Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2023 i PC Gamer

3 months RATCHET & CLANK: RIFT APART RELEASE July 26, 2023 | PUBLISHER Insomniac Games The iconic duo finally get a port from PS5, with a dimension-jumping adventure to blast through on offer. It’s being upgraded for PC, too. ARMORED CORE VI: FIRES OF RUBICON RELEASE August 24, 2023 | PUBLISHER FromSoftware Inc After an 11-year gap the Armored Core series returns, promising even more massive stompy mechs, dazzling new graphics, and an epic story set in a dying star system. BALDUR’S GATE 3 RELEASE August 31, 2023 | PUBLISHER Larian Studios The legendary fantasy RPG returns in the hands of Larian Studios, the talented chaps behind the Divinity: Original Sin games. Minsc and Boo confirmed! 6 months STARFIELD RELEASE September 6, 2023 | PUBLISHER Bethesda Game Studios We now…

The History of RuneScape Somehow, despite PC gaming since the early 1990s, I managed to completely miss the 300-million-account phenomenon that is RuneScape. Maybe it is because my genres of choice have always been RPG and FPS, or maybe it is because I played original WoW to the point where you got your mount and then immediately realised it was my end-game and that I was terminally demotivated to do any more boar slaying, dropping the game stone cold and never playing another MMO seriously since. Whatever the reason, the free-to-play MMO developed by British developer Jagex, completely passed me by. As such, I was almost perfectly placed to get the lowdown on not just how the venerable 22-year-old MMO has managed to attract more than 300 million gamers to…

Every time I play a new kart racing game, I’m always disappointedly surprised at the lack of innovation within the genre – and Lego 2K Drive is nothing new in that respect. I’ve played this game before. You’ve, undoubtedly, played this game before. This is Mario Kart. This is Crash Team Racing. This is Garfield Kart. Lego 2K Drive’s story mode is absolutely stuffed full of content, although this is mostly to its detriment. The actual story missions only took me about five hours to complete, but there’s a wealth of side content to work through once you’ve beaten them. The side missions are very cut and paste however, and you’ll be repeating the same missions several times across every map if you’re going for 100% completion or, worse, trying…

Crimson Fantasia makes daring changes to the traditional shmup formula, in that you can’t actually die, no matter how many times you’re hit by enemies or bullets. What’s the point of it, then? Well it’s to set an unbeatable score, of course. But without death to worry about, you’re free to focus on earning points, by haemorrhaging bullets and dashing through enemies. By chaining dashes together you’ll start a points multiplier, and that’s how you’ll make your way up the leaderboard. Getting hit stuns you, which could be enough to ruin your multiplier streak. That might actually be a fate worse than death. There are other changes. You’re not playing on scrolling stages, but in one small arena with constantly spawning monsters, while the game will end after only a…

One of the best things about the early Sims games was the opportunity to torture your hapless virtual inhabitants with hauntings. Should one of your household die, from old age or reckless interior design, you could leave their urn unmourned and let their spirit roam free, terrifying their already-fragile housemates. Ghost Master is essentially that concept, but reimagined as a strategy game. Imagine a version of The Sims where the goal is to gradually break the minds of your inhabitants, rather than procreate and score promotions. To that end, you have an army of ghosts that can be deployed in a house, each with their own abilities. The catch is that they can only be deployed near ‘fetters’ – usually physical objects that relate to how they died. It’s a…

TECH REPORT Here’s the elevator pitch: you’re competing in an online race across a virtual landscape with hundreds of other competitors, all grinding for better gear that’ll buy them faster times in subsequent events. There are cheaters. There’s persistent character-levelling. There’s even a fandom page. What that paragraph of exquisitely descriptive prose actually describes is roughly every PC game release from 2017 to present. It’s also a very thorough explanation of Zwift, the cycling app-meets-MMO where legions of people with razor burn on their calves hook up their road bikes to a smart resistance trainer and cycle in front of a TV screen, watching their efforts translate wattage into virtual locomotion. You probably know Zwift as ‘that thing everyone did in their garage during 2020’. No, not that. The other…

