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Your Hosts The Topics The Top 7... Coolest video game islands A celebration of this ever-evolving gaming staple Daigo’s Ryu beats Ricky Ortiz’ Rufus in the final round, North America’s Justin Wong eliminated early New Batman: Arkham Asylum 2 domains offer "earth-shattering" clues A catastrophic earthquake, martial law, and other hints towards No Man's Land What's your favorite game commercial? As much
This has to be one of the most bad-ass video game vehicles of all time
Yes. At last. It's the tuk-tuk we've all been waiting for. It's called - logically enough - the 'Tuk Tuk Boom Boom'. It's a 'thank you' present from developer Avalanche to the Just Cause 2 community and it's free to download now. Look at it. It's a humble auto rickshaw converted into a magnificent motorised beast with massive testicles. As well as having an enormous piece of heavy artillery in the
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Our Verdict
The tractors look great, but the rest of Farming Simulator 15 comes off like shovelware from 2012
need to know
What is it: First/third-person farming simulator
Play it on: Dual-core CPU, 4GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 500 series GPU
Reviewed on: Windows 7, Intel Core 2 Quad 9450, 8GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 570
Alternatively: Euro Truck Simulator 2 (85%)
Copy protection: Steam
Price: $30/£25
Release date: Out now
Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Developer: Giants Software
Multiplayer: 1-16 player online co-op
It wasn't long after I started playing Farming Simulator 15 that my eyes began to glaze over.
Link: Official site
It wasn't long after I started playing Farming Simulator 15 that my eyes began to glaze over. It’s not because of the subject matter, which at its best I actually found oddly relaxing as I cultivated, sowed, and harvested my fields, up one row and down the other, with nothing but my thoughts and the diesel roar of my Deutz-Fahr to keep me company. The trouble is that underneath, it's not really much of a simulation at all. It's just tractor porn.
I was initially enthusiastic about Farming Simulator 15 because of the obvious effort that went into creating its undeniably impressive array of agricultural machinery. Tractors and attachments look fantastic, with switches, knobs, and buttons all where they should be, plus flashing lights, augers that move realistically, and even caked-on dirt that looks ‘right.’
But far less attention to detail has been paid to the rest of the game. Even though I opted to play in the US, for instance, my earnings were measured in euros, not dollars; posted speed limits were 55, yet the speedometers in my tractors measured KM/H, not MPH. No effort to actually "Americanize" the setting was made beyond slapping red, white, and blue on just about everything within eyesight. [Correction: It is possible to change measurements, though this oversight has little bearing on the review's conclusion.]
That superficiality goes all the way down. The physics are a joke—roaring over and off of rocky outcroppings reminded me of driving the Mako in Mass Effect—and I moved ghost-like through fully-grown fields, bushes, and even pedestrians, none of which registered any trace of my passing. Yet wooden fences and clotheslines stopped me as fast and as dead as if I'd hit the ground after jumping out of a plane. With some effort, I managed to overturn my tractor, only to learn that there's no option for getting it upright aside from hopping into another tractor—fortunately, I had several—and smashing it around until it bounces back up on its wheels.
The time acceleration mechanic is especially bizarre. Farming Simulator 15 will run at up to 120 times normal speed, but the setting affects only the passage of game time, and not the real speed at which anything moves or gets done. At normal speed, I completed a single cultivator pass through a small field in less than one minute; at 120 times normal, that exact same pass took two hours and 50 minutes of game time. I thought it might be different if I left the job to a hired hand, the game's way of automating jobs, but it was exactly the same: Accelerated time passes by much more quickly, but the world crawls along at an unchanged rate.
Mowing lawns
Farming Simulator 15 is a very unguided game. I began with several tractors, basic implements, and a field of wheat waiting to be harvested. But once that was done, I was entirely on my own, a situation not helped by the largely uninformative tutorial and a brief instruction manual that explains the basic mechanics but little else.
Commodity prices fluctuate based upon supply, but while arrows beside each commodity type indicate whether its price is up, down, or stable, there's no record of past prices, sales, or anything that makes the game feel like something coherent is happening under the hood. Not that it really matters anyway, thanks to the ridiculously generous side missions: I made nearly 20,000 euros in a single day by completing three grass-cutting jobs. Worse, I was given the same yard to cut, every single time.
People shamble around aimlessly, like zombies, with dead eyes and expressionless faces.
And as pretty as the tractors are, everything else looks like it could have come out of Farming Sim 2012. Textures are flat, the draw distances are terrible, clipping errors abound, and virtually the entire world is non-interactive. People shamble around aimlessly, like zombies, with dead eyes and expressionless faces, and even the shop where I bought all my swanky new equipment was utterly empty: My purchases simply appeared, like magic, in the parking lot. It's actually kind of creepy.
The sad part is that I actually enjoyed the ‘farming.’ Keeping my rows straight(ish), pulling loads of canola and corn in my beat-up old Hurlimann, and not really having to think too much about anything. I spent the better part of an hour one night just hauling corn from the field to my silo, watching the harvester trundle up and down the field under the light of the moon. I wasn't even really playing the game. The PC was doing most of the work, and yet it was the closest I ever came to feeling like I was on a farm. Then the field was done, the harvester came to an idling halt, and my hired hand disappeared without a word. And with nothing else to do, I swapped tractors, hired someone else to plow the field, and went off into the night to see if anyone needed their grass cut.
Image 1 of 11
Toys in the yard.
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First-person driving view.
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The visual detail of the tractors is very nice.
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This is what passes for a road around here.
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Cultivating at sunset.
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Cultivating the same field at maximum time acceleration.
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Loading up seeds.
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One of the fine citizens of Westbridge Hills.
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And now we are well and truly screwed.
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I don't think I'm supposed to be here.
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As you can see, clipping errors are a real problem.
The Verdict
Farming Simulator 15
The tractors look great, but the rest of Farming Simulator 15 comes off like shovelware from 2012
We recommend By Zergnet
Steam Controller won't be ready until 2015, Valve says
Today, Valve's Eric Hope in the Steam Universe group saying that thanks to feedback from playtesting, the Steam Controller will not make it out in 2014 as it is being reworked.
in the Steam Universe group saying that thanks to feedback from playtesting, the Steam Controller will not make it out in 2014 as it is being reworked. "Realistically, we're now looking at a release window of 2015, not 2014," he wrote.
The controller is Valve's attempt to make a control device that works well for both PC and console-style games, and has already been substantially iterated since its debut outside Valvelate last year.
The controller is one facet of its Steam Machines initiative, which should see third-party manufacturers supplying game-oriented PCs using its Linux-based SteamOS sometime this year -- though now without Valve's controllers, which it has said it will supplyto them.
It is unclear from Hope's blog post if the delay in the controller will affect the overall Steam Machines initiative, though the post seems to suggest it might: "Obviously we're just as eager as you are to get a Steam Machine in your hands. But our number one priority is making sure that when you do, you'll be getting the best gaming experience possible. We hope you'll be patient with us while we get there."
Third-party PC manufacturers recently expressed concernover multiple aspects of the Steam Machines initiative, though they do still plan to support it. Valve shipped beta Steam Machinesto testers starting in December 2013, and distributed beta units to developers that attended its Steam Dev Days in January of this year.
Star Citizen's Chris Roberts extends congratulations to Elite: Dangerous team
After years languishing in obscurity, the space sim has seen a healthy renaissance this year.
After years languishing in obscurity, the space sim has seen a healthy renaissance this year. The two big titles— Star Citizenand Elite: Dangerous—are among the most anticipated PC exclusives, but that doesn't mean they need to be in competition. Indeed, Star Citizen creator Chris Roberts has extended congratulations to David Braben and the team at Frontier Developments for the launch of Elite: Dangerous, and intends to play the finished build during the Christmas break.
"I know that many Star Citizen backers imagine there to be an intense competition between our game and Elite, but nothing could be further from the truth," Roberts wrote on the Roberts Space Industries website.
"David and I promoted each other’s projects during our respective crowd funding periods because we both believe that the world is better off with more PC games and even better off with more space games. In the nineties there was plenty of room for multiple Space Sims and there is no reason that still can’t be the case now!
