Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2017 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

Total War: Warhammer II is shaping up to be an excellent continuation. It’s a similar proposition, but, as Matt Elliott shows in this month’s cover feature, there are exciting changes afoot. Yes, that’s an analogy. Hi, I’m Phil, your erstwhile deputy editor, and the person now in charge of this magazine. There are some exciting changes ahead for PC Gamer, too, but don’t worry: we’ll still make lots of Dragon Age II jokes. EDITOR phil.savage@futurenet.com@Octaeder TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Tweet us @PCGamer…

HIGHS The Long Dark Hinterland’s survival sim finally leaves Early Access. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds The first-person servers are a revelation, upping tension to a ridiculous degree. Wolfenstein II The imaginative Swedes at MachineGames are doubling down on Wolfenstein’s absurdity Tacoma Fullbright brings its rich worldbuilding and keen storytelling to space, and it totally works. Hearthstone The new expansion is bringing 135 new cards. Time to get sucked in again. LOWS Steam It’s about time Valve updated Steam’s default UI. Even Uplay looks nicer these days. Early Access We get the benefits, but can someone just release a finished game? Dust Whoever invents a PC that doesn’t constantly get coated in dust will be a rich, rich person. Half-Life With Black Mesa’s Xen level incoming, the lack of new official games stings.…

PLAYED IT NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Early 2018 DEVELOPER Hazelight Studios PUBLISHER EA LINK bit.ly/eawayout It’s like a David Cage game, but good,” I say to PC Gamer US’s James Davenport after we leave our session of A Way Out. This co-op narrative adventure game comes from Josef Fares and his studio Hazelight. Fares directed Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, which you may remember as a devastating entry in the ‘sad boy’ subgenre. In this, you and another person play as Vincent and Leo, two guys who become pals in prison before breaking out. They form a kind of working relationship as they make their way through the world outside of their jail cells. I don’t really mean my slight towards Cage’s work. The way his games present interactive storytelling…

1 RAT’S UNBELIEVABLE Humans refuse to believe Skaven exist. That hasn’t stopped them from building an empire and contriving to destroy the planet, though. 2 STONE INITIATIVE Skaven society is a tangle of infighting, but it’s governed by the Council of Thirteen. Even then, it’s not true co-operation; the Skaven are the least unified of all the Warhammer races. 3 UNLUCKY FOR SOME Warpstone is the most precious substance to the Skaven. It’s the solidified version of pure Chaos energy, used to power their nefarious-looking war machines. 4 GOD MODE Their god is the Great Horned Rat—a deity intent on covering the world in Skaven. During the End Times it did such a good job of ruining stuff that it ascended to being a Chaos god. 5 HEAVENLY BODIES In the lore, Skaven help destroy…

Drifting somewhere between the Earth and the Moon, the lunar transfer station Tacoma lies empty and abandoned. An incident has forced the crew to evacuate and you, Amy Ferrier, have been sent to investigate and recover its omnipresent artificial intelligence, Odin. But even though the six people who ran the station are long gone, their presence is felt all around you. And not just because of the empty coffee cups, photos of loved ones, and other traces of life they left behind—making the station feel like a sci-fi Mary Celeste. Venturis, the megacorporation that owns Tacoma, has 3D recordings of every second of the crew’s year aboard the station, which you’ve been granted access to. And it’s through these ghostly memories— which Amy relives using an augmented reality viewer—that you’ll…

MASTER THIEF You only get one, but they’re immortal. Scouts, burgles, can upgrade to attack. URCHIN Your Artful Dodger. Put three in an orphanage and they’ll be able to evict other urchins. GANG Your William Cutting. Evicts urchins, attacks. Levels up with each murder. ASSASSIN Causes six points of damage, then goes away. Probably on a well-deserved holiday. THUG Can block streets for two turns before heading home with an Orcy “JOB’S DONE!” TRUANCY OFFICER Collects urchins, and takes them away in a cage to the poorhouse.…

RUNE 2000 Dark for its time, Rune follows the Viking Ragnar as he tries to stop Loki from bringing about Ragnarok. FOR HONOR 2017 It takes a few liberties, but few games capture the brutality of Viking combat so well. THE BANNER SAGA 2014 This beautiful adventure follows a band of allies as they attempt to flee the world’s end. THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKY RIM 2011 The Nordic culture it depicts captures the Viking spirit in memorable ways. JOTUN 2015 The story of a warrior who gets a second chance to earn a place in Valhalla by defeating a race of giants.…

