Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2020 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Street Fighter V The Street Fighter subreddit raised $15,000 with an impromptu Black Lives Matter online tournament. Elite Dangerous Next year’s Odyssey expansion will finally let you get out of your ship and explore worlds on foot. A Total War Saga: Troy The mythological Total War spin-off will be free to keep for the first 24 hours after it launches. BlizzCon BlizzCon 2020 has been cancelled due to the coronavirus. GeForce Now Now that publishers and developers have to opt-in, Nvidia’s streaming service has shrunk once again, with 89 games leaving the service. Kerbal Space Program 2 After ditching the original KSP 2 studio, Star Theory Games, publisher Take-Two reportedly tried to poach its employees. LOWS…

Two armies hold opposing ends of a battlefield. The sun’s out—it’s a nice day for a fight—and in the background sits a city, nestled behind stalwart walls. It’s the calm before A Total War Saga: Troy’s storm, but any second now a man dressed up as a bull is going to start massacring my poor troops. PLAYED IT At least I’ve got Achilles on my side, and hopefully he’s packed some reinforced sandals. Troy’s legendary leaders are extremely gifted in combat and the echo of the fantastical stuff established in Warhammer continues here, but the heroes’ abilities are less magical, and they’re less of the big nuclear threat than their predecessors. While they aren’t quite as supernaturally gifted as their cousins in other Total Wars, they still sit at the…

The night fog is thick as I drive towards Windland Plains in my borrowed company hatchback, its engine rattling so loud I can hardly hear the radio. A few feet in front of the windscreen, my headlights cast a sodium haze. Any further, and the weather reduces everything to shapes in the darkness. Perfect conditions for monster hunting, then. Well… I say ‘hunting’. Don’t expect the thrills of Capcom’s monster hit here. The wyverns and colossi you encounter in Titan Chaser don’t present any threat, and your interactions never get any more violent than shining a spotlight in their general direction. You play, essentially, as a supernatural park ranger, keeping an eye on these titans and nudging them towards home when necessary. But first you’ve got to find them. I’m…

The reason space sim MMO EVE Online’s universe is so special—and enduring—is its relationship with its players. Thanks to an interwoven tangle of reactive systems, it’s a sandbox that plays host to dynamic politics, economics, espionage, and warfare on a grand scale. Whether it’s hitmen spending ten months undercover to bring down a rival corporation, or explorer Katia Sae embarking on a nine year journey to visit all 7, 805 solar systems, or an enterprising pirate scoring loot worth $60,000 in real money from one month-long raiding spree, it’s a game that has spawned a thousand fascinating stories—with more arising every day. Check out more on its latest updates, including a full-scale alien invasion, over on p70.…

VENDORS PLY THEIR TRADE, ILLUMINATED BY THE GAUDY LIGHT OF NEON SIGNS When it comes to virtual tourism, it’s hard to beat the atmospheric streets of Sleeping Dogs’ Hong Kong. It’s at once an authentic snapshot of a unique and historic city, and a kind of exaggerated martial arts flick soundstage writ impossibly large. On hazy streets, market vendors ply their trade, illuminated by the gaudy light of countless neon signs above. Cars honk their way along clogged roads, towered over by forests of skyscrapers. A world gorgeous enough to simply stroll through, transporting yourself to another place—but also dynamic enough to sprint and leap across for yet another parkour chase, scattering crowds and plates of street-dumplings like John Woo doves. Not bad for a studio based in Vancouver, over…

When you think about open world games, your mind tends to leap to Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto, and all the other big hitters of the genre. But you might be surprised to learn that one of the best, biggest, most varied, and constantly evolving open worlds doesn’t belong to a blockbuster thirdperson action game with a mega budget; it’s the setting for Euro Truck Simulator 2. THERE’S SOMETHING COMPELLING ABOUT THOSE LONG STRETCHES OF ROAD Longtime readers of PC Gamer will know we love SCS Software’s trucking sim. It’s one of the best driving games on PC, with weighty, nuanced handling and fun RPG elements. And since its release way back in 2012, the game’s map has been steadily growing. It now includes a huge chunk of Eastern Europe,…

