Innholdsfortegnelse for Holiday 2018 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE First half of 2019 DEVELOPER Paradox Interactive PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.paradoxplaza.com When I sat down in front of Paradox’s new grand strategy game I had one big question: What is Imperator: Rome exactly? Is it Crusader Kings in togas? Is it a Roman Europa Universalis? Is it, as the fans will no doubt ask, Vicky 3? The answer is none and all of these things. PLAYED IT “You have the population mechanics that are similar to games like Stellaris or Victoria, the warfare and diplomacy which is similar to Europa Universalis and the characters that are closer to Crusader Kings,” explains Johan Andersson, the creative director on Imperator and a Paradox veteran of over 20 years. He knows what he’s talking about, because he’s worked on…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER SquarePlay Games PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.overcrowd.co.uk At rush hour on a hot day, the London Underground can qualify as the tenth circle of Hell. But something positive has come out of all that sweaty chaos: Overcrowd, by game developer Alastair McQueen, describes itself as a “commute-’em-up”. With a colorful, isometric visual style reminiscent of Theme Park (with a smidge of Habbo Hotel), Overcrowd is attempting to turn the bustle of the tube into a fast-paced strategy building game, and from the brief demo I played, it’s shaping up nicely. PLAYED IT You begin by building a station, which is snappy and intuitive, objects clinging to a grid to keep things orderly. You can carve into the earth, and there’s an enjoyable amount of freedom…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2019 DEVELOPER John William Evelyn PUBLISHER In-house The Collage Atlas offers a thoughtful journey into a beautiful world of hand-drawn objects. The current build lets you wander a strange landscape, encountering intricate wrought iron structures, wooden boat hulls, tussocks, lanterns, and other motifs which help flavor the world. The game is still a way off completion, but every time I encounter it I’m reminded of its charm. Maybe it’s extra special to me because I’m from one of those old seaside towns, or because I have fond memories of the old-fashioned paper theaters with 2D characters and props which the presentation reminds me of. Regardless, it’s a small and beautiful thing, which is a joy to follow on the developer’s various social media platforms.…

It was a busy four days for the Republic of Gamers (ROG) team at PAX West 2018. Its meticulously structured booth, complete with gaming stations and product demos, was filled with curious gamers throughout the four-day event. Gamers were greeted with hands-on demos of ROG’s upcoming gaming hardware, and were given the chance to win great prizes. After passing rigorous trials, the final members of Team NA were recruited through the Join the Republic community challenge. The Join the Republic challenge lets everyday gamers duke it out for the opportunity to go pro and compete against some of the best esports players out there. Team NA’s captain, the veteran CS:GO player Erik Flom, personally battle-tested his newest members at the ROG eSports Desk. In time, his team will represent North…

Here’s Mighty Goat, one of the many struggling streamers uploading Fortnite Battle Royale videos to the internet every day. His library offers jump-pad highlights, cross-country snipes, and garish guides on how to acquire the latest skins. But recently, in the middle of all that, he tried something different. “We’re gonna play the new—well I guess it’s not new—but it’s new to me, Save The World,” he says. “It’s like the campaign version of Fortnite. I’ve never played it. I’ve never even seen videos on it.” “THIS IS FORTNITE,” THEY HISS. “BATTLE ROYALE IS NOT FORTNITE” It’s both funny and tragic to watch a career SEO miner play the version of Fortnite Epic spent six years developing. My favorites are the comments that dot Mighty Goat’s videos; they’re full of surly…

It’s autumn. The fields and fells are a rolling sea of reds, browns, and yellows. Light rain falls on the screen, and small puddles shimmer in the sunset as I drive across windswept grasslands, skid straight into a stone wall, and drift across picturesque farmland, catching a hill at just the right angle to lift my car off the ground—raising my skill chain combo multiplier a little bit more. It’s beautiful and it’s absurd, and, next week, it will all be different. Forza Horizon 4 is built around seasons. In its opening moments you drive a McLaren Senna across autumnal country roads, race a Polaris RZR across a frozen winter lake, skid through mud in a Ford Fiesta in spring, before hopping back into the Senna for a road trip…

