Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2020 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS The Witcher 3 Thanks to the show, the game now has more people playing than ever before. Resident Evil 3 Remake Capcom confirmed an April 3 release date for its latest remake. Half-Life Alyx We finally got to hear the creepy G-Man, once again played by Mike Shapiro, for the first time in 12 years. LOWS Escape from Tarkov Despite apologizing for an interview that claimed women can’t handle combat, the devs still don’t want to add playable female characters. Fantasy Flight Interactive The digital division of the board game publisher has closed its doors. It only got to release one game. Windows 7 Support for Windows 7 has finally come to an end after a decade.…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE March 20, 2020 DEVELOPER id Software PUBLISHER Bethesda Softworks LINK doometernal.com PlayingS this FPS sequel is… exhausting. After three hours, I feel like my nervous system needs a vacation. Any good shooter demands something from your reflexes, learning how to aim while dodging incoming fire, but that’s just learning how to breathe in Doom Eternal. Properly operating your entire body—and staying alive—is a lot harder. PLAYED IT The game on ‘ultraviolence’, its version of ‘hard’ difficulty, is the most stressed I’ve been playing a game in a long time, because almost every fight has me feeling like I’m on the ragged edge. It’s been a couple years since I played any of id Software’s 2016 Doom, the surprisingly great reboot that Eternal is following up on,…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE May 26 DEVELOPER Amazon Game Studios PUBLISHER In-house LINK newworld.com Yes, retailer Amazon is getting into development, kicking things off with an MMORPG. Set in the 17th century during “the twilight of the Age of Exploration”, the game mixes aspects of real-world history with fantasy, with thousands of players battling and working together to make a home on the dangerous, monster-ridden island of Aeternum. The idea of an MMO feels almost old-fashioned in this age of shared-world shooters and battle royales, so I ask director Scot Lane from Amazon Game Studios why he thinks now is the right time to bring this genre back to life. FIRST LOOK “Well, it sounded cool,” he says. “But also because MMO development has slowed down. It’s kind of interesting…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £23.99 DEVELOPER Steel Sky Productions PUBLISHER In-house LINK warhammerunderworlds-online.com Deep in the cursed city of Shadespire, warbands battle for shards of precious shadeglass. The gold-clad knights known as the Stormcast Eternals, rampaging berserkers Magore’s Fiends, a jolly band of Orcs called Ironskull’s Boyz, and the skeletal Sepulchral Guard are the first warbands to brave this deadly treasure hunt. PLAYED IT Warhammer Underworlds is one of Games Workshop’s best competitive tabletop games. You and your opponent’s fighters activate one by one to defend, charge, and take points. After each activation you use ‘ploys’ from a hand of cards to perform extra special actions. These might let you give your fighters an extra move, or move enemy fighters into a worse position. This phase goes back…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Four humans, infinite zombies, hours and hours of well-made shootybangs EXPECT TO PAY $50 DEVELOPER Rebellion Developments PUBLISHER Rebellion Developments REVIEWED ON Radeon RX 580, AMD Ryzen 5 2600 3.9GHz, 16 GB RAM MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK zombiearmy.com What’s your eighth favorite snack? You know, that one you’d never actively buy unless it was on offer but, when left alone with a packet, you’ll eat until your fingers reach for the next and find only crumbs. Now, imagine your cupboards are filled with it—that’s what playing Zombie Army 4: Dead War feels like. Especially if the snack in question happens to be delicious braaains. In this analogy, the feeling you get as you chomp down—that beautiful weightless moment before the regret and mild tummy ache…

