Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2017 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

This issue’s cover feature convinced me that Arkane is building an even more ambitious game than Dishonored 2, our 2016 game of the year. Prey sounds like the perfect storm of immersive sim influences—exactly the sort of game that appeals to PC players. Let Phil’s feature convince you too: you’ll find it on p46. So 2017 starts with a potential GOTY, and that’s just one of over 50 games coming this year you’ll find in this issue. samuel.roberts@futurenet.com @Samuel W Roberts  TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Tweet us @PCGamer Our team of writers PHIL SVAGE Specialist in Immersive sims, aliens Twitter @Octaeder This month Went to Texas for the second time in six months. Almost died of the heat. Again. ANDY KELY Specialist in Taxis, Silicon Valley Twitter…

More than any other artform, gaming is defined by antagonism. From the earliest arcade machines to the most extravagant FPS, pitching the player against an external threat has been one of the industry’s foundational elements. As gaming evolved beyond the quickfire pleasures of the arcade, so have the opponents the player faces. The barrel-lobbing, space-invading pixels of the ’80s have been replaced by evil fantasy overlords, megalomaniacal dictators and rogue AIs. Many of gaming’s most iconic characters are its villains, from Monkey Island’s ghost pirate LeChuck, to System Shock’s almighty SHODAN. At their finest, villains can challenge the player not just on a physical level, but on a moral and ethical one, and gaming is uniquely equipped to portray these scheming, deceptive opponents. It can enable them to get inside…

JAMES DAVENPORT Specialist in Action, cyber Currently playing Watch Dogs 2 This month Achieved peak San Fran by playing Watch Dogs 2 in San Fran. PHIL SAVAGE Specialist in Adventure, voyeurism Currently playing Orwell This month Watched the internet habits of millennials. It’s about 90% Poe Dameron shipping. ANDY KELLY Specialist in Xtreme, snow Currently playing Steep This month Once climbed a mountain, thus was the most qualified to review Steep. TYLER WILDE Specialist in Shooters, violence Currently playing Killing Floor 2 This month Became so entranced by KF2’s gore that we’re now questioning if he’s really Canadian. LIEF JOHNSON Specialist in Zombies, Christmas Currently playing Dead Rising 4 This month Forgot that zombie entrails don’t make for a suitable Christmas tree decoration. JODY MACGREGOR Specialist in Strategy, trees Currently…

Steep’s recreation of the Swiss Alps is enormous. Activate map view and you fly around a vast 3D model of its snowy peaks, then pick a drop point and transition seamlessly into the game. Being able to hop around this colossal open world without any loading breaks creates a wonderful sense of freedom. Even choosing your desired extreme sport, whether snowboarding, skiing, wingsuit flying or paragliding, is as simple as bringing up a radial menu Countless events and challenges are scattered around the mountains. So many, in fact, I often felt paralysed by choice. You steadily unlock more as you level up, and that’s really all there is to Steep. There are races, time trials, and freestyle events where you have to score as many points as possible by pulling…

TOTAL WAR: WARHAMMER ww.totalwar.com The Wood Elves, also known as the best elves, have invaded Total War: Warhammer. Get a treeman or two and a million archers and smash up some Orcs. This is not the deepest or most complex Total War that The Creative Assembly has made, but it’s got bags of character for a wargame and is surprisingly easy to dip into. STLLARIS www.stelaisgae.com Civilization VI is nice, in a plodding sort of wa , but if you’re looking for excitement and discovery, this space-based 4X, where you guide your alien race to galactic greatness, is where it’s at. Ste lar s l oks l vel , has a terrific exploration phase and is improving all the time with the aid of regurlar updates. TYRANNY www.tyrannygame.com Obsidian’s RPG…

 NEED TO KNOW release 2017 Developer Warhorse Studios Publisher Deep Silver Link www.kingdomcomerpg.com Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an ambitious game—as evidenced by its realistic combat system and topographically accurate recreation of the Kingdom of Bohemia in the 15th century. It may have a small map for an open-world RPG, but that compactness becomes an asset for the interwoven world Warhorse Studios is creating. The condensed map is a web of overlapping systems that encourage player improvisation, and it also makes you accountable for every NPC interaction—however minute. Fail a quest and the game continues, forcing you to find another solution; walk through a village covered in blood and your reputation in that area, as well as with each individual who sees you, will plummet (though it may open opportunities with…

 NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2017 DEVELOPER SMAC Games PUBLISHER Mode 7 Games LINK www.tokyo42.com I ’m watching a naked man do yoga through his window. Behind him, a woman is lying in bed, smoking. The implication is obvious. SMAC Games’s Maciek Strychalski makes the comparison to Where’s Wally. Not the post-coital tableau. Rather, he’s referencing all the hidden jokes and details found in each picture. Tokyo 42 is full of hidden jokes and details. It’s a 3D action game that takes place in a colorful cyberpunk city. Zoom out, and the world is a surreal, vibrant diorama set atop an intricate sprawl of rooftops that poke above the clouds. Zoom in, and you start to see the intricacies, Easter eggs and in-jokes. The action is reminiscent of the early, top-down…

COMBINE SOLDIERS HALF LIFE 2 HL2’s cannon fodder are fascinating for one reason. What’s behind those masks? Are these once-human entities controlled directly by the Combine, or are they just trying to get by? THE CITY WATCH DISHONORED THE WATCH COME TO LIFE through Corvo’s magic Heart, which offers insight into their lives, and reveals a complex moral spectrum from noble soldiers to depraved psychotics. SLIGS ODD WORLD The cybernetic, tentaclefaced guards of Rupture Farms, Oddworld’s sligs are a prime example of lacing humor and menace into even the lower orders of your game’s enemies.…

Alexis Kennedy FAIL BETTER GAMES Baldur’s Gate was the first game that made me feel like I was inside a genre novel, and it was the first game that made me care about my companions. They showed that you can take the elements of an RPG—the loot mill and the explorable map and the rest—and combine it with a tabletop sensibility, where context and motive and dialogue are important. Since then other developers have done similar things, and in some ways BioWare has gone even more mainstream, but that’s still at the core of what they do, and their body of technique has accumulated around it. TYLER SIG MAN Red Hook Studios The RPGs that have inspired us the most are rather old. The C-64 era and the early PC…

Hackers are often portrayed as computer savants hunched over a keyboard, sucking down a Diet Coke and writing script faster than the characters can appear on a dirty CRT. They’re performing sorceries a half-step removed from actual magic, exploiting people and systems without leaving the house. Watch Dogs 2, an open-world action adventure set in the San Francisco Bay Area, turns hacking into a full contact sport. It’s the GTA template of a city, cars, guns, and ragdoll physics, but you can also use a phone to remotely overload a circuit box and knock security guards comatose or hack underground pipes to blow up huge sections of the street. (Yes, you can hack pipes.) It rarely feels like you’re using technical expertise to give big, insidious tech companies the run…

Welcome to 2017. Once upon a time that would be the title card for a dystopian science fiction film, but now it’s reality. The Spy embraces the future and moves with the times, but hopes you can find some solace in the fact that, no matter what happens in the world, The Spy will always be there, inexplicably uncovering rumors for the readers of PC Gamer. And if The Spy somehow fails to stop a nuclear missile launch (which hasn’t happened yet, touch wood) then your heroically dedicated rumor merchant will escape to a private bunker and tap them out in Morse code. If your hands haven’t melted off, tune your radio to emergency frequency 140.52 to hear them. But The Spy digresses. Here are some rumors, relayed for you…

 NEED TO KNOW RELEASE April 4 DEVELOPER CI Games PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.sniperghostwarrior3.com There’s something romantic about being a sniper. You have to monitor your targets carefully, learn their patterns, and be mindful of their tendencies to lean, yawn, or pick their nose lest you miss your shot and all hell descends upon you. It’s a morbidly intimate experience, and one that makes you value each sporadic kill. The Ghost Warrior series has been attempting to capture that experience for two games now. How successful it’s been seems to depend on whether you’re a reviewer or a gamer, the combined sales figures—north of five million—having defied lukewarm critical opinion. Ghost Warrior 3 marks a break with the past, replacing linear, heavily scripted missions with open-world rural Georgia. The country is…

immersive sim is less a genre than a design philosophy. Its roots extend back to Looking Glass and Ion Storm. Ultima Underworld, Thief, Deus Ex and System Shock were the template for a new way of thinking about first-person design—where immersion is heightened through dependable systems and NPCs who respond to the player’s actions. It’s why JC Denton’s boss admonishes him for walking into the women’s toilets. Immersive sim developer Arkane Studios has, in recent years, been more focused on action and stealth. Dishonored’s combat is fast and decisive —you can disable a guard instantly with a chokehold or sword to the neck. Prey is more deliberate. “Dishonored is probably the legacy of Thief,” says Raphael Colantonio, CEO of Arkane and creative director of Prey. “Prey is the legacy of…

