The weeks highs and lows in PC gaming THE HIGHS Shaun Prescott: No Man’s Sky continues to look incredibleA lot of people seem confused about No Man’s Sky. Initial enthusiasm for the ambitious procedurally generated space adventure has descended into worry. It looks good, they say, but what do you do? Is it just a beefed up exploration sim? What will the combat be like? Can I play it with my friends? Will it even come to PC? Well the answer to the last question is that yes, it will, though only after a period of PlayStation exclusivity. Regarding the other questions, I can’t help but feel they miss the point. If No Man’s Sky makes good on its promise, you won’t need any of these elements even should they appear, because No Man’s Sky will offer something we didn’t even realise we wanted. Like the Hello Games team, I was reared on the hard sci-fi of Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov, so the prospect of exploring an alien universe is its own reward. The idea of seeing and contemplating sights no one else is ever likely to see (which is likely, given the sheer size of the game) is what will keep me busy in No Man’s Sky. This week’s new footage has only increased my excitement for its eventual PC release. Chris Livingston: Rise And ShineI look at tons of mods every week for our weekly mod column, and often wind up reading blog posts, patch notes, and diaries, sometimes spanning years, about the countless hours of work—all of it volunteer—that goes into them. So, its great when mods get a little extra attention, as Lambda Wars did with an official launch on Steam. The mod team have been working on it for six long years and its exciting to see it released as a standalone experience. While their work isnt done (its still in beta), Im hoping their spot in the Steam store will greatly expand their playerbase. Tyler Wilde: A great round of Fractured SpaceA few days ago I posted a video of Fractured Space—a 5v5 giant spaceship combat game on Early Access—in which I said I’d probably just play a few more rounds before shelving it until future updates come through. I might have been wrong about that. I started playing the other night after a small but important update, and didn’t stop for five rounds. There are bugs. There are crashes. There are balance problems. There’s only one map and one mode. There are better games like it. Chris Thursten would probably look at it and ask me why the hell I’m not just playing Dota 2. But despite all that, I’m having a lot of fun being a part of this game’s genesis. In one round, I went something like 7 kills/0 deaths and made a number of vital base captures. It felt great, because for once I feel like I’m in the top tier of a competitive game (never mind that I’m playing with the same small group of early adopters every time). I tend to be more of a tourist when it comes to multiplayer games, skimming the surface for what fun I can have before moving on to another game, but I don’t think anything is as enjoyable as becoming an expert. I’d forgotten that. Don’t take this as a recommendation that you go out and buy Fractured Space right now—this is just me remembering what it feels like to have a home. It’s comforting. I don’t know if Fractured Space will be that game for me long term—that might depend on how it develops, and if anything else captures my attention (I’ve started playing Elite: Dangerous)—but at least it’s given me another taste of the joy I had playing Quake 2 every night back in the day. I’m re-hooked on competitive multiplayer. Evan Lahti: Good riddance, CZ-75Valve gave CS:GO some love this week. Train got a total visual overhaul (that included a cute exploit, now removed), but maybe more significantly, the oft-criticized CZ-75 auto pistol got a significant nerf, cutting its per-mag ammo capacity from 12 to 8 and increasing its time-to-equip. This should spell the end of a period of CS:GO where the CZ was widely used as “AWP insurance” both in professional play and ranked matchmaking, thank goodness. In the same patch, a form of cheating was patched out. Valve is doing a better job of listening to the CS:GO community and giving the second-most played game on Steam attention proportionate to its popularity. Tom Marks: Blowing up the metaThe first full expansion to Hearthstone, Goblins vs Gnomes, launched this week and it is glorious. The meta has been table-flipped and we are in a beautiful, if perhaps fleeting, period of time where anything goes when it comes to deck building. The pros have their opinions and the net decking has already begun, but for at least the first month after GvG’s launch you can open a bunch of packs, decide which cards you like, and build a silly deck that can still hold its own on the ladder. As someone who doesn’t have a lot of cards, the prospect of being allowed to think outside of the box and still succeed is very liberating. The most exciting part of all the experimenting I’ve done is that the new cards are really fun. As much as people complain about RNG, the craziness we’ve seen from some of GvG’s more noteworthy cards have brought me nothing but joy. Samuel Roberts: New Alien modesI thought I was done with Alien: Isolation after 28 long hours of being stalked across Sevastopol by a sweaty sci-fi horror icon, but apparently not—the inclusion of brand new difficulty modes, including one which breaks your motion tracker, adds a Dark Souls-like punishing appeal to a game that wasn’t short of challenge already. I’ve been sampling the Survivor Mode and contemplating another playthrough with that brilliant AI. This Christmas, I may do just that. Andy Kelly: Getting started with Elite: Dangerous The best news for me this week was that progress in the ‘gamma’ version of Elite: Dangerous, which early adopters and backers can play