Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2016 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBC Developer Frogwares PUBLISHER Big Ben Interactive Link www.bit.ly/SherlockGames S herlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments proved a much more successful game than previous releases in the series, generally respected for its grittier, more modern treatment of the world’s greatest detective. Now it’s follow-up time and a lot of new fans are looking nervously at the coming sequel. What does The Devil’s Daughter have to offer? PLAY EDIT For the most part, a sense of consequence. “In this one we wanted to make it feel more meaningful,” Alexandre Sainsily, software product manager at Big Ben Interactive, told me. “In this one all of the consequences of your choices are going to carry on, so if you make a wrong decision, you’ll have to live with that.” Most…

The Space Marine and Eldar forces meet on the ice. This is it, the moment that Dawn of War fans have waited a decade to see. Dawn of War’s sequels shunned huge armies, focusing on intricate tactical exchanges between a small collection of customizable heroes. They were great games that understood the appeal of the action RTS years before the MOBA explosion, but the fiddly gearmeddling and complex small-scale engagements always sat uneasily with the fiction. If Warhammer 40,000 is about one thing, it’s about huge armies clashing in the 41st millennium. As the Eldar and Space Marines open fire in a glittering exchange of lasers and bolter blasts, it’s immediately obvious that Dawn of War III is a game about exactly that. In the center of the line about…

ANDY KELLY THIS MONTH Ate some gourmet dog nibbles. ALSO PLAYED Hyper Light Drifter Some of the best humor in Broken Sword comes from the weird, seemingly useless junk filling George’s bottomless pockets and the reactions when he shows it to people. In the first game, The Shadow of the Templars, he carries a soggy greasepaint-soaked tissue halfway around the world, and waving it in people’s faces is met with disgust. And I loved the running gag of people always having an excuse not to shake his electric-buzzer-trapped hand. In the second game, The Smoking Mirror, it’s a box of gourmet dog biscuits he’s got hold of that creates some of the best laughs. Everyone George meets, be they military general or art dealer, is asked if they want one.…

1 AUTOFIRE FREEWARE This year’s seven-day roguelike challenge There are so many game jams these days that websites exist just to keep track of them, but if you only pay attention to one, make it the venerable, the always surprising, 7DRL. It took place this year in early March, the competing developers once again having been given the task of making a game a bit like Rogue in just a week. AutoFire stood out to me as the highlight, a game that replaces the traditional adventuring hero with a automobile, of all things. To answer your first question: yes, it’s still a fairly small, claustrophobic dungeon environment that you’re exploring, hardly built to accommodate the horseless carriage. And to answer the next one: yes, your character moves, well, like a…

THE RULES 1 Don’t look at any walkthroughs or FAQs for answers. 2 Use the old ‘verb wall’ interface, and no object highlighting. 3 Andy Kelly is your LucasArts hint line representative. I never played Day of the Tentacle, despite its reputation as one of the best adventure games ever made. With the remastered edition now available, Andy has challenged me to finish it without a walkthrough. It’s my chance to experience the game as it was meant to be played: without the safety net of the internet. In the spirit of the era, I can use Andy as my very own LucasArts helpline. Be warned, there are puzzle and plot spoilers throughout this article. I’m not too bad at modern adventure games—I completed the Blackwell series without a walkthrough—but…

Chris Pate isn’t a designer or an engineer, but after 17 years at Logitech he knows more about making mice than anyone I’ve met. When he talks about the mice he’s worked on as a product manager, he relates back to his days playing Quake III for hours on end. He doesn’t claim technical expertise, but he knows when a mouse feels right. So when Pate tells me his goal for the G900 Chaos Spectrum, a mouse three years in the making, is to “bust all the myths about wireless, to the point where there was no reason not to use a wireless mouse,” I believe him. “The very basic starting point was I wanted to make a wireless mouse that was professional grade,” Pate told me when he first…

YOUR REVIEWS TrackMania. It’s old, classic, but still fun and challenging, and refreshing. Angelo Geels Challenging unless you play one of those ‘Press Forward’ tracks where you just press forward. DiRT Rally, the first game in years I truly enjoy. All about the player skills, not some fake skill tree or the most OP Car/Weapon. Grande Lord Brian Well now you’ve got us hoping for Codemasters to patch in some assault rifles. I’m playing Wolfenstein: The New Order. I probably should have played this game earlier. CLG RohnJobert Definitely. One of the best FPS campaigns of recent years. Dark Souls III of course! With Miyazaki as the lead director, it feels more like a direct continuation of Dark Souls I. Love it. Kyle Tertzag By direct continuation you mean just…