"I’ve always maintained that we aren’t a success if we just make a game; part of the reason that I came back from film was to build a game in a genre I loved and hopefully remind people how amazing it is to lose yourself in another universe, adventuring amongst the stars. So rather than be worried about Elite or No Man’s Sky, I welcome them."
Roberts' full post continues over here. Elite: Dangerous launched earlier this monthafter a successful crowdfunding campaign.
Total War: Attila trailer features the head Hun
Symbolism ahoy!
Symbolism ahoy! Total War: Attila is revelling in the titular Hun's bad-boy persona. Look at him there, recreating the Last Supper with the corpses of vanquished soldiers. What a cad.
This particular Attila trailer is all about the game's leading antagonist—and more generally about the Hun faction. They're good with horses and bows, making them a fast and long-range threat. Luckily, they'll be playable, giving you a chance to sweep the map with the terrible and deadly force.
Total War: Attila is due out 17 Feb. For more, read Tom's interview with the devs.
Total War: Attila trailer is big on horses
Total War: Attila is leaning big on Horsemen of the Apocalypse mythology—taking queues from the Book of Revelation and the seven seals.
Total War: Attila is leaning big on Horsemen of the Apocalypse mythology—taking queues from the Book of Revelation and the seven seals. What this means, in practical terms, is that whenever I have to write about it, I inevitably end up listening to Johnny Cash's The Man Comes Around on repeat.
This aside, it's a new Total War—one with some similarities to Rome's Barbarian Invasion expansion. In this new in-engine trailer, you can get a feel for some of the themes Creative Assembly are honing in on.
For more, head on over to my first-look Attila impressions.
Surprise! Elite: Dangerous appears on Steam
Insert your own 'Shazam!' here if you like, because space combat sim Elite: Dangerous has suddenly appeared on Steam .
. However, Frontier Developments says that it currently has no plans to give Steam keys to those gamers who have already purchased it.
Elite: Dangerous on Steam is the same price as it is when purchased directly from Frontier—$60/£40—and the community manager said there is "no functional difference" between the two versions. He also explained how to add the original release to Steam libraries as a non-Steam game, which for now is as close as current owners can come to having it in their Steam libraries without buying it again. He did, however, leave the door open for a change of direction in the future.
"We don't have any plans to do this at the moment, but we'll be listening to player feedback and looking to see how much demand there is," he wrote.
Unsurprisingly, the demand is quite high: The Steam thread is rapidly expanding with calls for keys, as is one on Frontier's own forums. In the Frontier thread, Executive Producer Michael Brookes also confirmed that the studio does not plan to "immediately" add support for achievements or trading cards, but may do so in the future.
Total War: Attila trailer catches up with the Goths
Here's a new trailer for Total War: Attila.
Here's a new trailer for Total War: Attila. I think it was about the Goths, and how they've been driven from their homes by the approaching Huns—forced to travel further afield for the resources they need to survive.
I think it was about that, but I was somewhat distracted by all the beards.
Seriously, look at all these beards.
These are all in-game beards—this latest trailer running on the game's engine. They're... unusual. Like foreign entities clinging desperately to these war-men's face skin. Is this a subtle commentary on aggression expressed through the metaphor of bushy folicles? Or is it that TW:A's engine is tailored for an overhead view that offers less fidelity in smaller-scale close-ups? Probably the latter, to be honest.
Er, anyway... Total War: Attila. That's out on 17 February. For more details on CA's portrayal of Rome's end of days, take a peek at this preview.
Elite: Dangerous bug becomes community event
Frontier Developments should have been celebrating the visit of Farragut class capital ship the FNS Nevermore to the Hudson Dock space station.
Frontier Developments should have been celebrating the visit of Farragut class capital ship the FNS Nevermore to the Hudson Dock space station. Instead it was left with an epic battle between two NPC behemoths.
A bug—possibly caused by a player firing on the Nevermore—caused the capital ship to return fire, and miss, instead hitting the Hudson. The Dock returned fire, the Nevermore returned fire back, and so on and so forth.
By the time Frontier got around to fixing the issue, the Farragut class ship was down to 26% hull strength and saddled with a 72,000 credit bounty—not exactly intended.
But instead of just fixing the issue and ignoring everything, Frontier decided it would become a canonical—very much accidental—community event.
As such, players are now able to travel to Hudson Dock (not this one) in BD+03 2338 and will be rewarded for selling metals there, based on both individual and community efforts. These metals will go towards the reconstruction efforts being carried out on the Nevermore and its silly turret targeting computers.
The event runs until March 26, though the disappointment that a capital ship wasn't annihilated so soon after being introduced into the game will forever be with us.
[main image from this albumof the battle]
Rome 2's penultimate playable faction rides armored horses across the desert
I kind of tuned out of Rome 2's faction announcements after personal favorites, the Arverni and the Suebi , were announced, but if you've been holding out for some Eastern flavor, today is your day.
, were announced, but if you've been holding out for some Eastern flavor, today is your day. Joining the aforementioned barbarian badasses, their Icenicousins, and the imperialist dogs of Rome, Macedon, and Carthage, the Parthian Persians enter the fray from the previously-shrouded, right-hand side of the map.
"A confederation of tribes, Parthia is famed for its horses, nomadic horse-archers and heavy cavalry," the new faction pagereads, continuing, "the latter developing distinctive bronze or iron scaled armour which covers both horse and rider. For its infantry it relies on ethnic Persian/Iranian hillmen, spear and skirmisher units and sometimes mercenaries, armed and drilled in the Seleucid fashion."
Long-time Total War fans will be familiar with horse archers as the most annoying thing ever invented in human history. It seems we will not be spared their wheel of death in Rome 2. The Parthains are also bringing some Zoroastrian flavor to the battlefield, which basically demands that you name at least one of your generals Farrokh Bulsara (the birth name of Freddie Mercury, the most rocking Zoroastrian of the last 1000 years.)
Terry Pratchett tribute added to Elite: Dangerous
The station was added with little fanfare, noted only by a single, short sentence in the Wings Update 1.2.05 patch notes : "Added Pratchett's Disc starport." But Executive Producer Michael Brookes told Eurogamer that the author had a great impact on many people at the studio.
Frontier Developments has paid tribute to the late author Terry Pratchett by adding a new space station to Elite: Dangerouscalled Pratchett's Disc.
"At Frontier we have a great many Pratchett fans on staff and we were all saddened to learn of his passing," he said. "The sentiment was reflected by our community so we felt it would be right to remember him in Elite: Dangerous."
Pratchett, the author of the long-running and immensely popular Discworldseries, died last week at age 66. Chris Livingston wrote a tribute to the author, his work, and his connection to videogames—in 1993, he appeared on the cover of the very first issue of PC Gamer—which you can (and should) read here.
Total War: Rome II preview - what's new in Creative Assembly's latest
The doors of Creative Assembly's Total War development fortress creaked open a little wider today with the release of a new trailer for Rome II's Battle of the Teutoburg Forest scenario .
. I saw this mission being played live a few months ago while visiting CA for the lead feature in PC Gamer issue 250. It was the first time I'd seen the game being played properly rather than running as a pre-scripted demo(or while dressed up in black spandex and dancing around like a moron.)
There was a lot to take in, and you'll be able to read my full impressions in the preview feature which will be going up next week. Now that we're allowed to talk about it, however, I thought I'd rattle off a few of the key changes to the Total War formula that were shown off - or discussed - while I was there.
A simpler, stylised interface
Rome II's UI continues the trend of ornate, era-appropriate artwork that began in Shogun 2. Each faction has their own style - the Mediterranean factions, for example, are themed around Greco-Roman pottery. Unit cards are a little larger, by default, but can be minimised - and they'll shrink when your army grows, like the icons on an iOS dock. It didn't look like any elements had been removed - mousing over units still brings up a detailed status indication, for example - but there's been an evident effort to get you looking at the battle more and the interface less, which I like.
