Indholdsfortegnelse for issue 273 i PC Powerplay

Some of the players in Battlefield 5’s open beta, which ended this week, were worried that the maps were too small, and didn’t live up to the mammoth arenas in previous games (this is a good example of the complaints). The DICE concerns, assuring fans they’re still making big maps—including one that’s more than 1.5km end-to-end. The big map in question is Hamada, and lead multiplayer designer Valerian Noghin shared an image to show its scale, noting that it’s still a work in progress. The development team also shared a list of changes they’re planning to make based on feedback from the open beta. Distance haze and lighting changes will make enemies more visible, and automatic weapons are being “adjusted” to make “time to kill as fair and fun as…

So you take Borderlands and you drop the cel-shaded graphics and hitpoint fountains. You take a dash of Fallout. You get one of the best smartest devs on the planet to make everything look shiny, and you then inject the results with BRO DO YOU EVEN LIFT levels of steroids. The result of this melange of influences would, I think, look and play a lot like Rage 2. There was a significant pre-roll video I watched before going hands on at Gamescom, recently, which focused on the open world, the different biomes and environments, and the vehicular side of the game - but the demo itself was pure run-and-gun, following a brief introduction to the powers on offer in the game. To call these bombastic and over the top is…

Well, let’s be pretty up front - if you’re the kind of player who’s always wanted World of Warships’ aircraft carriers to be a little more action packed, the massive update hitting CVs in the next few months is going to be right up your alley. The new gameplay is designed to present truly cinematic carrier battles, and to bring the carrier game into line with the ‘all-action’ ethos of the rest of the game. If, however, you’re like me, and you really enjoyed the more strategic aspect of carrier battles in the game as it currently stands... Well, you’re just a little screwed. That RTS-style, top-down view of the game, and the ability to control multiple squadrons of multiple types of aircraft, will be going the way of the…

DEVELOPER MOTION TWIN • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE • PRICE $US20 www.dead-cells.com Dead Cells has robust DNA. This is an action platformer with Castlevania’s environments and gothic bestiary, wed to Dark Souls’ exploration and sense of risk. And it’s gorgeous. Smooth animation, evocative pixel art, and gratifying effects cast Dead Cells in a good light from the off. Its moody fortresses and haunted villages are atmospheric but never drab, and each zone introduces a new splash of color to the game’s palette. These touches gild a superbly-executed movement and combat system. You have a double jump and a dodge roll that grants a vital window of invincibility. You can bust through doors to stun enemies with a satisfying crunch, and leap from chains to dodge projectiles and reach new areas. “...being reset…

DEVELOPER SEGA • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE www.yakuza.sega.com The first thing you do is beat up a gang of street thugs. The second thing? Before the crime drama unfolds, before a real estate turf war earns you hundreds of millions of yen, before you battle your way through the Japanese underworld, you sing karaoke. You tap your way through a rhythm action minigame; the dingy bar transforming into a concert stage as series lead Kiryu imagines himself rocking out to an ’80s power ballad. Welcome to Yakuza 0, ostensibly an open world action game, but one that blends arcade-style brawling with a visual novel’s languid conversations, throws in a selection of weird and wonderful minigames, and wraps it all up in a world where the sublime meets the ridiculous and the ridiculous…

DEVELOPER D3T/SEGA AM2 • PUBLISHER SEGA • PRICE £25 www.bit.ly/segashenmue It’s 1986 and on a bleak, snowy November day, teenager Ryo Hazuki witnesses his father’s murder at the family dojo. Swearing revenge, he dedicates his life to finding the man responsible – a mission that takes him from the streets of Yokosuka, Japan to the sprawling metropolis of Hong Kong and beyond, across two huge, ambitious and idiosyncratic games. Many of the features that were considered groundbreaking back in 1999 may seem quaint by modern standards, but almost 20 years after it was first released, Shenmue is still an experience that no other game will give you. “Living the life of an aimless Japanese teenager is compelling” The first game is set in a small corner of Yokosuka, which includes…

DEVELOPER REBELLION • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE www.strangebrigade.com Deep in the bowels of a sacred temple, my buddy has been stabbed to death. An angry mummy – completely and rightfully pissed off that a bunch of dicks are stealing their gold – is chewing on his face until his corpse disappears. He reappears in a sarcophagus near me. I open the door, and out he pops, good as new, back into the fight. He shoots the mummy that had previously killed him before the undead sap can climb off the tiles. When it comes to making exciting combat moments, an instant-respawn sarcophagus isn’t ideal. Any other co-op shooter would have players fall wounded to the ground, unable to get up until a friend fights their way over and applies a bandage. This…