The Blancpain GT racing series may or may not be on your radar. Unlike its cousins Formula One and MotoGP, it’s not a motorsport you’ll stumble upon on a Sunday afternoon; you have to seek it out. Assetto Corsa is a similar prospect, never likely nor intended to pull in Forza-sized crowds, instead bickering with Project Cars 2 for niche accolades like, ‘Who’s got the best racing wheel support?’ and, ‘Which game models tyre temperature better?’ Any degree of oversteer or traction loss is terrifying in its Blancpain cars It makes sense, then, that the developer of Assetto Corsa is the one making the official game of the 2018 Blancpain GT Series. Newly released in Early Access, Assetto Corsa Competizione’s offering at the moment is barebones: One car, one track,…

PHIL SAVAGE THIS MONTH Beat a computer without even trying. ALSO PLAYED Forza Horizon 4, Destiny 2 I’ve been keeping tabs on Gwent by watching Gwent Masters—a year-long series of tournaments to determine who’s the best in the world at turn-based fantasy card warfare. It’s a bit intimidating. I was pretty good at The Witcher 3’s version of Gwent. It was a simple game in which you tried to earn the most points by playing spy cards until your opponent couldn’t win. That, it seems, was considered unsporting for competitive play, and so in the standalone Gwent, spies were nerfed. Then, every card was remade and the rules were changed. Now, pro players do absurd things I don’t understand—constructing elaborate decks for a small advantage. While I’ll never be at…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2019 DEVELOPER Vile Monarch PUBLISHER Devolver Digital LINK www.devolverdigital.com Chuck a dart at a map of the USA and you’ll get a different answer as to whether sparking up a joint is legal, decriminalised or going to get you a bunch of jail time. Weedcraft Inc. is a game where you can navigate these muddy waters for righteous or nefarious reasons, but ultimately for profit. FIRST LOOK Weedcraft Inc. is very much a Tycoon-style game that puts you in the shoes of a business graduate who has come back to the family home to deal with the aftermath of their father’s death due to cancer. Your brother quickly tells you he had been growing weed to help with the pain management, rather than prescribed opiates, and…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Coming soon DEVELOPER A Brave Plan PUBLISHER Bossa Studios Link www.bradwellelectronics.com PLAYED IT Waking up in the ruins of a museum dedicated to Stonehenge, my character moves around the remnants of a launch celebration. The celebration was apparently to mark the Clean Water Initiative from Bradwell Electronics, and I discover it’s the summer solstice of 2026—a significant point to be at Stonehenge. More pressing than dealing with the ‘conspiracy’ element of the title, though, is getting my character out of the creaking and groaning building. I’m equipped with a pair of AR smart glasses. These allow me to transition to a Firewatch-ish setup where I’m interacting with an unseen companion via a device. A fellow survivor, Amber, can talk with me, but the blast has damaged…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Coming soon DEVELOPER Pale Room PUBLISHER In-house A beautifully illustrated experience, Small Talk invites you to attend a house party during an apocalypse. I wasn’t sure whether the apocalypse was a literal one, but peering out of the apartment’s French doors I could see meteors falling on the city, so I’m taking it as literal. Initially, I drifted round the room, looking at the art on the walls, the snacks on the table and the curious folk who made up the rest of the guest list. One was wearing trousers filled with water and fish. But falling into conversation with someone can transport you to the world of the story they are telling. I ended up in a bookshop maze exploring a snippet about love. Unusually…

PHILIPPA WARR THIS MONTH Concocted a side-hustle salad. ALSO PLAYED LoL: Odyssey, Deep Rock Galactic Possibly drunk on the success of getting the latest edition of the magazine to the printer, I decided that not only was I acing my current job, but I probably had the bandwidth to excel at multiple other jobs too. Striking while the iron was hot meant applications and interviews were out of the question—too time-consuming. Instead I turned to my game libraries. Which is how I came to be a games journalist, an aquarium tycoon, an executive healthcare director, a graveyard keeper (unrelated to the healthcare business, I swear), and a vineyard owner. My business cards are now printed on A4 paper. The aquarium side of things is going swimmingly via my Megaquarium save…

Has any videogame story been told from more perspectives than Half-Life’s Black Mesa incident? Including expansions, the vanilla game offers three points of view alone, while countless mods have added to the Black Mesa lore, introducing new playable stories centring on lawyers, black ops assassins, and even alien slaves. Half-Life: Echoes is the latest in this tradition of framing the Black Mesa disaster from a new angle, and it’s easily the best singleplayer mod for Half-Life in years, offering incredible level design, thrilling survival horror and blistering action. It also weaves itself into the broader Half-Life fiction in some clever ways. Created by first-time modder James Cockburn, Half-Life: Echoes puts players in the shoes of Candidate Twelve, another Black Mesa employee who arrives for a normal day at work when the…