More varied individual soldiers
The version of the game I saw was reportedly pre-alpha, and I was told that there's still work to be done inserting greater variety into the game in terms of animation - there were a few awkwardly synchronised moments in the demo, as is Total War tradition. Nonetheless, the guys from CA spent a lot of time excitedly pointing out little details that add granularity and visual interest to Rome II's battles. There's now height variation between soldiers, with the Germanic forces notably taller than their Roman rivals. Men coming under fire from a unit of archers raise their shields dynamically as individuals. Slight differences in equipment establish the idea that these are individuals, not clones.
This extends to voice work, too: the orders you can hear being yelled if you zoom in close enough are situation-appropriate. A few I heard were definitely scripted for the Teutoburg Forest scenario - Roman leader Varus, for example, yelling for someone to go and find German 'ally' Arminius and his auxiliaries - but others weren't, and I was told that this is another way that CA are trying to communicate battle information in more interesting ways.
Tactical view
The new Total War's highest zoom setting pulls you right back out to a top-down view of the battlefield with units represented as translucent coloured rectangles. I was told that the art for this is currently a placeholder, and that CA are experimenting with a few different looks - including depicting troops as pieces of Roman-style coloured glass. The view was used sparingly during the demo, usually as a way to quickly confirm the position of multiple units before crashing back down to give orders at the unit level. I can see the two options working together well, due to a major change to Total War's battle mechanics:
Dynamic line-of-sight
In a first for the series, you are now only able to see what your men can see - no more abstraction of certain battlefield elements, no more always-visible generals represented by a star. This has the effect of making battles much more reactive - in the dense Teutoburg Forest, with its winding forest paths and multiple elevated ridge-lines, units could appear from the treeline or from around corners demanding an immediate tactical shift. According to the designers I spoke to, making this change has allowed them to fiddle with the pace and balance of battle in ways that will hopefully do away with some of the series' long-standing problems. Heavy cavalry units, for example, will now be limited by the fact that wearing a lot of armour means that they're not very maneuverable and they can't see very much. They'll need to be accompanied by light auxiliaries or scouts to be effective, and this in turn keeps lighter and faster units tactically relevant when a faction has the resources to afford more powerful troops. A modern analogy would be the relationship between a piece of heavy artillery and the advance spotters that mean it can actually hit something.
It also means that it's potentially possible for an army to disguise its numbers or composition right up until the point where it lands on top of an enemy. I'm really excited about the potential this has - as ancient history nerds will know, there are innumerable instances where misinformation and deception earned victories for smaller forces that seem impossible on paper.
Baggage trains!
Creative Assembly were still experimenting with the inclusion of optional objectives for regular battles when I spoke to them, but one example that was mentioned was the presence of an army's baggage train as a static encampment behind the lines of each engagement. Capturing or destroying supplies would be a way for a clever, maneuverable army to get the better of a larger one. Again - the way this works as a part of a regular campaign is still being worked on. But it's great that they're working to provide ways to win besides 'bringing more dudes.'
Persistent terrain and ambushes
Once a terrain map is generated for the campaign it'll be persistent for any subsequent battles that take place in the same area - in previous Total War games, a series of variously hilly, flat and coastal maps were rotated in and out for each new battle. What this means is that players will become familiar with the best places to attack, defend, and ambush enemy armies, turning the home-field advantage from a rule-based mechanic to a dynamic one based on your tactical understanding of your territory.
This works hand-in-hand with the ambush feature, which lets you put armies into hiding ready to jump out at anyone - enemy or ally - that you'd like them to force into battle. In ambush scenarios, the defending army won't get a chance to deploy: they'll be marching in a line when the battle starts and will have to move into defensive formation as soon as possible. The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest is a standalone mission, but hopefully situations like it will be repeatable in the main campaign.
Assuming direct control
Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai allowed you to fire certain pieces of siege equipment - such as the gatling gun - directly, using a crosshair. This feature will return in Rome II for siege equipment. I haven't seen it in play yet, so that's about all I know - but expect to manually fire some trebuchets.
Dynasty warriors
We still haven't seen the new campaign map, but a few details crept out. When selecting a faction you'll also choose which political power you belong to - in the case of the Romans, these are the Junii, Julii and Cornelii. You are still playing as Rome, effectively, but the presence of other interest groups within your faction gives you something to consider at home as well as abroad. The designers I spoke to described this as a substantially expanded version of Shogun 2's loyalty mechanic.
Sudden but inevitable betrayal
Creative Assembly are experimenting with ways to keep the game interesting when your power as a faction has reached critical mass. The clean-up phase has always been a weakness of the series, the point in the game where you can't be stopped, and the road to victory looks a lot like clicking 'auto resolve' over and over again. Part of this will be an expanded reputation system where your deeds throughout the entire campaign are remembered: brutality towards one enemy will be factored in by the others you might face, meaning that you'll face increasingly violent opposition even from enemies who you otherwise outnumber, or alliances of necessity formed in the face of your rolling war machine. Likewise, internal politics can lead to your faction facing outright civil war when power vacuums form. It all sounds very appropriate to the period. The Romans had a bit of a problem with uppity generals crossing important rivers, don't you know.
Elite: Dangerous 1.2 "Wings" update goes live today
It didn't quite make its "first week of March" release target, but the Elite: Dangerous 1.2 "Wings" update is now live.
1.2 "Wings" update is now live. The patch makes a number of changes to the game, foremost among them facilitating cooperative gameplay through the use of beacons that simplify the process of forming up into groups—"Wings"—that can share information and bounties on kills.
"Players will be able to share lots of feedback across the wing—who is targeting who, hull and shield statuses, etc.—and more easily follow each other in and out of Super Cruise," Lead Designer Sandro Sammarco explained in our preview from last month. But counterbalancing that increase in firepower will be "larger, more dangerous signal sources, where single ships would be at serious risk," he added. "Those signal sources will be perfect battlegrounds for coordinated squadrons, and they’ll find the rewards—in terms of bounties and cargo—will be suitably elevated in line with the challenge."
The update also adds two new ships, the Fer-de-Lance and the Vulture, overhauls the comms interface, adds AI groups and the ability to reboot destroyed sub-system modules, and incorporates a "flyable debug camera with limited range."
There's also an extensive listof somewhat less headline-worthy fixes and tweaks, like "let the player get much closer to the event horizon of a black hole." Although that actually sounds pretty cool, so try this one instead: "Show the player a warning if they are changing power distributor and that power distributor does not have an engines capacitor large enough to facilitate boosting."
Community Manager Edward Lewis wrote that the update process was taking a little longer than expected, but would likely be finished by 6 pm GMT, which works out to 2 pm EDT/ 11 am PDT. An instructional video is on the way, and in the meantime a more detailed breakdown of how Wings work has been posted in the Frontier Developments forums.
Gabe Newell: PC gaming communities are keeping games alive
Maximum PC , our sister publication, sat down with Valve founder and Steam overlord Gabe Newell at GDC to talk about Steam Machines , Source 2 , and the growth of the PC gaming market.
, and the growth of the PC gaming market. Newell dropped a ton of great information, but it all starts with this humble introduction: “My name is Gabe Newell, I work at Valve.” Adorable.
Newell first laid down some amazing data: Steam has grown 50% year over year, and $57 million has been paid to content creators since Steam Workshop was introduced. Those two facts show why Valve thinks it’s such a safe bet to release Source 2 for free. For Valve, no barrier to entry means more users coming to Steam, and more cash flowing through the Steam storefront.
“Source 2 is going to be free,” Newell said. “Anyone who sees it as a valuable tool for developing a new game and shipping it, there’s no license fee, there’s no royalty, they’re free to use it.”
He also announced a release date for Steam Machines to hit retail: “Steam Machines will be coming this November at good, better, and best price points.” Valve will also be debuting Link, a device that lets gamers stream from any Steam Machine, PC, Linux, or Mac system to any TV. The interview team got to play with a Steam Controller, checking out a pre-alpha build of Unreal Tournament and last year’s Talos Principle.
