Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2019 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

Everyone watches trailers, whether as part of a big industry showcase such as E3, on YouTube, or on a Steam store page. To generate interest, trailers need to simultaneously capture your attention and efficiently deliver essential information about plot. The exact method differs a lot depending on the game’s genre and its unique selling points, but the basic aims are the same. I spoke to developers and a marketing team to find out what a good trailer needs. “Game trailers are often not clear enough about what you end up doing. Is it a narrative game without a fail state? Is it a survival game? All this really basic information is missing, but it’s really important in games because of the great variety of experiences games offer,” says Game Designer…

Zarwulf, an orc hunter, was the first character I invested any meaningful time with in World of Warcraft. But then I moved onto other characters, and when I eventually returned to my old pal, he was gone, at least the one I knew. Warlords of Draenor had arrived, transforming his appearance, while expansions had overhauled the entire class. Last week, I resurrected Zarwulf when I had the chance to play World of Warcraft Classic at the recent Warcraft Summit. The first thing I had to do, of course, was make the pilgrimage to the Crossroads. The walk from Orgrimmar was uneventful, aside from a spot of zhevra hunting. I had a hungry wolf to feed. It was a saunter, accompanied by Barrens chat refusing to leave the old days behind.…

There’s been a deadly terrorist bombing at London’s Piccadilly Circus. The perpetrators have been tracked to a four-story house in North London. British Special Forces prepare to infiltrate the building to capture the terrorist cell’s leader known as The Wolf who is presumed to be at the townhouse. All other suspects are to be eliminated. At a presentation in Los Angeles earlier this month, I got to watch (but unfortunately not play) this mission from the singleplayer campaign of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Members of developer Infinity Ward laid out a few reasons there isn’t a ‘4’ after the title, and why they wanted a “re-imagining” of Modern Warfare rather than a sequel. Their aim was to create a game that feels relevant and “ripped from the headlines”, and…

Rex Crowle and Moo Yu know how to make games that appeal to children and also the childish sense of wonder that stays with us as adults. Crowle worked on Tearaway and LittleBigPlanet. Yu’s portfolio includes Ratchet & Clank. And their first indie game is just as playful as these previous projects. Knights and Bikes takes place on a fictional Cornish isle called Penfurzy Island. Demelza has lived there her entire life, together with her father who runs the local caravan park. One summer she meets Nessa, and since there’s nothing like a new friend to breathe life into familiar places, the two of them set out on an adventure. Despite having charm, Penfurzy Island isn’t doing so well, with eviction on the horizon for local businesses. Perhaps digging up the island’s cursed treasure…

Over ten years ago, the concept of dinosaurs in RuneScape was the scientific formula for my teenage self’s perfect adventure. But how did this come about and how is RuneScape’s biggest update looking for players? I visited Jagex for my own personal trip into the Land Out of Time. This new island was first teased to the public on May 21 in the form of a bite-sized trailer. It shows the mysterious boat that was recently placed beside the newly reworked Dig Site. Before departure, players will have to work together to get the boat shipshape and ready to sail to Anachronia. Once there, you’ll realize the grand scale of what you’re dealing with as a bipedal T-rex chases you all the way to the safety of a rundown but fortified outpost. It’s…

1989 A sinister organ made up of high-ranking members of the CIA, NSC, FBI, and DEA secretly runs the United States behind the President’s back. 1994 A nuclear meltdown occurs in Pittsburgh, PA. Almost 300 people die and cancer rates skyrocket. The exclusion zone around the reactor is named The Pitt. 1996 A catastrophic societal collapse begins. Martial law is established in the United States, the President is killed, and street gangs take control of the country. 2002 An event called the Food Crash occurs. Crops around the world are ravaged by a virus, but the United States defeats it by developing a counter-agent. 2004 The first Corporate War begins. Two megacorps, Euro Business Machines and Orbital Air, engage in a campaign of cyber-warfare after a deal falls through. 2017…

After years away you have returned home to your village in response to an urgent letter from your father. Three men try to kill you the moment you step off the train. The town instantly knows about this, and blames you for some other recent murders. To top it all off you’re also quickly dying of hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and blood loss. That’s just day one in this strange, gruelling survival game Pathologic 2 is “supposed to be almost unbearable” according to devs Ice Pick Lodge, who created the obtuse, near-unplayable original Pathologic, and purgatorial horror game The Void. Pathologic 2 challenges you to survive 12 in-game days in a town that’s going completely to shit. Disease, paranoia, mob justice, and paranormal happenings unfold in real time as you plod…

