Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2016 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

IT’S THE FIRST TIME WE’LL GET TO SEE FORZA MOTORSPORT 6 RUNNING AT 4K Microsoft is having another shot at winning PC gamers’ hearts. With the announcement of Remedy’s Quantum Break coming to PC simultaneously with its Xbox counterpart, as well as a version of Forza 6 and the release of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition on PC, months after the Xbox One version, it seems like the company is taking more of a dedicated approach to our platform. The announcements at Microsoft’s Xbox Spring showcase were intriguing but conservative. Forza Motorsport 6: Apex is described as a “free, curated standalone experience for Windows 10 that provides fans with a diverse tour of what Forza Motorsport 6 has to offer.” It’s the first time we’ll get to see Forza running…

With big-name game engines like Unity and Unreal opening up access to their incredible tools for free, it’s never been easier to make your own games. But it’s not as easy as having a great idea (although you’ll want one of those too). You need a wide range of design skills and experience, along with some friendly artists and engineers. The best way to get that experience, meet the friends that’ll work alongside you to make your project awesome, and connect with the mentors that can pass on their experience and wisdom is to get a degree in game design from a university. But there are a ton of universities out there, and not all of them are taking game design seriously yet. Thankfully, The Princeton Review has been carefully…

There are 18 quintillion planets to explore in No Man’s Sky. That’s so many that if one was discovered every second, our own sun would have burned out by the time they were all found. But the dizzying scale of this vast procedurally generated universe is something most people already know about. The real question is, what do you actually do there? I visited Hello Games at their Guildford studio to play the game and find out for myself. I’m on the surface of an icy planet. The temperature is a chilly minus 160 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s night and I’m standing in the middle of an endless snowfield dotted with trees. It could be a forest in Scandinavia, but then an enormous creature lumbers past and I remember I’m on…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A puzzle-platformer starring an adorable yarn creature. EXPECT TO PAY $20 DEVELOPER Coldwood Interactive PUBLISHER EA REVIEWED ON Laptop with Windows 10, Core i5-6200U, Intel HD Graphics 520 MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.unravel.com A decent chunk of Unravel is trial-and-error yarn murder Unravel renders the little world under our feet with dazzling fidelity and grace. It zooms in on sticks and stones and rust, mushrooms and berries. It reminds me of all the summers I spent sitting on the ground playing—following ant trails, ripping out blades of grass to see if I could whistle with them. Unravel is at times a stunning trip to wide-eyed childhood, so it’s a shame how mopey and mean it can be. As the cute little Yarny, you ‘enter’ photographs (really sidescrolling…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A standalone game set in the Half-Life universe. Not Half-Life 3. EXPECT TO PAY $10 DEVELOPER Richard Seabrook PUBLISHER Self-published REVIEWED ON Windows 10, 8GB RAM, i5-3570k, GeForce GTX 970 MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.prospektgame.com I’d grown dissatisfied and frustrated with Prospekt long before the end Created by one man, Richard Seabrook, Prospekt is a kind of Half-Life 2 fan fiction. It’s not a mod as such—you don’t need to own Half-Life 2 or its episodes to play it—but it’s set in Valve’s world, and uses its enemies, weapons and assets. It’s presented as a follow-up to Half-Life: Opposing Force, where you play as Adrian Shephard—recently rescued from the G-Man’s stasis by the Vortigaunts, and dumped into Nova Prospekt to help Freeman. Half-Life 2 is one…

PAX South attendees lined-up for hours to experience AMD’s LiquidVR technology with the new Oculus Rift consumer VR headsets. INits second year, PAX South transformed San Antonio, TX into a gamers paradise featuring hands-on experiences with new games, hardware, and lots of free swag. We were excited to join forces again with AMD. The AMD booth, in collaboration with PC Gamer, rocked the PAX South show floor, with lines wrapping around the booth all three days of the show. AMD showcased high-power systems from its top partners, to feature the power of its FX series processors and Radeon graphics cards. PAX South attendees lined-up for hours to experience AMD’s LiquidVR technology with the new Oculus Rift consumer VR headsets. Gamers competed in League of Legends and CS:GO tournaments throughout the…

