Innholdsfortegnelse for Xmas 2018 i PC Gamer

PHIL SAVAGE Specialist in Team Fortress 2 Twitter @Octaeder This month Finally got to write off 100+ hours spent playing Destiny 2: Forsaken as being “for work”. Sorry, Half-Life fans. Despite your wishes, prayers and memes, Valve’s next game is not Episode 3. Still, as Chris explains in this month’s cover feature, Artifact is no less exciting. When Valve pushes into a new genre, it makes a mark – whether that means reinventing the shooter, reinventing the puzzle game, or just reinventing the concept of shopping. Artifact reinvents what it means to be a digital card game. This issue celebrates reinvention. In the second half of our History of Strategy feature, we explore how turn-based tactics revitalised the genre. And we celebrate the 20th birthday of Thief, the game that…

The hell I love your website, but what the hell is with the article, ‘Every penis in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, rated’? Please ask yourself if you would do an article ranking women’s breasts in games, and if not, why not? Then perhaps you could explain why your article on penises was okay? Ben Lewis Phil: No, we would not do an article ranking women’s breasts in games. Writing about a subject in a way that would be offensive if you wrote the same way about a different subject is literally how satire works. The hype Picked up the latest issue and saw that it was reviewing Shadow of the Tomb Raider. “Great,” I thought. “They are reviewing the first title to use ray tracing on the new GTX cards. Finally…

As a future Earth slowly becomes uninhabitable, humanity begins relocating to Mars for a better life. The problem is, only the stinking rich can afford a ticket. And you? You’re just a regular kid with a beat-up hoverbike and enough dollars for a bowl of ramen and not much else. But what you have plenty of is determination, and you’ve decided to use your hoverbike, and knack for driving, to earn enough money to make it to the Red Planet. You’ll hunt bounties, deliver pizzas and take part in racing tournaments, all to a wonderfully chill, lo-fi hip-hop soundtrack. Developer Oscar Brittain cites Akira and Cowboy Bebop as influences, and that’s clear to see in the stylish, colourful, fast-paced visuals. Whatever you’re doing in Desert Child, whether it’s slinging pizza…

I’m a snob for aesthetics, which is a terrible sentence now I’ve written it out. Still, the point stands: I’ve skipped many a game simply because the way it looks makes it seem like an unpleasant space to exist in. One Finger Death Punch has always been an exception: an ugly game that I’ll still play because its two-button action is just so good. One Finger Death Punch 2 does not look any prettier than its predecessor. For me, this is more than just an aversion to stick figures. If anything, I find the more detailed background art even more repellant. Crucially, though, I’m too busy judging the pattern of button presses needed to complete a fight to notice. As in the first game, you press…

Like the wargames of the ’70s and ’80s, collectible card games have increasingly been going digital. Some, like the wildly popular Magic: The Gathering, started out as physical games before digital spin-offs cropped up, while others, like Hearthstone, were developed as videogames from the ground up. While the settings, rules and mechanics often differ a great deal between them, these strategy-adjacent games task players with creating decks of armies, heroes, buildings, spells or just broad concepts. Hybrids have been appearing too, like Card Hunter, which mixed tabletop RPGs with CCGs and tactical combat, and Valve’supcoming Artifact, inspired by Dota 2.…

There’s always a new Warhammer game knocking around, whether it’s inspired by the fantasy universe or its 40K sibling, and not surprisingly, quite a few of them have been strategy games. The licence hasn’t always been used well, but there is variety. Even just in the last few years we’ve seen claustrophobic turn-based tacticslike Space Hulk, massive wargames like Warhammer 40,0000: Armageddon, grand strategy in the form of Total War: Warhammer, and even a 4X game, Warhammer 40,000: Gladius, which reimagined the genre without diplomacy. If you’ve got an idea for a new Warhammer game, give Games Workshop a shout; it will probably let you take a crack at it.…

