Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2018 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

PHIL SAVAGE Specialist in PC Gamer, intros Twitter @Octaeder This month Missed a trick by not wearing an actual crown to this year’s PC Gamer Weekender. True to name, the 18-year-old Total War series has brought us a totality of war—from 15th century Japan to a fantasy universe full of rats. Now, Creative Assembly is trying something new. Thrones of Britannia is the first Total War Saga: a new series that offers more focused, in-depth action around a specific area and time period. The first is Britain in the 9th century. Here in the mag, we’re also trying something different. We’ve refreshed the Monitor section with some new regular features. Get in touch and let us know if you like the new look. phil.savage@futurenet.com TALK TO PC GAMER Have your…

The Chinese Room cofounder and composer Jessica Curry summarizes her initial pitch for a live performance of Dear Esther in a typically humorous manner: “I’ve had this possibly really bad and commercially unviable idea—how would you feel about it?!” She was speaking with the Barbican’s Contemporary Music Programmer, Chris Sharp. The idea came during a Film, Archive, and Music Lab (FAMLAB) week Curry was attending. “They were talking about composers and how they work with silent film in terms of putting that into a concert experience,” she says. She began to ponder that in relation to her expertize in videogame music. Sharp has previously summed up the Barbican’s work as ‘Slightly Insane Ideas Made Reality’, so Curry’s proposal would seem a perfect fit for that remit. “They were amazing from…

Vampyr is an elusive one, flitting on the peripheries of our consciousness but never quite showing its true form. Dontnod’s action-RPG has looked promising in the past. Set in London, England during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, it promises a reactive environment where no NPC is off-limits. Now, finally, I’ve had a chance to play it. PLAY EDIT My hands-on begins in charnel fashion, as the hero, a doctor-turned-vampire called Jonathan, awakens from the dead amidst a pile of corpses. Overcome by bloodlust, he dips into his sister’s jugular, killing her, before fleeing a mob of vampire hunters who bore witness to his crime. During the chase, I encounter three pursuers on a gloomy quay. I dash to evade an attack, countering with a vicious flurry to kill the…

I am the king of nowhere. My lying bastard nobles have spent years tearing me down with a prolonged campaign of extortion, and now they rebel in unison, turning my provinces to their cause, and sending armies to claim my head. All I wanted was to turn the northeast of England into a Viking paradise. I crushed rebels and repelled aggression from the north for them, and now they AT A GLANCE, THIS IS STILL VERY MUCH A TOTAL WAR GAME My kingly ego would rather overlook the fact that I failed to build any farms and presided over chronic food shortages, My decision to mint my own currency and put an imprint of my head on all the coins didn’t go down well with my Christian English subjects, who…

The opening of Kingdom Come is surprisingly peaceful. You help your father at his forge. Run errands for your mother. Cause trouble with your mates. Flirt with your girlfriend. But just as you’re getting comfortable with protagonist Henry’s simple life, an army attacks his village and kills everyone he loves. This is the brutal flashpoint for the game’s tale of war, political turmoil and vengeance, and I was genuinely devastated when it happened. It helps that Henry is such a likable hero. There isn’t much to him, but I think that’s the point. He’s so normal, so unassuming, that his presence provides a firm, relatable foundation for the story. As he reluctantly leaves his old life behind, becoming a page for a lord who takes a shine to him and…

Continuing the last couple of Civilization games’ predilection for ‘unstacking’, Civilization VI: Rise and Fall has peeled apart more of the series’ fundamental systems. This time it’s the march through history itself. It’s more dynamic and messy, with civs—as the title promises—rising and falling as they enter new eras and experience Golden and Dark Ages. Yet Civilization has rarely felt this structured or cohesive. Every civ is in a race to increase their era score with historic moments Eras divide Civilization, representing a civ’s technological and cultural level. In Rise and Fall, the system has been spun out into two types of era: Player eras and game eras. Player eras are the mark of a civ’s individual progress, while game eras start and end at predetermined moments and affect every civ. The result is that you’ll…

Half curious kaleidoscope, half confusing bullet hell, untitled (the flower game) is somewhere between a drawing machine and an arcade game. In fact, it caters to that split by letting you choose between a game mode where you collect red markers and one where you play around with sliders to generate images. For the more traditional game mode you’re essentially playing Snake, except the snake you control has been put through a kaleidoscope. That means that as you keep an eye on one head, there are many others, all originating from the central point and all mimicking your moves. When you’re collecting red markers you can thus just switch your attention to whichever snakehead is nearer the next marker. That’s a cool twist, but means you’re also keeping track of…

