Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 279 i PC Powerplay

What would you say is the appropriate way to celebrate a game’s tenth birthday? If you’re Riot Games, and the game is League of Legends, you would apparently say “announcing everything, and then one more thing”. Blizzard’s reputation has taken a hit lately (see page 8), and Riot’s huge push into new ideas, genres, media, and IPs is surely not a coincidence. LoL itself gets an update named Rise of the Elements. This is running on the PBE right now, going live with update 9.22 due before the end of November. The biggest news here is arguably the earthquake-level shakeup for the main map, Summoner’s Rift. Killing an Elemental Drake will still give your team a buff (though some of these buffs have been tweaked) but now such a kill…

Remember when Steam was a drab olive green? That was a long, long time ago, and yet Steam’s library, the place we go to launch games every day, has rarely changed in that time. In fact, rumours and leaked images have pointed to a new library design since 2017. Valve’s been taking its time, but it’s finally here: a spiffy new library with smarter tools for organising games and big, shiny box art that makes browsing a pleasure. “There are three main goals,” said Valve’s Alden Kroll when he showed off the library redesign at an event in Seattle. “To help players find the games that are in their library and find what to play next. Secondly, to stay up to date with the things happening in the games, what…

my tiny Cessna light aircraft is barrelling down the terrifyingly short runway at Lukla, an airport nestled in the mountains of eastern Nepal that’s said to be one of the most dangerous in the world. The end of the runway approaches fast as I yank back on the yoke, but I’m not getting any lift. I resign myself to my fate, but half a second before I slam into the barrier separating Lukla from the misty void below, the little plane lurches into the air and suddenly I find myself soaring down a deep, vast Himalayan valley scattered with little fluffy clouds. if you’re bored of clear skies you can call in a supercell to spice things up. Ten minutes later I’m flying over New York City, a dense urban…

DEVELOPER REVOLUTION SOFTWARE • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE • RELEASE TBC 2019 www.revolution.co.uk Before we dive in, some history. Back in 1994, Revolution Software, the UK studio behind the Broken Sword series, released a point-and-click adventure called Beneath a Steel Sky. Set in a future Australia, it followed the adventures of Robert Foster, an outback wanderer who found himself stranded in the dystopian Union City. The game was notable for the involvement of Dave Gibbons, the artist behind Alan Moore’s Watchmen comics, and it was a commercial and critical success. Beneath a Steel Sky could have easily been forgotten, one of those adventure game curios that we occasionally dig out of the archives to fondly remember. But for years it’s been one of the games people receive for free when they sign…

HEISTS 2015 Grand Theft Auto Online launched in 2013, but it wasn’t until 2015 that players finally got the chance to indulge in multiplayer heists. These epic multi-part missions are some of the most challenging in the game, but also the most lucrative, for obvious reasons. CUNNING STUNTS 2016 This update added a massive selection of outlandish stunt races to GTA Online, featuring death-defying loops, boost pads, jumps, and twisting tracks that snake for miles into the sky. Cunning Stunts is GTA Online at its most ridiculous and anarchic. GUNRUNNING 2017 This update brought a selection of military-based business opportunities to GTA Online. Players could purchase a bunker and get involved in arms trading. New vehicles were also added, including an anti-aircraft trailer and an armoured APC. AFTER HOURS 2018…

Communication is a fundamental pillar of Squad, and that’s best exemplified by its excellent voice comms. The audio quality is crystal clear, so there’s no need to gather separately in Discord. In fact, that’d be doing the game is a disservice, as it adds on subtle audio effects to distinguish between chatter heard over your in-game radio (like orders from your squad leader) and local chat spoken by soldiers in your vicinity. Voices are spatially relevant, so a medic can listen to a soldier’s cries for healing to determine their location.…

DEVELOPER FROZENBYTE • PUBLISHER MODUS GAMES trine4.com Not often, is it, that the fourth game in a series is considered to be an ideal jumping-in point? That’s the case here, for a few obvious reasons. Firstly, the controls and mechanics are taught with a wonderful understanding of communication and pace. Secondly, the story requires no knowledge of the previous games. Thirdly, things are so similar to the first two entries that it’s best enjoyed by players who are experiencing it all for the first time. It almost feels unfair to highlight the similarities to what has gone before. After all Frozenbyte attempted to address the grumbles around Trine 2’s similarity to its predecessor by moving to 3D environments for Trine 3. The result was identifiably the weakest game in the…

