Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2018 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Campo Santo Valve acquires Campo Santo and In the Valley of Gods. Go back and read about the game in issue 316. Stardew Valley 2016’s best meandering farm RPG now lets you play with friends. Get ready to maximize your parsnip yield. Graphics Cards The absurd GPU prices are finally starting to stabilize as manufacture catches up with demand. LOWS Deus Ex Eidos Montreal confirms that the immersive sim series isn’t dead. For now, though, its on hiatus. Dota 2 Valve is hoping to earn over $85 million from The International’s Battle Pass. $85 million! For hats! Blockchains “What if videogames, but blockchain,” is the subject of every third email sent to PC Gamer. Stop.…

Post-processing is the catch-all term for the series of effects applied to the frame of a videogame to make it appear in the intended manner. While these effects can encompass everything from anti-aliasing to ambient occlusion, they are frequently used to replicate the viewpoint of another medium entirely: Cinema. The visual cues typically associated with physical cameras are becoming more commonplace in games. This is primarily due to advances in rendering technology and techniques, because the nuances of a physical camera are much more complex to replicate than they might initially seem. The differences start with an essential discrepancy in how the cameras in our games even work. “Imitating real-world cameras is hard,” says freelance engine programmer Amandine Coget. “Really, really hard, because they have lenses, and the typical renderer…

FIRST LOOK The thing which pushes me from mildly curious about Rend to actively interested in Rend is not that it takes the survival genre and uses RPG systems to sand off the rougher edges. It’s not even the idea of a 20v20v20 factional battle that plays out over months. For me, it’s the idea of riding a spider around to get to hard-to-reach places. In my imagination those hard-to-reach places are ‘under the fridge’ and ‘on top of the bookcase’, but in Rend I think it’s probably ledges atop steep slopes where your arachnid will come in handy. Spiders aren’t the only mounts mentioned during my chat with Frostkeep Studios by the way, so arachnophobes can breathe a bit easier. Boars might help you snuffle out truffles, while wolves are more of a…

ALPHAFLEET GOONSWARM FEDERATION “Shield Maelstroms with artillery cannons, the most powerful salvo out of all battleships in EVE Online. This allowed Goonswarm to play in the big league again. The huge volley damage, in conjunction with a large spy network, was used to headshot fleet commanders with no hopes of them receiving repairs in time.—Mister Vee ARMORGASMS CURATORES VERITATIS ALLIANCE “Take the Phantasm—a tanky cruiser, the main weaknesses of it being electronic warfare—and flip it on it’s head. If you predicted your opponent’s plan, you mauled people as each Phantasm could lock out two other ships from being able to do damage if it was flown perfectly.”—Jin’taan PANIC GEDDONS NULLI SECUNDA “Armageddons were cheap and had two unique properties: a fast lock speed and a fast rate of fire. When…

1 ARMOR AND SYSTEMS The health bar is split into segments—white represents armor, orange represents internal systems. 2 HEAT! When heat builds up, your mech risks taking damage or shutting down completely. Environmental effects and the brace action can help mitigate it, and you can use flamers to force your opponent into hot spot. 3 STABILITY When this bar fills up, mechs fall down. The exclamation point indicates that this mech is already unstable: Another hit should do it. 4 DESIGNATIONS You can see both a mech’s type and its pilot’s chosen training path above its head. This is vital info: a Defender gets bonuses when they shoot without moving, so you’ll want to consider flanking them.…

POLLY GEIST Her dating path is probably the one with the most sex. How does that work with a ghost, anyway? VERA OBERLIN Want to know what it’s like to spit-swap with Medusa? Vera loves turning losers to stone. DAMIEN LAVEY If you like things spicy, go for Damien—an intense personality burning with rage and hellfire. LIAM DE LIONCOURT Liam is the typical monster hipster: The one who loves Infinite Jest and cold brew coffee. MIRANDA VANDERSHIFT A spoiled mermaid, with a genocidal streak that her cuteness hides pretty well. SCOTT HOWL More like a puppy than a werewolf, Scott is the lovable jock in possession of infinitely more brawn than brains.…

While RCT2 had plenty of scenarios to keep you occupied you could also download extra ones, including three promotional tie-ins to PC mags that no longer exist. Scour the internet and you can still find them, if not the actual mags, but we do wonder: Why didn’t PCG get its own theme park? PC GAMING WORLD These guys got the short end of the stick with a dull desert theme and only four letters. PC PLAYER Made by a company of ex-Future employees, this is technically a distant cousin of PC Gamer. GAMEPLAY The URL in the park redirects to something else. There’s no glamor in the death of a PC mag.…