THIS MONTH Built a suit of armor and battered some fish. ALSO PLAYED Alpha Protocol The moment I learned about the existence of the PRAWN, I had to have it. It’s a suit of power armor that lets you explore the depths of the ocean, and has a pair of arms that can be used to gather resources and fight predators. My little Seamoth can only dive to 200 meters before it crumples like a can, but with the PRAWN I could go as low as 900. But building one takes work. To find the blueprint for the suit, you have to venture into the radioactive wreckage of the Aurora: The ship you were on before crash-landing on this water world. Here, you’ll find a chamber filled with broken suits…

MAJOR MODS, ANALYZED I know few virtual places as intimately as Seyda Neen, the port in the southwest of Vvardenfell where your Morrowind character begins their adventures. I’ve fleshed out dozens of characters in its Census and Excise office, and I’ve bought many a starting weapon at Arrille’s Tradehouse. I’ve passed the necromancer’s tower countless times, and I’ve… Hang on, that isn’t right. There’s no necromancer’s tower on the outskirts of Seyda Neen. Actually, I don’t recall there being this many shacks clustered on the coastline. And was that shady-looking tavern with the red lantern outside always there? What in Vivec’s name is going on? Such is the sensation of exploring Vvardenfell with the Morrowind Rebirth mod installed. This enormous mod remodels huge chunks of terrain, expanding towns and adding new…

Something very strange is happening to the graphics card market. Prices of current generation Nvidia cards, like the GTX 1070 and GTX 1060, aren’t just more expensive than they were at launch in 2016—they’ve doubled. It’s a similar story for AMD’s latest batch of Vega cards. This would be bad enough for gamers, but major retailers have such low stocks of them that even if you wanted to shell out double the RRP for a new graphics card, you’d have a job finding one. The problem is cryptocurrency. As well as spawning all manner of self-satisfied millionaires who hold the keys to vast fortunes on flash drives, and love to tell people how many fractions of a penny one bitcoin was worth when they bought theirs, it’s tanked the graphics…

Saturday was my big chance to investigate the Weekender show floor. First up was Candleman: The Complete Journey. I’m a sucker for a pretty 3D platformer, so I spent a pleasing chunk of time igniting my little avatar sparingly to give bursts of visibility, looking for fellow candles to light and objects to interact with. Biomutant was also on the must-play list. I’ll admit that in retrospect this was because I’d conflated it with a different game, but I was surprised by my own competence with this curious action RPG. I set my furry avatar to be a hench pink and green monstrosity, then set about using my sword and gun to rampage through the world, exploiting an intimidating array of combos. I SET MY FURRY AVATAR TO BE A…

World of Darkness tabletop RPGs brim with intelligent, subversive reimaginings of horror archetypes. Its compelling mythos helped vamp-punky RPG Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines grow into a cult classic on PC, and now Werewolf: The Apocalypse is taking us back to that world, heading inland from the sleaze of Bloodlines’ West Coast to a US wilderness eroded by corporate greed. NEW INFO Werewolf is set in a series of hubs dotted around US states like Nevada, California and Arizona. Each of these areas are being exploited for natural resources by Pentex, a megacorporation corrupted by an entity known as the Wyrm. If you’ve heard anything about the original pen-and-paper RPG, you’ll know that it’s effectively raising a green finger to capitalism. It’s your job as a werewolf to stop the…

Campo Santo—the studio behind the contemplative forest experience Firewatch—is swapping tinder-dry trees and Wyoming fire lookout towers for ancient Egyptian tombs and early cinematography in its next game, In the Valley of Gods. Its announcement trailer offered a glimpse of a first-person adventure set deep in the Egyptian desert of the ’20s. You and a partner scramble through stunning ruined spaces before setting up a shot for your beautifully animated film camera. The duo, as studio cofounders Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin tell me, are Rashida and Zora—filmmakers whose careers have hit the skids. The women are using their last chance at resources to try to make a hit documentary. But a documentary must have a subject, and thus Rashida and Zora have decided to investigate the rumor that an…

Risk of Rain developer Hopoo Games has been chronicling the development of Risk of Rain 2 in a dev blog. They answer technical and gameplay questions from readers, and also break down the challenges they’ve run into making the jump to 3D. EXAMPLE: Skills and abilities that were fun and exciting in 2D were suddenly useless or overpowered in 3D, especially piercing bullets and movement abilities. Hopoo didn’t want Risk of Rain 2 to be a super precision-based game, and they couldn’t directly translate the gameplay of the original. Before deciding to work in 3D, they had to make changes and find a new balance. READING MATERIAL: http://bit.ly/Risk2Tumblr. HOMEWORK: Play a few rounds of the original Risk of Rain and identify which abilities would work very differently in 3D, and…

Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope maintains a dev blog on his upcoming game Return of the Obra Dinn, a mystery game about uncovering causes of death. Shortly after finishing the alpha build, he ran into huge game-breaking problems that had to be fixed before development could continue. EXAMPLE: Return of the Obra Dinn’s alpha build gave players too much freedom and too many things to keep track of. Play testers often got lost or overwhelmed, not knowing what to do next. To keep things orderly and keep players focused, Pope added an archive called The Book which records the hints players have found and orders them on a timeline. READING MATERIAL: https://bit.ly/ObraDinnBlog. HOMEWORK: Play Return of the Obra Dinn’s old demo and note when its hands-off approach feels liberating, and…

Dalmasca has been invaded by the forces of Archadia and it’s up to a couple of street urchins, a resistance leader, a knight, a sky pirate, and a rabbit lady to save the realm. There’s an airship, of course, and there are Chocobos—so far, so Final Fantasy—but look past the iconography and you’ll find the boldest, most inventive game of the series, powered by a weighty squad-based RPG system and remastered to run at high resolutions on PC. After a brief scene-setting prologue, you start the game in control of Vaan, a charmless teen from the streets of Dalmasca. He’s hitting rats in a sewer alone, and seems determined to give you the worst possible introduction to FFXII’s world and systems. As you guide him around town and into the…

Doki Doki Literature Club introduces itself as a sugary-sweet high school scenario. You’re cajoled into joining a literature club populated by four girls, and begin to get to know them. The visual novel trappings mean it’s conversation-heavy, but you’ll start to make choices about who you hang out with and play poetry minigames where your word choices affect how the girls react to you. Then it starts to show its teeth. An entirely spoiler-free playthrough is best if you want to feel the full impact of Doki Doki. But that approach is difficult to recommend, because so many of the tricks after this initial segment revolve around difficult and upsetting subjects. As such, a spoiler-free playthrough is the privilege of players who have never needed or benefitted from a content…

THIS MONTH Gazed at the Singularity and hoped it didn’t gaze back. ALSO PLAYED Oblivion, Swamp Alchemist, Subnautica Until this week, my most recent conversation about Astroneer involved bumping into former lead designer Jacob Liechty at GDC in San Francisco. He was in the process of leaving the company, and we had a fascinating chat about his new work in AI safety. Playing Astroneer roughly a year on, that chat came back to me. I meant to check in with the game’s progress and fiddle around with multiplayer. What I ended up doing was listening to a 2015 episode of The Partially Examined Life—a philosophy podcast—featuring Nick Bostrom. Bostrom is the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. I came across his work when I…

1 STORAGE SSDs are the best thing to happen to PC gaming since Half-Life. And now, they’re cheaper than ever. 2 CASES Using a case from 2003? This is the time for a makeover. That Windows XP sticker has seen better days. 3 MEMORY Upgrading RAM won’t break the bank. Even if the difference isn’t a massive one, it’ll help with a bottleneck. 4 SCREENS If you want to go big with your spending, why not give a new monitor some thought?…

HIGHS Phoenix Point Julian Gollop’s X-Com spiritual successor looks great, and was one of the highlights of this year’s PC Gamer Weekender. Two Point Hospital Also at the Weekender, this spiritual successor to Theme Hospital is looking like a fine evolution. Assassin’s Creed Origins The educational Discovery mode is a great way to explore Ubisoft’s world. LOWS Destiny 2 We’re on a break from this right now, although the roadmap hints that welcome tweaks are incoming. “No Loot Boxes” Some publishers now announce their games won’t have microtransactions for marketing points. But is your game good? Red Dead Redemption 2 We still don’t know if it’s coming to PC. Will it? Won’t it? Tell us, Rockstar.…

Last year’s footage of Call of Cthulhu felt more tailored for the ‘quiet-quiet-BOO’ let’s play audience than it did to the implacable horrors of Lovecraftian literature. But now I’ve beheld another side to the game, which has eschewed jump scares for a tasteful atmosphere of sickly unease. It’s okay, Howard, you can stop turning in your grave now. NEW INFO I meet with the developers for a guided, hands-off demo. We follow private eye Edward Pierce as he travels to Darkwater Island—a dank fishing village—to find a mysterious painting belonging to a wealthy deceased couple. Darkwater is a place of surly mariners and sludgy jetties. Looming over it all is a scabrous spike of a mountain. Reality here seems to be being encroached upon by the energies of a cold,…