TREASON LEVEL: 5 Stepping into an area demarcated for those of higher social standing than you TREASON LEVEL: 10 Initiating conversation with those of higher social standing than you TREASON LEVEL: 15 Asking questions that attempt to gain information beyond your clearance TREASON LEVEL: (VARIOUS) Giving the wrong answers in a confession booth designed to decrease your treason level.…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A moderately interactive adventure about androids developing their own consciousness EXPECT TO PAY $40 DEVELOPER Quantic Dream PUBLISHER Quantic Dream REVIEWED ON Core i5-8400, GTX 1060, 16 GB RAM MULTIPLAYER No LINK quanticdream.com The titular city in Detroit: Become Human is a representation of a future industry. Best known as the center of the US car industry and the birthplace of Motown, the city has fallen on hard times, but the virtual Detroit of 2038 has found a second life as heart of the android industry. This has left the populace unemployed all the same, causing them to mistreat their artificial servants. It’s this injustice that causes androids to develop their own consciousness. You follow the story of three such androids—Connor, a brand-new investigation…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A survival-Metroidvania hybrid with jokes EXPECT TO PAY $30 DEVELOPER Typhoon Studios PUBLISHER Epic Games REVIEWED ON i7 9700K, RTX 2080 TI, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK savageplanetgame.com It looks like No Man’s Sky and it’s made by Far Cry 4 director Alex Hutchinson, so perhaps it’s best to start with which games Journey to the Savage Planet is not like. Although you and a co-op partner find yourself on a distant planet, it isn’t anything like as non-linear or as vast as No Man’s Sky. And sure, there’s a gun occupying the bottom-right of the screen, but Far Cry in space it is not. What Typhoon Studios has made with its debut title is something else entirely. Something that gives you a real sense of…

Everything I make in Beseige ends up looking like something from a Warhammer geometry book for toddlers. It’s not just a square on wheels: It’s a hate-forged slaughterquad; an agonybox; a doomdeathahedron. It’s a testimony to my complete and crushing lack of practical skills, and that’s why I adore Beseige. I can create the most dangerous vehicles imaginable without any risk to life or limb. For example: My latest hatesquare gets stuck on the production line because I haven’t left enough room for wheels. I feel like a crab drawing on a wall with a crayon, in that I have no idea what I’m doing, and it’s fun in a way I can scarcely comprehend. 83…

JAMES DAVENPORT THIS MONTH I role-played the cruel jock so when I die no one’s mad. ALSO PLAYED Tyranny, Life is Strange 2 I didn’t belong to any particular clique in school, but Last Year I lets me live out that—now that I’m saying it out loud—pretty abnormal fantasy. But it also punishes me for wanting to in the first place, often by A) feeding me to a large spider B) placing my skull between the large, meaty fists of a giant, or C) uh, well, hooks. So, so many hooks. Yeah, it’s another asymmetrical monsters vs men game, but Last Year doesn’t just copy Dead by Daylight or Left 4 Dead. It takes the conceit, a genre all its own at this point, and makes the monster an offensive…

PIXEL PERFECT I was only a nipper during the golden age of 90s shooters, so grisly, retro FPS, Dusk should be a great way for me to understand it. STEALTHY SHOOTIN Made by Tom Francis—previously of the PC Gamer parish—Gunpoint is a clever indie shooter. Well, I think. I still need to find three hours to STORY TIME The impact Her Story had on narrative storytelling was profound, so I should really get to it. Shame I can’t take my own advice: I just bought Telling Lies, too.…