CONTINUED ADVENTURES IN GAMING I stare into the cold, dead eyes of the NPC quest vendor as he narrates my latest go here, kill that, pick up this mission to bring his wasteland community a little respite, and I feel his pain. This is because, whenever Rage stops, well, raging for any moment, its cold, soulless core raises its head. I’ve started a replay of Rage after not playing the game since launch and, while I’ve got more appreciation than ever I think now for the technology that powers this game, and its strong core first-person shooter gunplay, the truth is time has done nothing to magically add-in the things that this game never had to begin with. The good news is that Rage still plays, as both a…

I completed Fallen Order only recently, fuelled by the post-Andor glow, and really enjoyed myself. Cal was bearable, the Mantis crew were endearing enough, and, well, lightsabers and Stormtroopers were involved. It was hokey, yes, but so much of Star Wars is, and I have no wish to pull on that thread. The arrival of the sequel hot off the back of this experience spoke to the five-year-old inside me. He has a hole in his soul the shape of a Star Destroyer, and he got all excited just hearing the music start up. He shouldn’t, because this is a Souls-like. Combos and boss fights are a nightmare for me as I’m way too uncoordinated. However, Survivor has variable difficulty settings, including my favourite story mode. Because that’s a big…

NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT PC Gamer’s always looking to keep ahead of the latest hardware developments, and in our age of technological breakthroughs few things are more exciting than the field of quantum computing. Quantum computers like the IBM Q System One exist, but the long-awaited breakthrough which may never come is scalability. So it was serious news when the Imam Khomeini University of Marine Sciences and Technologies – in Iran – unveiled the so-called “first product of the quantum processing algorithm” – its own quantum processor. “YOU TOO CAN GET THIS ‘QUANTUM PROCESSOR’ FOR THE LOW PRICE OF $589” In the presence of Iran’s Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, coordinating deputy of the Islamic Republic’s Army, the university held a press conference in June featuring this impressive looking ‘quantum…

As a professor who studies the politics of games, I’m fascinated by the late 1990s. This period of massive technological innovation was also the crucible in which modern gaming culture was forged. When researching the era I sometimes encounter such an odd piece of gaming ephemera that I can’t resist tracking it down – like Lara Croft: The Art of Virtual Seduction, a book published by Prima Games in 2000. “Everyone knows how to make this tomb raider jump, shimmy and swim,” the ad suggested, “but do you know what makes her tick?” I did not know what made Lara tick, so I rushed to eBay to purchase a tattered copy. What arrived at my doorstep is a fascinating window into gaming at the turn of the millennium. It’s difficult…

The wonder of Candlekeep and Imoen. Gorion’s fall. Recruiting the heroic Jaheira, Khalid, Minsc and many more. The wind-swept beauty of the Sword Coast. Deep in the mines of Nashkel. Cloakwood. Baldur’s Gate, the City of Blood. Sorcerous Sundries. Sarevok and the Temple of Bhaal. Dreaming deep. Waking in Athkatla, the City of Coin. Khalid’s tragedy. Dancing with the Shadow Thieves. Boo, Edwin, Bodhi and others. Yoshimo’s duel with fate. The de’Arnise Keep. Spellhold. Dreaming deeper. The horrors of the Underdark. Suldanessellar’s majesty. Fighting elven mage Jon Irenicus in hell. Walking the planes. Choosing whether to sit on the throne of Bhaal or destroy it. Fragments of a story from the past, drifting out of memory slowly for decades, resting in shadow until the chance arrives to be reborn…

Diablo IV tries to ground us in its dark fantasy world, but that’s an impossible task in a game where you can pull a two-handed axe out of a wolf. The storytelling is as subtle as a Marvel film and about five times as long. No matter what Diablo IV’s cast of characters tell you, you’re just a superhero born with an empty inventory and the desire to fill it. The title of Blizzard’s latest action RPG hides what’s really going on: Diablo IV is a reboot. An unnecessary reboot, but one with a recognisable goal: to reconfigure the series’ strengths into a modern live service format that fits into the lives of players who probably have a handful of other games to play. Once you finish its campaign, its…