DEVELOPER LAB ZERO GAMES • PUBLISHER 505 GAMES www indivisiblegame.com If you can stomach the cheesy dialogue long enough, Indivisible’s battle system is excellent. It blends the turn-based party structure of a JRPG with the moveset and combo memorisation of a fighting game, requiring enough skill, quick-thinking and observation to make me feel badass when, for instance, I figure out that a one-eyed tree monster is vulnerable to air launches and juggle it to death, but not so much that I need a pro’s frame-perfect timing. In the way you’d expect of a turn-based JRPG, each fight pits my party of four (which I can change as I recruit new companions) against a few enemies on the opposite side of the screen. But rather than taking clearly defined turns, I…

PRICE $225 www.corsair.com Everything seems to be “smart” these days: phones, home appliances and yes, even smart cars. It was only a matter of time until case manufacturers jumped on the smart product bandwagon as well. Corsair’s latest mid-tower chassis has just the right amount of RGB bling and great thermal performance as well. But how does Corsair define smart? Measuring 467mm x 216mm x 465mm and weighing 8.16 kg, the Corsair iCue 465X RGB features steel and plastic construction with tempered glass panels on the front and left side. Painted in the buyer’s choice of white or black both inside and out, this chassis comes with a two-year limited warranty. Build quality and thermal performance aside, the case’s biggest selling points are the new design, the Direct Airflow Path…

PRICE $729 www.asus.com.au We’re very happy to see the return of the small form factor Impact to Asus’ line up, having been absent from the last couple of generations. Impact boards always seemed like a labour of love for Asus engineers, with their one-off daughter boards and unique implementations. The X570 equipped Crosshair VIII Impact (C8I) looks like it does justice to the Impact legacy. One obvious area of departure for the C8I is its form factor. Whereas Impact boards have previously been true mini-ITX designs, the Crosshair VIII Impact is instead a mini-DTX board, where the PCB is about 3cm longer at the bottom part of the motherboard. While a mini-DTX board won’t fit in a true ITX case, most of them do allow for a dual slot graphics…

PRICE $879 www.amd.com AMD’s third generation Ryzen CPUs boast higher clockspeeds and more cores than the previous first and second gen parts, and the Ryzen 7 3700X is now one of the best CPUs for gaming. Zen 2 CPUs are so good that AMD almost doesn’t need the faster offerings. Its second-string 3700X is perfectly capable of running the offense, and it isn’t quite as demanding when it comes to signing bonuses and contracts. For those teams (aka PCs) with salary cap concerns that can’t quite justify chasing the 3900X, the 3700X is a versatile QB that can throw a quick short pass, scamper downfield for a modest gain, or even launch the long ball when occasion requires. “As with other Ryzen CPUs, I didn’t do extensive overclocking tests on…

PRICE $249 www.microsoft.com The Elite Series 2 is not only a premium controller, but it’s also an expensive one too, coming in at $180. Its design and performance give you all the indication that this is a piece of luxury gaming tech, meant for those who want the very best or just have some serious disposal income to spend on gaming. The highlight here is the incredible level of customisation, which allows you to fine-tune most aspects of the controller to the point of obsession. So, what are the big improvements over the original Elite controller? For starters, the nice storage case that houses all the neat little customs doodads; 6 thumbsticks, 2 d-pads (cross-shaped and faceted) 4 rear pedals and one tool for adjustable thumbstick tension, now has a…

The problem with couch co-op is that it involves (shudder) Full Human Interaction. Valve to the rescue! Steam now offers (in the beta client) Remote Play Together, which allows local co-op games to be played over the internet. There are over 4,000 supported games at launch, and no, I’m not listing them here because we only have so much space and I’m not looking them all up. The host invites somebody from their friends list (who doesn’t need to own the game) to play, the game is streamed to their screen, and away you go. While we’ve found that internet speeds have an effect on quality, it’s surprisingly solid so far. 25 Years Monolith has been making games. Happy birthday! 12,000,000 (and then some) dollars revenue for Youtubers Life! Mad……

GET SMART New Dynamic Collections are the best way to organise. Pair tags like ‘Co-op’ and ‘FPS’ to round up what to play. PICTURE PERFECT Near the top of a game’s library page, Steam inserts a box of the screenshots you took last session for easy access. MOVE IT Animated box art! Download from reddit.com/r/steamgrid. Right-click a game > Manage > Set custom artwork. PERFORMANCE MODE Disable some graphical niceties and use less bandwidth by enabling Low Bandwidth and Low Performance.…

“My favourite reference is a tiny encounter which actually doesn’t feature Ciri. When arriving in Oxenfurt, the player, controlling Geralt, can come across a conman presenting a ‘basilisk’ in a cage. Geralt recognises that the monster in question is actually a [wyvern]. The creature breaks free a moment later and it’s up to our favourite witcher to clean up the mess. This whole encounter is a nod to a scene from The Time of Contempt, where Ciri goes through a similar event.”…