Strategy games weren’t entirely excommunicated from consoles. Tactical RPGs thrived, from Final Fantasy Tactics to Valkyria Chronicles. The latter, in particular, took advantage of console and handheld control schemes, so there was no sense that you’d be better off with a mouse and keyboard. There was an abundance of them on handheld consoles, and being able to play large, complex strategy games on the bus or on the loo was something of a revelation. They’ve been making their way onto PC recently, too. Valkyria Chronicles appeared in 2014, followed by Valkyria Chronicles 4 in September, along with several entries in the devilish Disgaea series.…

One of the neatest examples of Looking Glass’s pinpoint design philosophy is the maps that Garrett uses to navigate the levels. Most games would’ve provided a complete and accurate map full of icons and prompts to ensure the player didn’t get lost, but that would have both killed the tension and made the fiction a lot less believable. So, instead, Garrett’s maps are hastily annotated sketches that offer players a vague guide, but also retain the mystery that makes Thief so compelling.…

1 You and your opponent have two rows each. The right-hand numbers are the strength totals – the sum of every card. 2 The top number is strength, the bottom value is armour. If a card is reduced to zero strength, it’s moved to the graveyard. 3 How many Order actions you can perform. These are different for each card, and other cards can recharge them. 4 Gold cards represent characters that Meve meets across the story. This one is a good dog that follows me around. 5 Unlike in Gwent, you can perform multiple leader actions each round based on the length of that ability’s cooldown timer.…

It’s only been three years since the first Rusty Lake game, but we’re already on our 13th puzzler set in the macabre world. The latest game, Paradox , belongs to the Cube Escape sub-series, meaning it’s shorter, and free, and tasks you with escaping, yes, a room by pointing and clicking. Where Paradox differs from previous entries is its presentation. It’s a little more polished, and a tiny bit more story-focused, once again roping in serial puzzle-solver Dale Vandermeer, who enjoys nothing better than unravelling moderately tricky puzzles. As part of his murder investigation, detective Dale has to prod at lamps, open drawers, and use objects in unusual ways – if you’ve played previous entries,…

When Realm of the Mad God arrived on Steam in 2012, I was charmed by it. It’s a frenetic micro-MMO where roaming mobs of players tear across pixellated fantasy landscapes annihilating hordes of enemies by chucking swords and spells at them. It’s a sort of EverQuest-adabsurdum, a joke strapped to an arcadey RPG that’s compulsive enough to keep you playing for hours after the punchline lands. There’s a healthy playerbase, mind, and Realm of the Mad God is still receiving regular updates. This helps take some of the sting out of the aggressive expansion of its microtransactions system – which has journeyed to the place beyond hats where shiny golden crab pets live – and helps explain the game’s state of feature creep. They’ve been adding…

AT-shirt I’ll never wear, but a multiplayer format I’ll always respect. There are still people playing Natural Selection 2 because it’s one of the few shooters to make asymmetric multiplayer work. You’ve got a team of marines, led by a commander who plays the game like an RTS. You have aliens that work together to build a hive and evolve into scarier forms. They fight. That said, it can be jittery and unstable, player counts are low and not every match is a banger. When it works, though, it shines.…

‘Since forever’ is a long time to wait, but that’s how far back you have to go to find a decent mobile CPU from AMD. In other words, it’s debatable whether AMD has ever made a competitive laptop chip. Yes, AMD’s mobile processors based on the Bobcat core were okay for budget devices, but Intel’s dominance was even stronger in laptops than it was on desktop. At least, it was until Ryzen came and proved how complacent Intel had become. But that was just desktop, right? On paper, the Acer Swift 3 is the ideal system for weighing up the relative pros and cons of the latest mobile CPUs from AMD and Intel. That’s because it’s one of the very few mobile rigs offered with both AMD Ryzen and Intel…

Theme parks are my happy place. I’ve never found a rollercoaster I didn’t immediately want to rejoin the queue for afterwards. To be honest, my not-so-secret life’s dream is to buy up Alton Towers, live in its manor house and run the park solely for my own pleasure, no public allowed. Sadly, that wealthy long-lost aunt who’ll remember me fondly in her will remains long-lost. This is why I love Planet Coaster’s eye for detail. Go on a ride, and the restraints will click down over your virtual head. You’ll see the rivets on the lift hill. And you can tinker with everything. The flipside is that its tiny virtual guests are an utter nightmare to please – always complaining about something, from the lack of toilets to, if you…

