Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2017 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Summer 2017 DEVELOPER Square Enix PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.finalfantasyxiv.com FIRST LOOK Impressive scenery, epic music, and handsome people punching each other atop a giant statue—the teaser for Stormblood, the next expansion for Final Fantasy XIV, certainly has all the hallmarks of another epic Final Fantasy adventure. However, there’s a lot more going on than those pretty CGI faces suggest. As has been hinted for almost two years in-game, Stormblood will be heading to Ala Mhigo—a city that has been held by the Garlemad empire for 20 years. You’re part of the resistance movement trying to take it back and reclaim it for the thousands of refugees who escaped to Eorzea. Things are not completely black and white however. There’s a new generation of people who have…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE February 2017 PUBLISHER Ubisoft DEVELOPER Ubisoft Montreal LINK forhonor.ubisoft.com PLAYED IT Against the backdrop of a siege, burly men and women—vikings, knights and samurai—hack each other to pieces with two-handed weapons. AI footsoldiers engage in unending conflict on the front line, but the real fight is between two small teams of players controlling For Honor’s powerful champions. The temptation to rush in swinging is high. It took me a good few hours with the alpha to see the error in this approach—to the extent that you can see anything when you are being repeatedly decapitated by an internet stranger. Despite the chunky physicality, this third-person melee game is not a brawler: you can hammer the light and strong attack buttons and hope, but doing so will…

CHRIS THURSTEN THIS MONTH Kicked some guards in the nuts, a single tear in his eye. ALSO PLAYED Dota 2, Thumper I’ve played Dishonored enough times to know that, as I return to the Hound Pits pub in the penultimate chapter, I can start to game the chaos system a little bit. I’ve undertaken this latest, perhaps final playthrough to see off a game I love before the arrival of its much-anticipated sequel. I also wanted to have completed a run where I made all the decisions that I now know to be “canon”—branding but otherwise sparing the High Overseer, letting Daud go, and so on. Given that Arkane’s official version of Corvo is a merciful sort, this has meant taking a predominantly stealthy approach. Which, in turn, means leaving…

YOUR REVIEWS I’m playing Dragon Age Inquisition on the recommendation of a mate, and have to say it’s amazing! Take that dragons! Jack Taylor Never mind the dragons, it’s the bears that’ll get you. Playing Disney Infinity on Steam so I can unlock the lightsaber so my four-year-old can be Jedi Queen Elsa. Dustin Faber This is father of the year material. Battlefield 1! I’m loving it! The maps are great, and the destruction is the best in the series! The Red Dead Potato It’s not often you see that many exclamation marks associated with World War I. Kentucky Route Zero—Act 4. This is how it would look if David Lynch made a game. Katphood Let’s hope the upcoming series of Twin Peaks is as good. Hitman. Lots of fun…

WISH COME TRUE “The work that will always be closest to my heart will invariably be Brian Moriarty’s Wishbringer, which I believe was published in 1985. It came with a ‘feelie’ of a storybook that included library stamps all over it, and a glow-in-thedark magic rock, the very same as that depicted in the book and the game. I played it on my Atari 800. It was true magic.” Jason McIntosh Interactive fiction games are the more literary cousins of choose-your-own-adventure books and old-school text adventures. They’re the modern incarnation of an old artform. They’re also far easier to make yourself than creating games in Unity or GameMaker—all they require is a PC and the ability to read and write. Those requirements are all you need to play one of…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Out now DEVELOPER Fenix Fire Entertainment PUBLISHER Reverb Triple XP LINK www.fenixfire.com FIRST LOOK Fenix Fire lead developer Brian McRae and I have something important in common: we don’t like survival games. For McRae, this might be an understatement. “I hate survival games,” is what he said recently while demonstrating Osiris: New Dawn to me. It’s a survival game. You play a member of the Osiris 2 mission, which crash lands on an arid alien planet. Without a spaceship or food or water (or hope), all you can do is try to stay alive. Doing so involves collecting resources, building a base, finding food, and fighting off the natural fauna. Survival game stuff. The key difference is that McRae approached the design from the direction he…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Summer 2017 DEVELOPER Airship Syndicate PUBLISHER THQ Nordic LINK www.battlechasers.com PLAYED IT It’s been 15 years since the final issue of arcanepunk fantasy romp Battle Chasers ended on a cliffhanger and its creator, Joe Madureira, left comic books for videogames. Now, thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign, there will be not only new comics but a game—Battle Chasers: Nightwar. At first glance, it evokes such games as Torchlight, thanks in large part to Madureira’s bold comic style. Airship Syndicate has tucked in a few twists, however, not least combat reminiscent of SNES-era JRPGs, with diverse characters, an active initiative bar, a dual mana system, and super-attacks known as battle surges. “We want you to be thinking about multiple things in a fight,” Madureira tells me. “Each…

