Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2017 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

SPECIAL REPORT WHAT IS PDXCON? In May, Paradox Interactive hosted its first ever public convention in Stockholm, bringing players, developers, and modders together for two days of demos, panels, and yes, karaoke. It was a celebration of Paradox and grand strategy, but also gaming in general, with other studios like Mojang and Frontier hosting their own presentations. For Fredrik Wester, it’s just the beginning—an experiment that will hopefully lead to annual conventions with thousands of attendees. For years, Paradox Interactive has hosted press conventions and small fan gatherings, but this year, in the publisher’s hometown of Stockholm, it combined the two with the first public Paradox Convention. Around 700 people gathered in Sweden’s capital for two days of panels, seminars, competitions, and demos. But why has Paradox decided to open…

After a much-needed year off, Assassin’s Creed takes us to ancient Egypt. The director of the series’ best entry, Black Flag, is leading Origins’ development. You play as a character called Bayek, in a story set in 49 BCE, at the end of the age of pharaohs. It’s a more challenging game this time around, with a revamped combat system and special encounters against boss enemies—including fights in a gladiatorial arena. Ubisoft’s ancient Egypt is a gigantic, seamless world, made up of many cities and villages. There’s a lot of new stuff here, and there’s a sense Assassin’s Creed has been infused with ideas from other open world games, including Ubisoft’s own Far Cry series. There’s a focus on customising your hero, with a levelling system and the ability to…

This co-op-only narrative game was one of E3’s unexpected treats. You play as one of two characters, Leo and Vincent. They’re in prison now, but the narrative jumps to different points in their life. While the story is prescribed, you get to dictate what happens in individual scenes. We’re shown the example of a robbery at a gas station. You get to choose which character takes the gun, based on what you know about their personalities, and each has unique interactions with NPCs and the environment. There’s enormous potential for fun couch co-op, as you and your friend discover how far you can bend the events of each scene. A Way Out comes from director Josef Fares, who worked on Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.…

1RACE Guardians come in three flavors: Human, Exo, and Awoken. Exos are machines, and the Awoken are purple humans who ventured to the edge of the universe. 2GUNS You can take loads of guns with you, but only three can be loaded into quick-access slots. You can switch them around in menus if you find a quiet moment. 3LIGHT You hit the level cap quickly in Destiny, after that your Light level is what matters. All gear has a value that contributes your overall Light level. 4CLASS ITEM You get a cosmetic item that improves your Light and looks cool, in theory. Hunters get cloaks, but Titans have waist-towels and Warlocks get a measly armband. 5MOBILITY Classes have multiple types of jump—from gliding to blinking. Destiny is full of cheeky…

TITANS ARE THE MOST MAJESTIC THINGS IN EVE ONLINE. THESE COLOSSAL SPACESHIPS SPAN UPWARDS OF 18 KILOMETERS IN LENGTH AND COME EQUIPPED WITH DEVASTATING ‘DOOMSDAY ’ WEAPONS THAT CAN EVI SCERATE ENTI REFLEETS IN ONE FELL SWOOP. THEY TAKE ALMOST A YEAR OF TRAINING TO FLY, COST NEARLY 100 BILLION ISK TO BUILD, AND ARE THE BACKBONE OF ANY MAJOR EVE ALLIANCE. AND ROCKETX KILLS THEM FOR A LIVING. imeet Rocket in the media room at EVE Online’s annual Fanfest in Iceland. For the average EVE player, nearly every minute of this week is spent reuniting with corpmates, drinking beer, and celebrating PC gaming’s dauntingly complex spaceship MMO. But my meeting with Rocket X has a different, more sombre tone. I’m here to talk about one of the most embarrassing…

Plagiarism is common among MMOs, but if one game could stand to have a few more ideas stolen, it’s EVE Online. This space-faring sandbox from CCP Games is both a fascinating and depressing social experiment. EVE Online encourages players to make their own objectives and tell their own stories. Naturally, those players decided to make those stories a chronicle of war so violent that it makes Game of Thrones feel like a Sunday school story. Anchored by a player-driven economy, the galaxy of EVE is a diverse ecosystem of industrialists, merchants, criminals, and soldiers all coexisting together. But venture out beyond the safety of high-security space, and you’ll find EVE’s beating heart. Here, massive player alliances numbering in the tens of thousands maneuver with all the weight of actual nations.…