Lute, Wooden Mallet Alt-F4 will probably save you some time. Dagger, Short Sword, Cleaver, Quarterstaff, Bows I hope you’re good at this game. Like, really good. Training Sword, Arming Sword, Axe, Warhammer, Blacksmith’s Hammer, Throwing Knife, Falchion, Mace, Crossbow You might actually make it out of this alive. Short Spear Rapier, Bastard Sword, War Axe, Battle Axe, Longsword, Maul, Throwing Axe Take a breath. You got lucky, but you need to stay sharp. Billhook, Estoc, Greatsword, Poleaxe, Executioner Sword, Bardiche, Eveningstar, Spear The gods have smiled upon you. Don’t mess this up. Zweihander, Halberd You’re all clear, kid! Now let’s blow this thing and go home!…

There have been several games recently that mess with the fourth wall separating their fiction from our reality. Games like Doki Doki Literature Club, or IMSCARED, whose self-aware horror spills out of the game and onto the files and folders of our PCs. There’s a transgressive horror to a game outstepping its bounds like that. However, as File://maniac shows, there’s great potential when it comes to other genres as well. This is a puzzle game. A damned clever, yet brief one where you progress not by pulling switches, or MacGuyvering things together, but by manhandling files belonging to the game. That’s the contents of the actual game directory, which you’ll copy, delete, relocate, or rename to fix problems within the game. In the fiction, you’re a detective hunting down a serial killer, but there’s…

I was sort-of obsessed with the original Chaos: Battle of the Wizards when I was a kid—and by ‘sort of’, I mean that the tape is literally still in the deck in the ZX Spectrum, buried in my parents’ loft. So going back to this updated version feels nostalgic like a school reunion with manticores and blobs. It’s a crisp, neat, strangely satisfying update. I love the interface and monster designs. And even though it’s a more cerebral experience than the original, the range of spells feels more familiar than something should after 30 years. There’s a compelling campaign mode, which saves me the trouble of searching out old school friends for a long-overdue grudge match. 81…

Every couple of years I like to remind myself why Deus Ex is my favorite game. Most PC games I loved in the late ’90s haven’t held up that well, but Ion Storm’s pioneering immersive sim remains eminently playable. It’s also a relic of a time when videogames were much, much bigger, to a degree you just couldn’t match with the production values and visual fidelity expected of modern games. Mankind Divided had one hyperdetailed city, Prague, but in the original game you visit New York City, Hong Kong, Paris, and a dozen other locations including Area 51, a submarine base, and an airport. It’s an irresponsibly huge game, and some of it is even optional. Today’s games are terrified that you’ll lose interest or miss something, but early in Deus Ex,…

I’m not a From Software kind of guy. I’ve never finished a From game, and I didn’t think I ever would. So how come I ended up finishing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, widely considered its hardest game yet, twice? I’ve been on a stranger journey with this game than perhaps any other, uninstalling it, screaming “this is bullshit” at an enemy who in retrospect, was very easy, and ultimately revering Sekiro as a masterpiece. The key moment in any player’s run in Sekiro is a boss fight with Genichiro Ashina, a swordsman who slices your character’s arm off in the opening scene of the game. The fight is atop Ashina Castle, as you’re surrounded by mountains and valleys on three sides—it’s scenic, and the long climb up there in and…

Imagine a universe where Patrick Stewart charges into battle holding a pug and firing sound at people, where Sting plays a ginger psycho lubed up with baby oil, and where Freddie Jones is forced at syringe-point to suckle milk from a cat—all whilst under the watchful eye of a gigantic spice-puffing space vagina. I am of course talking about David Lynch’s 1984 film, Dune, the adaptation for the big screen of Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi novel. Dune is an intriguing and complex story about time and space, bravery and betrayal, and ultimately about one young man’s destiny to unite a universe. Set in the year 10191, the story sees two great houses battling for control of the desolate sand planet Arrakis. The planet’s mysterious spice is harvested to fund war,…