It’s an auspicious day in Atana. Members of the gentry have gathered in their finest with the kingdom of Davern to witness the wedding between their two princes. As the officiant, Queen Soproxi of Atana bursts dramatically into the room only fashionably late to the festivities. “GOOD MORNING RICH MEMBERS OF ATANA!” She yells. “AND BEAUTIFUL WAR-TORN DAVES!” The queen’s bold entrance is met with dozens of reactions from the crowd in the form of Discord emoticons beneath her all-caps messages. There are nearly 50 of us sitting silently in a voice chat room called ‘the-wedding’ listening to a bot called ‘Rythm’ provide the sounds of a lute-playing bard. An unknown number more are spectating the ceremony unfold in several text channels. These are my first confusing but intriguing moments…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER Owlcat Games PUBLISHER Deep Silver LINK wrath.owlcatgames.com It’s Tuesday, and demons are invading again. It’s the sort of cataclysm you’d expect from a place called ‘the Worldwound’. A planar tear to the Abyss has opened up, and now mere mortals must push back against a tide of demonic rage flowing into the dark world of Golarion. PLAYED IT Pathfinder: Kingmaker was part of a welcome clutch of new CRPGs to follow Path of Exile’s success. Its follow-up, Wrath of the Righteous, is set in a different part of the world, with new heroes and villains, and Owlcat Games promises “a more epic conflict”. There won’t be a straightforward divide between righteous mortals and furious demons, however. Traitorous mortals are all too happy to sacrifice…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE March 19 DEVELOPER Flashback Games PUBLISHER Slitherine Ltd LINK slitherine.com/game/panzer-corps-2 Sometimes all a game really needs is a good Undo button. Wargames can be intricate things, full of edge-case rules and surprising mechanics—how do bridges work, again? Can this unit attack after moving? The complications are myriad. The power to take back an accidental click, avoid a misunderstood mechanic, or dodge a dodgy combat resolution, is powerful. Euphoric, even. Friends, I write here today to say that Panzer Corps 2 has a really good undo button. I recently got to sit down with a preview build of the game, courtesy of developers Flashback Games and publishers Slitherine, and I found the ability to take-backsies my way to victory not just useful, but thrilling. No amount of…

Sequestered well away from other game teams at Valve, the 30-odd people making Dota Underlords are having a lot of fun. They’re loud and competitive, playing instruments on breaks from coding and jumping at the chance to down tools and play their game for a while. After a year of growth and work, they’re preparing to release season one of Underlords this month—February 25. I visited the team, talked about their development, and got a look at what’s new in the game’s 1.0 version. What really struck me is that they’re still in love with their game in a way unlike many other teams I’ve spoken to. Even in a studio with a healthy work environment, the time before release is still fraught and stressful. The Underlords team seems to just…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A rhythm-action game inspired by the now-deceased Swedish DJ EXPECT TO PAY $20 DEVELOPER Hello There Games PUBLISHER Wired Productions REVIEWED ON RX 480, i5-6500, 16BG RAM, HDD MULTIPLAYER Local split-screen, up to 4 players LINK invectorgame.com Videogames have the power to work miracles. Songs like Levels, Waiting for Love, and Wake Me Up soundtracked my evenings in nightclubs. I fuzzily recall grumbling, “You’ll never find me listening to this at 3.00am on a weeknight when I’m older.” Instead, the best part of ten years later, I’m doing exactly that. Except this time I’m toe-tapping away to Tim Bergling’s (aka Avicii) inoffensive earworms in my flat. And slippers. This is thanks to Avicii Invector, but this isn’t your average rhythm-action game. The project that…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? If Paradox made a Horrible Histories game EXPECT TO PAY $40 DEVELOPER Creative Assembly PUBLISHER SEGA REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-7700 CUP @3.60GHz, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070, Windows 10 MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK bit.ly/37xZnVE It might seem like I’m starting with the strap and working backwards, but Thrones of Britannia is the most revisitable of all the Total War games. To some, it’s the spin-off that tried too hard to be different. If Wes Anderson made a movie personifying the Total War games, Thrones would be the one played by Willem Dafoe who only eats raw meat. But is it really that radical? Less so now than ever. A stream of patches has followed since release, recalibrating the game and addressing some…

Recettear is like a soothing balm after Kingdom Come’s muck. At least, it is until 1) I realize that the world of commerce is basically just war with maths; and 2) even haggling with NPCs brings me out in hives. But it’s such a fun concept. Go to dungeons. Find loot. Sell it. In fact, I think I like this more than the inventory management that comes with most RPGs. I never need to worry about ruining my OOTD with the wrong cowl just because the stats are better, and I’m not going to accidentally junk the Sword That Saves Mankind because I’m intentionally selling absolutely everything. 75…