Endless Space 2’s journey is just beginning. A 4X strategy game starts, if you’re lucky, with a promising foundation. After six months in Early Access, Amplitude’s stylish game of conquest enters a competitive field with much to distinguish it. It isn’t the deepest space strategy game available, but it is perhaps the most pleasant to spend time with: An atmospheric afternoon-killer that blends strategic decision-making with beautiful presentation. It really is gorgeous. There’s a sense of style here that’ll appeal to anybody who loves the fantasy of a 4X strategy game, but typically finds the presentation dry. Amplitude knows when a bit of flare is necessary to push through the sense that you’re really setting down on alien worlds or trading fire with an enemy fleet, when what you’re really…

A hundred people are dropped on an island full of guns, and the last one alive wins. That’s the beautifully simple premise of Battlegrounds, the survival game taking the internet by storm. A storm that I’m hopelessly caught up in. At first I was treating it like a deathmatch, tooling up with any guns I could scavenge and seeking other players out in an attempt to shoot my way to the top of the food chain. But I was dying quickly, and embarrassingly, without even scraping the top 50. So I decided to take a different approach. I started playing the game like an elaborate game of hide-and-seek. Hiding instead of attacking. Sneaking through the foliage, holing up in buildings, letting other players pass rather than engaging them in a…

PROCESSORS The CPUs that will supercharge your PC The CPU market has been one-sided for years. With AMD struggling to produce rival processors, Intel has been able to rule the roost. However, with the arrival of AMD’s new Ryzen processors, we finally have competition again. So, whether you’ve got $200 or $600 to spend, you have a decision to make. The picture is quite a simple one: For any given price AMD offers more cores, while Intel offers a higher clock speed. As such, depending on how you use your PC, one will suit you better than the other. Focus mainly on games? Intel’s higher clock speeds will more often than not get you the highest framerates, although most of the time most games are still going to be limited by…

Let’s face it, this is all we really wanted from E3, and that’s why it had to be revealed in our own E3 show. War of the Chosen is an expansion to one of our highestscoring games of the last decade that radically changes up the campaign. In case you were worried that XCOM 2 wasn’t hard enough, this one adds new alien heroes who you’ll come up against multiple times in the campaign. Your conflict with them will escalate into an arms race between the humans and aliens. They’ll remember past encounters with you, apparently, and are even capable of kidnapping your soldiers. These new villains include a sniper called The Hunter, The Warlock, who summons spectral enemies, and purple melee maestro The Assassin. To help rally against these…

In Darksiders III, you play as Fury, another of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This comes courtesy of some of the original creators of Darksiders, which is nice—right now, this looks in a pretty early state. Fury is a whip-wielding mage, and this is again an open-world game with puzzle-y bits, and remains as close as we’ll get to Zelda on PC. Fury is looking to eliminate embodied versions of the seven deadly sins, presumably by hitting them until they’re dead. Environments will be laid out like a giant dungeon, encouraging the player to explore by teasing bits of the world to come. Darksiders is dependable puzzle-action fodder, and its return is welcome to PCG’s Tom Senior, a connoisseur of mostly 7/10 games.…

It’s time for BioWare’s stab at a Division/ Destiny-style online service game, this time with people in mechs called ‘freelancers’ exploring a brutal sci-fi land. Anthem looks decent until the action starts—and its reveal doesn’t showcase BioWare’s strengths of writing and world building. There is at least the suggestion that there’ll be tough choices that’ll affect the world around you. Anthem doesn’t make a mind-blowing first showing, aside from its gorgeous environments, and the footage feels like little more than a proof of concept. But it’s the first truly new thing BioWare has made since Dragon Age. That’s alone a reason to take interest.…

1 ARENA SHOOTER PVP maps aren’t huge, but they give you a good look at parts of the world you don’t often see in singleplayer, like this lovely town. 2 THE BOMB In this particular game mode, Guardians rush to arm one of two bombs on the map. Defenders try to stop them. Think Counter-Strike with dance emotes. 3 DREAM TEAM Destiny 2’s PVP modes will be four-on-four. Players don’t normally stand in a big circle like this. 4 GUN GAME You can take any weapon you can find into PVP. In the first game this was a nightmare to balance.…

Conceived by John Smedley, Everquest is heavily inspired by its creator’s passion for MUDs. Gorgeous 3D graphics brought the high fantasy world of Norrath to life in ways that Ultima Online’s 2D sprites never could. Though SOE originally had modest expectations for Everquest, it quickly became the most popular MMO of the ’90s, releasing an unprecedented 22 expansion packs If Ultima Online started the genre, Everquest refined it. Featuring 16 different races and classes, it digs deep into fantasy’s roots to let players be anything from frog necromancers to ogre shamans. Many of Everquest’s ideas, like grouping with dozens of players to kill tough raid bosses, would become archetypes of the genre. Everquest was unflinchingly difficult and obtuse, however. Unlike today’s MMOs, quests required patience and persistence. Very little was…