One of the great pleasures of PC gaming is that games can grow old gracefully. If you dig your old console out of the attic and dust it off, you’ll find your games for it run exactly as well as they did back in the 1990s. If you load up an old PC game from that period, however, it’s a different story. You might have to jump through a few hoops to get it running, but once you do it’ll take advantage of your new hardware and run better than ever. And that’s before you get into modding. In the world of PC gaming, old games can actually get better as they age, as fans work on them, for free, for years. So why not dig out your old…

I sneak up on a vampire—he’s staring off into the distance—and stake him in the head. Strictly speaking, that’s not where his heart is located, but it does the job. Unfortunately, the commotion has drawn the attention of a lumbering behemoth. After a bit of a dance, the giant vampire pummels me and ends my evening of vampire hunting early. I get back to my headquarters and local coffee shop where I am told, unceremoniously, that my home has been burgled. As concepts go, Buffy-inspired Slayer Shock’s is a doozy. By night you patrol the streets of a Nebraskan town, doling out justice to the undead. Then it’s back to your favorite coffee shop, where you hang out with your very own Scooby Gang—ostensibly free agents who go on their…

KATHARINE BYRNE THIS MONTH Traumatized the next generation of cyborg children. ALSO PLAYED Hitman For all its intricate tutorials, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided never explains a vital lesson: never press Q in public. I learn the hard way, all thanks to the innocuous act of trying to back out of a menu screen. Perhaps I’m too eager to return to the mission, but a slip of the keyboard and the next thing I know Jensen floors an innocent bystander and dozens of gawping onlookers are in mass panic. Seems he had dormant OafTech buried in his robo crannies. Shots are fired; cucumbers in the nearby market disintegrate into a hundred pieces. Is that a metaphor for the frailty of organic matter against metal’s might? Either way, it’s a terrible waste…

What good is all that graphics processing power if those pixels don’t end up on a high quality screen? A new ultra-wide monitor might be just what you need. An ultra-wide display stretches the usual 16:9 aspect ratio to 21:9, which is the difference between a normal widescreen TV and a true widescreen movie. As well as making movies look great—no more black bars—the extra width can get you a wider view in games, and it’s handy for work too. Typically ultra-wides come in either 29” or 34” sizes, but I’ve stuck to the big guns—monitors have to be 32” or larger for this roundup. Q&A What panel type should I get? IPS, TN and VA are the usual LCD types, but you don’t tend to get TN at…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Early 2017 DEVELOPER Big Robot PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.thesignalfrom.com PLAYED IT A mysterious signal is coming from the planet Tölva, and your mission is to find out what it is. That, according to Big Robot, is the heart of the game. But you don’t explore the surface yourself: you hijack a surveyor robot and do it remotely. And if you die at the metal hands of an enemy faction also hunting for the signal, you can just hijack a new one. Similarly to Sir, You Are Being Hunted, the studio’s previous game, it takes place in a large open world and has a freeform structure. There are missions, but no critical path in the traditional sense. But Tölva is not procedurally generated: a lot of time…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Early 2017 DEVELOPER iFun4all PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.ifun4all.com FIRST LOOK With so much of our gaming lives spent spilling blood, it’s surely about time someone waded to the fore in waist-high wellies to clean it all up. That someone, it turns out, is you. As stealth-action games go, Serial Cleaner from iFun4all is a bizarre concept, but surprisingly entertaining. Each small level is devoted to a different crime scene, and your job as a professional cleaner is to sort out the mess. This means disposing of bodies in the back of your seedy station wagon, swiping evidence, and mopping up copious amounts of claret spattered over floors, factories, and campsites. If you’re already straightening your bowtie, however, forget it. There’s no Winston Wolfe panache here –…