PHILS AVAGE THIS MONTH Had strong feelings about Windows 10. ALSO PLAYED Oxenfree, The Witness THINGS APPEAR TO BE FINE, DESPITE MY DISOBEYING THE ONLY COMMAND I’VE BEEN GIVEN Hitman: Go is a surprisingly enjoyable turn-based puzzler. It’s styled like a board game, where your job is to move your Agent 47 piece towards the target without being seen by the patrolling guards. In essence, it’s a series of maze puzzles. Like The Witness, but with murder. I don’t really do mobile gaming, so I’d only tapped my way through a couple of levels of the Android edition. But the PC version seemed like a fine lunchtime distraction. I can’t simply play the game, though, because for some reason Square Enix neglected to release it on Steam. Instead, Hitman: Go…

1. UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA Grads Salary: $63k Grads Hired: 93% Studios That’ve Hired Grads: 130 Faculty: Ben Noel (Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed) Cool Tech: An epic studio houses many different stages that are also used for movies and commercials, which offer students paid internships. 2. SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY Grads Salary: $61k Grads Hired: 87% Studios That’ve Hired Grads: 250 Faculty: Dr. Matthew Streit (Halo: Reach, Saints Row The Third, South Park: The Stick of Truth) Cool Tech: Every student gets an Alienware laptop and backpack loaded with every piece of professional software needed to make games—and they keep it after graduating! 3. UNIVERSITY OF UTAH Grads Salary: $87k Grads Hired: 96% Studios That’ve Hired Grads: 37 Faculty: Joe Barns (Epic Mickey, NFL…

TONY ELLIS THIS MONTH Failed to fall in love in a game or with it. ALSO PLAYED Life is Strange, Metal Gear Solid V I’M TOTALLY CLICKING ON THE ADORABLE PINK OCTOPI TO MAKE NINA ZAP THEM WITH HER STAFF Illicitly trawling through the contents of an adolescent girl’s computer is less fun than I had previously imagined. The folders I open contain a lot of selfies, a few message logs and blog entries, and not a lot else. I’m playing a game called Cibele, by the way, in case you thought this was something I do as a hobby. It’s set in the online world of nearly-nineteen-year-old Nina, as revealed by the contents of her desktop. Nina has pink hair, plays videogames with her friends, and is sorta interested…

1 TECH GONE BAD MAP Romero returns to his hell-bound classic A whole 21 years since he last made a Doom level, John Romero has suddenly released a new map. It’s the gaming equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci revisiting the Mona Lisa to add a few clouds or maybe fix that perplexing grin, and it’s a great reason to return to a classic first-person shooter. Scratch that, the classic first-person shooter. Romero has replaced the original game’s eighth mission with the level he would have made back in the day, if he had been assigned to make it, and as you might expect it puts the level design of many modern shooters to shame. E1M8, also known as Tech Gone Bad to its friends, is a deceptively small facility that…

Sound is a vital component of gaming. Try playing Alien: Isolation with the audio off. Try to imagine Grand Theft Auto V without its radio stations, or Fallout without the ambient audio of its oppressive wastelands. But while the rest of the PC gaming hardware industry iterates at breakneck speeds, innovation and advancement is pretty glacial on the audio side. So glacial, indeed, that the outright best headset in this test is still the one we’ve been recommending for more than a year. Q&A What should look for? The broadest frequency range. Traditional gaming headsets work on 20Hz to 20kHz, the standard range for human hearing, but a broader frequency dispersion shapes the audio experience even when you can’t hear specific sounds. USB or analog? If you’ve already got good…

The groin, my friend My friend and I were having a physical fight over how gaming these days is rife with sequels. With a punch to the nose, I hollered, “It’s a damn good thing because, unlike movies, technology improves and therefore so do the games.” With a kick to the groin, my friend retorted, “Bollocks—look at the rubbish Resident Evil has turned into since the fourth installment.” I delivered an axe-kick to the shoulder blade, and stressed, “Why pick on the dumb kid in the class, huh? Take BioShock, or GTA, or the many others that improve with each installment.” This was met with a Mongolian double-chop to the sides of the neck: “You think Mafia II bettered the original, or that anything after the first Monkey Island came…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Summer DEVELOPER Blizzard Entertainment PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.bit.ly/20ododJ PLAY EDIT “OUR PLAYERS LIKED THE BIG VIKING DUDES FROM THE LICH KING EXPANSION, RIGHT?” Odin (or ‘Odyn’ as Warcraft calls him) lied to me. Ater I was the last to fall in battle, he lifted me up to Valhalla on the wings of Val’kyr and told me I was the greatest warrior alive. So exemplary were my exploits, that he claimed he brought me back to life to serve as the only living hero of the Halls of Valor. No one else, he said, had ever attained such an honor. And that’s why I was so taken aback when another warrior—a gnome, no less— trotted past and shouted out his affection for Donald Trump. So it goes…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2016 DEVELOPER Epic Games PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.epicgames.com/paragon PARAGON WILL BE THE MOST VISUALLY SPECTACULAR GAME OF ITS KIND PLAY EDIT The first thing that strikes me about Paragon is how slow it feels. That’s not necessarily a complaint, but based on Epic’s history with games like Gears of War and Unreal Tournament, I expected something closer to an arena shooter. Epic has said it’s serious about making a MOBA and it’s not joking. Unreal Engine gloss and shiny weaponry aside, this is a heavy and thoughtful third-person team strategy game. Two teams of sci-fi fantasy heroes line up at either end of an overgrown temple complex divided into lanes linked by winding jungle pathways. Mountaintop laser towers are powered by energy crystals that must be…