DEVELOPER TYPHOON STUDIOS • PUBLISHER 505 GAMES • RELEASE SPRING 2020 www.savageplanetgame.com Lead designer Alex Hutchinson calls Journey to the Savage Planet an “earnest comedy”. What he means by that is on the colourful planet you explore as part of the fourth best interstellar exploration company, you embrace that things can and will go wrong, and you get to laugh at yourself in the process. The point of Savage Planet, and by extension exploration games in general, is that you don’t set off beset with sleek, expensive gear. Instead everything from your equipment to how you come across new locations and species, has a distinct air of improvisation to it. My jetpack belches huge clouds of smoke when I use it to double-jump onto a platform, and a wide-eyed, birdlike…

That is not how Squad, a tactical FPS soon leaving Early Access after years on Steam, sees teamwork. Squad is about being a cog in a grand machine. Matches are long, two-hour struggles over territory where you don’t know if you’re winning until it’s over. Teams are spread across the kilometres-wide map working towards different goals. Maps are so big, in fact, that it’s common to chat with someone at the main base in the staging phase and then not see them again for the rest of the match. Squad’s sheer scale is a crucial factor in what makes organisation and coordination paramount. You can’t just respawn on a squadmate or at a captured objective. Squad leaders have to construct FOBs (forward operating bases) for the team to use. Because…

DEVELOPER INFINITY WARD • PUBLISHER ACTIVISION callofduty.com/modernwarfare This latest sequel/reboot has sold itself as a return to the setting that “started it all”. It’s a snappy marketing line and it’s not entirely misleading. The warfare is once again modern and Captain Price is your squad dad. Yet it’s Modern Warfare’s moments of unfamiliarity that impress me – rebuilt weapon handling, new modes, and characters that aren’t the cookie-cutter operatives we’ve seen in the last decade. Unfortunately this evolution is only half-realised in multiplayer. Here the relics of 2007 clash with fresh ideas. Modern Warfare aspires to be grounded and tactical while also giving you the power to pilot your own heavy gunship, and it doesn’t work. It’s easy to forget about that complaint in the heat of a match, because…

PRICE $1,149 www.asus.com.au When I first took the Asus Prime X299 Edition 30 out of the box, I fell in love. It’s one of the most attractive motherboard designs (and packages) I’ve ever seen. Though admittedly looks are not at the top of the list when evaluating a high end motherboard, it just oozes appeal with its subtle modern finish and the way the gorgeous OLED panel looks when the system is powered up. It screams ‘I am premium’ and if the looks don’t do that, then the price tag will. At $1,149 the Edition 30 is one of the most expensive consumer motherboards on the market. Is it worth the price? The Asus Prime X299 Edition 30 comes with pretty much every connectivity and expansion feature that a 2019…

PRICE $299 thermaltake.com.au TT’s newest AIO CPU cooler is its flagship cooler, and supersedes the Riing coolers – which are excellent and still widely available. The new design has a lot going for it. Superficially it appears almost identical to the Riing range of coolers, but there have been some useful refinements. The Riing was always well regarded for its near-silent operation, and the new Floe DX is still among the quietest but sees a slight bump in fan speeds, from a max of 1400 to 1500rpm, now. While a small increase, the Riing was arguably most appealing for its quietness, rather than its performance relative to much of the market, so this increase in airflow is welcome. At the same time the new Floe DX is a little quieter…

PRICE $259 www.razerzone.com Razer has gone all-out with its Viper Ultimate mouse, cramming in new wireless tech and an improved optical sensor into a slim, ambidextrous body. The result, while not perfect, is the best wireless gaming mouse you can buy right now, and it feels as responsive as any wired mouse I’ve used. You’re paying for that quality – it costs a hearty $260 – but if you’re going to splurge on a lightweight wireless mouse in 2019, the Viper Ultimate is your best bet. It’s a real contender to the Logitech G502 Lightspeed’s wireless throne. It starts with the Razer Focus+ Optical Sensor, a new bit of kit Razer has slotted into both this mouse and the Basilisk Ultimate. The Basilisk is the bigger of the two, and…