Hop on the T-rex with the E button and then control will enable targeting mode.” I heard this in a dream once, but I’m definitely awake now. Studio Wildcard co-founders Jeremy Stieglitz and Jesse Rapczak are walking me through how to use the plasma cannons mounted on my pet T-rex’s head in ARK: Survival Evolved, their dino-laden survival sandbox. Were it 1997, I would have passed out by now. I FEEL FOR THE NAKED MAN I PUNCHED THE CLOTHES OFF OF. HE WORKED FOR THEM Dinosaurs equipped with lasermounted future armor aren’t all ARK has going for it. Rapczak and Stieglitz have a lot to say about simulating an ecosystem, and the inherent mystique of their massive environments and science fiction narrative. ARK is the most complex survival game there…

Sapienza, the second level of Hitman, began as two words: Coastal Town. “This was the only direction we got,” says Torbjørn Christensen, lead level designer. “So we really had a lot of freedom to be creative.” That coastal town would become the game’s standout level, against which subsequent Hitman episodes are compared. For many, myself included, it was the level that proved IO knew what it was doing— that after Absolution, and despite a controversial episodic release plan, the studio was back to making quality assassination sandboxes. Sapienza was developed in parallel with Paris, Hitman’s first level, and in part as a response to it. The Showstopper mission was built around exclusivity— the idea that 47 is able to infiltrate any location. “This night-time gala feeling was something that…

There’s this thing some people have called a penis, and Shadow Warrior 2 wants to make sure you know it. Without pause, Shadow Warrior 2 takes every opportunity to elevate dick jokes and other aimless, crass humor above its acrobatic first-person shooting, wildly diverse weapons, hilarious precision gore system, RPG-lite loot hooks, procedurally generated levels, and open-ended four-player co-op campaign. It’s a shame, because systemically, Shadow Warrior 2 is one of the most joyful and expressive FPS games of the year. But thematically, I want to kick it in the teeth. In a rare moment of silence from Wang, the chatty protagonist, I swing a chainsaw skyward and grind a cyber ninja into two long vertical pieces. As the halves fly up, I swing horizontally, quartering the guy. For fun,…

AMUEL ROBERTS THIS MONTH Drove a friendship to breaking point, in a rocket-powered car. ALSO PLAYED Soma, Shadow Warrior I knew going into coaching in Rocket League would be a disaster for me, because I’m now infamous within the PC Gamer team for throwing tantrums and/or salt when the game suddenly turns against me. Still, with my friend Andrew staying over for a week, I thought I’d give it a go. I went from the patient, friendly stepdad saying “that’s OK!” after every error, no matter how appalling, to being that bastard of a teacher who yells at his students simply because he despises children (and fair enough, children are the worst). In this case, the child is 28, and a guest in my house for most of the week.…

1 CK2 HISTORY GENERATOR TOOL Reroll history with this Crusader Kings 2 mod History can be a useful asset when it comes to strategy games, providing centuries, no, millennia of conflict (and maybe a few minutes where we all got on) for developers to draw on for their assorted factions and systems. But it can also be something of a hindrance, bringing all the politics and prejudices of the real world into games where you sometimes just want a bit of escapism. Here’s a tool for Crusader Kings 2 that procedurally generates a fresh history for the world, replacing countries, religions, and all the horrible stuff that went on in humanity’s past with an entirely new world that carries none of that baggage. After generating a random culture, the tool…