Finally, Newell gave the first look at Valve VR, pivoting off of System Shock 2. Fifteen years ago, developer Looking Glass included a look at their vision for virtual reality. “Even though... Looking Glass is no more, you’re still playing it as a PC Gamer using Link and you’re using a Steam controller. What’s cool to us... is that this is a game that is being kept alive by its community. If you can keep an entire game alive just because of the contributions of the community, that’s a way of getting people outside of the PC gaming space to marvel at our focus on user-generated content.”
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Elite: Dangerous studio Frontier hit with redundancies
Frontier Developments will make 15 positions redundant, the studio announced today.
Frontier Developments will make 15 positions redundant, the studio announced today. Following last year's Elite: Dangerouslaunch, and this week's announcement of an impending Coaster Park Tycoon game, the studio announced in anthat it will "re-focus" its development activities away from its Nova Scotia office towards its Cambridge studio.
"Development roles are being moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Cambridge, and the overall staffing mix will be changed to match the needs of these two projects," the announcement read.
"15 content creation roles have been made redundant in Cambridge (from 281 total headcount), while Frontier continues to recruit in areas such as game and technology programming, server and web front end development."
The news follows the announcement of Coaster Park Tycoon earlier this week, which the studio intends to "run as a second franchise alongside continued development of its existing self-published Elite: Dangerous title".
While Elite: Dangerous launched to favourable reviewslast month, it was not immune to controversy: the studio's eleventh hour decision to remove offline play resulted in many players demanding, and then receiving, a refund. The refund policy was later amended.
Gabe Newell: PC gaming communities are keeping games alive
Maximum PC , our sister publication, sat down with Valve founder and Steam overlord Gabe Newell at GDC to talk about Steam Machines , Source 2 , and the growth of the PC gaming market.
, and the growth of the PC gaming market. Newell dropped a ton of great information, but it all starts with this humble introduction: “My name is Gabe Newell, I work at Valve.” Adorable.
Newell first laid down some amazing data: Steam has grown 50% year over year, and $57 million has been paid to content creators since Steam Workshop was introduced. Those two facts show why Valve thinks it’s such a safe bet to release Source 2 for free. For Valve, no barrier to entry means more users coming to Steam, and more cash flowing through the Steam storefront.
“Source 2 is going to be free,” Newell said. “Anyone who sees it as a valuable tool for developing a new game and shipping it, there’s no license fee, there’s no royalty, they’re free to use it.”
He also announced a release date for Steam Machines to hit retail: “Steam Machines will be coming this November at good, better, and best price points.” Valve will also be debuting Link, a device that lets gamers stream from any Steam Machine, PC, Linux, or Mac system to any TV. The interview team got to play with a Steam Controller, checking out a pre-alpha build of Unreal Tournament and last year’s Talos Principle.
Finally, Newell gave the first look at Valve VR, pivoting off of System Shock 2. Fifteen years ago, developer Looking Glass included a look at their vision for virtual reality. “Even though... Looking Glass is no more, you’re still playing it as a PC Gamer using Link and you’re using a Steam controller. What’s cool to us... is that this is a game that is being kept alive by its community. If you can keep an entire game alive just because of the contributions of the community, that’s a way of getting people outside of the PC gaming space to marvel at our focus on user-generated content.”
First "significant update" to Elite: Dangerous planned for February
Updates have been arriving for Elite: Dangerous regularly, including one just this morning to optimize servers and fix (as-yet unnamed) bugs.
Updates have been arriving for Elite: Dangerous regularly, including one just this morning to optimize servers and fix (as-yet unnamed) bugs. Frontier Developments has also recently added in newly discovered real-life planets, such as Kepler-438b, so you can visit them between your space-trucking and pirate-hunting missions.
In a post on Frontier's forums this morning, executive producer Michel Brookes gave a vague outline of future updates, including one planned for the first week of February which he describes as "significant." While he provides few details, he mentions the update will provide "a new way to collaborate with other players in the galaxy," something Elite: Dangerous is certainly in need of. According to Brookes, version 1.1 will also increase the maximum distance for the galaxy map route-planner, up to 1,000 light years, allowing players to schedule longer journeys for their exploration missions.
March is slated to bring another big update introducing " player wings," which will allow players to group up with others and share missions, bounties, and rewards. You can read the entire forum post here.
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Black hole fun? Searching for purpose in Elite: Dangerous
I'm searching for a black hole in Elite: Dangerous , and I'm doing it simply because I don't know what else to do.
, and I'm doing it simply because I don't know what else to do. You might say I've already found one black hole, and it's sitting in the cockpit of my ship. Despite hours of play and trying my hand at various professions, I'm somehow still not sure what I want to be. Fighter? Trader? Explorer? Miner? I've tried them all out, and nothing is really sticking. It's sort of odd to be presented with the entire Milky Way galaxy and sit there thinking: what the hell should I do with it? But that's where I'm at.
Several black holes have already been found in Elite, but I'd like to try finding a new one. I use the galaxy map to examine the systems where black holes have already been indexed. A couple of them have large blue glows that can still be seen even when you zoom out until all the other stars on the map have faded. I search the portion of the galaxy I'm in, looking for something similar. Eventually, I find it.
It's designated HIP 23692, and it's just over 100 light years away, which is pretty close, all things considered. I plot a course, hoping not only to find a new black hole, but to figure out once and for all what kind of pilot I want to be.
Naturally, I'm immediately interdicted by another ship looking for a fight. I've been submitting to interdictions lately, just to get better at combat, but I still haven't really developed a taste for it. I always seem to wind up fighting a ship with the same turning speed as my own, meaning some fights feel like a fruitless exercise in trying to get behind someone who's always behind you. Bringing down a ship is exciting, but to claim a bounty you need to find a station in the correct system, then dock, then repair your ship and reload your weapons, which eat into the often meager profits. It's a lot of time spent for what is not always a worthwhile reward.
I escape the interdiction and make a few jumps, soon discovering a system with a pristine asteroid belt, so I stop to do some mining (I'm immediately joined by a handful of other NPC miners who have just happened to arrive at the same discovery at the same moment). I actually enjoy the act of mining: it's relaxing. But it's also problematic because you need to collect at least one ton of a particular resource for it to leave your refinery and become saleable cargo.
What keeps happening is I wind up with just under a ton before an asteroid runs dry, and then I have to spend just as much time looking for the remaining 4% as I did the original 96%. That requires zapping other asteroids and examining their chunks until I find the exact resource I'm looking for. This adds more and more clutter on the radar, so even when I've dislodged the chunks I need, they can be hard to target and collect.
What mining needs to really work is an asteroid scanner to determine a rock's composition before you start drilling, so if you're looking to complete your tonnage you can do it without physically chipping into the 'roid. If you could sell that collected data to refinery stations for a small profit, that'd be nice too. I'd also welcome the ability to sell unfinished loads of minerals. Surely, someone would be interested in buying 98% of a ton of platinum at a discount? Unless the game changes along these lines, I think I'm done with mining for the time being.
Speaking of goods, I tried the commodities trading racket early on. It's a good way to make money, examining trade routes and hauling goods from station to station, and in the early game it's fun, mostly because learning how to dock properly is initially challenging. Once docking became easy, even the profits from trading didn't make up for the relative drudgery of visiting spaceport after identical spaceport. I've decided to scratch that job off my space-resume, too.
With combat, mining, and trading of little interest, I guess I'm left with what I'm doing right now: sheer exploration. Pop into a system, hit the discovery scanner, and see what's there. Often, what's there isn't terribly interesting, which I suspect is probably accurate. Let's face it, with billions of planets, most of them are gonna be duds. Look at our own solar system. You've got Saturn, which is beautiful, and Jupiter, which is huge and stormy. Everything else is a bore. Venus is an oven, Mars is a rock, and while Earth used to be great when it was populated by dinosaurs, now it's just a damp, dirty mudball covered with people tweeting about Beyoncé.
Exploring can also be a repetitious drag at times. Surface scans need to be done from a certain proximity, meaning you have to spend a great deal of time accelerating toward far-flung astrological objects and then even more time decelerating before they flash past and require a u-turn, more acceleration, and more deceleration. Sometimes there are dozens of objects to visit, which can take ages. I only have an intermediate discovery scanner, so not only am I sometimes annoyed by how many visits I have to make, I'm also worried that I'm missing some.
