THE HIGHS
Evan Lahti: Gettin’ Dirty
This week I finally jumped into Dirty Bomb (out of a vague feeling of guilt and obligation) and was pleasantly surprised by its pace and style of movement. Looking forward to digging in more this weekend and writing a longer thing on it.
Dirty Bomb has the best "dances" in multiplayer FPS right now. Zero-recoil guns, no penalties for jumping, high TTK. Great duels.
— Evan Lahti (@ELahti) July 24, 2015
Andy Kelly: Tunnel of love
I played Soma this week, the new game from the creators of Amnesia. You can read my thoughts here. Summary: It's really good, and I can't wait to play the finished thing, which is out very soon. One of the reasons I like it is that it features some really good sci-fi corridors. I love a good sci-fi corridor, and there have been some great ones in games lately: especially the wonderful Alien: Isolation, which I'm in the midst of replaying.
There's something evocative about a metal space-tunnel, and I don't know why. Maybe it's because I grew up fascinated by films like Alien, Star Wars, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I've always liked the contrast of space, which is this vast, unfathomable thing, and the tight, confined designs of sci-fi spaceships. It's also a brilliant place to set a horror game, because it's so damn claustrophobic. So while I'm excited about Soma's mad story about robots who think they're human, it's the sci-fi corridors that I'm really looking forward to.
Tim Clark: Resistance is not futile
My pick will come as no surprise this week (or, uh, arguably any week): It’s Hearthstone! But this time, it’s definitely justified, because on Wednesday we got the first details of The Grand Tournament, a 130+ card expansion arriving next month. There are big changes here—being able to interact with and alter your hero power is huge. Power creep has meant that using your hero power was often tantamount to a disastrous loss of tempo, but with the new set you’ll be able to access beefier versions, and derive additional benefits thanks to the new Inspire mechanic. Check out our gallery of the cards spoiled so far here.
On a personal note, it was an absolute pleasure to mingle with Hearthstone pros and streamers before the event at The Foundry in San Francisco. I didn’t play any Hearthstone, but I did get to play a round of a board game called The Resistance with Trump, Amaz, Backspace and Firebat. I’ll spare you who called who a dummy after one mission’s verdicts were revealed, but the game is a ton of fun, even if my slim grasp of the rules probably cost the good guys the win. (Sorry, Trump.) Maybe we should add it to our list of the best board games for PC Gamers.
Phil Savage: Stranger and stranger
The fourth and penultimate part of Life Is Strange is out next week, and, on reflection, I don't think I've ever been this excited for the continuation of an episodic series. Life Is Strange isn't short on problems—just take the awful bottle collecting sequence from episode two—but around these missteps is one of the most interesting adventures I've played in some time. There's a vulnerability and awkwardness to the characters that proves to be disarmingly likeable, and the emotional range of the story feels more human and believable than, say, the concentrated misery of The Walking Dead.
Best of all is that, with only two episodes left, I have no idea how it will all wrap up. Last episode's cliffhanger was a potentially massive shift in the story, and I'm still uncertain how (or if) it will be resolved. That's a great place for an ongoing story to be in, and I can't wait to see what's next.
Tom Senior: Development sorcery
I’ve always enjoyed messing around with level editors like Hammer and UnrealEd. They give you a good look at the guts of a game.They can operate in ways that seem counter-intuitive to a player. You might assume that Team Fortress 2 measures player distance from the mine cart and sets the cart moving if players come too close. Actually, there’s a just big invisible box around the object that triggers when players break its boundary. You see a bomb cart on rails, but in game logic terms the rails matter less than the a separate thread of nav point the cart moves between. This week we learned the bizarre mechanism that powers Fallout 3’s trains, and immediately went hunting for more. It turns out Breen’s performances on Half-Life 2’s screens are broadcast live from a tiny inaccessible studio. If you replace him with the Scout, that’s what you’ll see on the screens throughout Half-Life 2. Games are wonderfully strange.
James Davenport: Rise of Rise of the Tomb Raider on PC
Though we knew Rise of the Tomb Raider wasn’t an Xbox One ‘exclusive’ despite the confident and liberal use of the term, we didn’t know when it was coming to PC. “Early 2016” is the new date, not too long after the Xbox One release. PS4 owners get the shortest end of the stick, having to wait until “Holiday 2016” to raid tombs again.
As a big fan of the Tomb Raider reboot, I’m super jazzed to see where the sequel takes us, especially in terms of how hard it pushes PC hardware. The last game looked pretty darn nice, so I’m hoping we don’t get a rushed port in lieu of a wide selection of graphical options. Imagine hair TressFX 2.0, in which Lara’s hair doesn’t only bounce around, but you can style it, comb it, take it to the barber, name it, feed it, watch it grow into a tiny hair person with a mind and hair all its own.
Yeah, 2016 should be a good year.
THE LOWS
Phil Savage: Crime and punishment
Rockstar released a cheeky little patch for Grand Theft Auto V this week, supposedly fixing the performance problems introduced by a previous update. It's ostensibly good news, although some claim the patch hasn't reduced the recent onset of in-game stuttering.
Alongside the patch, Rockstar also clarified their position on modding. "Our primary focus is on protecting GTA Online against modifications that could give players an unfair advantage, disrupt gameplay, or cause griefing," they said. "However, as a reminder, mods are still unauthorized and as such, Title Updates may cause Story Mode mods to behave in unexpected ways because they are not supported or tested, and players run them at their own risk."