I enjoy the ‘well, screw it’ whimsy of trying to navigate conversations I’m great at sweet talking people into getting what I want, but surrounded by burly men with big guns, I can’t be too sure of the right thing to say. Without a color-coded guide, heart symbols, or success percentages, a well-intentioned misstep could force me into a gunfight. I’m out of stimpaks and must tread carefully. It’s a typical day in the wasteland. I played the first Fallout when it was already a classic, and it introduced me to ‘darker’ games—for me, anything without an elven forest or a bloodless death. Its candor about violence, sex, and humanity surprised me at the time, but I felt welcomed into the wasteland by the game’s sardonic humor and tongue-in-cheek mascot.…

PHILIPPA WARR Specialist in Gatherings This month Wrote about games where you have to kill people at a party. This doesn’t bode well for our next office do. ANDY KELLY Specialist in Engagement This month Asked Activision difficult questions, like: “Does a shooter really need 50 types of grenade?” STEVEN MESSNER Specialist in Compulsion This month Steven, a man who has written 14 features about EVE, has written a feature about obsession. In EVE. FRASER BROWN Specialist in Edicts This month Built an island full of people who didn’t like him. There’s probably a Twitter joke in this.…

SCENE BUFFER The scene or ‘albedo’ buffer could be considered as the ‘raw’ frame. The unlit colors, models, and textures currently within the player’s viewpoint, that will eventually be transformed and processed into the final image. DEPTH BUFFER The depth buffer is a greyscale image that is generated to determine how far away in-game objects are within the context of the player’s current viewpoint. Darker objects are determined to be closer to the player. NORMAL BUFFER The normal buffer shows the directions that polygons are facing in a frame (such as the faked ripples on a character’s jacket, for example), so they can be suitably lit or adjusted in the final image. SPECULAR BUFFER This determines how light interacts with a surface or material. If something needs to appear shiny…

PLAYED IT My hour with the first level of Two Point Hospital is comforting more than anything else. Like playing Cities: Skylines—or any other modern spiritual successor that aims to breathe new life into a mistreated management sim classic—it’s lovely to immediately know how to play a game like this. The opening moments of a Two Point Hospital game feel pretty similar to Theme Hospital. I build a reception desk, a GP’s office, and a pharmacy. I hire a few doctors and nurses to staff them. I drop in some waiting benches for my patients. From there, I add another GP’s office, another pharmacy, and a staff room with a coffee machine, comfy chairs, and a dartboard. It’s a pretty weird-looking hospital with spaces where there probably shouldn’t be any, mostly because I…

1 NINE Thousands of years in the past, a priest activates an artefact in a gladiator arena, turning a group of prisoners into shrieking zombies. Four fighters are sent in to kill them before a roaring crowd. 2 VOYAGE OF DESPAIR Centuries later, aboard the Titanic, the same device is activated, turning the crew and passengers into zombies. It’s up to the same four heroes to stop them. Rogue icebergs are the least of their worries. 3 BLOOD OF THE DEAD Little has been revealed about this mission other than a shot of a cell block that looks a lot like Alcatraz. I wouldn’t be surprised if the heroes’ dimension-hopping powers took them to the famous prison island.…

NOT THE BEES! Enzyme Samples can be found in the Silverwing Apiary. Don’t forget to calm those bees with the smoker first. PHYLL YOUR POCKETS Discarded flasks of Chlorophyll Solution can be found dotted around Arcadia. Or preferably on dead Splicers. BOTTLE IT Distilled Water is in plentiful supply in the Worley Winery. Check out the cheese and bullet-hole Pac-Man tribute upstairs. FRESH AIR Put the key ingredients into a U-Invent machine to create the Lazarus Vector that will restore the vegetation and air supply.…

In 2015, Obsidian took the best parts of beloved classic RPGs such as Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment and built one of the best modern RPGs on PC. Pillars of Eternity plundered the genre’s deep combat, rich dialogue and reactive stories, and made its own mark with an incredibly well-realized setting. Now Obsidian is taking us to a new corner of its world: The Deadfire Archipelago, a chain of islands far to the east of the relatively green and pleasant Dyrwood. You are the Watcher, a hero who is either, depending on who you ask, cursed or blessed with the ability to peer into the souls of the dead and talk to them. After the events of the first game you’ve decided to hang up your sword and shield and settle down in the fortress of…