The designers at Riot Games love to talk about how they make sure every champion has “counterplay” built into them. By that, they mean that the opponent has an opportunity to see what their opponent is doing and then take meaningful actions to react. EXAMPLE: Nami’s ultimate Tidal Wave is a massive, long-range AoE knock-up ability, but it travels extremely slow so that players can move out of the way if they’re paying attention. READING MATERIAL: bit.ly/LoLCounterplay — Tom Cadwell’s slideshow from his GDC presentation “Counterplay and Teamplay.” HOMEWORK: Play a game of LoL and look at how you’re able to counter opposing champion’s abilities. Then play another game and look for abilities that you can’t counter, and think about why those exceptions exist.…

There are good and bad ways to make a game challenging. The recent Kickstarter hit, Darkest Dungeon, is a great example of how to do it right. Like roguelikes, DD uses permadeath and crippling ailments to make individual units disposable. That lets you to progress your permanent camp and facilities, even when you fail during an individual mission. EXAMPLE: Early on, the most efficient way to play is to simply grind through willing adventurers to earn money and callously discard them after they’re injured, instead of upgrading and healing them. READING MATERIAL: bit.ly/DDCorpse — Look at how the devs respond to players’ outcry when they introduce mechanics deemed too punishing. HOMEWORK: Play a onehour session of Darkest Dungeon and keep track of everything you do that would be considered a…

DRALETH Alice’s main character, director of IT and Diplomacy in Brave Newbies for two years. Alice ‘Draleth’ Bevan-McGregor wasn’t having a good day. Beyond the transparent shimmer of her covert ops frigate, Brave alliance—her alliance— was having an old fashioned witch hunt, and their pitchforks were pointed at her. Two years of her life had been dedicated to shaping Brave from a group of fledgling newbies into one of the biggest alliances EVE Online has ever known. But that was all over now. She was public enemy number one. And so she sat, watching the drama unfold with a smile on her face. “There was a hunt out for me,” she says. “And I’m just floating in space laughing my ass off.” Earlier that day, Draleth had resigned from her…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A survival roguelike where you travel down a river. EXPECT TO PAY $20 DEVELOPER The Molasses Flood PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON Intel i7 x980 3.33GHz, 9GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.themolassesflood.com If you’re swept past a campsite, you’ve got no choice but to keep going The spear trap, given to me by a couple of helpful feral children, works perfectly, impaling the wolf just as it’s about to tear me to ribbons. I prepare to disassemble the carcass, gleefully—wolves have been a frequent cause of death in games past—when two more wolves suddenly appear. It’s about the most fleeting victory in videogame history. I wind up torn to ribbons yet again, and my dreams of spiteful dining go unfulfilled. In…

ANDY KELLY THIS MONTH Wished there were more tombs to raid in Rise of the Tomb Raider. ALSO PLAYED Assassin’s Creed Syndicate Rise of the Tomb Raider is a game whose title contains the words ‘tomb’ and ‘raider’, but where raiding tombs is, mystifyingly, an optional extra. These so-called ‘challenge tombs’ are the highlight of the game for me; more so than any of the big, flashy action set-pieces or the slightly tedious combat. Each one features a small self-contained puzzle, and they remind me of the old games. They give you the feeling that you’re disturbing some ancient, forgotten place and uncovering the secrets within. And I wish the whole game was like that, rather than a parade of increasingly long-winded gunfights linked together with cutscenes and platforming sections.…