now, will be kept intact when the game launches next week. This means, finally, I can get stuck into the game without worrying about losing my ships and amassed space-bucks. I’m about 10 hours into my first proper ‘life’ in the Milky Way now, and loving it. Last night I set a course for some random, distant star (using the new route planning feature) and went on a sightseeing voyage. I saw binary suns, vivid nebulae, dying stars, spinning space stations, and gorgeous Earth-like worlds—and that was only a quick run around the block. There are 400 billion systems in Elite, and I’ve visited maybe 20 of them. I can’t wait to see what else I find out there in the depths of space. THE LOWS Tyler Wilde: Getting started with Elite: DangerousLargely due to Andy’s enthusiasm, I’ve gotten started in Elite: Dangerous for the first time. I think I’m going to like it very much, but until I get to the part where I like it, I’ve got to figure out what the hell I’m doing. Elite’s tutorials are so baffling I had to look up a guide to one of them. A guide for a tutorial! Whatever hints it gave me while it was ostensibly teaching me its systems had a habit of disappearing, or not existing at all. How do you exit supercruise? Hell, what is supercruise? Nothing. It turns out that half the commands I needed weren’t bound to keys because I’d attempted to play with a controller, which Frontier CEO David Braben told me last week he sometimes does when a flight stick isn’t at hand. I thought I was being clever by doing what the pro does, but I think I need to stick to keyboard and mouse controls until I have a flightstick of my own to use. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with having a steep learning curve. The most rewarding games—Eve Online comes to mind—often do. But while my frustrating test flights weren’t enough to put me off of Elite (it’s so full of the fidelity I’ve been craving in a space sim that I can’t help but keep playing it), I do hope that the tutorials get an overhaul sometime after next week’s launch. There’s some joy in learning through experimentation, but if I’m going to recommend Elite to my friends, I don’t want them to hate me for the first five hours of it. Samuel Roberts: The Witcher 3 delayedI don’t actually mind The Witcher 3 being delayed again in the name of polishing up an RPG that sounds intimidatingly complicated to put together. I list this as a low more for the people waiting for the next big open-world fantasy RPG, as CD Projekt Red’s follow-up has been languishing for quite some time now—who knows, maybe it’ll make three E3s in a row? Since we’ve not had the opportunity to get hands-on with it yet, I honestly anticipated another delay—I’m hopeful the results will be worth it. Evan Lahti: A goodbye to BaerRalph Baer, the 92-year-old inventor of the first gaming console (which would come to be known as the Odyssey in 1972) passed away last Saturday. PC gaming and the gaming industry at large owes a lot to Mr. Baer, whose invention helped change the idea of computers being things mostly owned and operated by universities, rather than the consumer products we all enjoy in our homes today. Chris Livingston: Oculus GriftSo, Oculus VR continues to snap up talent for their facecomputer. This is good news for them but bad news for me, because Im a longtime VR skeptic and my stance—that mainstream VR is nothing but a goofy pipedream—is getting shakier with each passing acquisition. Its not that I actively want Oculus to fail, its just that I still remember the crushing disappointment the first time VR made the rounds. There was the 1992 film The Lawnmower Man, which featured a VR headest-wearing chimpanzee being machine-gunned to death, and of course the 1994 film Disclosure in which Michael Douglas had to walk around on a trampoline in his business-socks for ten minutes just so he could retrieve some Wordperfect documents. Ive been hurt before, people. Shaun Prescott: GTA V row still rages in AustraliaJust when we thought GTA V was safe from any more controversies, word arrived last week that two Australian retailers, Kmart and Target, have opted to remove the game from sale following a petition. It’s a move that was inevitably going to antagonise video game enthusiasts not only in Australia but internationally, prompting Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick to contribute his own two-cents. The thing is, unlike Australia’s long history of video game censorship, this particular instance is not censorship. GTA V is still on sale in Australia completely uncensored. Target and K-Mart, both owned by the same parent company in Australia, are both insignificant blips on the local video game retail market, to the extent that I didn’t even know Target still stocked video games until this week. It’s reasonable to assume that neither retailer is losing much from choosing not to stock GTA V—certainly not as much as the major retailers would. It seems like a cynical and tokenistic move overall, especially since recent catalogues positioned GTA V right next to Barbie and Peppa Pig, ie, in the kids section. A move from flagrant irresponsibility to moral high ground? Seems dodgy, but it’s not censorship. Andy Kelly: More Steam sales on the way Really? Another Steam sale? Jeez, we only just had one. Sales are, of course, brilliant, and one of the best reasons to be a PC gamer. But I have more games than I’ll ever have time to play—and I play games for a living. But I did think recently, what if I think of my ever-expanding Steam library as my retirement fund? ‘Cause then I’ll have all the time I need to finally get through it. Maybe then I’ll finally play The Swapper.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 23:08:33 +0000
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