THE BEST GAME DESIGN PROGRAMS, RANKED BY THE PRINCETON REVIEW Making games is easier than ever, but it still isn’t easy. Whether you want to build a game all on your own or bring your talents to the best studios in the industry, you’re going to need more than a grand idea. You’ll need the knowledge and skills to design and build a working game and get it in the hands of players. But you can only learn so much on your own, and only so quickly, so you’re going to need help. That’s where these schools come in. The next few pages will show you the best places to learn those skills. More and more schools are offering Game Design programs, and The Princeton Review has been carefully tracking…

Game design is an incredibly competitive field. Practical skills come before pedigree, and people skills aren’t far behind because making a game is such a collaborative effort. That makes portfolios incredibly valuable. Your portfolio is the best place to show off your projects and demonstrate your personality. Here are some tips on building yours, straight from professors at some of the top game design schools on these lists. Be Specific There’s no one-size-fits-all portfolio. A character or environment artist will focus on very different elements than a UI designer or an AI programmer in their portfolio. You need to research your field and determine what individual employers want to see up-front. That said, there are also some general boxes to check, and showing your work is the biggest one. On…

With Divinity: Original Sin, developer Larian Studios created its most successful game in its two-decade history, netting a plethora of accolades and comparisons to genre titans like Ultima VII. Not content, the studio rolled out an overhauled Enhanced Edition, all the while working on a fresh prototype. That would become Divinity: Original Sin II, Larian’s newest and biggest success story. That Original Sin II prototype started life as an arena mode, like the one that’s still in-game today, allowing designers to quickly create scenarios and fights to test systems. “We were using it to prototype how combat would feel, what we were going to do with Action Points, what new elemental combinations we could come up with, and how we’d shape the roles and archetypes,” Nick Pechenin, Larian’s systems designer,…

The first Age of Empires introduced the world to Ensemble’s Warcraft-meets-Civilization concept, and got a good two years in the spotlight before being overshadowed by its follow-up. Two decades since its launch, and it’s been resurrected, with electricity pulsing through its veins and a couple of new conveniences stitched on for good measure. Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is prettier and slicker, but it’s still not as good as its We’ve had enough remasters now that it’s pretty clear what people want from them: The game we remember, rose-tinted glasses included. We want our memories of the game, not the messy reality. When it comes to the sights and battlefields of the ancient world, at least, developer Forgotten Empires has given us exactly that. The Definitive Edition’s visual upgrade is…

There’s an enticing-looking hole near my main Subnautica base. It’s one of the more manageable underwater cave systems in the game as it’s not too deep and it consists of tiered concentric circles of terrain with only a few tunnels leading off. The arrangement draws your eye to a plant called a Rouge Cradle and is ripe for a few screenshots. But this colorful, relatively simple space can still hurt or kill me easily. You will discover the stunning kelp forests early on This particular segment of Subnautica’s ocean-based survival adventure contains Drooping Stingers—poisonous jellyfish-like plants that hang down across tunnel entrances. There is also at least one Sand Shark. I can see it throwing up clouds as it burrows along the sea bed below. There are mushrooms which, if I hit…

Plucked from the storybook end of the gaming spectrum, A Raven Monologue is a beautifully touching set of scenes following a raven and his interactions with the people of a village. It’s an exercise in wordless storytelling, so there’s no text, but accompanying the panels is a looping song by Christabel Annora. The music—indeed the whole project—has a bittersweet delicacy I tend to associate more with gently sad Scandinavian indie music. It probably wouldn’t be out of place in a Christmas commercial, but it manages to avoid being overly emotionally manipulative. Instead, it just feels honest and sweet—more akin to a touching Pixar short. A Raven Monologue was produced as part of an internal game jam at Indonesian developer Mojiken. The jam was focused on telling stories using a constrained…

It was a shock to go back to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I hadn’t been prepared for how dated the world seems now. I remember it as a vibrant, strange landscape which filled the areas between massive cities with wildlife and odd buildings. In 2018 it is a sparse place. There aren’t enough trees, there aren’t enough textures, there is a bit of bad weather that seems rooted in place near Kvatch so you can cause the rain to fall by walking into it. It’s clunky and weird, but it feels so good to be back. Actually, before I got to the landscape there was the escape route from the cells. The Emperor joined me for that bit, as fellow players will remember. What you might not recall—because nostalgia…

PREBUILT RIGS No need to build your own PC Forget building your PC. This month we’re delving into the world of pre-built gaming PCs to see what sort of performance and features you can get by letting someone else do all the hard work. There’s plenty of choice out there, but to keep things simple we’ve grabbed three of the big brand systems to see what you’re getting. Whether you’re looking to spend big or balance the books with a bargain, one of these three should fit the bill. Q&A Big brand or local builder?—UK only You’ve two main choices. You can either go with a big-name brand, or a more local system builder. The big names can be cheaper, but offer less tailored support and shorter warranties. Local system…