At Thermaltake, the focus has always been on providing gamers with the best tools possible to give them the edge in their games. Thermaltake is committed to giving you more options and better experiences, inside and outside your PC case – we recently increased the frequencies offered by our innovative ToughRam and WaterRAM products, which are now available in 4000mhz, 4266mhz, and 4400mhz models. But once you’ve built that killer PC, you need to make sure that your parts and peripherals are up to snuff too, whether that means the most responsive keys, the most precise mouse, or a tidier, more ergonomic set-up. This issue, we’re looking at some new Thermaltake products that will make for a more comfortable, more accurate, and all-around better gaming experience. KEYED IN The Level…

LEGO PORG PRICE $99.99 • DISTRIBUTOR LEGO www.lego.com/en-au If you had 800 pieces of LEGO, what would you build? A spaceship? A castle? A cool racing car? What about A MASSIVE PORG? POWERED UP: Yep that’s right, eight hundred pieces of glorious porg, with flapping wings and a mouth that opens and closes, along with a display stand and decorative plaque that contains facts about the porg. PLAYED OUT: We would never say anything bad about a porg (I hate you so much - Ed). AEROBAND POCKETDRUM PRICE $250 DISTRIBUTOR INDIEGOGO indiegogo.com Wireless drumsticks that don’t need a surface to strike are now a thing - maybe even a thing you want! POWERED UP: Connect to the Aeroband app and drum anywhere with low latency, a vibrate response to mimic…

You can check out later in the issue, but there’s plenty more announcements from Paradox’s annual convention to talk about. Battletech’s Heavy Metal expansion, for example. Eight new mechs! Flashpoint mini-campaign! Plus a free update to the base game, with two new mechs and official mod support. All of which should be out about... now. Stellaris gets an expansion by the name of Federations. Based on negotiating with aliens rather than blowing them up, this DLC will allow you to make alliances and be a space politician. Release is TBC, but the Lithoids Species Pack – with new species portraits and ship models – is out now. Age of Wonders: Planetfall’s first expansion lands November 19. Revelations offers two campaigns, a new faction, and more. With Hearts of Iron 4’s…

RING OF PAIN DEVELOPER SIMON BOXER, TWICE DIFFERENT • PRICE TBA http://ringofpain.com/ Strategic, card-based combat often requires guesswork. Until you learn the finer details of a game’s rules it can be, “What happens if I do this? Oh, I’m dead.” In a similar way to Into The Breach, Ring of Pain shows you what will happen, as you hover over potential next moves. If you’re considering attacking a monster, you’ll see who hits first, how much damage you’ll cause and how many hit points you’ll lose. If there’s a dice roll involved, like with a potentially cursed potion, you’ll see the spectrum of possibility, depicted in a range of colours. It’s nice to be able to focus on decision-making in a challenging roguelike. You’re navigating a dungeon by sneaking, fighting,…

After piloting a light aircraft over Lake Washington in the game, I was lucky enough to experience the same trip for real. I squeezed into a Cessna 162, the same model I flew in the sim, and took to the skies with an instructor. We flew over the lake and took in a few local sights including Snoqualmie Falls and downtown Seattle. The instructor handled the technical stuff, but I was able to take the yoke for a while and I was amazed by how light and responsive it was – a sensation Microsoft Flight Simulator recreates to an impressive degree. It was a thrilling feeling being in command of that tiny plane and the game evokes the same sense of freedom.…

DEVELOPER ICEFLAKE STUDIOS • PUBLISHER PARADOX INTERACTIVE survivingtheaftermath.com My first survivor dies after his house is flattened by a meteor. Things aren’t looking good for humanity in Surviving the Aftermath, the post-apocalyptic follow-up to Surviving Mars. Surveying my burning colony, I have a lot more things to worry about than the now rotting corpse. Like its predecessor, Aftermath drops you in a hostile world that you’ll need to make safe for a group of survivors. Sometimes they will die. This time, however, we’re back on Earth and with a new developer, Iceflake Studios, at the helm. It’s also a bit more conservative. On Mars we had domes, drones, and flashy future-tech, but back on Earth it’s all about the basics of survival. My colony isn’t in too bad a situation…

From the very beginning, Rockstar North wanted Grand Theft Auto V’s multiplayer mode to faithfully replicate the GTA experience online, with the same level of quality as singleplayer. “We used the game’s architecture, geography, and mechanics as a foundation and wanted the same kind of wide array of activities, and the ability to build on them to create new experiences,” says Rob Nelson, co-studio head at Rockstar North, reflecting on the GTA Online journey so far. “We’ve always wanted to build these immersive, complex living worlds to hold our stories, regardless of whether it’s for a single player or multiple,” he says. “We had created complex systems for weather, traffic, population, and more, to give people as much freedom as we possibly could to create unique experiences. And creating online…

