen Starkiller, alleged to have founded the Rebel Alliance on a whim apparently in between acting as Darth Vader’s apprentice, is no more. Also dead: his sarcastic droid and sassy love interest. ROGUE JEDI MASTER’S JOURNEY ENDS The Jedi Exile, known to some as Meetra Surik and known to others by thousands of other names including ‘CoolJedi420’ and ‘lololololol’, has died. Denied a…