NEED TO KNOW release 2016 Developer Obsidian Publisher Paradox Link www.tyrannygame.com In some ways, Obsidian’s next RPG feels like a sequel to a game we haven’t played or a story we’ve never read. Tyranny, which is built on a modified version of the tech used in Pillars of Eternity, doesn’t depict the beginning of an epic struggle between good and evil. Instead, it takes place in the aftermath of such a conflict, in which evil has triumphed and a world that has been shattered by the great war is now slowly trying to recover. “We started off talking about what are the traditional stories in RPGs,” Obsidian lead producer Matthew Singh told me during our GDC meeting in San Francisco, where I got to watch a brief demo of Tyranny…

Amushroom towers above you, reaching for the sky. The place feels familiar, but the light has changed. Plants have taken root in previously barren land, new rocks jut from the earth like gnarled fingers. It’s the same, but different—a place inspired by what came before. “A complete remake and re-imagining of Morrowind”, in the words of Brandon Giles, one of the lead developers of the ambitious community project Skywind. The mod aims to draw players fresh and old to the world of Bethesda’s 14-year-old RPG. Skywind had its inception in 2012. The seeds can be found in Morroblivion, which ported Morrowind’s content into Oblivion’s engine. Once the project came to an end, some leftover team members decided to attempt a similar feat—this time using Skyrim as their base. “It wasn’t…

Stardock’s new RTS clearly sees itself as a phoenix of sorts for SupCom and the genre in general. For the most part it succeeds in spreading its wings, tossing out the speedy tactics of StarCraft II in favor of a more determined, thoughtful approach, while carpeting the playing field with thousands of fighter planes, hovering battleships, and tanks. It’s an RTS for pensive folks interested in the big picture—hence the slightly dorky Kurzweil-referencing name. Too bad it doesn’t spin a yarn worthy of it. Ashes devotes a mere 11 missions to telling the tale of the ‘Ascension War’ between the technologically augmented Post-Humans and the strange AI faction, the Substrate. Victory rarely involves more than nabbing more resources than the other team. Each faction’s 15 units look almost identical. On…

As a historical artifact, Baldur’s Gate is important. As an RPG, it’s huge and expressive. But as a moment-to-moment experience, it can be something of a chore. Siege of Dragonspear is an expansion for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition. As an add-on—albeit one that takes the form of a full length campaign—it’s forced me to reevaluate if Baldur’s Gate is actually worth expanding. The D&D ruleset feels awkward and restrictive. Melee combat involves watching sprites wave weapons at each other until invisible dice register a hit. Detecting traps requires walking a few paces in a dungeon, stopping and waiting to see if your Thief signals danger. If she doesn’t, take a few more steps and repeat. If she does, disarm it. Then take a few more steps and repeat. There are…

I ’m standing in the cold gray Nordic town of Bruma. Expressionless NPCs acknowledge my presence with either an overly jovial “HELLO” or strangely omniscient statements about my various leveled skills. I’ve now spent a good minute watching a steady stream of town guards tumble from the city walls. They follow their patrol diligently, even when the route means flinging yourself off the battlements like a steel-clad Lady Macbeth. I’ve played this game for hundreds of hours in the ten years it’s been out, first on the Xbox 360 and now on my laptop (usually in bed with a cup of tea—luxury 12-year-old me could hardly dream of). My latest playthrough has been given a new lease of life by mods. Beautiful, face revamping, texture defining, location re-jigging mods. I…