VAILIAN TRADING COMPANY A powerful mercantile order with a special interest in harvesting and refining the Deadfire Archipelago’s abundance of luminous adra. ROYAL DEADFIRE COMPANY A company with a long history of trade and conquest. It believes that through engineering and organization it can bring civilization to the Deadfire. PRÍNCIPI SEN PATRENA The most feared pirate group in the Deadfire, with smugglers, mercenaries, and black market merchants among its fearsome ranks. HUANA A race of Deadfire natives. The arrival of foreigners has divided the Huana, with some believing it brings prosperity and others thinking it’ll end their civilization.…

PENGO A penguin who’s mislaid his troop of explorers. P-p-pick them up for a reward. TOGO Ditto’s helpful museum curator will tell you where to go (in a good way). OCK This cephalopod combines stickers, as long as you bring him three or more. FLOPP Mormo’s biggest fan, this creep will sell you some decent, pricey kit. SERENDIPITY A gentle giant, this kindly whale can give you an extra life or more time. ARFUR Too old to retrieve them, the lighthouse keeper can still open beached crates.…

COMMAND CENTER Pick missions here. Look out for employers that pay your travel fees to new sectors of space. ENGINEERING Upgrade the ship. Fixing up the Mech Bay and medical facilities will help you recover from battle faster. BARRACKS Train (and fire) your roster of mechwarriors. The skill system changes how each mech works in battle. NAVIGATION Plot your course from system to system. Pay attention to planetary conditions as well who lives there. MECH BAY A series staple. Design and kit out your mechs up to a tonnage limit, and deal with damage sustained in battle. CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS Check up on finances, rename your mercenary company, and pick a color scheme.…

SURFBOARD A floating platform that any unit can sit on and fire from. Yes, that’s right: You can attack the enemy with an army of surfing mechs. DIRTBAG A unit designed to piss people off. When they die, they disrupt the terrain around them, causing trouble for ground units. NEWTON A tactical turret that deals no damage, but can be set to either repel or attract any enemy that wanders past its gravity field. SUMO An armored ball of death that can leap into the air and stomp on enemies, tossing them around with its gravity cannons.…

HOTEL DUSK: DARKRIDE Creator: FSFRanger A ghost train set in an old hotel that reminds me of The Shining, with jump scares, eerie sound and a nerve-wracking plunge into a dark cellar. ALIENS: THE RIDE Creator: HN An incredible rollercoaster based on the movie, complete with a giant animatronic alien queen, HR Giger-style architecture and some atmospheric lighting. JIANGZHOU Creator: HeltRoy A sprawling theme park based on an ancient Chinese city. The castle in the center is particularly impressive, as is the fireworks display that colors the night sky. MOONRAKER Creator: Bhamilto1x A ride based on the silly, and better-than-you-remember, Bond movie. The ride follows the events of the movie, taking you from the canals of Venice to, eventually, outer space.…

REMAPPING 1 The default key assignments for build commands are far away on the function keys. Reassign the floor, fall, and ramp commands to keys within reach. F, C and Z are good candidates, and exploring your extra mouse buttons won’t hurt. WHO NEEDS FRIENDS? 2 You may be tempted to drop at a popular named location not far from the path of the party bus. Try landing away from people at unnamed locations to find some the best loot spots in the game, free of that pesky gunfire. ALWAYS BE HARVESTING 3 It’s hard to stick by the unofficial mantra ‘just build’ without any resources to build with. Smash whatever is around as often as possible. Without resources you won’t make it through a fight, let alone even reach…

In 2001 I played the demo of Operation Flashpoint for the first time, courtesy of PC Gamer’s cover disc. A month later, after the release of the full game, I found myself in love with its multiplayer, and at the start of an intriguing journey that I’ve been on ever since. Hosting a multiplayer mission in GameSpy with a 56K modem was like trying to race a camel whilst tied to a bungee rope. In 2001 Operation Flashpoint’s map editor was exceptional but, given my 56K connection, the only way I could play my homemade missions publicly was if I sent the files to people with better connections. That was how our clan began, and a year or so later we’d rented our own public server and begun using TeamSpeak 2. ‘Striker,…