The act of killing another player in any MMO before Dark Age of Camelot was, at best, shortsighted. Someone had stuff, you wanted that stuff, so you forcefully parted them from it. But Mythic Entertainment had a vision for a different kind of murder, one that included strategy, teamwork, and glory. Most MMOs were satisfied with petty killing. Dark Age of Camelot, however, aspired to all-out war. Introducing a structured form of player combat known as ‘Realm vs Realm,’ Dark Age of Camelot laid the groundwork for a new kind of PVP. Three factions battle for control of various zones, establishing outposts that they have to protect from opposing forces. This open world approach to war necessitates strategy, as choosing when to attack is just as important as where. At…

If you could live your life without limits, what would you become? For mostly everyone that plays this, the answer is apparently a nipple-clamped, leather-clad club dancer. Though it possesses none of the stat-based progression typical of many MMOs, you’d be foolish if you thought there is no roleplaying going on in Second Life’s sexual subcultures. While not your average MMO, the fantasy of becoming something else is just as strong. There’s no real objective, just a series of tools. Its reputation as a haven for kinks and fetishes is deserved, but that’s what makes Second Life so important. When we play MMOs, we’re asked to participate in a fantasy that’s already defined for us. This is an example of what can happen when the world bends to our imagination.…

The road that The Elder Scrolls Online has taken has been a rough one. Its attempt to unite fans of Skyrim and MMOs was seen by both parties as, at best, half-assed. The flexible class system and exquisite quests were hampered by rampant technical issues and a narrow storyline that funnelled players from one location to the next instead of giving them freedom to explore. To make things even worse, all of this culminated in an endgame grind that was so tedious it was demoralising. Things weren’t looking great for TESO, but then ZeniMax Online Studios started making fundamental changes to the game. The subscription model was binned, the endgame was redesigned to add more diverse activities, and One Tamriel was launched. This update scrapped the level restrictions that made…

Friday the 13th is improv, except the ‘yes, and-ing’ tends to end with a hole in your chest. One player is cast as Jason Voorhees, while seven player-controlled campers scramble to escape death at his hands. Die early on, and you become an audience member watching Jason tear the other players apart. The waiting isn’t painful, so long as a clever Jason is still tormenting the survivors while you cheer them on. You do need a good Jason, though. When I’m the killer, my goal is not just catch to the campers, but to appear at the worst moment—to startle a group and snatch away their hope, to taunt them with axe wounds in cabin doors. Friday the 13th’s local voice chat is vital to its fun. I once overheard…

Steel Division is a stressful game. It’s a daunting fusion of the complexities of a World War 2 wargame and the micromanagement of an real-time strategy, set amid the ruined towns and hedgerow hell of Normandy. This is why I’ve been unapologetically screaming—over loud explosions and gunfire— at supply trucks for not getting to my artillery fast enough. My throat is hoarse, but I’ve no regrets. The Wargame series has always been demanding, and Steel Division is part of that series in everything but name. It means interesting maps, authentic units crafted with an almost fetishistic attention to detail and battles that are as striking as they are challenging. But it’s blessed with greater focus than its predecessors, covering only a small area and period of time. By zooming in…

1 SLEET STORM A damage-over-time dealer which sprays stormy ice around you in a fairly generous radius. Not a bear. 2 SECLUDED GROVE A super area-of-effect heal, for sticky situations when partying with a group, most handy when heading into the new Battlegrounds. It is not a bear. 3 FERAL GUARDIAN It’s a bear. It growls and it hits things. Options for other animals wouldn’t go amiss, especially as everyone starting the game now is packing a Baloo in their backburner.…

PHIL SAVAGE THIS MONTH Backdoored the interflange through a TCP spatchnozzle. ALSO PLAYED Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain I f you watch US procedural dramas with any regularity, you’ll have doubtless been subjected to a hacking scene. It probably featured a spunky head of IT typing frantically on multiple keyboards, shouting panicked instructions at a second, more traditionally nerdy sidekick. “It’s no use,” they’d likely lament, “he’s backdoored the interflange through a TCP spatchnozzle.” Their boss, almost certainly a lightly-stubbled technophobe, reaches down behind the PC and yanks. The screens go blank. He holds up the power cord and rolls his eyes. Cut to an advert, probably about car insurance. Network television never learned the lessons of ’90s cyberthrillers, or of games such as Uplink and Hacknet. Hacking…