Awar is raging in EVE Online. Yes, another one. The last big conflict, a battle between two huge Russian corporations over a moon, destroyed $13,000 worth of ships. This one might be even more costly, and it all started with a failed Kickstarter. At fan convention EVE Vegas, a campaign was launched to fund a book about the Fountain War, one of the largest battles in gaming history. The catch? It would be managed and published by The Mittani Media, a company run by the leader of CFC (now The Imperium), the side that won. Inevitably, there were claims that the book was a cash grab by The Mittani, and that it would be biased towards the winning side. There were also claims that CFC (which stands for Clusterfuck Coalition)…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBA PUBLISHER Mode 7 Games Developer SMAC Games Link www.tokyo42.com Usually I’d avoid defining a game based on its similarities to other games. For Tokyo 42, it feels appropriate. That’s because SMAC Games’s Maciek Strychalski isn’t shy about such comparisons. As he shows me the prologue of Tokyo 42, he delights in pointing out references and naming sources of inspiration. “We’re just stealing from all of the games that we’ve loved, because designing games is really hard,” he says, laughing. Tokyo 42 contains elements of Grand Theft Auto, Far Cry, Hitman, Splinter Cell and Assassin’s Creed. It combines many of the best parts of many of the best action games into a single, beautiful package. It offers shooting, stealth and open-ended solutions, all contained in a…

NEED TO KNOW release 2016 Developer Mode 7 Games Publisher In-house Link www.frozensynapse2.com The first Frozen Synapse was an excellent turn-based tactical strategy game about simultaneous action. The challenge was in predicting your opponent’s movement and to respond accordingly. Clear combat rules and a turn preview function let you engineer the ideal outcome, but only if you’d correctly anticipated your enemy’s plan. Deception and deduction were your weapons. Also assault rifles and shotguns. FIRST LOOK Frozen Synapse 2 will offer more multiplayer modes and unit types. A new reactive orders system will expand the tactical possibilities by allowing you to use conditional commands—specifying an action to take if an opposing unit makes a specific move. As a multiplayer game, the action will be expanded and refined. It’s your typical sequel…

I met the Argentine lead designers behind Wargaming’s Master of Orion reboot in Buenos Aires under the light of Orion itself, on a night when the sky’s other half was dominated by the Southern Cross. I like to think they planned it this way, with the famous namesake of their game standing opposite a constellation only folks on the underside of the world can enjoy, as it pretty much symbolized their unique situation. I’d come to Argentina to learn more about how these guys, the leading developers at NGD Studios, wound up updating a 23-year-old turn-based 4X space game for a publisher best known for multiplayer tank battles. Younger players know Master of Orion about as well as they know the name of the bassist in Nirvana, but its influence…

I was tremendously satisfied the first time I reached out and snatched an oxygen canister. This first-person adventure takes place after a disaster on a massive space station orbiting Earth, and as I floated in zero-g amid the clouds of wreckage and debris, my space suit was leaking oxygen badly. While I struggled to control my movement with thrusters, small oxygen canisters spun and drifted maddeningly just out of reach. I held down a button to grab one and my arm extended, my hand desperately reaching for the bottle as it tumbled past. A little more thrust in the right direction and my hand clasped the bottle, plugged it into a port on my suit, and then finally discarded it, letting it spin slowly away into the void. Unfortunately, grabbing…

I came to Stardew Valley as a cynic. I’d seen screenshots, I’d seen praise, I’d seen it topping the Steam chart. It’s a sickeningly cheerful RPG about farming, I thought. Can it really be that good? Yes, it really can. I’ve now played for over 25 hours, and I’m creeping towards the end of my first year in Pelican Town. After the initially overwhelming introduction to Stardew Valley’s many activities, I gained an economic foothold via the fishing minigame. It’s a pleasant time waster, and easy enough that I could haul in a decent catch in a day. That’s when the numbers started growing, and everything became compulsive. Fishing gave me money that I invested in seeds. Weeks later, the seeds became vegetables, and money started to pour in at…

Q&A Is panel technology evolving? Slowly. I’ve been recommending IPS panels for years, but the recent 4K TN screens have been far more impressive than their washed out brethren. Is anything new coming? Quantum dot filters enable a screen to cover a wider color gamut; Philips is launching its first right now. And OLED offers a much quicker pixel response, because it doesn’t require backlighting. Should I step up to 4K? I’ve deliberately not featured 4K screens in this test because they’re not practical for the majority of gamers. You need an incredibly powerful rig to power a modern game engine at the 3840x2160 of a 4K panel. Can you really tell the difference between a 60Hz panel and 120Hz, or 165Hz? Absolutely. Making the step up to rates of…