Professional wrestling is fascinating, isn’t it? First you think it’s real, then you think it’s fake, then you realize it’s more real than you ever imagined, in ways it’s hard to comprehend. The injuries are legit. Real-life feuds spill over into storylines. The most talented people in the business are the ones that don’t hurt their opponents. And the only thing weirder than sports entertainment itself are the games that feature it. Like many of the titles that preceded it, WWE 2K20 aims to walk the top rope, ’Taker-style, between being a competitive fighting game and a means of simulating the spectacle of the real thing. And there are moments when it feels right—times when you pull off a reversal at exactly the right time, hit a signature move, and change the…

When searching for a cricket tie-in, it’s tempting to go back to Ashes Cricket 2013, a game so heinous that all trace of it has been scrubbed from Steam. But Cricket 19 is good, and something of an antidote to a summer spent without the reassuring crack of leather on willow. There’s enough depth for tactical play and the systems feel intuitive. But my favorite thing is how long it takes. Even the short form version of the game, Twenty20, will eat up a significant portion of an evening, and that’s widely considered a reductive coin-toss by Test Match purists. This doesn’t feel like a finessed, big-budget release, but the love for the sport is evident in every meandering over. 80…

There’s a strange idea in PC gaming that all games should strive for balance. A good game, conventional wisdom goes, is one in which every option feels as viable as any other, and everything is kept neatly in its place. ‘Broken’ is a dirty word. But in actuality, not only is balance ephemeral—it’s not always the path to fun. Slay the Spire is a perfect example of a game that understands this. On its face, it’s a card-based roguelike about building the most efficient deck you can. But in order to beat its toughest challenges, efficiency isn’t enough—you need to break the game, distorting the rules to your advantage, and creating combinations any other game would have written out at QA. It’s amazing fun. You don’t beat Slay the Spire…

There’s no component more crucial to a gaming PC than a graphics card. It’s the heart of any system that favors frame rate and fidelity, and that’s why it’s of the utmost importance to choose wisely when it comes to your next upgrade. You’ve got to ask yourself some questions—such as “what resolution can my monitor run at?” and “do I really need an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti?”. There are times when you will need an RTX 2080 Ti. If the goal for your PC is to deliver the very best 4K gaming experience that money can buy, then this card’s many cores and 11GB video memory are best suited to deliver. But with a price tag of $1,199, most of us will have to be a more parsimonious…

I thought I was an introverted person before this,” says Kirk Williford, a senior game designer on Guild Wars 2. After a few months in self-isolation as a result of the coronavirus, working on the MMO’s latest big update during the day and playing other games for escapism in the evenings, Williford realized he’s a lot more extroverted than he once thought. Daily casual human contact is one of those things anyone can take for granted when they work at an office, but after months without it, game developers who now work from home have to find new ways to make games and make do without the water cooler. Working from home is nothing new for plenty of indie developers, but the pandemic means something very different for much bigger…

Project Cars has amassed a large, loyal following of virtual motorsport fans, thanks in part to its impressively realistic car physics. But the series has always been missing a few of the features expected from a modern racing sim—something its developer is remedying in this scaled-up sequel. First up, career mode. This has been rebuilt from scratch, with the intention of giving players a better sense of progression. In your career you’ll progress through ten car classes, earning XP as you go, unlocking upgrade parts and new events. But if you don’t like a particular type of event, you can spend in-game currency to skip over it. This is so players don’t feel tied down, forced to drive cars they don’t enjoy. FIRST LOOK You’ll notice I mentioned car upgrades.…

The scene before me is unfathomably ghastly. Charred limbs and torsos the color of charcoal are only things that suggest that these are humans littering the ground as I pick through the gore to find a man’s lost brother. I’ve witnessed the carnage that remains of this battle between the forces of Nilfgaard and Temeria before in the deceptively-quaint region of White Orchard before, some years ago—so what possessed me to return to this nightmarish world? Well, for a start, The Witcher 3 isn’t all battlefields and rotting flesh. In fact, it’s frequently staggering in its beauty, from the rugged pastoral scenes of Skellige to the bustling metropolis of Novigrad. Nevertheless, amid the bucolic rolling hills and the sparkling rivers running between them, tragedy lies. Civilians are murdered by soldiers,…