Some games are better with a PC controller. As is apparently the case with Rage 2,certain games have garbage default key bindings. Others, like most third-person action games, aren’t cut out for a mouse and keyboard setup. And can you imagine playing Mortal Kombat 11 on a keyboard? We can, because we’ve tried. It sucks. Likewise, you won’t persuade us that open world games such as Grand Theft Auto or Far Cry aren’t enhanced by switching to a controller after climbing into a vehicle. While you can clutter your gaming space with a plethora of peripherals designed to support a specific genre—fight sticks, flight sticks, or steering wheels—the controller is the great generalist of PC gaming. It’s an easy, often cheap solution for when you need some extra analog control. But how do you determine the best controller?…

It’s easy to see game layoffs as a tragic but disconnected event. 150 people lost their jobs, but that’s easy to reduce to simple numbers. What does it mean? For many developers, it can be anything from the confusing loss of a dream job, to the sudden absence of treasured friends and colleagues. According to one person who requested anonymity—I’ll call him Jason—it meant a $25 Amazon gift card. “In 2013,” Jason begins, “I got a job at one of the three largest third-party game publishers as a PR employee. It was my first real job in the games industry—a dream job to me. I was immediately blinded by how ‘honored’ I should be to work for said brand. So much so that I didn’t notice obvious problems from the…

Divinity: Original Sin 2 developer Larian Studios is working on its follow up to one of the best RPGs on PC—a third adventure with a new party of heroes. Just what you’d expect from Baldur’s Gate III. Cue fainting elves and gasping halflings. Eighteen years after the Bhaalspawn saga came to a close, we’re finally returning to the Forgotten Realms. The world’s moved forward quite a bit since the last games, so instead of picking up where its predecessors left things, Baldur’s Gate III is a brand new adventure set in the Forgotten Realms as it is today, where Bhaal’s unruly kids are history. Not to worry, though, as Larian’s got another crisis to fling at the unfortunate city. With over 20 years of D&D-adjacent RPGs behind it, from Divine Divinity…

My super shotgun has a meat hook attachment. Let’s all stop and appreciate that for a second. The shotgun was already super—it’s right there in the name. But now it’s also got an attachment that grapples onto demonic meatflesh and pulls me towards it. Welcome to Doom Eternal. This feels like the natural successor to 2016’s Doom, which is to say id Software has had a think about everything that made the original one of the best shooters of the last few years and attempted to push it even further. The super shotgun’s meat hook is just one of those ways. Here’s another. In the previous Doom, you could stagger demons after doing a set amount of damage. Once staggered, you were able to trigger a ‘Glory Kill’—an instant melee…

One of the first things I discover on the Savage Planet is an enormous skull, so big I can wander around inside it like a cave. There I kill a few flying octopus monsters, and then I see a gigantic pink uvula dangling from that roof of the skull’s mouth. I leap up, rip it loose, and quickly eat it. Well, why the hell not? I’m stranded on this strange alien planet so I’ll take my meals where I can find them. And it’s not the most disgusting thing I’ll do while I’m here. I recently got to play a short demo of Journey to the Savage Planet, a first-person exploration game planned for 2020. It’s the first game from Typhoon Studios, which was founded by former creative director of…

What makes a movie, comic book, or video game feel like Star Wars? This is the question every creator has to wrestle with when they’re approached to work on a story set in that universe. When George Lucas began working on the original Star Wars in the 1970s, his aim was to make a film that looked timeless—never mind the endless budgetary and technical limitations he had to contend with. Production designer John Barry and set decorator Roger Christian proposed the notion of a “used universe”, a term that’s come to be associated with Lucas and the success of the classic trilogy over the years. The idea was to avoid the polished chrome and utopian vistas of earlier science fiction movies in favor of something a bit more tangible: The…

NETWORK PROBLEMS One of SAM’s earliest jobs is checking the station’s network. The crew ID system is down, making finding the astronauts tricky. STATION ALERTS SAM can see everything that’s wrong with the station and will be expected to deal with them before they get out of hand. STRUCTURAL FAILURE Some of the clamps connecting the station’s modules have been shaken loose. SAM has to leave the station and re-attach them. ASTRONOMY DATA If a crew member needs the coordinates of a specific planet or other celestial body, SAM can reference field images to locate them.…

The sun has gone supernova. That’s bad and all, but right now I’m actually more interested in some rocks. You see, I found a physics-defying obelisk that emits a specific, eerie noise. I wake up, jump in my ship, and use my signalscope to scan the solar system for matching sounds. I follow one to the planet of Brittle Hollow, but almost immediately get distracted by some ruins. I land nearby and investigate. And then the sun blows up again. I wake up, jump in my ship, and activate its log. A new entry appears for the ruins. There are rumors of other possible points of interest too. I’m trapped in a time loop. I’ve got about 22 minutes until the sun explodes once again. What can I discover this…