PRICE $1,199 www.nvidia.com.au Now that we’ve gone over some of the key highlights of the RTX series, it’s time to take a look at the cards themselves, starting with the RTX 2080. The GeForce RTX 2080 is based around the Turing TU104 GPU. It packs in 2944 CUDA Cores, 46 RT Cores, and 368 Tensor Cores. The Founders Edition comes with a 1800MHz boost clock, which Nvidia claims is a 90MHz overclock over the base GPU specification. In reality we’d expect these clocks to be the real world base specification. There’s also 8GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 memory, which combined with its 256-bit bus width, means it has 448 GB/s of available memory bandwidth. This is big jump from the 320 GB/s of the 1080. The PCB itself sees a significant…

The release of AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper platform in 2017 well and truly changed the high end desktop CPU market. Just a few years ago, 6 and 8 core CPUs were considered flagship offerings. Threadripper changed all that. Last year’s stunningly powerful 1950X redefined what the high end desktop was capable of. A full 16 cores meant content creators, multi-taskers, power users and professionals alike had access to options that destroyed anything outside of the ultra-expensive enterprise realm. Threadripper 2nd Gen brings options including the 2990WX with its unprecedented 32 cores. That’s not all though. There’s also the powerful and high frequency 16 core 2950X which will be joined later on by the 12 core 2920X and the 24 core 2970WX. THREADRIPPER EVOLVED The Ryzen Threadripper 2nd Gen processors bring all…

By this point, it’s pretty difficult to argue that the entire gaming industry hasn’t been driven by advances in open-platform PC technology. Everything from the USB plug-holes in your PlayStation 4 to the Bluetooth and low-powered GPU that makes the Nintendo Switch even workable at all, all come from PC. The Switch is an especially good example, because unlike the big box consoles, it has to be able to run every single game in at least two resolutions, specifically 1280x720 (in handheld mode) and 1920x1080 (in docked-mode). Dynamically switching between resolutions, while a game is running, is no trivial thing. Fortunately, Nintendo had approximately 30 years of PC experience to draw on. CEEGEE VEEGEES It really is hard to overstate the difference between the development of the Apple II and…

Loot boxes in games could lead to problem gambling, according to a study by the Australian Environment and Communications Reference Committee. Over 7,400 game enthusiasts were surveyed for the study, the results of which were presented during a public hearing in Canberra yesterday, as part of the Australian senate inquiry into micro-transactions and chance-based items. Participants who suffered a serious gambling problem were more likely to spend money on loot boxes, the study found. “These results support the position of academics who claim that loot boxes are psychologically akin to gambling,” reads the submission. “Spending large amounts of money on loot boxes was associated with problematic levels of spending on other forms of gambling. This is what one would expect if loot boxes psychologically constituted a form of gambling. It…

LawBreakers, the high-flying arena FPS created by Cliff Bleszinski’s Boss Key Productions, is gone for good. The shutdown date had been set back in June, ending a brief flash of hope that it might have a future as a free-to-play game, and former senior environment artist Josh Rife (who is now filling the same role at Red Storm Entertainment) confirmed just ahead of the weekend that the curtain had fallen on schedule. Rife also shared concept art for an unreleased map called Valhalla, “the craziest shit we ever put together,” he tweeted. “We basically said screw arbitrary limits to egregious vertical combat, and made the capture zones super vulnerable. Expert player map for sure.” “Valhalla was Bosskey’s 10th and final map for LawBreakers. Set in an abandoned Valkyrie training facility…

I have a few credits on games, mostly for composing music. Until recently, I had thought Thimbleweed Park’s ‘HintTron 3000’ would be the strangest, but it seems I’ve outdone myself. Technically, it’s more of a grizzly cameo in Lamplight City, an adventure game by Francisco Gonzalez, of Shardlight and A Golden Wake. I knew the story was going to be dark when I signed up for the weird role, but I was actually a little shocked when I saw how ‘my content’ is presented later in the game. I’ve now played the detectives’ first case... The game opens with a horse and carriage ride. You’re meeting a florist who has fallen victim to a spate of burglaries. An airship, the HMS Ligeia, drifts optimistically overhead. The city is shrouded by…

Fallout 76 plays like any other Fallout game. You begin your journey creating a character and stepping outside the security of Vault 76 to the wide open world of a post-nuclear war. Exploring relics of a forgotten time, you can explore abandoned buildings, hard-scrabble camps, and build your own community. You can play as a vigilante, a hero, a travelling merchant, a marauder, barter your way through life or resolve issues violently and with persuasion. Unlike past games in the series, however, instead of playing alone, you’ll be alongside other players in an always online world. In Fallout lore, Vault 76 is one of few controlled vaults that is designed to house people in the hopes they can resettle and restore society after the nuclear war. Set 25 years after…