Underwater levels in games can make you flounder. Weird water physics, breath timers, and clunky character movements have historically made submerged worlds daunting. But Giant Squid’s subaquatic adventure ABZÛ takes all that away, turning even the clumsiest of player inputs into the graceful movements of an aqua-dancer. It’s an effortless, relaxing adventure that makes you feel totally at home in its aquatic world. ABZÛ is a wordless story set within the depths of the ocean. You play as a diver who’s helping restore life back to parts of the sea that are decaying. As you delve deeper, you’ll begin to unravel the mysteries of an ancient civilization and start to understand the diver’s origins. The game has moments of quiet reflection, rushes of action, and playful interactions that use its underwater world…

I TAILED HER FOR A LONG TIME AS SHE RODE OVER HILLS AND THROUGH FORESTS The most compelling open worlds are the ones that feel like they would exist even if you never visited them, and the key to that illusion is to fill the world with convincing people. I’m not talking about the main characters, the quest-givers, or the speech-makers. I’m talking about everyone else—the background extras that fill the gaps in the world, the ones you tend to barely notice unless you slow down and start paying attention to them. Early in my life as Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2, I came across a woman being abducted. After killing her kidnapper and cutting her ropes, she thanked me and told me she was going back home.…

EVERY MISSION FELT LIKE A REAL JOURNEY, WITH ALL SORTS OF DIVERSIONS Fast travel is ubiquitous in open world games. I get why—it’s a time-saver in an industry more packed with massive games than ever. But I think it also undermines the scale of these virtual realms. More and more I find myself swearing off using it completely. Riding across the dunes of Assassin’s Creed Origins, I experienced so much more of a genuine sense of place than I would have zipping around the map. I came to learn the geography and its landmarks, and every mission felt like a real journey, with all sorts of diversions and twists along the way as I stumbled into other events and sidequests. Give it a try, next time you pick up an…

Just because this month’s theme is sport, it doesn’t mean they all have to be real. This is proof, were it needed, that I’ll find a way to put Warhammer in anything. That sandwich you just made. The jumper your mum knitted. The magazine you’re reading. They all contain Warhammer now. Blood Bowl 2 is more polished than I expected. There’s always a sense of trepidation when firing up a Warhammer tie-in for the first time: Is it one of the games that got made while the Games Workshop QA team were looking in another direction? Or is it one of the good ones? Thankfully, this is more skewed towards the latter, but it’s not without its faults. Good stuff first. It’s crammed with deep, on-brand cuts for Warhammer Fantasy…

This skateboarding game’s presentation really appeals to me. Or, rather, its total lack of it. You skate in a utilitarian hellscape while cool music plays. That’s it. It’s the opposite of WWE’s creatine-gorged bulk of pointless extras around a brittle skeleton. It’s a game where you’re happy to sit and do the same level for an entire evening until you’ve nailed your high score. It has the same sense of repetition as Hotline Miami, except that in OlliOlli every shattered kneecap is your own fault. 83…

After upgrading my GPU to an RTX 2070 Super, I picked Control to be my first ‘RTX On’ experience. It’s a good game to play for any reason, but it’s also the best showcase of Nvidia’s ray tracing tech so far. It almost entirely takes place in a mid-20th century office building where glass, marble, steel, and concrete intersect in hardedged geometric patterns, reflecting fluorescent grids, green CRT monitors, and interdimensional sun beams. I oohed and awed at the reflections for a while, but now I’m mostly taking selfies with dead guys. I swear I started out using Control’s photo mode to take tasteful shots of cool-looking stone cubes. I also snapped a few pics of the power plant control room, focusing on its glowing switches and their reflections on the floor.…

