THE HIGHS
Evan Lahti: Back in the bunker
The only explanation for how tailored XCOM 2 is to the collective wants of the XCOM community is that Firaxis must have access to some kind of alien telepathy to peer into players’ brains. XCOM 2 will be PC-exclusive for at least a little while. It’ll be quite moddable. Soldiers are significantly more detailed and customizable, as are their now individually upgradable weapons. Its maps are procedurally generated, but balanced by handcrafted elements. Based on recent video, the characters in your base are more fleshed out, but probably not at the expense of your self-authored storytelling (Dr. Shen’s daughter is an engineer, taking his place after his disappearance), and the base itself is more visually detailed. XCOM 2 will, more than XCOM, employ mechanics discouraging you from grinding alien encounters at your own pace—the aliens themselves will be playing a kind of concurrent game on the world map, racing against you in some regards. I’m unsure what else we could ask for.
XCOM 2 lets you pick your soldiers' attitudes! https://t.co/WqEAJqTl83 http://pic.twitter.com/gOqICgvxyK
— Dan Hindes (@dhindes) August 21, 2015
Wes Fenlon: Intel says: gotta go fast
The most exciting thing to come out of Intel's Developer Forum this week was the news about its plans for a new 'Optane' line of SSDs coming in 2016. New SSDs, OK, big whoop, there are lots of those. Except Optane is ditching the NAND flash memory we've been using for the past few years in favor of 3D XPoint memory Intel's been developing, which is supposedly way faster than flash. How much faster? Well, Intel demoed an early Optane drive against its P3700 PCIe SSD, which can hit read speeds of 2700 MB/s, and Optane delivered seven times the IOPS (input output per second) performance.
So that's pretty fast. Expect this 'high' to turn into a 'low' next year when we find out how much they'll cost.
Andy Kelly: Heavy Reign
I’ve been playing Satellite Reign this week, a Syndicate Wars-inspired cyberpunk strategy game, and I’ve fallen in love with its visuals. The rainy, neon city is derivative, but it looks fantastic. Floating above it, viewing the action from a satellite, you see giant video screens cycling futuristic advertisements, their reflections distorting in puddles on the street. Here’s an old tech demo showing off some of the effects the engine is capable of.
It’s what Blade Runner would have looked like if, for some reason, Ridley Scott decided to film it with a tilt-shift lens. The streets teem with traffic, pedestrians, and police drones shining their spotlights through the gloom. You can find out what I think of the game itself in my review, which should be up on the website and in the magazine soon, but if you love that particular kind of cyberpunk aesthetic, this is one of the best examples of it I’ve seen in ages.
Tom Senior: Besieging Bastogne
Like Andy, I’m bound from talking about Company of Heroes 2’s British Forces for review embargo reasons, but I CAN talk about Ardennes Assault, the standalone singleplayer campaign starring the US army set in the region near Bastogne. It revives an idea Relic experimented with in Dawn of War’s terrific Dark Crusade expansion, which gives you a planetary map with territories to conquer.
The idea harks way back to Dune 2, and has never been executed perfectly. Ardennes Assault’s take is pretty simplistic, and has a couple of problems, but I love that it lets you command three armies in the region that you can improve and personalise between battles. I think more and more about how context and a sense of incremental progress can mean the difference between a game I’ll play for an evening and a game I’ll play for months. I’d love to see more Ardennes-esque attempts to create that sense of progress in an RTS. As much as I adore linear story-driven campaigns such as Homeworld and World in Conflict, there must be a more dynamic solution out there that lets your tactical decision-making guide the campaign.
Tom Marks: The Grand Tournament is coming!
Hearthstone’s next expansion, The Grand Tournament, finally has a release date. And it’s very soon! And we can just ignore the fact that people deduced the August 24th release date pretty much immediately after the expansion was announced—with methods ranging from simply comparing the timing of past expansions and coming patches, to noticing (somewhat embarrassingly for Blizzard) that changing your computer’s date to the 24th made pre-purchased TGT packs appear openable. Why Blizzard waited until the week before to announce a date everyone knew was coming and they had seemingly already settled on, I have no idea.
But I digress, a card set is coming! The next few weeks are going to play host to my favorite period of time in Hearthstone; new cards are out and no one will have any idea what’s good anymore. The ranked ladder will turn into a castrophony of new decks and untested combo ideas. Sure you’ll still have the occasional person capitalizing on the still-unrefined decks by playing Face Hunter or whatever else they know will work, but not often enough to spoil the general atmosphere. There will be a blissful renaissance while no one knows what’s going on, where nothing you do is a wrong, no matter how silly it seems. 12 secret Paladin, here I come!
James Davenport: Metal Gear Solid High Five!
Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain comes out in just over one week. On PC. And to prepare, I, a grown adult, watched well over ten hours of MGS lore recap videos this week. I can’t say what I feel is shame, exactly. There’s some pride peppered in there, because, I mean, it wasn’t easy to watch over three-hours of Peacewalker—it basically amounts an extended expository recap of MGS3 with the best combination of words ever, “Mammal Pod,” thrown in every ten minutes or so. So I climbed a mountain, a tall, totally unnecessary mountain, but for Metal Gear Solid 5, I would do so much more.
I’ve been with the series as long as I’ve been playing games, so to not see it through, especially on my favorite platform, would be heresy. And how often does someone as bonkers-genius as Kojima get creative control over 28 years of such a huge franchise? Let’s ride this beautiful series out together, eh?