The Dame Was Loaded was, at the time, the biggest multimedia production ever made in Australia. Directed by Jo Lane of Vixen Films, the game’s cast includes a few faces that’ll be familiar to anyone who watched Australian TV shows in the ’90s such as Neighbors or Prisoner: Cell Block H. With nine different endings, a cast of 30 characters and an hour of FMV footage shot, it was a mammoth production. And Melbourne, for the most part, is a decent stand-in for Los Angeles—at least at this low resolution.…

For as long as videogames have existed on a 3D plane, we’ve had those pesky CG movies and their superior visuals lording it over our real-time virtual worlds. The ray tracing rendering technique has played a defining role in that discrepancy—it’s one of the best methods of simulating light behavior around but, prior to Nvidia’s RTX graphics card reveal, it simply hasn’t been possible to achieve in real time. Ray tracing’s been around for decades in movies, because movie CG takes its sweet time to render. At industry-leading effects houses such as Industrial Light & Magic, a 30-second scene might take three weeks to bake, while your poor old PC has to do everything—objects, surfaces, shadows, diffusion, reflections—before your monitor asks for the next frame. In the simplest terms possible,…

Play-listless I was genuinely excited when the Horizon Festival’s new radio stations started broadcasting. Finally, I thought, something to listen to other than Radio Cumbria’s bi-weekly discussion about fishing bylaws. At last, I can hear the kind of music I like—music that a mid-to-late 30-year-old executive thinks, based on their extensive polling data, someone in their early-to-mid 20s would probably enjoy. But isn’t it about time the DJs updated their playlists? I love that song by Chvrches as much as the next person, but they’ve been playing it every half-hour for what must now be over two years. – Chicago Buttress, Lake District Socially challenged Everybody makes mistakes, but I think it’s time the council admitted that rewiring all of the speed cameras in the area to grant ‘Influence’—whatever that…

Telltale Games, the studio behind popular adventure games such as The Walking Dead, Tales from the Borderlands, and Minecraft: Story Mode, has suffered a “majority studio closure”, with all but 25 of its staff members losing their jobs. 225 people are out of work and all games have been cancelled. “Today we made the difficult decision to begin a majority studio closure following a year marked by insurmountable challenges,” said Telltale Games CEO Pete Hawley in a Twitter statement. “It’s been an incredibly difficult year for us as we worked to set the company on a new course. Unfortunately, we ran out of time trying to get there. “With a heavy heart we watch our friends leave today to spread our brand of storytelling across the games industry.” STAFF RECEIVED…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER CD Projekt RED PUBLISHER CD Projekt LINK www.cyberpunk.net You’ve likely seen the Cyberpunk 2077 demo by now. After keeping it behind closed doors at E3, the Polish developer suddenly released the entire thing on YouTube. It was a power move by a studio aware of how anticipated this follow-up to The Witcher 3 is, and the video is now sitting at over ten million views: Figures usually reserved for Rockstar games. MORE INFO When I sit down in a cavernous boardroom in the studio’s Warsaw headquarters to see the game, I’m aware it’s the same demo. But the difference is, this one is just for me. The developer manning the controller tells me he’s relieved there’s no time limit, no queues of hundreds of…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Early 2019 DEVELOPER E-Line Media PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.elinemedia.com I magine getting a call from the BBC saying something like, “Have you thought about making a game inspired by Blue Planet II?” Apparently this is what happened in real life to E-Line, developer of ocean adventure Beyond Blue developer, E-Line. Choking down my jealousy I headed to their booth at EGX to find out more about the project. PLAYED IT “After we released [Never Alone] we got a call from the BBC who were in the process of making Blue Planet II,” says E-Line CEO, Michael Angst. Blue Planet II is a BBC nature documentary brimming with spectacular footage of underwater (and underwater adjacent) life. “[They] thought it would be interesting to have an original game…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Early Access in 2019 DEVELOPER Dante Knoxx PUBLISHER Excalibur Games Animal Crossing meets Papers, Please” was the elevator pitch for Willowbrooke Post. How that manifests in the trailer and show build is as a charming post office management simulator where you take over the running of your family business while your parents are away. The demo is only small at the moment, offering a glimpse of a wider game rather than a full slice. I did check out the family living quarters, and found a apple pie recipe and some letter writing paraphernalia. I also met a delivery person and discovered pie ingredients. But the Papers, Please-like document handling aspect is more of a mystery. I do, however, know that opening a parcel awaiting collection means…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Early 2019 DEVELOPER Other Tales Interactive PUBLISHER In-house There are a steady stream of co-op games where each player only has part of the information needed to solve a puzzle—Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes is a favourite. Tick Tock: A Tale for Two is a part of that lineage, offering a pair of players half the pieces of a puzzle and needing them to share information to progress. My partner and I pieced together clippings, broadcasts, and music box instructions as we played. Most of the puzzles seemed straightforward, but a moment of delight came when I realised we needed to turn clockwise on the spot to advance time and cause a shop to open. While the other tasks were more about reading to each other,…