The star of the show in Sovietcore boomer shooter Hrot is solo developer Spytihnev’s levels, all of which are inspired by real-life locations in and around Prague. The tenement blocks, metro stations, churches and castles of this twisted version of the city all feel like cheeky de-makes of real-world locations, a MyHouse.wad blown up to huge proportions. The levels twist and fold in on each other in surprising ways, and Spytihnev likes to troll. He almost feels like a dungeon master in active conversation with you – or chuckling at your blunders – rather than a level designer who created these areas and stepped back. There’s almost always some kind of trick to activating switches or picking up keys, with walls falling away to reveal enemies, trap doors dropping you…

I remember every encounter I had with Amnesia: The Bunker’s antagonist, an ape-like thing that lives in the walls of the World War I hellhole protagonist Henri Clément finds himself trapped in. Whether I was peeking out at it through the slats of a confessional in the company of a mutilated chaplain or using the last of my precious bullets to drive it back into the walls knowing it’ll just come back angrier, every escape from it felt harrowing and earned. Amnesia: The Bunker is like a new beginning for this series, preserving a distinctive sense of powerlessness and foreboding while slotting that fragility into a full-on immersive sim. You don’t just run and hide in The Bunker: you plan expeditions out of your Resident Evil-style safe room, exploring a…

Daggers McBlack is an exceptional name, even if the character it’s attached to is a bit of a numpty. This is a game about driving while texting, while checking Tinder and taking drugs. But I suppose it is the gritty cyber-future, where everyone has the attention span of… er, what was I saying? Oh yes: Neo City Express. It’s a joke game, and a good one, in the vein of The Typing of the Dead, only instead of typing sentences to fend off zombies, you’re doing it to reply to incoming messages. As you move the car with the arrow keys, steering it out of the way of oncoming cars, the rest of the keyboard is free for you to painstakingly t-y-p-e out each message, as a trio of dialogue…

Rounding up our ghost-adjacent column this month is Spiritfarer, a game that provides a more wholesome, compassionate look at the afterlife. If Ghost Master was the Tim Burton take on what happens to us when we die, this is more like something by heartfelt Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda. Much like Kore-eda’s 1998 movie After Life, in which a team of heavenly social workers recreate peoples’ most cherished memories, Spiritfarer is all about specificity. As you ferry lost souls to the afterlife, you expand your boat to accommodate a range of new characters, all of whom have favourite foods, desires, and memories. And accommodating those needs is always a detailed, mindful task. Gwen, for instance, loves coffee. And meeting those needs involves planting coffee bean seeds, watching them grow, and then…

Let me tell you why Apple’s £3,500 VR headset announcement made my heart sink. I know this is a PC mag, but when an industry player that big tries to make VR a part of everyday life it affects everyone. PC gaming doesn’t exist in a bubble. It’s not because the idea of seeing my iPhone menu buttons everywhere I look, all day, forever, is so nightmarish, or because £3,500 for a toy was presented like a perfectly rational purchasing decision. Me and VR, we’ve just never hit it off. My first experience of it was about as bad as you could possibly engineer, if you were deliberately trying to make someone nauseous. An Oculus DK2, a PC that couldn’t quite run a rollercoaster demo at a high-enough framerate, and…

NOW PLAYING THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW Voxels were meant to be the future. These volumetric pixels act like tiny Minecraft blocks, building things up in their billions to create truly 3D objects in your PC’s memory rather than the 2D illusions we see from most games today. Sadly, like the water-powered car and every perpetual motion machine ever made, there were shadowy forces acting against them. Big Pixel, with its so-called ‘GPUs’ and alleged ‘rendering’, has forced the truth of voxels underground, with a small cadre of believers keeping the dream alive. But unlike the two examples earlier, voxels exist, and they work. They’re what give Station to Station its distinctive look. The game, which exists only as a demo on Steam at the time of…