TOUGH LUCK Damage modelling for vehicles is especially realistic. Most games simplify tank armour down to a vulnerability to shots from the rear, but Squad takes things far further. TREAD FLAG This diagram from the game’s tutorial shows how the game assigns a unique armour value to every piece of the exterior. So you get different results depending where you hit. BOOM OR BUST Penetrate that armour, and the effect will vary based on where you target – often you’ll simply disable the engines, though hitting the ammo storage results in a dramatic explosion.…

DEVELOPER ZA/UM • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE zaumstudio.com Disco Elysium is a detective RPG of improbable depth. It’s part Planescape: Torment, part police procedural. Your hungover detective peels himself off the carpet, naked except for a pair of soiled underpants, and begins the laborious process of piecing his broken mind back together, while attempting to solve a gruesome murder on the wrong side of the tracks. The game has stats, skill checks, companions, quests, and an interface inspired by classic Infinity Engine CRPGs. But it also has a lot in common with visual novels, tabletop games, and point-and-click adventures, with dense, branching dialogue and the ability to intimidate, charm, or bullshit your way out of tricky situations via several novels’ worth of strange, vibrant dialogue. A man has been found hanging from…

DEVELOPER CHANCE AGENCY • PUBLISHER FELLOW TRAVELLER neocabgame.com Lina is ready to start a new life. When you meet Neo Cab’s protagonist, she’s en route to Los Ojos, a fictitious city reminiscent of Los Angeles. Her taxi holding the last of her belongings, she sets out to reconnect and move in with her best friend Savvy. When Savvy disappears, Lina is all alone in ‘Automation City’, left to juggle the demands of her job, her mental state, and the mystery surrounding the person she thought she knew best. After Night Call, Neo Cab is the second taxi driver-detective game this year, but despite this rather astounding coincidence, Chance Agency’s game takes a completely different point of view. Like any other taxi driver, Lina has to ferry a certain number of…

PRICE $799 www.asrock.com When we look at a platform like Intel’s X299, and AMD’s Threadripper too, for that matter, we often wonder why motherboard manufacturers excessively focus on gaming when the mainstream platforms are better options. Asrock’s Taichi brand doesn’t resort to this tactic, usually delivering an excellent combination of useful features and affordable price. X299 refresh motherboards have undoubtedly taken a step up in price though, and at $799 the X299 Taichi CLX can’t be considered an affordable board any longer. With this in mind, can the latest Taichi land in the sweet spot as we’ve come to expect from Asrock? The X299 Taichi CLX looks every bit a high end board and you’d expect it to have a long list of features. While it’s not a barebones motherboard…

PRICE $5999 www.gigabyte.com Gigabyte has been making some of our favorite laptops in 2019. The Gigabyte Aero 15X v8, for example, gives us the portability and power we demand in the thin and light versions of the best gaming laptops. The Auros 17 YA is Gigabyte’s response to the other big boy laptops that sacrifice portability and overcompensate in terms of size and power, like the MSI GT76 Titan or Acer Predator Triton series. It’s a big, powerful PC with a big, powerful price. The review model we tested retails at around $6,000 so there is definitely a performance expectation here, especially when someone can easily put that money into a killer desktop. The question of how comfortable you are carrying a $6K laptop around in your bag is something…

PRICE $119 www.steelseries.com 2019 marks the tenth anniversary of SteelSeries’ original Sensei mouse design, a truly iconic gaming peripheral that set the bar for high-performance mice in the years following its release. It’s seen several different iterations along the way, the most recent being the Sensei 310 released in 2017. While that mouse is a fantastic bit of hardware in its own right, many fans missed the classic Sensei design, a sentiment that SteelSeries has heard loud and clear. Enter the new Sensei Ten, a return to form for one of esports’ favorite mice. SteelSeries has resurrected the original ambidextrous Sensei shape, and enhanced its performance with a top-of-the-line sensor and a sleek, matte finish that feels great in the hand. There’s also some fancy RGB lighting, profile customisation, tilt…

We’ve never seen anything like this. The ROG Mothership stands tall, resembling the result of an unholy union between the Microsoft Surface tablet and a hefty gaming laptop. Functionally, it sits firmly in the latter camp; with a ninth-gen Intel Core i9 processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 GPU, and 64GB of DDR4-2666 memory, the Mothership is ready to handle just about any triple-A game. The keyboard can either be aligned like an ordinary laptop or detached and folded in two for more casual control. The screen (and the computer itself) is held upright by a metal fin that extends from the rear, enabling you to adjust the angle at which the screen sits, and improving airflow to keep the GPU cool. It’s a heavy unit, with two big power…