TOTAL $1,018 MOTHERBOARD B360M-DS3H Gigabyte $68 It lacks overclocking options, but the new B360 chipset is far cheaper than Z370, and perfect for this budget build. PROCESSOR Core i3-8100 Intel $119 Intel’s new Coffee Lake processors add an additional two cores to the lineup. Think of this as a Core i5 processor, but cheaper. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce GTX 1060 3GB Inno3D $280 The GTX 1060 3GB is the clear choice of graphics card for this price of build, and this month Inno3D is offering the best value. COOLER Hyper 212 Evo CoolerMaster $30 We’ve dropped the controller from this build and added in a better CPU cooler, for a quieter, cooler system. MEMORY Vengeance LPX 8GB (2x4GB) @2400MHz Corsair $103 DDR4 prices are still high, however this Corsair pair is…

TOTAL $1,977 MOTHERBOARD Z370 Tomahawk MSI $125 This is a nice-looking bit of kit at a good price. Couple that with two M.2 slots, and it’s the perfect place to house that Core i5. PROCESSOR Core i5-8400 Intel $179 Better default gaming performance and a lower price puts this chip ahead of the AMD Ryzen 2600X. GRAPHICS CARD GTX 1070 SC Gaming ACX EVGA $590 Trying to balance prices, we’ve opted to drop down to an SC Gaming card. Don’t worry, you only lose out on a very minor overclock. COOLER MasterLiquid Lite 240 CoolerMaster $55 This 240mm, dual-fan, all-in-one liquid CPU cooler is ludicrously cheap, but performs well and stays quiet, too. MEMORY Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) @2666 Corsair $180 16GB is the minimum amount of RAM we’d recommend…

TOTAL $3,565 MOTHERBOARD Strix X470-F Gaming Asus $215 Get the most from the new AMD Ryzen 2700X with this matching X470 motherboard that’s packed with features. PROCESSOR Ryzen 7 2700X AMD $330 Easy to overclock, and with huge performance out of the box, AMD’s new flagship CPU is the one to go for. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce GTX 1080Ti Turbo Asus $950 The GTX 1080Ti isn’t cheap, so any chance to knock money off the price is one we’ll take. This Asus version does just that. COOLER Kraken X62 NZXT $156 The Kraken is the culmination of three of our favorite things: An infinity mirror, a 280mm radiator, and slick braided cooling. MEMORY Vengeance LED RGB 32GB - 3200 Corsair $430 Ryzen is the one processor that does benefit hugely from…

BORN YESTERDAY 1 “First we simulate the circumstances of a planet’s birth,” says Ross of the planning phase. “You must first know what materials went into making it, how old it is, what its neighbors are doing, and which stars are nearby.” SCIENTIFIC METHOD 2 Real scientific data fuels the generation. “I studied research papers on the density, age, and masses of stars across the different parts of the Milky Way,” says Ross. “My background as a scientist helped with this.” COMPUTER LOVE 3 Using this scientific data, a tool called the Stellar Forge is used to create the planet. “Surface liquids, ground, and tidal activity, be it a gas giant or a terrestrial world. All of this happens in a fraction of a second on your CPU.” SPACED OUT…

PLAYED IT Way back in the mists of time (well, January 2018), Hi-Rez Studios unveiled its own foray into the popular battle royale genre. Battlegrounds was initially a mode within the hero shooter Paladins: Champions of the Realm but it has now transitioned into a Fortnite-esque standalone project called Paladins: Realm Royale. Realm Royale is going through technical alpha right now, so it’s possible its developers will make more big changes, but at the time of writing the setup shares many of the trappings of other battle royale games and modes. 100 players jump out of an airship onto a chunk of land and use a combination of hiding, killing and looting to ensure they are the last person (or people in the case of the four-person team Quad mode) standing. The main point…

DIE BY THE SWORD 1998 One of Treyarch’s earliest games. Interestingly, it lets you independently control your character and weapon arm. TRIPLE PLAY 2000 1999 Treyarch developed a few baseball games, but this was the only one that ever made it to PC. Good luck finding a copy and getting it to run. ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN 2005 Time has nearly forgotten this Spidey game, based on the Ultimate comics run, but it’s actually a decent open-world superhero game. CALL OF DUTY: WORLD AT WAR 2008 Treyarch’s first CoD remains one of the best, returning to WW2 with some memorable setpieces across the Pacific and Eastern fronts. CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS 2010 The first chapter in Treyarch’s Black Ops series tells one of the better CoD stories, mixing in elements of…