On a lovely afternoon in autumn, Amicia De Rune is out on a hunt with her father and the family dog, a scene so warm and tranquil you just know things are going to go very wrong very soon. That doesn’t make it any less shocking when Amicia suddenly comes face to face with the Plague, which manifests itself not only as a horrible disease, but as a teeming mass of rats that devours everything in its wake. Amicia and her father make their way home, only to find the Inquisition at their doorstep. For reasons unknown they want Amicia’s little brother Hugo, and are not above slaughtering their way through to him. Due to an illness, the small Hugo’s lived a completely sheltered life, and is basically a stranger…

While every other game with a mysterious story sups from the damn fine coffee and delectable cherry pie of Twin Peaks, Somewhat’s SPEK.TAKL is the rare game to explore the territory of The Fly director David Cronenberg. In the body horror of Videodrome, technology and flesh become intertwined—just as the apartment setting of SPEK.TAKL morphs to resemble the inside of a human body. You wake up one day in a flat that you’re unable to escape from, and where a TV set plays ancient propaganda films on a loop. Films about the dangers of masturbation, or the threat of homosexuality, before a mysterious stranger provides you with viewing matter that’s less ridiculous, and more unnerving. Tapes posted through the letterbox contain footage of your apartment, footage spliced into a series of prophetic short films…

Now is a good time to go back to Total War: Warhammer II. It’s had a steady flow of updates since release. The construction of the world has altered. You’re now as likely to be sacked by crab-wrangling vampire pirates as you are orcs or beastmen. So this is a great opportunity to step outside my comfort zone and get a feel for how the landscape has evolved. After 20 minutes spent looking at the faction select screen, I decide to play as Dwarfs. This is a very dwarfy thing to do—change is bad—but I promise I’m not just being boring. One of the things I love most about Total War games is how stories spring up as you play, adding context to the perpetual conflict. I want to experience how…

Chaos is a bedroom classic now played online. Crawl is the lo-fi opposite. It’s a multiplayer game about ganging up on your friends. One player controls the hero, the others the monsters. Whoever succeeds takes their place, like a savage, dungeon-delving version of tag. I especially love that despite each game lasting only 30 minutes, there’s a genuine sense of progression. Every player levels up in a different way, and it always feels balanced. It’s also a great test of your timing—but not in a Necrodancer way. At the risk of sounding like a motivational poster, picking exactly the right moment to kill your friends is the difference between success and failure. 75…

I’ve been dropped off at The Hotel Norwood. Why? I’m not sure. It appears to be as part of some mysterious scheme that I’ve not been made aware of. Still, I do have a coupon for a free room, so what the hell. I walk the meandering path past arguing unicyclists, a giant apple and a lonely turtle. Finally, near the hotel car park, I meet a couple of corporate suits from the Modulo group. They’re plotting to buy the hotel. I think they might be the bad guys. They demand I fetch a six-pack of Blue Moose energy drink. Coincidentally, as part of a sponsorship program, each guest is handed a free pack upon check-in. I smell a quest. Instead I get a cascading series of menial tasks. Problem…

It’s the Holy Grail of current gaming PCs—144fps. You’ve splurged on a great gaming monitor, and paired it up with the fastest CPU and one of the best graphics cards money can buy. It’s so smooth, so responsive, and you’re ready to dominate your opponents with your superior skills—or at least your higher refresh rate. There’s only one problem. Hitting 144fps in many games is difficult, and sometimes it’s just flat out impossible. What gives? It starts with a game’s core design and features. Not to throw shade on consoles, but when several of the current generation gaming platforms cannot output at higher than 60Hz, it’s only natural that the games played on them don’t go out of their way to exceed 60fps—or even 30fps in some cases. When a…

PC Gamer returned to Los Angeles for the annual PC Gaming Show on June 10, which is still the only major E3 event completely dedicated to PC gaming. Held at the beautiful Mayan Theater, it featured almost two hours of interviews, trailers, gameplay footage, and exclusive reveals. Rebellion showed off the first trailer for Evil Genius 2, a sequel to the cult strategy sim which lets you become a Bond-style supervillain. We also served up the first in-game footage of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, a sequel to the vampire RPG. Chucklefish revealed its space colony management game, Starmancer, and Tripwire Interactive unleashed the first ever trailer for the brutal-looking medieval brawler Chivalry 2, which includes castle sieges and large battles. Klei, the studio behind Don’t Starve, revealed more about…