Quantum bits If a qubit can be kept isolated from its environment it can go into superposition, a state of both 1 and 0 at the same time. This is what supplies the advantage over classical digital computers. This can be used to calculate across several qubits, but as soon as the qubit is read, the superposition collapses to an answer of either 1 or 0 again. This month we need to deal with a big concept: Quantum supremacy. Not the story of a subatomic particle trained as the CIA’s ultimate assassin but now suffering amnesia and uncovering a conspiracy. No, it’s the idea that a quantum computer might be able to solve some task that a classical computer cannot, or at least couldn’t do within the remaining lifespan of…

Speedruns weren’t the only records being broken at this year’s Awesome Games Done Quick, which raised a grand total of $3,133,898.56. That’s more than $700,000 higher than last year’s event and $100,000 more than the previous Summer Games Done Quick. The money raised from these 54,160 individual donations goes to the Prevent Cancer Foundation. As always, AGDQ’s speedrunners showcased a massive variety of games, from devilishly tricky platformers to entire RPG anthologies. One of the highlights was Tomatoangus, who had to add a ‘g’ to his handle before he was allowed to participate, and his Fallout Anthology run. When he got to the Fallout 4 leg of his journey, he brought out props—hastily assembled—to show how he’s able to glitch through walls and shave off vital seconds at the start…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE May 18 DEVELOPER Zenimax Online Studios PUBLISHER Bethesda Softworks LINK elderscrollsonline.com Skyrim is inarguably a monolith in gaming. Now, The Elder Scrolls Online, the MMO set in Tamriel 1,000 years before TESV, is headed back to the Nord homeland for a major story update. NEW INFO The Elder Scrolls Online has been to places covered by past mainline TES games before. It has hosted a chapter in Morrowind. Its original campaign included the eastern half of Skyrim. It has gone to Cyrodiil. But returning to Skyrim seems like a distinct peak to summit. It’s easy to imagine that ESO: Greymoor could amount to just another version of The Elder Scrolls V, but ESO’s creative director Rich Lambert is adamant that the MMO will chart its own…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £27.99 DEVELOPER Crema PUBLISHER Humble Bundle LINK ks.playtemtem.com You’ve come of age. It’s time to leave your hometown and explore the rest of the world, catching wild animals that roam the tall grasslands and battling other trainers. A professor gives you a starting critter and a piece of tech that logs all the wild creatures you come across. Sounds a bit familiar, right? This is the opening of creature-collecting MMORPG Temtem, developed by Madrid-based studio Crema. It might be a tad on the nose, but after raising $574,000 through Kickstarter (eight times the project goal) with over 10,000 backers, it’s safe to say that there are players out there who want a Pokemon MMORPG—who can blame Crema for taking the opportunity? In fact, the…