DEVELOPER BIT KID, INC. • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE • PRICE $US20 www.chasmgame.com It seems like a simple job. Travel to a nearby town and rescue a few villagers who have gotten themselves lost in the local coal mine. But when your rookie knight arrives in the snowy hamlet of Karthas, he learns the true horror of what has happened. Something terrible has been awakened in those deep, cavernous mines—something evil—and it’s a good thing the knight has brought his sword along with him. Chasm is a side-scrolling platformer in the Metroid mould, with games such as Castlevania, Zelda, and Spelunky coded into its DNA. The titular chasm is the mazelike network of tunnels that yawns beneath Karthas, from the dusty coal mine just below the surface, to the ancient dungeons and arcane…

DEVELOPER CODEMASTERS • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE www.codemasters.com/game/f1-2018 You’ve got to feel for Codemasters’ design team when the annual, ‘What shall we put in next year’s game?’ meeting cropped up at the end of the 2017 season. “Well, there are unsightly head protectors on the cars now, so they’ll be going in.” Everyone gives resigned nods. “And… shall we totally overhaul the game engine?” No. No we shan’t, Callum, because the game’s out in eight months. Working to an annual deadline, it’s testament to the developer’s talents that the series has maintained, by and large, a high standard worthy of the licence. But that licence is a double-edged sword: over in the real sport, Lewis Hamilton has been a blur of Petronas logos for what feels like ages, drivers are openly bemoaning…

PRICE $1899 www.nvidia.com.au N the gaming car e all want to own, but the question is, at $1,899, can mortals afford it? The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is built around the TU102 GPU, this is the ‘big Turing’ chip and its release is something of a surprise given Nvidia’s recent strategy to delay the big chip until later in the market cycle. Spec wise, it’s a big jump over the outgoing 1080 Ti, with 4352 Cuda Cores tied up with 68 RT Cores and 544 Tensor Cores. It’s clocked slightly lower than the 2080 with a 1635MHz boost clock but more than makes up for it with sheer grunt. There’s 11GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 memory, which with its 352-bit bus, gives an amazing 616GB/s of memory bandwidth. There’s no doubting that…

Not quite so many changes as last issue, but let’s face it, the one addition to our inventory of essential PC builds is pretty damn remarkable - not to mention expensive. Nvidia’s new RTX 2080 Ti has graced our test bench, and while it may be a little while from release, it is without a doubt the fastest card on the market, and so it’s a gimme to plug one into The Beast. When the 20-series is more widely available, we expect a lot of price drops elsewhere, but for now, things are steady.…

Right now there are two No Man’s Skys. One is the game you can currently play and which has just stepped into the realms of true multiplayer via its Next update. The other is the game it was at launch which, in some corners of the internet, is preserved in aspic along with its attendant controversies and outrage. To give a brief overview if you’ve managed to avoid it thus far: At launch and in the weeks immediately following, players and spectators needed to reconcile what the game was with what they had expected. For some people this was simple—they got what they thought they would get, and either enjoyed it or didn’t. Those that did enjoy it went on to pour astonishing numbers of hours into the game. For…

HERO U: ROGUE TO REDEMPTION DEVELOPER TRANSOLAR GAMES • PRICE US$35 http://hero-u.com/ I literally sold the school shirt off my back so that I could ante into a game of Poobah. That was the moment I began to appreciate what Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption was trying to teach me about the character class I had so rarely picked in Quest for Glory. I had failed my friend in her dangerous quest, not because I was weak or amoral. I was inadequately prepared, lost my traps, and hadn’t practiced enough with the rope and grapple. Determined not to let this happen again, I gambled the shirt money and won my friends’ lyra, for the purpose of buying better gear. There’s a lot to that anecdote and there’s a lot to this…

In many ways, the Resident Evil 2 Remake represents the past, present and future of the popular survival horror franchise. The recently announced remake features a familiar sense of isolating paranoia and series iconography - like inventory management and limited resources - and is set in the ruined Raccoon City, but with modern gameplay and visuals. Resident Evil 2’s Re-creators, producers Tsuyoshi Kanda (Resident Evil 7) and Yoshiaki Hirabayashi (Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 7), are drawing on their experience as fans of the series, as well as their skill as developers, adding elements from the games in the series that people love. As a result, Resident Evil 2’s gameplay is more akin to Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 7: the tank controls and fixed camera angles are…

“You’ll see the effects of your attacks on the monsters’ bodies.” DEVELOPER ID SOFTWARE • PUBLISHER BETHESDA SOFTWORKS • DUE 2019 www.bethesda.net It’s called the ‘Meat Hook’: a pair of spikes that sit under the barrel of the shotgun. When fired, it rockets forward on a chain, attaching to demons and letting the player pull themselves to their target. The possibilities of new movement options and combo attacks are already tantalising in Doom Eternal, and it doesn’t even come out until next year. The sequel to id’s Doom reboot was announced at E3 with a brief teaser but it was officially revealed in August at QuakeCon with long, unbroken minutes of carnage-filled in-game footage. Throughout the weekend of QuakeCon, at panels and interviews, id Software’s executive producer Marty Stratton and…