IRRATIONAL GAMES The poster child for offshoots, this mass-layoff led to the creation of The Deep End Games (Perception), Question Games (The Blackout Club), and Chump Squad (Kine), among many other talented teams. CLOVER STUDIO After the commercial disappointment of Viewtiful Joe, Okami, and God Hand, Clover Studios was dissolved. One of the teams formed in its wake was PlatinumGames, now recognized as one of the best action developers around. VISCERAL GAMES The four developers at A Wandering Band met at Visceral Games, and two were directly affected by EA’s closure of the studio. The small team now develops Airborne Kingdom, a high-flying city management game. FUNCOM Funcom has changed sizes several times over its history, with these sometimes wild swings and layoffs leading to the rise of teams including…

Between Wolfenstein: The New Order and its (slightly inferior) sequel The New Colossus, it seemed like MachineGames had a solid template for what a modern Wolfenstein game should be. There was stealth, there was action, there were over-the-top guns (including a shotgun that sounded like the deafening roar of industrial machinery). Wolfenstein: Youngblood has all of those things, and yet also feels like an entirely different prospect. Let’s start with the most obvious change: It’s co-op. In place of war hero B.J. Blazkowicz, Youngblood stars his twin daughters Sophia and Jessica, a pair who, in their own words, were “born to kill Nazis”. An early cutscene shows the two being trained by their parents—being pushed to their limits and beyond. That training is only now being put into practice, after the pair smuggle away to…

Painted in shades of black and white, this stylish noir murder mystery is set on the perpetually rain-soaked streets of Paris. You, a taxi driver, fall prey to a serial killer the police call The Judge. But against all odds you survive, and soon find yourself hunting for the killer at the request of a desperate detective. She has dirt on you, she says. Presented with a top-down map of Paris, I click on a man’s face, and find myself driving over to him. Well, I watch the yellow arrow representing my cab automatically head in his direction. He wants to go to Issy, a suburb in the southwest of Paris, and I’ll receive €16 for the pleasure. The camera switches to inside the cab as the passenger taps away…

Keanu Reeves is no stranger to bleak sci-fi visions of the future. He was, of course, the star of The Matrix—the story of an office drone who learns that the world is a simulation created by machines. He also starred in Johnny Mnemonic (the film The Matrix could have been) as a cyber-hacker in a world dominated by megacorporations. And in the movie adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly he played an undercover agent working for a government engaging in invasive high-tech surveillance of its citizens.…

The space station Observation has broken away from its Earth orbit, and is drifting somewhere near Saturn. Its systems are malfunctioning, a fire has broken out, and the on-board artificial intelligence, SAM, is acting strangely. Things are not looking good for Dr Emma Fisher, the reluctant hero of this sci-fi thriller from the studio behind Stories Untold. But what’s interesting about Observation is that you don’t play as Fisher, but SAM. The station is an extension of you, and its cameras are your eyes and ears. You can, when asked, open doors, cycle airlocks, assess damage, and all manner of functional duties. But something seems to have awoken in you. A flicker of selfawareness, perhaps. And an ominous command from an unknown party has infiltrated your code: BRING HER. The Observation…

What’s new is old again. The trademarked ‘HD-2D’ art style of Acquire’s likeable JRPG tips its hat to its publisher’s rich genre history while acknowledging technical advancements since Square’s 16-bit golden age. Combining pixel art with contemporary effects is a distinctive look. As a fusion of past and present, it works very well… up to a point. And, well, I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. Octopath Traveler’s main hook isn’t entirely new. The idea of a multistranded tale with several protagonists harks back to Dragon Quest IV, though that had five heroes rather than eight, and managed to tie its narrative threads together more effectively. This is more like eight different stories that occasionally—and awkwardly—cross paths. However, here you can choose who to begin your adventure…