Atonal swerve takes Amanita Design from the comedic daftness of Chuchel’s cherry-based point-and-click and into the mysterious Gothic platform puzzles of Creaks . This is a game about lights and ladders where you must lead your pullover-wearing character through a labyrinthine house while avoiding monsters. You use light to convert snarling beasts into household objects which you can clamber on or use to press switches. It’s a way of using childhood fear as a game mechanic: a terrifying shape in the corner of the room is definitely a wolf right up to the moment you switch on the light and reveal... an innocent dressing gown. NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2019 PUBLISHER In-house DEVELOPER Amanita Design LINK www.amanita-design.net…

TV shows featuring videogames are usually rubbish, but not Time Commanders. The BBC show gave teams of four a historical army to lead and an enemy to fight, with captains barking out orders and the rest of the team relaying them to staff from the show. There were planning sessions, teams poring over maps and tons of heated discussions, but the thing that brought the battles to life was our pal Rome: Total War. Products can’t be promoted on the BBC, so the game wasn’t mentioned, but it was the show’s linchpin. All of the Time Commanders’ orders were acted out on a modified version of the game, and it looked incredible. Only two series were produced, but it was briefly resurrected in 2016.…

Total Annihilation’s unique approach to RTS games in the ’90s didn’t lead to many imitators, which is possibly why Chris Taylor decided to make a spiritual successor to his own game. Supreme Commander tookTotal Annihilation’s foundation and then made it bigger. Huge. It was no wonder that it was an early adopter of dual-screen support. Recent years have seen a greater yearning for a Total Annihilation-style game. Planetary Annihilation, with its conflicts taking place across solar systems, upped the scale, but lost something by trying to appeal to the esports crowd. 2016’s Ashes of the Singularity was the latest in the line, though hopefully not the last.…

Mods and map editors have had an incalculable impact on strategy games. Defense of the Ancients spawned MOBAs, of course, but so many great ideas and, indeed, developers have sprouted from mods, while the communities that build up around them can sustain a game long after the patches and official content have ceased. Total conversion mods like A Game of Thrones for CrusaderKingsII andThe Third Age forMedievalII: Total War are considerably better than most official licensed games, especially now that they’ve seen years of updates, while others answer important what-ifs: like what if Fallout was a grand strategy game? Yeah, there’s a mod for that.…

Song of the Caverns is the 11th mission in Thief: Gold , and the last of the three added as part of the Gold expansion. It sees Garrett on the hunt for the Water Talisman, which will help him open the doors to the Haunted Cathedral and steal a mysterious jewel known as the Eye. His search leads him to a sprawling opera house containing the Water Talisman. The story behind Song’s development offers an insight into both Looking Glass’s process and the atmosphere of the studio behind the game. Song was designed by Terri Brosius, who started work in games in a different capacity entirely. “I entered the game world sideways, so I was a musician first,” she says. Specifically, Brosius was…

Looking Glass Studios announced its closure on May 24, 2000, just four months after the launch of its final game, Thief II . The studio had weathered financial troubles for many years, but its end still came as a shock. This was because Looking Glass had all but settled a new deal with Eidos Interactive, with the primary focus of the deal being on the Thief franchise. Indeed, when Looking Glass closed, it had been hard at work on a third Thief game for the best part of a year. “Thief became one of the best-selling games that Looking Glass ever did,” says Paul Neurath, the founder of Looking Glass Studios. While it was a slow-burning success, the initial…

If you press ‘alt’ at any time while playing Wandersong , you’ll do a little dance. As you travel across the world, you’ll repeatedly run into a character who teaches you new dances – new ways to rhythmically gyrate. There is no reason for this. At no point are you required to dance. But you will – and I did – because in Wandersong you’re encouraged to just… go for it. To express yourself and have fun interacting with the world and with your character. It’s the smaller character details that ultimately resonate Wandersong is charming from the off. I was walking to-and-from the main village of the first act, and, without really needing to – without there being a puzzle to solve…