It brings into focus the problem Rockstar has. On the one hand, GTA mods are great. On the other, GTA Online is a mess. I started playing it again this week, and—while I've not had too much trouble with hackers—I have found more than a few players walking around as cats, or avoiding bounty hunters by teleporting across the map. I imagine clearing out GTA Online cheats without accidentally punishing singleplayer modders is a tough problem to solve. Nonetheless, if Rockstar really wants GTA Online to thrive on PC, it's in their interest to do it.
Andy Kelly: The great outdoors
From tomorrow I'll be in the Scottish Highlands for 8 days. I'll be hiking, getting bitten by midges, probably getting rained on, and recreating that bit in Skyfall where M and Bond stand looking at some mountains. Seriously, I found the filming location on Google Maps. But even though I'll be out there, having fun, living my life, exploring the great outdoors, I just know I'm going to miss my PC. Pathetic, eh? Whenever I'm away for a week or more, I always get withdrawal.
Gaming has, over time, become an intrinsic part of my everyday life. It's my primary means of relaxing, and the thing I turn to whenever I'm bored or have a moment to myself. When I'm in the wilds of Scotland I won't be able to play any games, except on my phone, but who the hell wants to play mobile games? So I'm just going to have to tough it out. It worries me that I've become so dependent on technology, though. The human race is doomed.
Evan Lahti: I read the comments
My story about the number of games hitting Steam in 2015 drew more than 1,000 comments, if we’re tallying Facebook too. A lot of folks have a lot to say about the state of Steam, as it turns out! The article was meant to be persuasive—putting forth the idea that, yes, there are a ton of games on Steam right now, but no, that isn’t something that should create concern of any kind.
I didn’t get any backlash for that, or anything, but I was let down a little that the comments indicated that a lot of folks have the perception that cheap, bad, or Early Access games are “clogging up” Steam. Are we really counting on Steam as our primary or even secondary way of finding new games? I feel like that stopped being a good strategy a long time ago, and along with it died the notion that dozens of new games each week would “clog” anything.
Here’s another way I can put it: for me, finding the right book through Amazon itself is an unparalleled nightmare. The interface does absolutely nothing to convey the substance of a book, doesn’t do a good job of curating specific genres I like, and whatever algorithmic “recommendation” or “curation” Amazon shoves in front of me to compensate just gets in the way. But this is an incredibly solvable problem. There are hundreds of blogs, podcasts, and reviews of books, and dozens of those are sources that I get a lot out of. Once I stopped relying on Amazon for discovery and started relying on experts and writers I loved, my reading experience got a whole lot better.
Tom Senior: Roping the dopers in
The practice of player doping in esports has reached public attention recently, and the ESL will introduce randomised drug testing at the upcoming Cologne meet as a result. It’s a sensible move, but goes to show that it doesn’t matter which side of the tedious “can games be sport” argument you adhere to: esports will face many of the same challenges as traditional sports. Wherever you have vast sums of money and limited independent oversight, there’s a risk of corruption, match-fixing, doping and more. Not to suggest that these elements are rife in esports yet, but boxing, soccer and even cricket and snooker have endured many such scandals; it would be foolish to assume that esports won’t.
James Davenport: Got TF2 many FTProblems
I spent a good amount of time over the last week teaching myself how to configure a TF2 server remotely through FTP. With a fellow admin, we tinkered and touched up the place. It’s been a while since the PC Gamer TF2 server has been attended to, so we figured a proper comeback was in order. Everything was hunky-dory, ready to go, but while editing some config files on our server via an FTP client, I held down the mouse button for too long and dragged and moved a bunch of map files into another folder. In my panic, I clicked again, faster, and dragged more data elsewhere. My panic reached such a climax, that I’d lost track of what went where. Now maps wouldn’t load properly and the client would crash without warning. I was not doing a good job. In fact, you might say I did a bad job—we could debate semantics endlessly. But with a quick server reinstall and the help of a person much smarter than me, everything slotted back into place without much of a hassle. Just be careful in that FTP client, folks. Don’t be: Me.
Tim Clark: Beauty not just in the eye of the beholder
Obviously, I get why Randy Pitchford feels the need to uphold the honour of Aliens: Colonial Marines and Duke Nukem Forever. In the case of the former, a lawsuit based on supposedly broken promises is bound to make anyone a little defensive. And ultimately, those games are his babies, even if they came out looking a little wonky. Okay, quite a lot wonky. But he and his colleagues sweated over those games, so of course he’s going to see the best in them. But, where I lose sympathy for his argument is with the suggestion that all opinions are equally valid, therefore any criticism is kinda irrelevant.
Back when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I took a course in aesthetics at university (yes, yes, I know, but I found work eventually) and used to run into this argument regularly. Essentially it boils down to: “Well, it’s art... It’s all subjective innit?” The professor would eviscerate anyone attempting this line with ease. His counterpoint was that for any artform, there may not be definitive definitions of what’s good, but there are generally loosely agreed indications of quality. And using these it’s easy to build a strong empirical case for why X exhibits greater artistry than Y. It’s not just an opinion that Breaking Bad is better than Beverly Hills 90210. You can make a watertight case for why it’s a strictly better example of televised drama. I hope that’s cleared that up, and we can all stop talking about Colonial Marines now. Which, in case there is still some confusion, was not good.
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