You’re trapped in something the size of a camper van with three of your buddies for the next three years. The payoff is that you get to go to Mars, but at what cost? How do you look after your mental health on such a strange journey? Crewed missions to Mars and beyond are still in the planning stage at NASA and private companies such as SpaceX. In 2015, then-administrator of NASA Charles Bolden pointed to 2030 as the date for a human landing on the red planet, and current US Vice-President Mike Pence wants boots on the surface of the Moon again in 2024. There’s rather more to it than jumping on the top of a giant missile and setting up a guidance computer running at 0.043MHz though. Long…

Many developers and publishers have expressed their support for the Black Lives Matter movement this month, along with pledging donations to it, the NAACP, and other related causes. Events and announcements have also been moved back to draw attention to the protests that have been occurring in the US, as well as internationally. On May 25, George Floyd died after police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes. Floyd’s death, which was recorded, sparked protests that spread across the US and beyond, with millions marching to demand an end to unjust, racist systems. Within the games industry, EA was one of the first to address the protests—five days in—delaying a Madden NFL 21 announcement to instead make a statement about systemic racism. SOME GAME UPDATES…

When games journalists outline the problems with a game, they’re often met with a familiar retort, “Why don’t you make one then, if you’re so clever?” And of course, most of us aren’t. But for Tom Francis, a former staff writer at PC Gamer for nine years, that’s become a foolproof method of development. “I think my process is to play a game, articulate what I wish was different, and make a game that does it that way,” he says. For Tactical Breach Wizards, the starting point was one of Francis’ favorites: XCOM 2. “I love it, and I’ve played it for hundreds of hours, and yet I could talk forever about what’s wrong with it… big, serious problems.” Francis vented his frustrations in a design document. XCOM 2 battles…

Space is mostly bleak and empty,” says Michael Schade, CEO of Rockfish Games, the developer of Everspace 2. Without getting too Douglas Adams about it, this makes open space combat games “boring, because most of the time you shoot at tiny pixel clusters in the distance without having a concrete sense of player orientation and movement”. PLAYED IT We’re playing the prototype build of this space shooter, the one that appeared at PAX East back in late February and which would have been shown off at this summer’s entertainment shows if they hadn’t been cancelled. It’s playable, in that it functions—you fly through space exploring, shooting, and trading. It’s not exactly coherent yet, however, with little sense of purpose or mission structure. A whole mission-tracking system exists in the game,…

In this unusual sim, you play as a one-person restoration company specializing in cleaning and repairing abandoned railway stations. In the same vein as House Flipper or Viscera Cleanup Detail, there’s a big ol’ mess, and you’re the one that’s going to clean it all up. A whole string of stations have unfortunately fallen to a sorry state, and you’ll be working your way through each one, turning trash into treasure as you go. You start by working on a small village’s single-platform station, and work your way up to the grottiest inner-city stations, all of them in a terrible state of disrepair. You’ll need to pick up the trash, scrub the graffiti off walls, sweep the floors, replace old furniture, and rip up weeds you find until the whole…

IT TURNS OUT THERE’S ESCAPISM IN PREDICTABILITY AND ORDER Hereby, I offer my apology to every environment artist working in games, past, present, and future. How many hours do they spend creating lavish, gorgeous, massive open worlds? Hundreds? Thousands? Huge teams spend years bringing to life spaces we could only dream of exploring—resplendent fantasy vistas and detailed historical reimaginings both. And how do I respond to this work? By running face first into a mountain. My strongest memories of Skyrim are of being pressed against a cliff texture. Yes, it’s a game filled with big moments—the dragon attacks, the dramatic battles, the fun sidequests discovered in unlikely locations—but those are punctuations on a game that’s often about simply travelling through an enormous world. Less than an hour into a fresh…