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 ’s take on battle royale, Blackout, feels like an unintentional commentary on the series as a whole. It’s a sales-driven version of one of the most popular trends in gaming right now, expertly tuned to the whims of a capricious community. Blackout is a variation on ideas forged by bolder games. But with its usual array of compulsive multiplayer modes and the most instantly thrilling battle royale mode to date, Black Ops 4 has reignited my interest in the series. Blackout’s shooting easily outclasses the clunky gunplay of PUBG Note the lack of singleplayer in that description. If you haven’t heard, Treyarch has jettisoned the usual glossy eight-hour corridor campaign from this year’s game. Though I have…

The Red Strings Club developer Deconstructeam regularly releases freeware games that play around with the adventure game genre. In its latest, Behind Every Great One , you explore life from the point of view of a woman lost in her self-obsessed artist husband’s shadow. While he works on his art, you undertake an assortment of chores, walking between a series of hotspots in a pleasantly drawn house. As with real chores, you’ve never enough time (or energy) in each day to do all of them. The jobs you have neglected will be brought up over the dinner table, and even those you’ve achieved will be torn apart when the artist’s horrible parents come to stay. Victorine refuses to break down in front of her family…

Of the many characters that Henry comes across in Kingdom Come: Deliverance , the cocky, wine-loving lord Sir Hans Capon is the most memorable. And The Amorous Adventures of Bold Sir Hans Capon DLC sees him recruiting Henry to help win the heart of a fair Rattay maiden named Karolina. As you might have guessed already, this is a much more lighthearted affair than the other quests in this often relentlessly bleak RPG. It’s just a shame it isn’t longer. Just as Hans’ amorous quest begins to get interesting, it’s over The quest slots neatly into the main game, and if you have an epilogue save, Sir Hans will postpone your ride into the sunset to get his love life in order. Your…

No other component can have as big an impact on your gaming experience as your graphics card. Processors, memory, mobos and storage are important, but the GPU is the heart of any gaming PC. As such, it warrants the biggest chunk of your budget, regardless of whether that’s an extreme build costing thousands or a budget entry-level PC. GeForce RTX 2080 Ti NVIDIA £1,100 1 Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is the latest and most potent GPU around. It’s packed with features, including more CUDA cores, RT cores for real-time ray tracing, and Tensor cores for deep learning calculations. The Turing architecture contains other enhancements as well, making this the fastest graphics card for gaming and everything else. If you’re looking for the best value, forget about the new RTX…

There’s no getting around it: the Razer Raiju Tournament Edition controller is a luxury item. Designed as a premium alternative to the PS4’s DualShock 4, at £150 it’s more than triple the price of its first-party alternative. The most obvious difference between the Raiju and the DualShock 4 is the former’s size: it’s definitely more of a fistful, and yet it’s a delight to hold – especially for those who prefer the bulkier dimensions of Microsoft’s Xbox One controller. There’s a textured grip on the underside of each wing, and the L2/R2 buttons are more emphatically angled upwards at the edges. The four face buttons audibly click when pressed, and the ‘Share’ and ‘Option’ buttons protrude from the controller itself, making them much easier to press on the fly. You…

One does not simply walk through the futuristic corridors of Warframe’s facilities. After watching  YouTubers play the game at a much higher level, I now understand that the done thing is to ninja slide into a ninja leap, and then in midair do a ninja lunge back into another ninja slide. Using this technique you somersault through levels, pausing only to headshot some enemies or scoop up an objective. Nothing is straightforward in Warframe. You don’t just level up your character, you level up all of your weapons and your pet dog. Every time one of these levels up your character’s overall ‘Mastery’ rank increases, too. You can earn rep with factions to earn gear, but half of them hate each other, so when you earn…