Fortnite—yes, that Fortnite—is the hottest thing in the world. But, we’ve lived within the Fortnite development cycle for seven years, and for most of that time it’s carried the reputation of either a troubled project or a piece of flat-out vaporware. That Epic has proven us all gloriously wrong is one of the greatest gambits in the history of the industry. But the story of Fortnite’s success involves resignations, rescopings, and company-wide restructurings, as well as a lot of luck, and a lot of hard work. We begin our tale at the VGAs… DECEMBER 10, 2011 FORTNITE OFFICIALLY ANNOUNCED AT THE VGAS The story of Fortnite begins in a moment of optimism. Epic had just closed the book on Gears of War 3, wrapping up the most profitable period of…

I’m restarting my campaign level in Megaquarium. I forgot to hire staff to feed the fish, and oh god there were so many fishy autopsies. Amongst those floating belly-up are three schooling bannerfish. You need at least six in a tank to satisfy their shoaling requirement. Ordinarily, I’d buy three more and pretend none of this ever happened, but this particular level restricts the availability of some fish. I can only pick up new bannerfish if the right seller pops up. Prestige acts as an overall measure of how attractive your aquarium is If that doesn’t happen soon the rest will sicken and die. I restart and hire a team of experts to feed, clean, and fix. This time the problem is my striped boxfish. Or rather, the big fish…

For everything it gets right on the battlefield, Valkyria Chronicles 4 is defined at least as much by what it does off it. For all the narrow escapes, the nervy sorties into uncharted territory and stressful defensive missions, it understands that war involves plenty of preparation and downtime. It captures both the intensity of conflict and the effort (and occasional tedium) of the long hours in between. And all without losing the player’s attention. The game has a knack of finding ways to keep you on your toes The series has always managed to find a balance between considered strategizing and bursts of action. Each turn begins with you looking down at a tactical map, from which you can spend a supply of action points: You’ll either select a soldier…

MATTHEW ELLIOTT THIS MONTH Finally got to the (2006) level cap in WoW. ALSO PLAYED Unavowed, Donut County Returning to WoW is like visiting a curmudgeonly relative after years of distance. ‘Finally decided to show your face, have you?’ Yes, World of Warcraft, I have. And I’m finally going to get to level 60. Now, I realize that getting to level 60 is meaningless. With the level cap increased to 120, it’s the gaming equivalent of celebrating your 43rd birthday. But my departure from WoW four years ago, and the fact I never reached the endgame with my favorite troll rogue, Kanhoji, has been hanging over me like an Arcanite Sword of Damocles. The latest expansion, Battle for Azeroth, gives me the perfect excuse to return and not-actually-finish the job.…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASED 1995 PUBLISHER Philips DEVELOPER Beam Software LINK www.bit.ly/damewasloaded Hard-boiled noir had something of a renaissance in the late ’80s and ’90s. There was James Ellroy’s acclaimed L.A. Quartet, a series of dark crime novels set in post-war Los Angeles. On the big screen, Curtis Hanson’s film L.A. Confidential (itself adapted from an Ellroy novel) won two Academy Awards. And a new genre, neo-noir, came into its own with films such as Michael Mann’s brooding crime horror Manhunter, Alan Parker’s sinister occult mystery Angel Heart, and David Lynch’s beguiling Blue Velvet. After the flashy excesses of the early ’80s, it seemed people were ready for a return to the darkness that filled the pulpy pages of Black Mask in the ’40s and ’50s. Cynical private dicks like…