1 STALKER: LOST ALPHA MOD The best Stalker mod gets even better W here the Stalker Complete mods leave sweeping system changes alone in favor of visual upgrades to textures and models, Lost Alpha is almost the complete opposite. While there are new weapon animations, textures, and tweaks to the weather and vegetation, this Shadow of Chernobyl mod is not afraid to stick its fingers into Stalker’s innards. The beta version of Lost Alpha was released three years ago, after a leak, and while it was clear that its creators weren’t able to include everything they wanted, they still found time to add newly drivable vehicles, and plenty of other cut features that never made it into the original game. Well, it’s three years later, and here’s Lost Alpha’s Developer’s…

T his is a ‘last-manstanding’ online shooter, in which up to 100 players parachute onto an island in order to scavenge, fight, run and hide until only one person is left alive. It’s an Early Access phenomenon with over 3 million players, and the PC Gamer team wants to know what the fuss is all about. We’ll be playing squad mode, meaning we must work together as a four-man unit in order to become the most lethal lads on the island. Sounds simple, but there’s a problem: three of us have never played the game before. Attempt 1 Andy: Every Battlegrounds game begins with a leap from a plane. But in multiplayer you have to make sure everyone jumps at the same time, otherwise you’ll all be scattered around the…

The PC Gamer view of the world The PC Gaming Show came back for a third successful year at E3. This year was our best yet, with the announcement of a huge expansion for XCOM 2, as well as superb indies and other news. XCOM 2: War of the Chosen brings three new champions to XCOM, as well as a new story and loads of other content. It is an even bigger deal than Enemy Within was for XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and will be out on August 29. Microsoft, meanwhile, announced that Age of Empires is getting a Definitive Edition release, with various enhancements over the original. We also saw an update for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, offering players the ability to dive through windows, among other improvements. The 2017 show marked…

FIRST LOOK I sat front row while Dan Hay, the creative director for Far Cry 5, talked about visiting the place I grew up like it was another planet. I guess it is. Montana, the setting for the next Far Cry, is one of the biggest states in the USA with one of the lowest populations. When we broke a million—my dad texted me saying, ‘We’re big time now.’ Big is right. There’s so much empty space in Montana, it doesn’t always feel attached to the rest of the US—a perfect home for the strange. Montana is where the Church Universal and Triumphant started, a cult that performs eerie mantras to assure the stability of economies. Pinesdale is home to a Mormon sect that actively practices polygamy, just a short…

In my first five minutes of Middle-earth: Shadow of War, I hired spiders to torment an orc bard. He wanted me dead—sang about it and everything. I wanted us to lead an army together, and sweep the land with song. If only he hadn’t made such a fuss over my spider mercenaries. PLAYED IT My goal was to siege a fortress, a massive castle with thick stone walls, battlements peaking into sharp points, each occupied by artillery units dropping curse bombs in big AOE circles on the dozens of fragile orc soldiers below. There’s quite a few of them in Shadow of War, and taking control of each will be a unique experience. That’s Monolith’s goal, at least. LEAVING IT TO CHANCE During my demo last week in Santa Monica,…

We had the silly one in Forza Horizon 3, and here comes the 30% more dad-friendly, serious racer in Forza 7. It features a huge garage of 700 cars, as well as 30 environments to drive them around in, and changing conditions to keep things interesting. While Forza Motorsport looks like the more sim-y end of the series, it’s designed to appeal to everyone who likes ogling shiny new Porsches. Forza Horizon 3 offers a glimpse of what we can expect when it comes to the PC version: 4K-supported, gorgeous visuals, and yes, like Horizon, it will only be available on the Windows Store. Forza is the sort of broadly appealing but detailed racing game you don’t see quite as much of on PC these days.…

The sequel to 2003’s cult classic is finally revealed—making a surprise appearance at Ubisoft’s surprisingly decent and suitably baffling E3 press conference. Beyond Good and Evil 2 is a prequel set on a planet called System 3, and it sounds different to the nature-focused action adventure of the first one. For starters, it features a talking chimpanzee shouting profanities from the back of a flying motorcycle. It’s been described as GTA in space by creator Michel Ancel, with cities to explore. There’s no gameplay or release date—in fact, it’s likely we’ll be waiting a while for this one. Despite that, it’s hard not to be swept up in its eccentric charm.…