Path of Exile is not the same game it used to be. When it first launched in 2013, it was a charmingly grim but janky throwback to Diablo II that doubled down on character customisation using an obscenely complex progression system. In the years since then, however, that obscene complexity has spread to nearly every other system, creating a sprawling, daunting and deeply satisfying RPG that evolves at such a rapid pace it’s a challenge to keep up. Thanks to a rigorous schedule of four expansions a year, Path of Exile is a free-to-play game that never stays in one place for long. Take Delve, Path of Exile’s last update, for example. Like all of Path of Exile’s Challenge Leagues,…

One of my biggest problems with Fallout 4 is how most of the quests boil down to walking through some dilapidated corridors, killing a load of ghouls or Gunners or whoever, then returning for your reward. Which is why Echo , a quest created by modder Kilosandwich, is so refreshing. This one-to-two hour long quest features a load of custom voice acting and music, multiple endings, a few secrets and it uses mostly vanilla assets, meaning you will be able to play through it without installing a mountain of other mods. Once installed through the in-game mod manager (search for ‘employment’, it’s the only result) you can start the quest either by discovering the Dartmouth Professional Building, which lies southeast of the Boston…

Peter Calloway, a writer who has worked on Marvel spin-offs Legion and Cloak & Dagger, is developing a TV series based on Alan Wake . Remedy’s psychological horror game was written and directed by the studio’s creative director, Sam Lake, who will serve as an executive producer on the series. “Alan Wake was basically a TV series that was put into a game,” says Tomas Harlan from Contradiction Films, the series’ production company, in an interview with Variety. “That was Sam’s vision. It was influenced by The Twilight Zone, Northern Exposure, Twin Peaks. A lot of US TV. We plan to work closely with him on this. It’s his vision.” Contradiction has suggested that we’ll be spending time with Alan before horrors start invading his life. “We can’t just…

Until now, the only way to play the original Shenmue was on the Dreamcast. But thanks to a relentless campaign by fans to bring it to modern platforms, and UK development studio D3T, Yu Suzuki’s ambitious martial arts epic has finally been given a new lease of life. Shenmue I & II collects the first two games in the series, enabling you to play them in 4K with a few subtle visual tweaks including anti-aliasing and subtle bloom lighting. “The love and passion that went into these games is clear to see,” says Noel Austin, technical director at D3T, when I ask him why he thinks Shenmue has such a cult following. “The world is incredibly detailed and researched, and really makes…

Some of strategy gaming’s most influential titles were developed for consoles, but by 2000 the genre had been synonymous with PC for a decade. The launch of the PlayStation 2 saw more and more people drift away from their PCs, prompting Microsoft to make the Xbox, which appeared the following year. It might have looked like a PC, but when it came to traditional strategy games, it was just as hostile an environment as any other console. The audience was shrinking, publishers were becoming increasingly risk-averse and players were coalescing around stalwart franchises. Out of this came oddities, hybrids, spin-offs and more experiments with 3D maps and cameras, like Massive Entertainment’s real-time tactics game, Ground Control. Similar to Relic’s Homeworld, it gave you free rein of the camera, letting you…

When Civilization codesigner Bruce Shelley embarked on Age of Empires, it was going to be a cross between Civ and RTS games like Warcraft and Command & Conquer. Those lofty ambitions were never quite matched by Age ofEmpires, but Rise of Nations got a lot closer. Also designed by a Civ alumnus, this time Brian Reynolds, it made all of human history an RTS playground. Reynolds threw lots of concepts more common in turn-based games into the mix, including territory, attrition and overseeing multiple settlements, but it was all manageable, even with the real-time pace. It looked poised to usher in an exciting new era of RTS games, but despite being brilliant, it never did.…

Command & Conquer defined a generation of RTS games, but after Westwood was closed by EA in 2003, the series started to lose its shine. EA Los Angeles started strong with the rather different Command & Conquer: Generals, but quickly returned to the Tiberium andRed Alert series. The sequels were well received, but they played it safe at a time when other RTS titles, ones without Command & Conquer’s legacy, were innovating and experimenting. 2010’s Tiberian Twilight veered in the other direction, putting all of its eggs in the multiplayer basket. It proved to be a bit of a misstep, and since then the series has been relegated to browser and mobile games.…