WALK THE STREETS OF KAMUROCHO AND YOU’LL HEAR MUSIC LEAKING FROM BARS It’s interesting how two of the most atmospheric, detailed and wellrealized worlds on PC—Yakuza’s Kamurocho and Shenmue’s Yokosuka—are among the smallest. Each game presents a painstakingly recreated, but economical, slice of Japanese life, rooting their fantastic stories of revenge and conspiracy in a lavishly mundane reality. In both games, a grimy Tokyo real estate office or a budget travel agent will have as much detail, if not more, as the story’s more glamorous locations. In the Yakuza series we explore a semi-fictionalized version of Kabukicho, Tokyo’s infamous red light district; in Shenmue, the port city of Yokosuka. By the standards of most games, these are small spaces. But by focusing on a few streets, rather than an immense,…

Many fervent Dark Souls fans have written off Dark Souls II as an accident. But, in the words of Bob Ross who’d no doubt look over Medula with a tear in his eye, the sun setting over an endless sea, bathing the ruins of a once proud civilization in golden light: it’s a happy accident. Dark Souls II has all the ‘serious’ series staples, of course. There are ruined castles, dead kings, piles of lore implying terrible histories of avarice and sorrow. But in contrast with those expectations, Dark Souls II folds in endless absurdity, humor, and creativity, particularly in its boss design. This is a grim fantasy world, but it’s one that never takes itself too seriously, which is why I remember more of Dark Souls II beat-by-beat than any other game in…

I’m in a dark crypt, surrounded by skeletons and creepers. I’m blasting mobs with my firework arrows which explode into a cloud of colorful sparks, dual-wielding sickles that freeze enemies, and harvesting the souls of the fallen to power my laser cube that obliterates everything in my path. Throughout this whole spectacle, the llama I’ve summoned keeps charging head-first into mobs in a throw of spitting rage. It’s ridiculous, and I’m enjoying every second. It’s safe to say that Minecraft Dungeons doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s set in the same universe as its sandbox predecessor, but there’s no crafting or building in his world. It’s a dungeon crawler that challenges you to furiously hack-and-slash your way through hordes of enemies with an arsenal of fun enchantments and items. I’ve…

You remember that bit in The Shining when Jack typed the same sentence over and over? This entry could be that but with the words ‘sorry I got it wrong’. I reviewed Rocket League in 2015, and scored it an idiotic 87 percent, when it’s clearly one of the greatest multiplayer games on PC. So yes: I’m sorry. Going back to it now feels like bumping into a former paramour who ended up being fabulously successful. I’m not even angry with you, Rocket League. I’m glad that you’re important enough to have your own Back To The Future tie-in DLC. I knew you when you were new and pure and special, and honestly, I didn’t give you the love you deserved. 92…

Regrettably, I wasn’t lucky enough to get my hair cut in the last week before lockdown, but I was fortunate enough to have my brother-in-law rig up an ethernet port in my home office. Much to the despair of my family, and sausage dogs, this was to signify a momentous return to gaming, the likes of which no hurried garage conversion had ever seen before. At least I’d hoped so. It’s been several months since I’ve played games with any meaningful passion, and at least a year since I’ve joined the old boys from my Battlefield clan for a few rounds of ‘Sweary McShoot Bang’. After Battlefield 1 and 5 came along, we all seemed to melt away, some meltier than others. But with no end in sight to the…

Here in the real world, it’s Saturday. In the eternal night of The Longing’s caves, it’s impossible to tell what day it is. What I do know, though, is how much time remains: 71 days, 15 hours. See, The Longing plays out over the course of 400 days, in real-time, while you wait for a mythical king to awake. Just under 72 days? Nearly there then. It’s been over a month since I last played, but the seconds tick away all the same. The Shade is right where I left him. He rubs his eyes—those huge yellow headlamps—and tries reasoning with me. “Maybe I should return to my home?” But that wouldn’t be much fun to read, would it? So I send him deeper into the cave system, up a…

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 MOTHERBOARD B450-A Pro Max MSI $100 A healthy dose of ports and PCIe SSD support has this B450 at the heart of our budget build. PROCESSOR Ryzen 3 3300X AMD $120 AMD has packed its latest Zen 2 architecture into a speedy four-core package, and that’s great for gaming. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce GTX 1650 Super Gigabyte $160 The…