HYPOTHERMIA There are lots of ways to contract this, like walking into the wind and falling through ice. Warm yourself by a fire to combat it. FOOD POISONING This will severely weaken you. Cure it with antibiotics or a tea made from Reishi mushrooms. CABIN FEVER Stay in one place and you’ll develop cabin fever, which prevents you from resting until you move somewhere else. BURNS If you stumble into a campfire you’ll be badly burned. Apply a bandage, then use painkillers or brew up some Rosehip tea. SPRAINS Fall and you’ll sprain your ankle, which slows you down. And if you sprain your wrist you’re unable to use guns or bows.…

Pyre’s Rites are a strange sport-like ritual that I’ve come to call ‘wizard basketball’. According to super-secret design documents, these are the alternatives that didn’t quite pan out. SPICE GIRLS QUIDDITCH A fearsome combo of brands. What could go wrong? (Turns out the licensing would cost $1,000,000,000.) WHITE WALKER MARATHON Seven years later, we’re still waiting for one of them to cross the finish line. TAROT TEXAS HOLD ’EM This experiment ended after a full house of Devils full of Deaths just seemed like a really unsettling way to win $35. WAAAGH FOOTBALL A disaster. The referee’s head ended up as the ball and the Orks went back to Blood Bowl. RING OF POWER TOSS No one would toss the damn ring. ENT LUMBER JACKING “It’s for the world record!”…

SAMUEL ROBERTS THIS MONTH Became the lone rider, and not in a cool way. ALSO PLAYED The Sexy Brutale, Night in the Woods In the slightly directionless world of GTA Online, where NPCs ring you with mission requests every five minutes, and the map is strewn with task icons, the best thing you can do is own a piece of Los Santos that feels like yours. Aside from buying apartments or cars, there are several ways to do this—the most appealing of which is running your own biker gang. I spend just over $500,000 to get a decent hangout in the middle of Los Santos. I christen this new gang ‘Biker Grove’. Ha. I’m a cool guy. I’m also the only one here. Here’s my dilemma: I don’t want to…

1 BEARDS There are a mad selection of beards. You can filter it to make finding the right fuzz simpler. 2 CLOTHES Clothes are split into two parts. Getting it wrong leads to a condition known as ‘Ghost Ass’. 3 PERSONAS These can be tweaked. There aren’t many music options, though. Feeder for Phil it is, then. 4 FINISHERS Naming finishers is a joy. There’s also a menu that lets you rename all of the moves.…

THE SCYTHIAN Says: “We were tempted to maybe just stop with the whole woeful errand but there’s something attractive about martyrdom.” LOGFELLA Says: “In my experience, there are times when owls are not what they seem and at other times they’re just plain old owls.” GIRL Says: “If I’m being honest the sylvan sprites totally freak me out. I mean… what are they? Where are they from?” THE ARCHETYPE Says: “Are you feeling that vibe? It is a time of miracles! Sing a Song of Sworcery and look up to the looming angry birds.” DOG FELLA Says: “Sometimes I grow weary of barking all the time but a dog’s gotta do what a dog’s gotta do what a dog’s gotta do do.”…

TURNIPS A servant finds turnips in a fireplace. Then a man mentions a soldier passing peacefully. The soldier’s last thoughts, thanks to Cole, were of the turnip stew he ate as a child. PLUMS A woman will mention finding plums, which are attracting flies. Later, you hear someone say that cobwebs are good wound dressings. The flies were meant to attract the spiders. CHEESE Cheese and mint go missing. The maids say the cook hasn’t yelled at them. The cheese brought mice, which brought cats, which act silly because of the mint, delighting the cook. DAGGERS A soldier will talk about finding a barrel full of missing daggers. Later a woman will mention being unable to find her dagger when she nearly pulled it on someone in a drunken fight.…

TOTAL $1,722 MOTHERBOARD X370 SLI Plus MSI $129 MSI’s X370 SLI Plus is identical to the gaming series motherboard that costs not a lot more, so why waste money? PROCESSOR Ryzen 5 1400 AMD $158 Four cores, eight threads, and half the price of the Intel equivalent. Gaming performance is solid, and streaming capability is robust. GRAPHICS CARD GTX 1070 FTW Gaming ACX EVGA $460 The GPU market is a crazy, thanks to the Ethereum boom. But if you can nab this GTX 1070 for a steal, 1440p 60fps is abound. COOLER Kraken X31 NZXT $80 To get the most out of a good CPU you need a cooler to match. The Kraken X31 is powerful, quiet, and great for overclocks. MEMORY Fury 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 - 2666 HyperX $143…