THE HOURGLASS TWINS Sand pours between them (like an hourglass). There’s two of them (like twins). Get it? TIMBER HEARTH The boring, habitable planet on which you live. It’s got trees and caves and water. Yawn. BRITTLE HOLLOW It’s brittle! It’s hollow! It’s got a moon that constantly pelts it with volcanic asteroids! GIANT’S DEEP It’s got water, it’s got cyclones and it’s got loads of gravity. That’s about it really. DARK BRAMBLE If not outright evil then at least pretty malicious. Don’t go here unless you have to. (You do.)…

Most games that hand you a sword and point you in the direction of a battalion of foes feel empowering and heroic. After a few rounds of Mordhau, the prospect of heading into the breach seemed more terrifying than anything else. Of all the multiplayer melee games I’ve played, this one has decidedly the highest skill cap and the least patience for those who haven’t taken the time to learn its complex combat. The upside is when you do go on a hot streak, you feel like way more of a badass than any of those more forgiving games can ever let you feel. The basic premise is pretty simple. In the default Frontline mode, you take up arms as a rugged warrior from one of nine classes (or you…

Ever since BioShock Infinite released and Irrational in its previous form went away, I’ve gladly played any games that offer a comparable experience. That is, a first-person shooter where you have more at your disposal than just cool guns. Void Bastards is described as a strategy shooter inspired by System Shock 2 and BioShock, and it features the talents of some former Irrational staff who previously made 2013’sCard Hunter. You are a prisoner, traveling across the galaxy to fulfil the whims of an HR computer that might eventually grant you your freedom. You get across the map with an FTL-style interface, and while most locations are enemy spaceships that you can board, loot, and escape, there are also stores, asteroid ranges, and deadly hazards to be aware of. Mostly, though, your time is spent navigating ships in…

Tom Petty was wrong about waiting being the hardest part. In fact, it’s the best part of free, um, sitting game The Interlude, which is all waiting, all of the time. It’s about the stuff that happens in the intervals between exciting moments: Checking your phone, staring out of the window, that sort of thing. In its exquisite detail, it’s also a strangely engrossing game. Ten minutes. The Interlude will consume only ten minutes of your time, the game ending suddenly once those 600 seconds are up. Your job, as perhaps a getaway driver, is to make contact with an associate, but what you do before that happens is up to you. As you’re stuck in the driver’s seat, you can’t get up to stretch your legs, but you can take a…

It’s easy to be mean about Kingdoms of Amalur’s low fantasy world of gnomes and underplaces and races that sound like they’re copy-pasted from the self-published fantasy novel your cousin wrote. But there’s something honest about The Reckoning—the RPG equivalent of a well-made cupboard. Plus the sprightly world and distracting quests make it feel like playing an MMO without all the other people getting in the way. 69…

Astrologaster was described to me as “sort of a Jane Austen visual novel”. Superficially it’s an odd comparison—Astrologaster is set in the Elizabethan era and the visual aspect of the novel is more about how it’s designed to look like a pop-up book—but it gives a good sense of the romantic entanglements and human drama contained within. Plus it taught me more than how a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Here, Simon Forman consults the stars—i.e. me—to diagnose his patients’ diseases and solve problems. This approach is a wonderful examination of both the strange cures that were common in 16th century England, and the fact that you can’t heal every malady with bed rest and herbs. Astrologaster wastes no time…

The Oculus Rift S sits at a crossroads. In one direction is the Oculus Quest, a standalone headset that doesn’t require being tethered to a gaming PC, for the same price as the Rift S. In the other direction is the upcoming Valve Index, at more than double the price but with 144Hz screens and much more advanced sensors. In the middle is the Rift S, replacing the outgoing original Oculus Rift. Let’s start with what the Rift S does well. Visually, it offers a 1280x1440 display (per eye), an upgrade over the Rift’s 1200x1080. After spending a few hours smashing bots in Robo Recall or fiddling around with the virtual desktop, it’s clear the new headset offers an improved viewing experience, despite the modest resolution bump. I didn’t notice…

KEY Budget build PC gaming is for everyone. Pick the parts you want to build a new, well-rounded PC for a good price. Mid-range build You want to run every new game at 1080p 60fps. This recommended build will see you through. Advanced build You’re looking for the best PC on the market and superior components. But you still want to spend smart. BUDGET BUILD Enjoy 1080p gaming without breaking the bank TOTAL $1,270 MID-RANGE BUILD Our recommended build for playing the latest games TOTAL $1,606 ADVANCED BUILD Go above and beyond with a PC powerful enough to end worlds TOTAL $4,057…