There are some real highlights to exploration, though. About midway through my trip, I pop into a system and find a cool-looking red metal-rich red planet, a nice change from all the boring frozen or rocky planets I've been finding so far. After examining it, I hit the discovery scanner again, which shows me another contact. After flying out to discover it's a ringed gas planet, I hit the scanner again, and get another new hit. This continues until I've discovered a deep system full of gas giants. One of them even sports ammonia-based life. It's cool to think about being the first one to discover life on a certain planet, even a planet that probably smells like cat pee. It also gives me profitable data to sell the next time I dock.
Finally, after almost six hours of travel, I'm one jump away from the mysterious glowing spot on the map, HIP 23692. Black hole? No black hole? I hold my breath and leap in, wondering if I'm about to be crushed into paste.
No black hole. Instead, I find two massive blue Class O type stars orbiting one another (and, of course, the game generates another NPC so I don't get too lonely). There may still be a black hole somewhere—obviously I won't be able to see it—so I fly around, scanning intermittently. After about twenty minutes, I've neither detected a black hole nor died from one. Still, the super massive stars of HP 23692 are beautiful and rare, and I don't think it was a wasted trip. ( You can read about the real HIP 23692 right here.) Besides, as I continue star hopping I find a cool station named after Carl Sagan near a sweet little red planet. A nice place to call home for a bit.
So, while I didn't find a black hole, at least I've ruled out combat, mining, and trading as professions for myself. I guess I'm left with being an explorer, then? I can deal with that. This trip has netted me about three hundred thousand credits from selling my collected data, and has taken me from the rank of Scout to Surveyor. The black hole in my cockpit is still there, but at least it's got a shape.
Amazon unveils Fire TV Gaming Edition
The newest member of the Amazon Fire family, the game orientated Fire TV Gaming Edition , will arrive on October 5, and it feels like a case of “anything you can do, I can do better” for the online retailer, which looks to be gunning for Apple’s new game-ready TV .
Designed specifically for “high quality gaming” the Fire TV Gaming Edition is a specialized bundle that includes the new Fire TV, a Fire TV Game Controller, a 32 GB microSD, and two games in the form of Shovel Knight and Ducktales .
The bundle will retail for $139.99 at launch, and is aiming to up the ante by utilizing the Fire TV’s new dedicated GPU, 128 GB of expandable storage, and 2 GHz quad-core processor.
Unlike the Apple TV’s remote-like controller, which must be supported by all games on the App Store, the Fire TV Game Controller sports a more conventional design, and includes a headphone jack as well as a built-in microphone for voice search.
Since the launch of the first Fire TV back in April 2014, Amazon claims the device’s game catalog has increased by 500 percent, meaning it now offers the largest selection of games on any streaming media player.
The pleasure of space trucking in Elite: Dangerous
You can be anything in Elite: Dangerous.
You can be anything in Elite: Dangerous. A fearsome pirate. A daring adventurer. A galactic explorer. But I've decided to be a trucker. See, combat is not my strong point, and most enemy encounters end with me warping away like a massive space-coward. So I'll be making my living in Frontier's huge galaxy as a trader. It's a perfectly legitimate way to play the game, and although not as exciting as dogfights and bounty hunting, is weirdly compelling in its own uneventful, slow-paced way.
I'm playing with a flightstick. You should too if you have access to the beta. It's perfectly playable with a gamepad or mouse and keyboard, but having a throttle and stick makes you feel connected to your ship in a way neither of them even come close to. I'm using an outrageously expensive Warthog, but if you're looking for a cheaper alternative, Saitek's X52 Prois good too. It's the quality of the simulation—the sensation of weight and motion—that makes Elite so much fun to play, even when you're doing something as tedious as ferrying random cargo between space stations.
Multiplayer is a lot busier now that Frontier have dropped that infamous £100+ beta price tag to a more reasonable (but still pricey) £50. I notice this when I'm trying to undock from a station and find myself in a queue waiting for other ships to move so I can slip through the tiny entrance slot. Seeing all these player-controlled ships buzzing around makes the world feel so much more alive than in the alpha, but you can play the game alone or with a closed group of friends if you want to.
Bulletin boards were added in a recent update, which generate combat and trading missions and give the game some much-needed structure. You'll earn credits more quickly doing special deliveries picked up here instead of buying and selling commodities manually. I'm still in my starting ship, a Sidewinder, which only has a small hold, but it doesn't matter. Some of these jobs are giving me 2-5k for delivering a single item between systems that are only separated by one or two jumps. Soon I've earned enough money to buy a bespoke trading ship, the Zorgon Peterson Hauler, which has 16 cargo capacity compared to the Sidewinder's 4. At just 25k it's a perfect entry level space-truck.
All of the ships in Elite have their own personality. After hours in the basic Sidewinder, strapping myself into the cockpit of an Eagle—a low-cost, high-speed fighter craft—was a thrill. The sound design in the game is incredible, especially the engines. The Sidewinder screeches like a Star Wars podracer; the Eagle has the roar of a sports car; the heavy duty Hauler groans as you heave its bulk through space. The cockpit layout varies between ships too, and the Hauler's interior has clearly been designed to echo the cabin of a truck. There's no third-person view, so you have to get a feel for your ship's size and shape. Squeezing through those narrow docking slots in a larger craft is nerve-racking.
The actual process of trading is fairly uneventful, but even so, you can't just switch your brain off and hit cruise control. Once you've undocked and set a destination, you activate your frameshift drive—I have this mapped to a satisfyingly clicky metal switch on the Warthog's throttle—and jump to the next system. You'll cascade through a tunnel of swirling light and colour, like that bit at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, before being spat out at the other end next to the system's star. You can only jump a certain amount of times depending on how much fuel your ship can hold, so for long journeys you'll have to stop off at stations along the way to refill your tank.
Once you've reached the system that contains your delivery point, you'll have to activate frameshift again and enter supercruise mode. This sends you flying through space at several times the speed of light, and the trick is to carefully manage your acceleration so that you don't ping past your destination. You'll get better at supercruising the more you play, but it's still a slow process. I wouldn't mind if they sped it up a little in future updates. You'll spend a good portion of your time as a trader in this mode, hurtling down the cosmic equivalent of a freeway. My advice? Play music in the background. Just pretend you're listening to a futuristic radio station if you're worried about killing immersion. Otherwise you might get tired of all those long, silent drives through space.
Drop out of supercruise and you'll see a station spinning in front of you. There's a frustrating delay when you shift from deep space to an 'instance' around a station when playing online, which shatters the illusion of your journey being seamless, but I'm sure they'll fix this. Approach the station and, once you're within 7km of it, use your computer to request docking. You'll be assigned a landing pad and given about ten minutes to get inside the station and land. This is absolutely my favourite thing in Elite: Dangerous. Approaching the giant, rotating station, sliding through the slot, and carefully settling down on the pad is such an amazing experience. I've docked hundreds of times and I'm still not bored of it. The orchestral music that plays as you enter the bowels of the station is brilliantly stirring, and I love the echoing announcements that cheerily warn you not to break the law.
Once you've landed you interact with the starport through a menu. Here you can refuel, repair your ship, buy and sell commodities, invest in a new ship, or pick up and turn in missions. Frontier's grand vision for the game talks of disembarking at stations and walking around them, talking to other players, but this is a long way away. The menus are fine, and easy to navigate using the buttons on your fightstick, but could do with some more personality. You feel like you're interacting with a computer, not a massive space-colony where millions of people live. It won't take you long to generate enough income to buy your first Hauler, but there are bigger and better trading ships to strive for. The Lakon Type 9 is the daddy, with a 440 cargo capacity, but it'll set you back over 3 million CR.