MATTHEW ELLIOTT Specialist in Rats, wrestling Twitter @MGElliott This month After leaving Future, Matt missed PC Gamer so much he remade us in a wrestling game. JOE DONNELLY Specialist in News, moving house Twitter @deaco2000 This month Relocated to the PCG office. We’ve already given him the scoop on Bath’s best fudge shops. SAMUEL ROBERTS Specialist in PCGamer.com, not having deadlines Twitter @SamuelWRoberts This month As our new EIC, Sam now lives on PCGamer.com. Find him in your browser.…

1 ZWEQ ON WC708 An eight-second win showcased the full artistry of the champion. “My team tried that route, and decided it’s impossible to pull off, but Zweq found a string of moves that made it barely possible,” says 8-ball. 2 ZERO ON WC705 Zero showed just why this level was titled ‘This Could Be Heaven or Hell’, as he zigzagged his way through its claustrophobic spaces at dizzying speed with the precision of a surgeon. 3 ADI ON WC702 It’s spins galore in adi’s masterful run. “The spin in the end was just ridiculously nice,” Zweq says of a remarkable sevenrotation spin from top to bottom of the level, during which adi collected two apples. 4 ADI ON WC711 Designer 8-ball tried to offer many viable routes, but adi…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE September 22 DEVELOPER ArenaNet PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.guildwars2.com PLAYED IT An MMO needs to be many things to many people. Some people want a social space to hang out with friends. Some people want a huge world filled with rich history. Some people want encounters to overcome, systems to master and gear to upgrade. Some people—for instance, me—just want to run around, leaping over other players on their new mount. Path of Fire follows the template created by Guild Wars 2’s first expansion, Heart of Thorns. As in HoT, the level cap won’t increase and no new tiers of gear will be introduced. Instead, progression comes through masteries—abilities that are earned via XP and Mastery Points, the former collected by killing and questing, the latter by…

EV ST JAMES Station administrator The boss. Manages the station, but ultimately reports to Venturis, the corporation that owns it. ANDREW DAGYAB Botanist Grows food for the crew in the biomedical wing and cultivates oxygen-producing algae. CLIVE SIDDIQI Operations specialist EV’s trusted second in command. Deals with the day-to-day admin of running the station. SAREH HASMADI Medical officer Keeps the crew healthy and makes sure they’re sticking to their diet and exercise plans. ROBERTA WILLIAMS Mechanical engineer Bert makes sure the station doesn’t fall apart. If something needs fixin’, she’s the one to call. NATALI KUROSHENKO Network specialist Nat looks after Tacoma’s systems, including the AI assistant Odin.…

I’m in the middle of exploring a lush cavern called the Queen’s Garden when the ground gives way beneath my feet. Instead of hitting spikes and resetting back to safety to try again, I just keep falling. If I had found the double jump ability by this point, I could hop up to an exit path and continue exploring in the relative safety of the Garden. But I haven’t, so I can’t. Instead, I have to fight my way through a spider-filled hell for hours. Hallownest is an unforgiving place. It’s also ridiculously huge. Hollow Knight is a 2D action platformer centered on exploring an open map, hunting for secrets and finding abilities that let you reach previously inaccessible areas. What makes it stand out, above all else, is how…

There aren’t many games that let you weaponize a corpse. I’m quite sure that there are no games that let you weaponize corpses with the grotesque invention of Diablo III’s Necromancer. He can blow up bodies to kill enemies. He can turn them into corpse-spiders that run towards nearby enemies and then explode. He can bring fresh cadavers back to life in order fight at his side. Nothing rests in peace when he’s around. He’s great fun. The classic Diablo II class has made the leap to the sequel, and he’s faster, deadlier, and Gothier than ever. You can run around with a posse of skeleton warriors, death mages, and flesh golems. If you take damage you can suck the blood out of your enemies to heal up. If enemies…