The $4.99 battle pass has over 75 rewards such as banners, Rocky the Ravenhook comics, skins, and props to litter your combat arena with. Other players will also now see your customized arena when they come to fight you. Summoners are here: Arc Warden and Nature’s Prophet return as part of this new alliance, while Lycan, Venomancer, and Broodmother regain their summoning powers and switch to it. Say goodbye to Scrappy Inventors, as those alliances are taking the season off. (And not a moment too soon.) It’s still undecided, but the team hopes to have three to four seasons per year. Of course this Valve game has sprays. Of course it does. The top battle pass reward is ultimate skins for the Underlords. Other Heroes, Alliances, and Items will rotate…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A comedic and light cRPG with active-pause tactical combat EXPECT TO PAY $30 DEVELOPER Black Shamrock, Cyanide PUBLISHER Bigben Interactive REVIEWED ON Windows 10, Intel Core i7, 16GB RAM, Nividia GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYER No LINK epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/paranoia/home The dystopia of enforced happiness has been dissected across media obsessively for decades, pretty much since capitalism and communism emerged as the two opposing ideologies of the 20th century, and did all in their power to show citizens on the other side just how happy we all are. It’s a theme that often plays out as satire, but Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory, based on the tabletop RPG, goes meta by parodying that satire. It’s witty and brimming with maddening bureaucracy and obfuscating double-speak that’s part Joseph Heller, part…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A fun adventure where you control a host of inanimate objects EXPECT TO PAY $20 DEVELOPER Funomena PUBLISHER Annapurna Interactive REVIEWED ON Windows 10, Intel Core i7, 16GB RAM, Nividia GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYER No LINK annapurna.pictures/interactive/wattam When Katamari released in 2004, it surprised players and critics with its joyous mechanics and soundtrack. It was an energetic, colorful bolt from the blue, and its creator, Keita Takahashi, was launched into the spotlight. Although Katamari, and his later game Noby Noby Boy, released over a decade ago, Takahashi’s latest game, Wattam, has the same free-spirited imagination and playful sense of fun. In Wattam you play as the Mayor, a green cube wearing a black bowler who sports a dapper moustache. But as happy as a fancy…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? An expansion to the combat heavy monster fighter EXPECT TO PAY $40 DEVELOPER Capcom PUBLISHER Capcom REVIEWED ON 64-Bit Windows 7, Nvidia GeForce GTX-970, Intel i7-4790K, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK monsterhunter.com/world-iceborne/us If you’re already a fan and want to know as simply as possible if Iceborne justifies its price tag, then let me put it like this: I had 200 hours in World before this expansion, and I’ve racked up almost another 200 since I started it. So yes, there’s a lot of bang for your buck. But if you’re at all interested in Monster Hunter beyond a time sink, then Iceborne complicates World in both incredibly interesting and some deeply disappointing ways. This beefy expansion is a mix of new monsters, regions,…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY $30 DEVELOPER Warhorse Studios PUBLISHER Deep Silver It’s hard enough to pick up the thread of a game when the fate of the free world rests in your hands. Stay away long enough, and it’s often impossible to remember what you were doing or why, no matter how important it was. And it’s even harder in Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a game with missions that include ‘meet a woman’, ‘collect nettles’, and ‘wash’. But that’s precisely the thrill of Warhorse Studios’s cabbagey peasant-’em-up. Few games make doing nothing matter this much. I spend at least ten minutes trying to work out what momentous act I managed last time I played. Turns out it was learning to read. That might sound low key to you, a…

There’s something pleasant about the immediacy of Reigns—even if every decision I make has negative consequences. If nothing else, it’s taught me to stop sharing. The original still feels very much like a mobile game—especially compared to the follow up, Her Majesty—but the writing is pin sharp and the stories are compelling. And more than this, fecklessly swiping past so many thoughtfully crafted narratives itself feels like behaviour of a debauched monarch. Bite-sized autocratic brilliance. 80…

UNDEAD NIGHTMARE Inspired by the first Read Dead Redemption’s Undead Nightmare DLC, modder JediJosh is working on a proper zombie expansion for RDR2. This is one to keep an eye on as a contender for custom servers. RDRFR Based on the GTA V LCPDFR that allows players to take on the role of local police, RDRFR is in alpha stage. This one will likely be a key component to roleplay servers that let players take on specific jobs. REDM RedM is a framework for creating custom servers not bound by Rockstar’s modding rules. This will be the lynchpin that other great mods turn on, giving many a place for players to experiment.…

1 WEATHER FORECASTING Carried out on supercomputers, predicting the weather requires the analysis of huge datasets. Quantum computers could also help build more accurate climate models. 2 DRUG DEVELOPMENT Studying the interactions between molecules is key to discovering new drugs. With a number of combinations still to be analysed, quantum computers could speed things up immensely. 3 AI The quantum processor’s ability to analyse large amounts of data quickly will be key to AI development. Shortening the time it takes AI systems to learn will speed their deployment. 4 ONLINE SECURITY If quantum computers could render our encryption algorithms useless, they can also replace them with quantum encryption methods based on quantum entanglement.…