The only real danger you'll face as a trader in Elite is being interdicted. Ships will occasionally pull you out of supercruise, and they'll either be pirates who want to rob you and blow you up, or security ships scanning for illegal goods. You can warp away, but their interdiction hardware will dramatically slow down the charging process for your frameshift drive. You can fight back, but I'd rather just run away. I'm not playing Elite to be Han Solo or Starbuck; I want to be a regular working space-stiff who just wants to keep his head down and quietly make a fortune. The fact that I can do that, and still enjoy myself, is testament to just how deliciously freeform Frontier's ambitious space sim is. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a shipment of fish to deliver to the Eranin system.
Here's the Elite: Dangerous edition of Andy's Other Placesseries.
SteamOS gaming performance lags behind Windows 10
With the first wave of Steam Machines now out the door , the good folks at Ars Technica decided to take a closer look at the performance of SteamOS , the Linux-based operating system on which they run.
, the Linux-based operating system on which they run. The site conducted a series of tests on a dual-boot Windows/SteamOS PC using the Geekbench 3 benchmark, because it comes in both Windows and Linux versions, as well as a handful of games.
Windows 10 came out on top across the board on the benchmark scores, but the results were close enough that most folks probably aren't going to lose much sleep over it. The picture changed rather dramatically when it came to actual games, however.
The site opted to use Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordorand Metro: Last Light Reduxfor its testing, because they're graphically demanding, have built-in benchmarks, and unlike a lot of newer releases, have both been ported to SteamOS. In both cases, Windows 10 outperformed SteamOS by a considerable margin: Shadow of Mordor at Ultra settings, for instance, ran at a playable 34.5 average FPS under Windows 10, but managed only 14.6 FPS on SteamOS.
Similar results came out of Valve's own Source-powered games: Portal, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and Dota 2, at 2560x1600 resolution and "maxed out settings," ran significantly better under Windows 10 than Steam OS. This is even more telling than the other results, since, as Ars Technica noted, Valve is the one studio that should be able to wring the maximum performance out of this operating system.
It's obviously not the final word on SteamOS, which will presumably (or at least hopefully) continue to improve and be supported by increasing numbers of developers. But right now, it's sure not going to help Valve put machines in living room.
A Retro Guide To Castlevania – Part 1
A Retro Guide To Castlevania – Part 1 Konami’s Castlevania series is undergoing something of a resurgence in popularity of late, thanks to MercurySteam’s critically acclaimed and commercially successful Lords Of Shadow entries. However, videogame veterans will be aware that the bloody history of this vampire-slaying franchise stretches back almost thirty years, right the way back to Nintendo’s 8-bit
Elite Dangerous patch stops AI developing WMDs
Elite Dangerous has been patched to prevent rogue NPCs developing their own hybrid superweapons.
has been patched to prevent rogue NPCs developing their own hybrid superweapons. To be clear, these weren't weapons they were crafting from recipes—the AI was building entirely new WMDs beyond the scope of Elite's weapon tables.
"It appears that the unusual weapons attacks were caused by some form of networking issue which allowed the NPC AI to merge weapon stats and abilities," writes head of community Zac Antonaci, "meaning that all new and never before seen (sometimes devastating) weapons were created, such as a rail gun with the fire rate of a pulse laser."
Fix NPCs ending up with overpowered hybrid weapons Stop NPCs deciding to attack if they only attack opposing powers and the player and AI powers are aligned to the same superpower Slight rebalance of the ambient AI rank chances, should see slightly less of the top end and more of the low/mid range Smooth out the mission-spawned USS AI levels so that high ranks are rarer and only elite missions hit the top end ai (though deadly can get close)Details on the additional tweaks and fixescan be found on the Frontier forums.
SteamOS gaming performance lags behind Windows 10
With the first wave of Steam Machines now out the door , the good folks at Ars Technica decided to take a closer look at the performance of SteamOS , the Linux-based operating system on which they run.
, the Linux-based operating system on which they run. The site conducted a series of tests on a dual-boot Windows/SteamOS PC using the Geekbench 3 benchmark, because it comes in both Windows and Linux versions, as well as a handful of games.
Windows 10 came out on top across the board on the benchmark scores, but the results were close enough that most folks probably aren't going to lose much sleep over it. The picture changed rather dramatically when it came to actual games, however.
The site opted to use Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordorand Metro: Last Light Reduxfor its testing, because they're graphically demanding, have built-in benchmarks, and unlike a lot of newer releases, have both been ported to SteamOS. In both cases, Windows 10 outperformed SteamOS by a considerable margin: Shadow of Mordor at Ultra settings, for instance, ran at a playable 34.5 average FPS under Windows 10, but managed only 14.6 FPS on SteamOS.
Similar results came out of Valve's own Source-powered games: Portal, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and Dota 2, at 2560x1600 resolution and "maxed out settings," ran significantly better under Windows 10 than Steam OS. This is even more telling than the other results, since, as Ars Technica noted, Valve is the one studio that should be able to wring the maximum performance out of this operating system.
It's obviously not the final word on SteamOS, which will presumably (or at least hopefully) continue to improve and be supported by increasing numbers of developers. But right now, it's sure not going to help Valve put machines in living room.
Elite: Dangerous Engineers add-on arrives next week
Elite: Dangerous' Horizons season pass gets another string to its bow next week, and yes, for the purposes of this intro, Elite: Dangerous' Horizons season pass is a sort of violin.
Horizons season pass gets another string to its bow next week, and yes, for the purposes of this intro, Elite: Dangerous' Horizons season pass is a sort of violin. That 'string' comprises the Engineers add-on, which adds loot and crafting to the enormo-space sim, along with NPC engineers to take your loot and do your crafting for you. You'll be able to improve your standing with these NPCs, in exchange for better stuff. It sounds like a pretty worthwhile add-on, and it's being added to Horizons as a big old patch on May 26.
Even if you don't own the season pass, you'll be getting new content at the same time too—version 1.6 of the base game will get "collectible loot", a new mission system, a mission board, and various other things with the word 'mission' in them.
So that's new missions and whatnot for the base game, and all that plus craftable loot and crafting for Horizons owners. You can read the patch notes for the beta versions of Horizons 2.6 and Elite: Dangerous version 1.6 here.
Horizons' last big bit of content was the Planetary Landings add-on, which added salsa dancing to the space trading/combat/exploration game. That or planetary landings. Probably planetary landings. Five quid/eight dollars has been slashed from the base price of the Horizons season pass, so if you've been waiting to pick it up, now might be a good time.
Steam Machines unboxing video shows snug components, hot cable management action
Valve recently sent out their prototype Steam Machines to a select few lucky Steam users.
Valve recently sent out their prototype Steam Machines to a select few lucky Steam users. As can only be expected by PC enthusiasts, the first thing some of those testers did was go digging inside their new toy. Some even went as far as filming the whole experience, putting it online for other PC enthusiasts to salivate over. Sit down and get ready for some exquisitely managed cables and finely moulded plastic.
Was it everything you hoped it would be?
While the Steam Machines aren't due to go on sale until next year, the beta release of SteamOSdoes open up the possibility of building your own. Despite that, it's probably best to wait. Valve suggest that, at this stage, SteamOS is only of interest to the "intrepid Linux hacker".
Steam Music exits beta, will officially roll out with new client update
After months of testing, Steam Music will today exit its beta phase to become a fully-grown application.
will today exit its beta phase to become a fully-grown application. Wave your hankies, beta testers, because during the new Steam Client Update (which you should have access to by now), the functionality will be an official fixture, though Valve promises it will continue to receive and address feedback from users.
To mark the ooccasion Valve is offering soundtracks to many of its most popular games for free, while the actual games themselves will get 75 per cent discounts until October 1. These include Portal, Half-Life 2 and more, so if for some ridiculous reason you don't already own these titles hurry up.
It's been a big week for Steam: a new '' earlier this week introduced a range of features designed to make browsing games a more personalised process. Games are recommended based on prior purchases, what you've been playing recently and friends' recommendations. A new 'curator' system has also been introduced, and we've got our very own page here.
Regarding other features in the new Client Update, you can get the full rundown here. Most are simple user interface tweaks and bug fixes, though improvements have been made to AMD hardware encoding.