THE LOWS
Andy Kelly: Disappearing act
The Assassin’s Creed series has finally lost its mind. I’ve just been reading this hands-on preview by Phil, where he outlines a new character’s ability to turn invisible. Invisible! I know the AC games are full of sci-fi nonsense, but this just throws its internal logic out the window. You use the Animus to turn invisible. Okay, fine. But what do the people from the time period you’re reliving see when you vanish? My head hurts just thinking about it.
I like Assassin’s Creed. Yeah, I’m one of those people. But even I admit that, of late, the series has gone awry. Here’s a thing I wrote about Ubisoft could fix it, but Syndicate is looking very much like business as usual, and I can’t get excited about it. I’m all for the smoggy, gaslit Dickensian setting, but the fact that a character is called ‘Bloody Nora’ leads me to believe it’ll be more like Mary Poppins, or Adam and Joe’s Bob Hoskins song, than From Hell.
James Davenport: Sad Snake
I’ve been watching and reading too much about Metal Gear Solid 5. It’s to the point where I forgo sunshine and exercise just to refamiliarize myself with bad writing I half paid attention to in seventh grade. I played through MGS2 in my basement with friends. We pointed at Vamp. We laughed at Vamp. But privately, I read every Vamp wiki I could. For every character. For every setting. For every game. It was important!
I mean, really, Metal Gear Solid’s story is super, super silly. My investment in the series hinges on it though. I’ve never been a great stealth gamer, so it was The Weird that kept MGS within my purview for so long. As a phenomenon, it’s been fun, and I hope to revisit the series within the context of gaming history for as long as I’m alive, but I think it’s time to pour my MGS lore study into something a bit more substantial right now. Which basically means I’m going to read A Confederacy of Dunces for the fortieth time, laugh, think for a minute, and then hop into the Mass Effect wiki wormhole.
Evan Lahti: Crowdfunding isn’t a crime
Crowdfunders continue to cope with the perception that substantial games can be made for modest sums. Recently Divinity: Original Sin developer Larian Studios was met with criticism for its plan to return to Kickstarter to fund secondary game elements (stretch goals, essentially) through the platform (we also talked about this in this week’s PC Gamer Show). And more prominently, the team-up of popular crowdfunders like Tim Schafer, Brian Fargo, and Feargus Urquhart to form Fig, a new crowdfunding platform meant to court formal investors as well as fan support.
Kickstarter has hosted its share of blunders, but as our recent article examined, there have been far more big successes than instances of mismanagement or outright deception. Crowdfunding has made it possible for more, and more different games to exist, for games like Pillars of Eternity to appeal to a specific audience rather than appealing to the masses. Whatever bumps in the road crowdfunding has presented and will still push PC gaming over, they’re worth it to me because they distance us from an ecosystem where publishers have creative input over the majority of games in the market. I don’t want corporate shareholders creating video games.
Tom Senior: Pining for platform exclusives
I’ve been greatly enjoying a couple of Playstation 4 exclusives that really feel like PC games. The first is N++, the final iteration of a lean and beautifully designed platformer that started life as an online flash game nearly a decade ago. The second is Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, from the creators of the narrative exploration game, Dear Esther. It’s essentially a radio play set in a idyllic model-town reproduction of a Shropshire village. It is very British, as Matt Elliott explains so very well over on GamesRadar, and it also feels very PC, for reasons that are trickier to pinpoint.
There’s the old adage that PC games are often about terrain, and the slow exploration of land in Rapture reminds me of creeping slowly around in DayZ, Stalker and Gone Home. Likewise, N++ reminds me of the great history of incredible prototypes we get to play for free on PC, from Meat Boy to Outer Wilds and Spelunky. As a result, both games ought to take their place in the PC gaming pantheon. Metanet Software suggest that a port might happen if the PS4 edition does well enough, but we may have to wait considerably longer for Rapture to shake free of whatever exclusivity agreement binds it.
Wes Fenlon: Square almost made a great Final Fantasy Port
I've been cynical about Square Enix's RPGs for awhile now; I don't think the Square side of the company has made a great game since 2007's The World Ends With You, and don't even get me started on how much I hate Final Fantasy XIII. But I love Square's older games, and genuinely want them and other struggling Japanese giants to find success on the PC. That's why the Final Fantasy Type-0 port is such a shame, as Durante pointed out in his great technical analysis. It's so close to being a great port, and Square (and/or the external studio who helped with the port job) actually nailed some of the hard stuff, like PC post-processing effects and even some new features. But they botched the landing with virtually no resolution options and terrible keyboard/mouse controls.
Square Enix is missing out on some sales, and a lot of fan goodwill, but not quite getting its PC ports right. I hope they pay attention to the criticism of their ports and learn, because if they do it right, Final Fantasy XV and the VII Remake (which aren't confirmed for PC, but seem likely) could be massive sellers on Steam.
Tom Marks: Can you help me beat this boss?
Nvidia announced a new set of features coming to GeForce Experience and Shadowplay, and I'm a big fan of both. Shadowplay has already made game capture and streaming a significantly simpler affair—provided you have an Nvidia GPU, of course—and I’m always happy to see a company support and improve its software, especially free software. The new Gamestream Co-Op feature seems neat, though our Hardware Editor Wes Fenlon said it had a few latency issues when he got his hands on it.
The thing I don’t understand is who would ever use that tool in the context they’ve presented it? The video Nvidia put out yesterday shows the dramatized scenario of guy stuck on a boss in Trine 3. He emails his friend a link through GeForce Experience inviting her to jump in and take control of his game. She joins and promptly beats the boss for him. Maybe it’s just me, but I can literally never see myself wanting to be on either side of that situation. Gamestream Co-Op’s ability to allow local-multiplayer across the internet is a much more appealing feature to me, but it’s hardly mentioned.
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