When sci-fi’s first writers imagined virtual realities, they’d never have guessed the ease with which we could access them. With just a few clicks, we can step into worlds filled with adventure. We populate cities, create digital cultures, and tell stories together while exploring strange new horizons. MMOs are defined by their scope. They take the basic foundations of roleplaying games, and stretch them over worlds where countless players coexist. Whether you’re diving into dungeons, hawking goods, or plotting the downfall of a rival, MMOs are best when they inspire us to be social. Here, I’m going to explore the history of this genre by touching on ten of its greatest examples. These are the games that pioneered online roleplaying, building the template that all others would conform to. Some…

Character classes have always been one the fundamental elements of MMOs, but few have ever had a more nuanced system than Final Fantasy XI. Known for its unique Job system, classic Final Fantasy staples such as White Mages, Dark Knights, and Dragoons, are a perfect match for online roleplaying. Each player chooses one of its 22 Jobs as a primary class, as well as a secondary Job. Doing so grants you access to half of that Job’s spells, creating a great deal of diversity, and enabling detailed theorycrafting around combos. If you make a bad class combo or get bored, you can always swap to a new job and begin levelling it What’s frustrating is how few games have paid attention to such a progressive system, clinging to the archaic…

Of all the MMOs on this list, none have had the impact that World of Warcraft has. As much of a pop culture phenomenon as it is a videogame, Warcraft’s absurd success transformed the genre and steered it away from innovation towards shameless imitation in hopes of recreating that success. If Blizzard could translate the Warcraft series of RTS games into an MMO, why couldn’t other developers find success doing the same? The reason is that Blizzard put two decades of MMO innovations into a single game. Other MMOs may be better at specific aspects, such as PVP, but as a whole package, nothing comes close. World of Warcraft made the genre accessible to anyone by eliminating much of the tedium of older MMOs. For the first time, players could…

MMOs can’t thrive in mediocrity. In order for a game in this genre to please a consistent or growing playerbase of the size necessary to keep an MMO world ticking over, there needs to be something about it that’s both different and brilliant. Upon its launch three years ago, The Elder Scrolls Online did not have this essential ingredient. It felt too much like an MMO by the numbers, and its splash of Tamriel flavoring was not quite enough to set it apart. Since then, it’s been added to, revamped, and revitalized with One Tamriel, which opened up the world via a level-scaling system, and Zenimax Online’s forays into more flavorsome RPG storytelling with its Orsinium DLC (among others). Morrowind, ESO’s first additional ‘Chapter’ (the developer is reluctant to use…

This vision of a futuristic Tokyo has little in common with the real city. It’s a stylized labyrinth of interlocking buildings, occasionally opening up into plazas littered with sculptures of smiling cats. Viewed from an isometric perspective, the city is gorgeous, buzzing with life and animation. Hordes of pedestrians scuttle back and forth, flying cars shoot between tower blocks, and in the middle of this chaotic urban sprawl is you, a killer for hire Contracts can be simple: Sniping someone on a distant apartment balcony from a vantage point, or locating them in a busy crowd. But Tokyo 42 is at its most thrilling when your target is tucked away in a restricted area—often at the top of a building—and protected by armed guards. It’s in these situations where you…

JON MORCOM THIS MONTH Clicked on ‘Load Most Recent Save’ many, many times. ALSO PLAYED Oxenfree, Prey I s there a finer treat in prospect than firing up The Witcher 3 for a fresh runthrough of all its quests and expansions and vacuuming up every single Gwent card out there? To be in the Northern Realms again, and to climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every rainbow, ’til you find your dream? Sorry, suddenly started channelling Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music for a moment there. Anyway, I recently undertook the full-on Witcher 3 experience, which had been going swimmingly for many hours until I neared the finale of the Blood and Wine expansion at the Tesham Mutna Ruins. Nithral, Imlerith, Caranthir, Eredin in the base game, and…

FRENZY FAILED! A fter the runaway success of the first Grand Theft Auto in 1997, DMA Design— now known as Rockstar North—had to keep the momentum going with a sequel. Grand Theft Auto 2 was released in 1999, and refined the freeform structure that made the original such a hit, but with a wildly different visual style and a new respect system. Reviews were mixed, and sales were lower than expected, but it was an important step towards the series’ influential leap to three dimensions with Grand Theft Auto III in 2001. While the first game features contemporary caricatures of New York, San Francisco, and Miami, Grand Theft Auto 2 takes place in the entirely fictional Anywhere City, a retro-futuristic metropolis with a bleak, dystopian atmosphere. Promo material for the…