DEVELOPER PLANET ALPHA APS • PUBLISHER TEAM17 www.planetalpha-game.com Planet Alpha opens with you, an elongated humanoid in a spacesuit, limping across a desert, eventually collapsing at the (surprisingly literal) mouth of a cave. One fade-to-black later and you’re waking up, fully healed and ready to jump, run, crouch and drag your way through the alien landscape. As well as that side-scrolling platformer toolset you also have the ability to turn day to night and night to day. Rather than putting you forward or backwards in time, this is used to manipulate your environment. Plants are particularly susceptible to changes in light, so full sunlight makes golden fungus unfurl to create new platforms, or prompts clumps of foliage expand to offer hiding places. But although it has the potential to be…

DEVELOPER DAEDALIC • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE www.daedalic.com Set in Berlin in 2048, State of Mind is a modern, streamlined take on the point-and-click adventure. Heavy on plot and light on puzzles, its story is split between a dark, oppressive reality and an idyllic virtual utopia. Berlin is neon-lit, rain-soaked and grimy; City 5 is all gleaming glass and metal and golden sunsets. It’s an interesting contrast, even if the game does lapse into cyberpunk and sci-fi cliché fairly regularly. Richard Nolan, voiced by Doug ‘Geralt’ Cockle, lives in an apartment above Berlin. As I’m looking down at the city through a window, a robotic arm holding a holographic advert swings in, blocking my view. This is one of many examples of State of Mind’s superb worldbuilding, wordlessly illustrating how commercialised and…

DEVELOPER CAPCOM • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE • PRICE $US60 www.monsterhunterworld.com Monster Hunter: World is an action game about dominating the food chain and looking good while doing so. It’s renowned for its endgame, where you go on challenging hunts in search of rare items needed to craft an armor set that’ll crown you the min-max champion of the world, but Monster Hunter’s essence and greatest strength is its prolonged, desperate, and tragic fights with beautiful beasts. Unlike the story, murdering World’s dozens of intricately designed monsters has a point. There’s no levelling up and skill point allocation in Monster Hunter, so crafting armor and weapons is the only way to permanently buff your stats. Gear crafted from monsters reflects their strengths and weaknesses, so if you’re having trouble with a thick-skinned…

DEVELOPER TWO POINT STUDIOS • PUBLISHER SEGA www.twopointhospital.com Running a hospital is a messy business. Managing the moods of petulant doctors, curing a bizarre list of fictitious illnesses, cleaning up poo and literally putting out fires – there’s little time to sit back and listen to the radio DJs driving patients to distraction over the PA system. The upbeat music, silly diseases and constant puns create a false sense of security, but underneath its tongue-in-cheek exterior this is a dense, tricky management game. Amid the barrage of catastrophes there’s one golden rule: cure as many people as you can. To get the star ratings that will let you move onto the next mission, you’ll need to complete objectives ranging from making the hospital look fetching to finding a cure for…

DEVELOPER GHOST TOWN GAMES • PUBLISHER TEAM17 • PRICE $US25 www.ghosttowngames.com Like the original, Overcooked 2 is a cheerful, nonviolent co-op game that’s simple enough for the whole family to enjoy. It also happens to be one of the most stressful games you’ll ever play. This sequel adds a generous helping of new ingredients, but at its core it’s the same game: One that, for all its fantastical elements and wilfully counterintuitive working environments, captures the pressure-cooker tension of a busy restaurant kitchen. As before, your goal is to successfully serve as many dishes as you can within four minutes: chopping, mixing, frying and steaming ingredients according to the recipe. There’s a wider variety of orders this time, including sushi and nuggets and fries but the processes themselves are still…

01 PlayStation Classic $149.99 • Sony www.playstation.com/en-au/ Nintendo were on to something with their NES and SNES minis, and Sony appears to have been paying attention, so come Dec 3rd, you’ll be able to snap up the PlayStation Classic... POWERED UP: Promising 20 of “the best” games from the original PlayStation, the list revealed so far shows TEKKEN 3 and Final Fantasy VII amongst others! It’s about a quarter the size of its progenitor, comes with two controllers, and a USB cable. PLAYED OUT: No included power source, and highly likely to sell out, if it hasn’t already by the time you read this. 02 Nintendo Switch Wireless NES Controller $90 • Nintendo www.nintendo.com Not to be outdone in the retro console arena, Nintendo has also announced a couple of…