TOTAL $3,260 MOTHERBOARD Crosshair VI Hero Asus $237 Asus’s Crosshair VI Hero provides a stable backbone for any would be early adopter looking to join the red core revolution. PROCESSOR Ryzen 7 1700 AMD $295 This is for the Twitch streamers, the pro gamers, and the video creators. Eight cores, 16 threads, stunning value. GRAPHICS CARD GTX 1080 Ti Founder’s Edition MSI $706 The king of high end performance right now. Don’t be fooled by its 11GB of VRAM, this will crush games at all resolutions. COOLER Kraken X62 NZXT $160 The Kraken is the culmination of three of our favorite things: An infinity mirror, a 280mm radiator, and slick braided cooling. MEMORY Vengeance LED 32GB - 2666 Corsair $255 32GB of RAM is excessive for anyone gaming today. Use…

1 ALAN WAKE Remedy Games packed the PC version of Alan Wake with improvements. It bundled the episodic DLCs with the game, and, as a bonus, included hefty options to boost the visuals beyond that of the original. 2 CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS III The PC version of Call of Duty: Black Ops III has local multiplayer options, custom dedicated servers and official support for what has become a vibrant modding community. 3 DARK SOULS III This is notable in how it learned from the mistakes of its predecessors. After the poor ports of the first and second games, FromSoftware put the time in to ensure the PC port of Dark Souls III was rock solid. 4 JOE DANGER Hello Games increased the resolution and stability of both Joe…

HERO QUEST 1991 This, isometric version of the board game appeared on DOS, set before the age of Sigmar. BLOOD BOWL 1995 A drab, DOS adaptation of the Warhammer tabletop game based on American Football. WARHAMMER: SHADOW OF THE HORNED RAT 1995 Excellent real-time strategy game, by all accounts. WARHAMMER: DARK OMEN 1998 Another fab strategy, and the direct follow-up to Shadow of the Horned Rat. WARHAMMER: MARK OF CHAOS 2006 A tolerable real-time tactics game arriving eight years after the last Warhammer title. WARHAMMER: BATTLE MARCH 2008 Expansion to Mark of Chaos which added Dark Elves and Orcs to the roster. WARHAMMER ONLINE: AGE OF RECKONING 2008 A lovingly-realised but doomed MMO, made by Paul Barnett. BLOOD BOWL 2009 Perfectly fine reboot of the Warhammer football game that nobody bothered to play. WARHAMMER QUEST 2013 PC version of the…

Writers of videogame histories often think in terms of individuals and periods—great innovators and clear-cut ‘epochs’ in design, typically bookended by technological advances. Events or people who contradict those accounts have a tendency to get written out of the tale. According to one popular version of the medium’s evolution, the first-person shooter was formally established in 1992 with id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D, a lean, thuggish exploration of a texture-mapped Nazi citadel, and popularized in 1993 by heavy metal odyssey Doom, which sold a thenludicrous million copies worldwide at release. The company’s later shooter, Quake, meanwhile, is often held up as the first ‘true’ 3D polygonal shooter. Founded in 1991 by former employees of software company Softdisk, id’s contributions to what we now call the FPS is undoubtedly immense. Between them,…

THE WALKING DEAD: MICHONNE 2016 A Telltale miniseries that follows the fan favorite as she deals with PTSD. LIFE IS STRANGE 2015 An game that tackles grief and depression through the powers of a girl with the power to change the past. SPEC OPS: THE LINE 2012 The morally objectionable situations here are more likely to give you PTSD than lead to wellness. DEAR ESTHER 2012 An artistic experience that explores issues of grief in the form of a first-person ghost story.…

A mysterious geomagnetic anomaly has plunged the world into darkness and rendered all technology useless, including the plane you were flying over the frozen wilds of Canada. You awaken surrounded by flames and wreckage, and find yourself in a battle to survive in one of the most inhospitable corners of the planet. It’s a hell of a place to spend the apocalypse, and death lingers around every corner of this deadly, wintry expanse. There are two ways to play The Long Dark. There’s Wintermute, an episodic story mode that follows bush pilot Will Mackenzie as he searches for his missing friend in the wilderness. This is a linear experience with stylish, melancholy cutscenes exploring Mackenzie’s past. Then there’s Sandbox, which lets you tell your own stories. The only objective here…

PAMITHA THEYN Pyre’s most tragic figure, one of the last of a race of harps nearly wiped out in a war. She was exiled for betraying her sister in a misguided attempt to save her life. DALBERT OLDHEART One of your first opponents in the Rites, Dalbert is an elderly cur who only wants to win in the Rites in a bid to earn freedom for his adoptive human son, Almer. SIR GILMAN A wyrm knight of the sea and Pyre’s silliest character, who refers to himself in third person and is chuffed to prove his honor at any occasion. Not keen on flying.…