REINSTALL OLD GAMES, NEW PERSPECTIVES What exactly is a god game? It’s a question that I’m quite sure if you asked a hundred PC gamers almost all would answer with, “Well, it’s a game in which you play some sort of deity.” And that’s definitively true. It is a prerequisite for a game to be classed in this genre. However, with that established prerequisite crossed off the list, what exactly is a god game? What do you do? What is the story? What are gaming mechanics? How does the game look and feel? How does the player interact with the game world? And how do all these things interact together? Here the answer from those exact same hundred PC gamers would be indefinite and mixed. There would be differing…

After studying computer science at Sheffield Hallam university, Thomas Crofts knew he wanted to work in games, but not precisely how . He ended up doing a Master’s degree in videogame animation (“[It] seemed like the fun one,” he says), which helped when he and some friends entered the Dare to be Digital contest in 2010. Crofts, with three others from Sheffield Hallam, made a game for the competition in two months. Called Grr! it was, “A family friendly RTS like a simple Dota. We’d spent a lot of time integrating the Wiimote.” Grr! missed out on the main prize, but won the Adult Swim award (“which as the animator of the team, I was quite chuffed with”) for innovation and creativity; and Crofts and his team featured in the…

Cyberpunk 2077 wasn’t always an easy game to love, but one thing I appreciated from day one was that V leaves a relatively small mark on the world. Sure, you cause some mayhem, but the movers and shakers of Night City always (rightly) treat V like a dispensable street punk. Well, this punk’s next mission is to save the president, and my partner-in-cybercrime is Idris Elba. It’s an Escape From New York situation that lands V in the middle of this mess – my demo jumped around through the early parts of the story, but the gist is that the local leader of Phantom Liberty’s new district, Dogtown, shoots down Space Force One and V is the most capable mercenary around to help. Dogtown is a new add-on to the…

The beard tech in Alan Wake 2 is borderline inconceivable. Chasing realism may be the great folly(icle) of the games industry, but by god is it captivating when Remedy’s doing it. It was hard not to be entranced by a demo of FBI agent Saga Anderson searching storm-battered woods to find Wake, who’s been missing for 13 years. Remedy is always playing with new tech, and for Alan Wake 2 that meant refactoring its in-house engine to stream in data in an instant. It was a necessary change to let players enter Anderson’s ‘mind place’ at the press of a button – a cabin players can walk around in and puzzle through the game’s core mystery. There’s a wall where you can place clues with red string threading them together,…

This might sound weird as one of PC Gamers’s resident FPS enjoyers, but is anyone else disappointed to learn that Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is an FPS? I always imagined running around Pandora while looking at the impressively snatched waist of a Navi, but the game we’re actually getting looks much closer to Far Cry. But I don’t know, something felt off about the snippets of combat I saw in a behind-closed-doors look at Avatar at Ubisoft Forward. Guns looked generic and sounded kinda weak. At several points the player fires an RPG at an RDA walker and it just sorta topples over. The bow looks kinda fun, though I’d love to see the Navi’s super alien strength expressed by, perhaps, arrowing guys so hard through the chest that they’re…

Baldur’s Gate III That, we remember. The game remembers because it’s built in there. But we remember it as storytellers as well, and we say, ‘OK, what is the expectation here? If you’re playing a drow then people are going to react to you like a drow, because that was your story.’ “You don’t need to pick those options. Sometimes the characters are going to pick them. But you could also say, ‘I’m going to carry on telling a drow story here, and maybe my drow story is one where I’m the outsider drow who doesn’t go with all this.’ Maybe your tiefling story is, ‘I sympathise with my fellow tieflings.’ But maybe your tiefling story is, ‘I don’t give a damn about these tieflings in the grove.’ “But you’re…

Failbetter has the most engrossing, amusing and evocative writing in the business, but it’s got an uncanny knack for hiding it behind mechanics that wear on my nerves. So it must feel like it’s found a perfect home with a visual novel, right? Kind of. Fallen London is as fascinating as ever, but while many of Mask of the Rose’s mechanics are interesting ideas, they often feel underbaked, leaving me without understanding the decisions I’m making. Mask of the Rose is a dating sim/murder mystery set just after London’s fall, and precisely who ‘you’ are is open to elastic definition. You have many suitors, but you can make it clear from the off just what kinds of relationships you’re open to. Physical, platonic, romantic, it’s all there. You can even…