Elite: Dangerous is getting a William Shatner voice pack
If you've ever thought to yourself that the one thing a deep-space exploration game like Elite: Dangerous needs is a ship's computer that sounds like William Shatner, then today is your lucky day.
needs is a ship's computer that sounds like William Shatner, then today is your lucky day. The upcoming Orion voice pack for the VoiceAttackvoice recognition system contains more than 1300 phrases from the ship's onboard AI, all of them voiced by the man himself.
This is probably the least-necessary bit of explaining I will ever have to do, but Shatner is famous around the world as Captain James T. Kirkof the Starship Enterprise, whose disjointed over-emoting on the small screen is the stuff of mockery, love, and legend. (Seriously, watch this. It's pure gold.) He's reeled it in quite a bit for his turn in Elite: Dangerous, going by the preview videos released today, and it's kind of weird hearing him responding to orders, rather than giving them. Still, “Shatner is my co-pilot” isn't the worst idea for a spaceship bumper sticker I've ever had.
The Shatner pack (technically entitled Orion, but come on, nobody's going to call it that) is scheduled for release on April 8. (VoiceAttack, to be clear, is an entirely separate piece of software, and not part of Elite: Dangerous.) Preorders may be placed now, and all advance orders will be entered into a draw for signed photos, a signed copy of his Leonard Nimoy retrospective Leonard, and other interesting bits of Shat.
Thanks, Eurogamer.
Jump to Section:Best Price
Comments
Our Verdict
A gritty, brutal WWII shooter that uses its scale, setting, and fidelity to great effect.
need to know
Expect to pay: $20/£15 (25% off for Red Orchestra 2 owners)
Release: Out now
Developer: Tripwire Interactive, Rising Storm Team
Publisher: Tripwire Interactive
Multiplayer: 64 players or bots
Link: www.risingstormgame.com
Vulnerability is an underused tool of FPS developers. Plenty of shooters empower us—by stamping experience points across the screen when we bag a kill, by handing us exaggerated guns or an array of increasingly fancy hats—but what pervades Rising Stormis the feeling that you aren't a soldier-superman. You're a set of fatigues wrapped around fragile humanity, ready to lose your dogtags.
Two years after the release of Red Orchestra 2, this standalone expansion to it is a little grittier and much more focused and technically sound. Tank combat and a single-player mode are out, and essentially gone are the bugs and performance issues that plagued RO2's initial release. Safety remains a luxury, and death is often anonymous and instantaneous—artillery shells and cooked grenades will unexpectedly separate your legs from your body, flame clouds will fill your bunker without warning, and bolt-action rifles will reach you from across the map. The near-constant sense of danger is part of what distinguishes Rising Storm from other multiplayer FPSes.
But Tripwire's feat is rendering this brutal, relatively authentic version of Pacific war and bending it into a balanced, mostly unfrustrating competitive shooter. For almost every emotional valley that results from random death, there's a corresponding high that arises from the gunplay. When you carve out a flanking route in a jungle map with great patience and wipe a whole reinforcement wave with a Thompson. When you connect on back-to-back shots with a bolt-action rifle. When you find the second-floor window that gives you the perfect shooting lane on the enemy advance.
Almost every kill in Rising Storm feels earned through of some combination of good positioning, instincts, timing, spotting, patience, or reflexes. There are roles that support scrappier, less precise, or more conservative play—any SMG role, the flamethrower slot, or team leader, respectively—but for the most part Rising Storm is a love letter to virtual marksmanship. It isn't a coincidence that Tripwire displays the range between you and your victim for every kill you score, and the ballistics modeling underneath the hood is a smart compromise between being authentic and being intuitive. Bolt-action rifles, for example, can be dialed in to different ranges with the mouse wheel (ranging the Japanese Type 38 to 300m or more flips up a folding sight), but these guns are so straight-firing that it's almost unnecessary to do so.
Against the odds of its 64-player scale, I love how important individual shots feel in Rising Storm. Defending from a rooftop on Peleliu, I caught a flamethrower soldier crouch-running around the side entrance of the factory I was perched on. Our angles were such that I only had time for one aimed shot, or maybe two snap shots if I hurried. I missed, then seconds later heard the death screams of my cooked teammates below. Now every time I eliminate a flamethrower (most maps allow only one or two), there's the palpable sense that I saved lives and slayed some sort of terrible WWII dragon.
In practice, playing as the flamethrower feels like you're a glass cannon. You have to protect yourself as you maneuver into position before you can ambush a bunker or firing line of Japanese, and moving while being unable to return fire against long- and medium-range threats is a tense dance. It's a tiny miracle that Tripwire can balance such a destructive role without muting the power you feel as you're slinging heat—it's one of the best examples of the studio's mastery over vulnerability and empowerment.
It's also an example of how embracing the asymmetry inherent to Pacific infantry combat gives Rising Storm's two factions personalities that wouldn't be present if Tripwire had simply mirrored the armories and abilities of the American and Japanese. In place of the Americans' flamethrower or their semi-automatic M1 Carbine and M1 Garand, the Japanese get a portable mortar role and the ability to bury basic grenades as land mines in any soft ground. Every Japanese soldier can join a Banzai charge, a running melee attack that suppresses nearby enemies, temporarily boosts your damage mitigation, and grows in radius and effect as more Japanese join it. It's a key mechanic of Rising Storm as well as a fun one—you can't shoot as you're sprinting, so joining the chorus of screams takes bravery to pull off, but when your squad sprints into a trench and guts a half-dozen Americans that've been sitting on a capture point for the past five minutes, you feel pride in your team.
The Americans are more powerful on paper because their semi-auto rifles mean individual players can put lead down range at a faster rate, whereas executing an effective Banzai charge, accurate mortar strikes, and to some extent smart booby trap placement all rely on coordination and teamwork. And that's the main caveat to my praise of Rising Storm—a match comes slightly unraveled, a tiny bit moreso for the Japanese, when your team doesn't have a vocal leader. Players have to be willing to die in order to take and defend capture points. It might take two corpses to make an entrenched machine gunner reload, so that a third attacker can rush in and kill him.
Likewise, artillery strikes (available to both sides) are a critical part of attack and defense. If squad leaders aren't marking targets and if your team leader isn't alerting grunts that they shouldn't attack the left side of the capture point because it's about to explode, your team will suffer. It's smart of Tripwire to not track players' deaths on the scoreboard (RO2 did), which will hopefully nudge some players out of a K:D mindset and get them to focus on taking territory. But otherwise, winning in Rising Storm relies on teamwork.
Tripwire's collaboration with the Rising Storm modding team has also produced incredible maps. They're balanced nicely despite all being attack and defend, and they're visually and tactically distinct. Guadalcanal is a purple-skied night raid. Hanto is a swampy, overgrown jungle. Iwo Jima is a siege set against a grey, bruised beach. Saipan is my favorite, an urban jungle that culminates in the Japanese defense of a railyard and cavernous sugar mill—attacking it is like sieging a tropical castle. These island battlezones naturally feature fewer concrete structures than Red Orchestra 2's maps, which I like—it gives them a flatness and flow that urges you to keep moving forward rather than shack up in a secure, four-walled apartment. I also love the way that plentiful soft cover on maps like Hanto and Guadalcanal put your spotting and listening skills to the test.
Rising Storm is liberated from the technical woes we saw during RO2's launch, but the single issue I have experienced, corroborated by other players on the official forums, are intermittent lag spikes on servers that are at or near capacity. Maybe one or two times per game, in about half the games I've played, everyone's ping on the server seems to peak and players start rubberbanding around the map. It hasn't happened frequently enough to really frustrate me, but it remains an occasional annoyance.
On the design side, melee combat is a little rigid—I don't like that activating a bayonet attack during a Banzai charge stops you in your tracks instead of carrying your momentum forward, and hitboxes have occasionally felt narrow or inconsistent to me. The first-person cover system, though a little less cumbersome than it was in RO2, occasionally doesn't cooperate with your intentions. And visually, while Rising Storm's setting provides natural beauty and an excuse for sunshine on some maps, character models aren't as detailed as I wish they were, especially in terms of uniform textures, facial expressions and animation.