Dating simulators often present an esoteric mix of cliches and quirks, and those that introduce high-concept comedy into the mix tend to do so satirically. Dream Daddy could so easily have been that—a parody of the way visual novels tend to simplify relationships down to dialogue options, or a commentary on the usage of queer relationships in the genre. It isn’t, though. Beneath the dad jokes, it’s a game about kindness and positivity. You play your own, custom-created dad, who’s moving to a new area with his daughter, Amanda. After his partner died, he’s been raising Amanda as a single father, and the two have a very close relationship. The cul-de-sac they move to is, conveniently, filled with dads, most of whom are single (the other is in the perpetual…

THE RULES 1 I can only play as wrestlers that I have created. 2 Everything has to have a wrestling explanation. 3 I’m not allowed to max out the stats of my creations. I’m going to make a new stable in Fire Pro Wrestling World. My goal is loftier than simple recreations of famous wrestlers, though. I’ve set myself an objective of Promethean arrogance: I’m going to create a compelling sports entertainment story using members of the PC Gamer team. I’m going to limit myself to members of the team I know, because the only thing stranger than meticulously creating a colleague is doing it to someone you’ve only met once. I’m also going to be realistically unrealistic about stats. PC Gamer might be the most physically imposing team in…

“It remains an affecting and mysterious success” Sword & Sworcery EP wants you to lose yourself in its world. At its most effective, it creates an unearthly atmosphere that lodges itself in your subconscious to the point that, years later, you might catch yourself remembering its gloomy landscapes, or haunting music. I’ve thought about it a lot in the five years since I first played it. On that basis, it remains an affecting and mysterious success. I’d love nothing more than to praise the mood of what is essentially a collaborative art piece masquerading as an adventure game—and I’m going to spend plenty of paragraphs doing so. But, replaying it now, I can’t help but notice how ill-fitting the game can feel on PC. Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP was…

When Cole arrives at Haven to warn you about the Red Templars marching your way, he yells “I can’t come in unless you open!” He’s talking to the door. And he talks to his shoelaces, and Sera’s bow, and the face cards during the game of Wicked Grace you play. Because in the Fade—the realm of spirits and demons that parallels Thedas in the Dragon Age series—these inanimate objects would speak. Or, at least, they would tell him things. Spirits are reflections of a feeling, not born into a physical form—and in the Fade, Cole’s true name is Compassion. It’s why Cole can hear the tree from which Sera’s bow was carved, and the lovers who kissed beneath its boughs. Because in the Fade, they’re connected, and the divisions he…

JOE DONNELLY Spanning 26 years, the following games are not only my favorites but also a measure of my age. THE EVIL WITHIN theevilwithin2.bethesda.net After playing The Evil Within at launch, I came away underwhelmed. But after watching the sequel’s reveal trailer at E3, I decided to give the original another go. I’m loving it, and better yet, I’m not sure why. Nothing has changed, but I’ve suddenly (re)discovered one of my favorite horror games. DARK SOULS 3 www.darksouls3.com I’m now on my fourth playthrough of Dark Souls III. And despite my familiarity with Lothric—and with the Boreal Valley, Farron Keep, Anor Londo, and beyond—I’m still discovering new gear, items, and fragments of its ever-suggestible lore scattered around its nightmarish and ashen grounds. PUSHOVER www.atari.com I recently discovered an Atari ST…

TOTAL $972 MOTHERBOARD H270M Bazooka MSI $84 Kaby Lake has landed, and the 270 series chipsets with it. MSI’s Bazooka H270M is a perfect fit for our new CPU. PROCESSOR Pentium G4560 Intel $73 We saw zero framerate difference between this four-threaded Pentium and a core i7-7700K across multiple titles. GRAPHICS CARD GTX 1060 3GB Gigabyte $246 Nothing beats the GTX 1060 3GB. Prices are haywire due to cryptocurrency mining, but this is still the best deal you can get. MEMORY Fury Black 8GB @2400 HyperX $76 DDR4 packs higher speeds, better energy efficiency, and larger capacities. 8GB is still perfect for most games, too. POWER SUPPLY 500BQ EVGA $37 It may be cheap, but this 500W PSU is more than enough to handle any budget build. This rig only…