CHAUNCEY This little pig, who I found snuffling around in the mud, grants my entire party a +1 bonus to dexterity, which is nice. ABRAHAM A hound with golden fur who reduces the recovery penalty for everyone’s armor. How? I daren’t ask. PETER Whenever this black cat is following us, the party’s area of effect attacks deal 15% more damage. Now that’s lucky. KAZ A stray Shiba Inu I adopted who grants the party a +1 bonus to stealth and survival as she tags along behind us.…

I wish everyone was just like you,” I mutter to my steampunk automaton as it stiffly lurches toward my coal mining plant, leaving big, round footprints in the snow. I have grown weary of the humans inhabiting my city. They get hungry, angry, and sad, they fall ill from the cold and skip work, they can lose their limbs to frostbite and can’t work. They suffer and die, and worse than that, they make me suffer because they have their own thoughts and opinions and fears. My steambot, though: it just works, only pausing occasionally to refuel. It’s an ideal citizen. In Frostpunk’s version of the 1800s, the entire world has become a subzero, arctic wasteland. After fleeing London, the only hope for the survival of your few dozen followers…

We’re all grown-ups here, and this isn’t the first survival game to render male and female genitalia in detail. However it is, as far as I know, the only survival sim in which you tweak the size of your character’s personal areas while they hang nailed to a cross, their breasts or scrotum flapping in the breeze as if being teased by a vacuum cleaner. Half-Life had the train. Oblivion had the sewer exit. Conan Exiles has this. This is a game about surviving in a hostile world by manipulating its resources until you live in relative comfort. Unlike most in the survival space, it’s also a game with a fantasy RPG lying beyond the first dozen or so hours spent fashioning tools. An RPG of silly boss fights and quests for artefacts, and one true…

I’ve had a weird couple of weeks. I live in Canada, but my family lives in England; when my grandfather was taken ill, I flew across the Atlantic to be there with him and my family. The tone was solemn. That is, until my uncle—whose purpose in life is to make fun of me—asked what I’d been working on recently. I mean, what am I supposed to say? Games journalism is so ridiculous a career to most people over the age of 30 that it’s hard to describe your latest work without it sounding like your office is a crèche. My approach is to tell them exactly what I’ve been working on, because even if I say something like “the underwhelming political message of Far Cry 5”, I’m fairly sure…

THE RULES 1 Oversee the Queen of Sardinia and Corsica’s reign 2 Offer money and murder using console commands 3 Don’t actually play Crusader Kings II. Let the AI handle it Matilda di Canossa—the real one—had a fascinating life. By the age of 31, the Margravine of Tuscany had survived (and was even rumored to have ordered) the assassination of her first husband, Godfrey the Hunchback, whom she despised. In 1077, King Henry IV of the Holy Roman Empire stood barefoot in the snow outside her castle for three days, seeking penance from the Pope, whom she was protecting. Over the decades, she would rebel against Henry many times, and even secure military victories against his armies. My Matilda di Canossa—the Crusader Kings II one—is essentially a turbocharged version of…

RAM might not be the most exciting purchase any of us will ever make for our PC, but it’s an essential component. Getting the right amount of it at the right speed does make a difference to your PCs performance. For this month’s test we’re delving into the depths of DDR4, to see how much RAM you need, how fast it should be and just what the deal is with RGB RAM. Q&A How much do I need? For non-gaming machines 8GB is plenty. Go for 16GB for a bit of breathing room, though. What about the extras? RGB lighting has spread to RAM. Heatspreaders are also an option. Neither make much difference, though. It costs how much? RAM prices are bonkers at the moment, and there’s not really a way…

1 GOOGLE The Bristlecone chip from the search engine giant boasts 72 qubits. Each additional qubit doubles the processing power of the chip. 2 IBM The manufacturer’s 16-qubit quantum processor is a prototype for upcoming commercial systems. It’s currently beta testing online access. 3 D-WAVE Its 2,000-qubit quantum annealing processor uses a different process to ‘true’ quantum computers, but you can actually buy one today. 4 UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND The university has developed a specialized piece of kit called an ‘Ion Trap’. Charged particles can be suspended in magnetic fields and used as qubits.…