Park Beyond isn’t a very subtle game, both in the sense that it’s loud and bombastic, and that it’s not exactly hiding which other games it’s been influenced by. Sometimes though, that’s ok – hundreds of games have tried to ride the coattails of Fortnite or Call of Duty, but there aren’t that many trying to emulate 2000s-era management sims like Rollercoaster Tycoon. Much as I did in other sims 20 years ago (oh god, did SimCity 2000 really come out in 1993?), I initially decided to skip the campaign in Park Beyond and jump right into sandbox mode. At this point the game lightly suggested that I should at least give the tutorial a go before getting started. I relented and, thankfully, the tutorial was succinct and relatively easy…

COOL TITLES FOR NO CASH Given the uniform wretchedness of delivery companies, perhaps it’s time to return to the days of carrier pigeons, whose only significant drawback was the risk of them shitting all over your door. Still preferable to Hermes, of course, and a great premise for an indie management game. Playing as a sentient raven operating out of a massive tower in a gorgeous fantasy setting, can you run a successful, bird-based delivery company? That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way: yes, yes you can, as Ravenhaul is pretty chilled-out for a management game. As a very wings-on boss, you spend the game fluttering between various stations in the tower, where you’ll select jobs, stock up on food pellets, and carry parcels to your crew, as jobs…

THEY'RE BACKOLD GAMES REVISITED It’s easy to look back at the terrible intro to a great game and forget how bad it was. After hours, days, weeks in Metal Gear Solid V spent exploding communication arrays, tying sheep to balloons and listening to Aha’s Take On Me, the memory of crawling through a burning hospital, medicated arse on proud display, feels reassuringly distant. But maybe this was all part of Kojima’s plan. It would be so Koj, wouldn’t it, to make you suffer through the opening sections of a game to fully appreciate the freedom that comes once you’re airdropped into the Afghan desert. It’s the opposite of those games that start you with myriad powers and a massive health bar, just to tear them away once the intro is…

If you had to buy a wireless version of any one peripheral for your PC, which would it be? Personally, it’s a close call between my mouse and my headset, but I think I’d probably say headset for its overall benefits and ease. With a set of wireless cans you’re free to wander from your desk and make a cup of coffee without turning off your tunes or leaving the Discord chat, and as you’ll see with a few of the headsets I’ve tested this issue, there’s even more flexibility in all-in-one wireless headsets for gaming at home and taking on the go, too. Nova Pro Wireless STEELSERIES £330 All-in-one 1 The SteelSeries Nova Pro is from a relatively new type of wireless headset that aims to be both a…

KEY Budget build PC gaming is for everyone. Pick these parts if 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 B660M Pro RS ASRock £115 This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. PROCESSOR Core i5 13400F Intel £210 Intel’s added four more cores to its entry-level Core i5 and it’s become even more fantastic value. GRAPHICS CARD Arc A750 Intel £230 You get…

The System Shock remake has been one of those “having trouble putting it down” games for me for a whole host of reasons: the atmosphere, the chunky combat, and the sense of discovery around every corner to name a few. But one of the most surprising has been how funny it is. This is almost entirely without scripted, discrete jokes too, with the notable exception of a delightful MST3K/RiffTrax Easter egg that’d have been right at home in a 10 Luck playthrough of the original Fallout. But I’m talking more about emergent, immersive sim slapstick and the plain absurdity of Citadel Station’s tragedy. There was this one time I was peeking around the corner at a Security Bot Mk 2, trying to think of the best plan of attack. I…

MOD SPOTLIGHT MAJOR MODS, ANALYSED As I continue to nervously monitor the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence, I have all sorts of questions. Is AI actually intelligent or just very good at pretending to be intelligent? Is it creating art or just stealing from human artists? Can it be trusted? Will it take our jobs? Will it become sentient like Skynet and give rise to terminators bent on the destruction of the human race except for one who is nice and makes us sad when it gives a thumbs-up while sinking into a vat of molten steel? Maybe I should start with an easier question: will AI make Skyrim better? I decided to find out using a mod called Herika – The ChatGPT Companion, which adds a new follower…