What was it that you wanted to achieve in founding Arkane Studios, and why did you settle on Arx Fatalis as your first project? Back then I was 28, I think. And my favorite games were Ultima, Ultima Underworld and Thief. I wanted to make one of those. A PC game, hardcore, first person, somewhat RPG—a mix of action and shooting. I had no idea about the market; was that going to work or not? And it actually was super hard, because as a first game, being there directly on PC, making your own engine was just a crazy idea. But it kind of worked out. The game back then was not successful—it’s probably more successful now than it was back then—but it kind of announced to the rest of…

1 THE HENCH MAN KILLER One of the laziest characterization tropes for a villain is that, with minimal provocation, they will brutally murder one of their own subordinates. Just to show us how terribly evil they are. “It’s ineffective, because we immediately lose any sense of this being a real person,” says Tom Jubert. 2 THE MIND - CONTROLLER The original plan for Dragon Age’s Loghain was that he would be mind-controlled by the more powerful Archdemon. “My feeling was that this deprived Loghain of agency,” Gaider says. This is true, but it also deprives the mind-controller of depth. The best villains are those who subtly manipulate others to do their bidding, rather than using force. 3 THE WORST CRIME IMAGINABLE Early in the story, they will do something unspeakably…

Goodbye, 2016. Whatever your thoughts about the year, it definitely happened. And it contained some great games. We awarded 13 scores of 90% or higher across 2016, from Pony Island (91%, PCG 277) to Dishonored 2 (93%, PCG 288). Now we end things with Watch Dogs 2. Is Ubisoft’s open-world hack-’em-up the last great game of the year? Not according to our reviewer, who gave it an unspectacular 68%. For James, the lack of depth to the combat and stealth systems is the cited reason for his disappointment. (Although—as a cheeky counterpoint—I’ve had a lot of fun mucking around in its gloriously detailed open world, doing cybercrimes and getting into some ridiculous antics.) Ubisoft’s other release, Steep, also gets a mediocre rating—here thanks to skiing an awkward path between simulation…

The government is spying on its citizens. Don’t worry, I’m not about to launch into a rant about the Investigatory Powers Act. Rather, this is the set up to Orwell, a five-part episodic adventure about the tension between privacy and national security. Set in The Nation, Orwell is a visual novel in which you voyeuristically watch over a group of activists, trying to determine who is responsible for a series of bombings. You play an investigator, and your job is to analyze the digital footprint of any citizens The Party has marked as a potential threat. At first you’re scouring public and state records— newspapers, websites and police databases. Soon, the intrusion deepens. You read emails and chat logs, listen in on phone calls, and, in extreme cases, dig into…

Most Warhammer armies start with a Tolkien base, then add off-kilter ingredients to create something familiar but warped. Wood Elves, for example, may seem like typical hippie archers and their Treemen Ents by another name, but the forest home they share is a gestalt entity they’re symbiotically linked with, and what you end up with is a mix of expected Elfy types and rather more unusual units. The Tree Kin, living dead plants, are solid melee specialists with a fire weakness. Legendary lord Orion has antlers and deer legs, and hurls a magic spear – a hybrid character effective at range and up close. Elves can also move while shooting, keeping them manoeuvrable. Shootiness combined with fragility means they need a lot of micro to manage – leave them alone…

A fter weeks of radio silence, Hello Games has released a huge update for its colorful space sim. It’s called Foundation, and the studio describes it as “a foundation for things to come”, promising that it’s the first of many free updates. Many felt short-changed by the original release, specifically by how shallow it was compared to the endless breadth of its procedural galaxy. And that’s one of the many things this update addresses, giving you a lot more to do besides mining, crafting, and traveling between near-identical planets. It’s a step in the right direction, but is it enough to tempt back lapsed players? One of the best new additions is Creative mode. This gives you infinite resources, so you can freely explore the galaxy without the constant need…

A s an exaggerated snapshot of 2010s life, it was inevitable Watch Dogs 2 would include an Uber-like taxi company. In this alternate reality it’s called Driver San Francisco, and allows Marcus to make some extra money as a taxi driver. Grand Theft Auto had taxi missions years ago, but there wasn’t much to them besides driving from A to B against the clock. In Watch Dogs 2 they’re more bespoke, with stories and a few surprises, elevating them above the usual open-world filler. Uber is famously controversial, with stories emerging of drivers being attacked by traditional taxi drivers who feel their livelihoods are threatened. I don’t know how accurate or widespread these stories are, but they’re common enough that Watch Dogs 2 directly references them in its ‘Just Earning…