Otherwise, you're looking at the best multiplayer shooter set in the Pacific, and the best WWII FPS since Battlefield 1942. Rising Storm's period-accurate weapons emphasize precision in a way that isn't present in other shooters, and the way danger, teamwork, and a sense of authenticity permeate the experience make it an essential game for multiplayer FPS players.
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The Verdict
Rising Storm
A gritty, brutal WWII shooter that uses its scale, setting, and fidelity to great effect.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Raised by a Team Fortress Classic clan, Evan can only communicate using multiplayer FPS jargon, sort of like that Star Trek: TNG " Darmok" episode. 2fort, when the walls fell...
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Jump to Section: Best Price Comments Pros Stunning presentation and attention to detail More varied and more attractive goals Expanded career mode with better scouting Cons Stodgy midfield battles Movement is stuttery and clumsy Player errors take control from your hands Here’s a slice of real football 101 that the FIFA series knows all too well. Some parts of a soccer team are more interchangeable
Elite Dangerous will be an Oculus Rift launch title
Space jockeys rejoice!
Space jockeys rejoice! Oculus VR announced todaythat the space combat-slash-trucking sim Elite Dangerouswill offer native support for the Oculus Rift VR headset. Even better, it's only a few weeks away: The Oculus version of Elite will be released as a Rift launch title on March 28.
Elite Dangerous has actually been playable on previous iterations of the Oculus Rift. But compatibility issues arose as the Oculus SDK continued to evolve, and then in January, Frontier indicated that it had shifted its efforts to focus on SteamVR. The studio later clarified that it was still working with Oculus, and that “SteamVR is just the focus,” but today's announcement, as far as I know, is the first indication since then that its plan to support the Oculus Rift hadn't been placed firmly on the back burner. But this has clearly been locked down for awhile, as Braben told Ars Technicathat he's “been itching to announce it.”
Oculus VR also confirmed that all current owners of Elite Dangerous will be given access to the Oculus Rift version at no extra charge.
Red Orchestra 2: Rising Storm expansion announced
A post on the Red Orchestra blog announces Rising Storm as the first expansion pack for Red Orchestra 2.
announces Rising Storm as the first expansion pack for Red Orchestra 2. It'll ferry Red Orchestra 2's bloody, muddy realism out to the sunny, sandy beaches of the Pacific theatre, where American forces will battle the Japanese army on famous battlefields like Tarawa, Kwajalein, Saipan, Iwo Jima and Peleliu.
The expansion is a total conversion created with help from Red Orchestra's active modding community. Tripwire recruited a "hit-list" of modders who had worked with Tripwire before, and asked them to help produce the expansion.
"As Red Orchestra: Ostfront had such an avid modding community, producing some pretty good content, it made sense for the Tripwire team, the core of whom were ex-modders themselves, to offer this opportunity to a team of modders," Rising Storm producer Tony Gillham tells Gamespy.
The US and Japanese factions will be asymmetrically equipped. Gilham tells Gamespy that balancing the well-equipped US forces against a Japanese army that hardly used automatic weapons at the time is the biggest design challenge for the team at the moment, but they're hoping that carefully constructed maps can help to even out each battle. The expansion's due to arrive at an unspecified point this year, and IGN have the announcement trailer, which you can see below.
Lucas Pope took a number of uneventful trips through international border control stations, fascinated
by the stamping and paper-shuffling. In what's to most a dull necessity, the game designer saw a fascinating opportunity: Instead of playing as common fiction's heroic spy, smuggler or subversive, what if you played as the bureaucratic inspector? Papers, Please , the game that emerged from that simple, even counter-intuitive concept, is brilliant on a mechanical level -- in order to earn enough to support their struggling family, the player needs to process as many travelers as they can in one day, an objective balanced against the stated goal of only admitting those who have their increasingly-complicated documents in order.
Road to the IGF: Lucas Pope's Papers, Please
, the game that emerged from that simple, even counter-intuitive concept, is brilliant on a mechanical level -- in order to earn enough to support their struggling family, the player needs to process as many travelers as they can in one day, an objective balanced against the stated goal of only admitting those who have their increasingly-complicated documents in order. Names, faces, issue and expiration dates all need to check out, and as the game adds in special regulations for unusual circumstances, it gets properly maddening.
Continuing our Road to the IGFseries of interviews with nominees, we talk to Pope about Papers, Please , nominated for multiple awards -- the Excellence in Design category, the Nuovo category, and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.
What's your background in making games?The first games I made were on the Mac Plus using HyperCard, which was the best. From there I moved to making small C64 stuff when it was long past its prime. After leaving college, I started a game development company, Ratloop, with friends in the late '90s.
What development tools did you use to make Papers, Please ? Papers, Please is written in Haxe using OpenFL. I work on a Mac and my general toolset is Photoshop, Audacity, Sublime Text, Illustrator, and TexturePacker. IDEA IntelliJ has half-decent Haxe support, which I used mostly to get the syntax highlighting and step-debugging in Flash builds. I also made a good number of custom tools in Haxe, Python, Javascript, and probably some other toolsets I'm forgetting.
How much time did you spend working on the game?From the first mockups to the initial release in August, it was around 9 months. I've been working on it non-stop since then though so I'm now at 14 months and counting.
How did you come up with the concept?I generally try to keep an eye out for interesting game ideas in everyday life, and at some point I'd done enough international traveling to start noticing the rigamarole that immigration inspectors do when checking your documents. I thought that whatever correlations they were doing could be turned into some fun game mechanics.
The sound and visual design really help build the experience -- it's dark and coarse-looking, and the finality of the rubber stamp noise, or the pinging of little keys and things on your work tray are really tactile. How did you create these tonal elements?A large part of the production was dictated by my lack of resources. For example, I knew that I couldn't fill the entire game with music. So instead I focused on getting the right mix of ambient and triggered sounds in the booth to make it feel natural.
The same is true of the graphics. The low resolution was dictated by my limitations, but the result is that I could create visuals and especially animations very quickly. I chose muted colors and stripped back a lot of the details to try to express the bleak mood and to reduce extraneous visual clutter.
How much of the experience is scripted versus procedural? It seems like that was a challenging balance to find.The general flow of the game from day to day, along with 2 or 3 immigrants per day are all scripted. Most of the immigrants are procedurally generated based on the current day's rules. Coming up with the scripted encounters was quite fun; the hard part was arranging everything to carry the game through 30 days without too many dry spots or unnecessary confusion.
The Soviet-bloc feel is really evocative, and it's possible to recognize our own experience of international travel and sociopolitical anxiety in the game, but at the same time, nothing feels 'ripped from the headlines.' What made you decide on the traits of this fictional world?The world of Arstotzka and surrounding area grew with the game's requirements. The only thing I knew at the start was that there were two bordering countries (Arstotzka and Kolechia) with a strained relationship. Everything else was written as I went, usually to introduce a new mechanic or explain a character's motivation.
Did you have any particular influences in making the game?There's nothing specific, but I did base many of the events on what I know as common spy or political thriller tropes. The game concept focuses on approaching things from a different direction than usual so a big part of the design was taking commonly-seen events and turning them around to put you on the other side.
You're not the hero slipping through the border, but the guard checking documents. You don't make the secret documents drop, you just hold on to them for the handler to pick up. You don't tackle the terrorist and drag him away, you just press the DETAIN button to call the guards. Etc.
Have you played any of the other IGF finalists? Any games you've especially enjoyed?Unfortunately I've only had the chance to play a few. I love The Stanley Parable for how far it steps outside typical games, all while staying as a [first-person] walker. I can't remember another game that made me reflect on the idea of choice so effectively. DEVICE 6 really impresses me with its concept and execution; it's just beautiful. And the design in 868-HACK is brilliant. That's my go-to iOS game on the bus or train.
What do you think of the current state of the indie scene?Seems pretty healthy to me. I think even calling it a "scene" isn't quite right since that implies something small. Game creation is becoming so ubiquitous that the exception now seems to be the triple-A pressed-disc game, not the small independently-developed one.