Sound plays a crucial role in Thief ’s design. Players must be wary of how much noise they make as they walk across different surfaces, and must listen to the footsteps of guards to figure out when to slip by. Its bespoke audio engine propagates sound realistically, to the point where players can press against doors to eavesdrop on conversations. But Thief ’s audio design goes way beyond what is mechanically necessary. Atmospherically it is one of the strangest and most distinctive games ever made. Its hypnotic, haunting soundtrack becomes the main contributor to immersing the player in Thief ’s world, and is one of the key elements that has preserved Thief ’s playability through the years. SOUNDS GOOD IT IS ONE OF THE STRANGEST AND…

Garrett’s original adventures may have come to an end with the launch of Deadly Shadows , but that hasn’t stopped a legion of admirers following in his shadowy wake. According to the Thief wiki, almost 1,000 fan missions have been designed for the Thief series over the last 20 years. These range from dedicated fan expansions to the original Thief story, such as T2X and the currently-in-development The Black Parade , to ludicrous flights of fancy like Fables of a Penitent Thief , which uses the Dark Engine in a completely different way. This map-making community, which is based around the Forum site TTLG (Through…

Of all the Assassin’s Creed games, Odyssey is the most aptly named. It’s a roleplaying game of mythic proportions, a world so vast and intricately detailed I feel lost in it all. This isn’t just Ubisoft’s usual style of open world draped over the Aegean Sea, either. Odyssey’s various activities weave into a satisfying web of interlocking systems. Many of Odyssey’s zones could host a smaller RPG on their own, but together they form an incomparably large world full of things to do. Odyssey sheds so much of what Assassin’s Creed is known for to fully embrace the concepts of a roleplaying game – and it’s all the better for it. Even though the…

I’m trying to drink a dwarf under the table. He’s currently ahead, but our competition has drawn spectators and I’m buoyed by the attention. I take a chance and play a card that consumes my remaining actions – in this instance, the ability to quaff a drink – and returns them twofold on the next turn. The dwarf continues to drink at a steady pace. On the next turn I’m rewarded with an abundance of actions, but it’s still not enough. I play another card that lets me take two drinks per action. That does it. The battle is won. I am the best at outdrinking a dwarf via abstract card abilities. If you’ve come to Thronebreaker for pure Gwent, look elsewhere In The Witcher 3,…

I was never much of an EverQuest player. Teenage me made the jump from Ultima Online to Asheron’s Call and then to Dark Age of Camelot , seemingly possessed by whatever gaming hipster streak also made me want a Dreamcast rather than a PlayStation. I remember EverQuest fondly even so: a giant of those strange, formative years of MMOs before World of Warcraft came along and dominated the genre. It feels impossible to fully return to EverQuest now EverQuest will be 20 years old next year, and it’s getting its 25th expansion. It has survived the death of almost all of its Sony…

With more than two decades of experience making speakers, I had some very high expectations for Logitech’s G560. They might not be the best for the modern audiophile, but I can confidently say these are the most immersive speakers I’ve tested for gaming. The G560 sports six high-powered RGB LEDs per speaker. While the lighting was a huge factor in the immersion aspect, the precision of the positional audio really impressed me, too. I don’t normally like the virtual surround of 7.1 digital headsets but was surprised with how well DTS:X worked with the G560. It’s the perfect compromise if you want surround sound without the hassle of a 5.1 or 7.1 set. They’re a steal at £200 and I recommend them to anyone who wants fantastic set of speakers.…

Given everyone’s getting into Assassin’s Creed Odyssey I finally caved. “Time to get in on a popular game bandwagon while it’s all hot takes as far as the eye can see!” I thought. “Perhaps I can have opinions about experience boosts and so forth, and really get to grips with a huge timesink of a game.” Now, before we go any further I want it on record that I did finally get in on a popular game bandwagon, and I do have opinions about experience, and I am getting to grips with a mammoth project. There’s just one tiny technicality. So tiny that it’s barely worth mentioning, really. It was Stardew Valley instead of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. I swear that I installed Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. I…