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MAY 2015
How BioWare makes RPGS
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BATTLEFIELD HARDLINE HOTLINE MIAMI 2 SID MEiEr’s STARSHIPS
#278 May 2015 Future Publishing Ltd Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA Tel 01225 442244 Fax 01225 732275 Email pcgamer@futurenet.com Web www.pcgamer.com EDITORIAL Global Editor In Chief Tim Clark Editor Samuel Roberts Deputy Editor Chris Thursten Art Editor John Strike Production Editor Tony Ellis Web Editor Tom Senior Section Editor Andy Kelly News Editor Phil Savage CONTRIBUTORS Andrew Cottle, Andy McGregor, Matthew Lochrie, Wes Fenlon, Evan Lahti, Chris Livingston, Tom Marks, Tyler Wilde, Dave James, Dan Griliopoulos, Jon Blyth, Ben Griffin, Joe Skrebels, Richard Cobbett, Jordan Erica Webber, Sam White, Matt Elliott, Phil Iwaniuk, Richard Lane, Tom Sykes Photography Future Photography Studio Advertising For Ad enquiries please contact: Michael Pyatt, michael.pyatt@futurenet.com Marketing Group Marketing Manager Laura Driffield Marketing Manager Kristianne Stanton Production & Distribution Production Controller Fran Twentyman Production ManagerMark Constance Printed in the UK by: William Gibbons & Sons Ltd on behalf of Future Distributed by:Seymour Distribution Ltd, 2 East Poultry Avenue, London EC1A 9PT, Tel: 0207 429 4000 Overseas distribution by:Seymour International Circulation Trade Marketing Manager Juliette Winyard – 07551 150 984 Subscriptions UK reader order line & enquiries: 0844 848 2852 Overseas reader order line & enquiries: +44 (0)1604 251045 Online enquiries: www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk Email: pcgamer@myfavouritemagazines.co.uk Licensing International Director Regina Erak regina.erak@futurenet.com +44 (0)1225 442244 Fax +44 (0)1225 732275 Management Content & Marketing Director Nial Ferguson Head of Content & Marketing, Film, Music & Games Declan Gough Group Editor-In-Chief Daniel Dawkins Group Art Director Graham Dalzell NEXT ISSUE ON SALE… May 7
Under siege Welcome to PC Gamer, kind reader. This issue’s cover feature is all about the artex-shattering multiplayer FPS Rainbow Six Siege, which stole the show at last year’s otherwise crushingly mediocre E3. We sent our shooter expert, Evan Lahti, to Montreal to embarrass our competitors in combat and find out more. Read about it on p40. This issue also contains our 20 best strategy games (play them all! They’re not listed in any order) and our first impressions of Guild Wars II’s new expansion, Heart of Thorns, as well as a first look at Valve’s revolutionary SteamVR headset. Then there’s a feature we’ve been working on for about six months, a passion project for writer Chris Thursten: a massive eight pages on BioWare and how it makes games, specifically the mighty Dragon Age: Inquisition. We got a whole bunch of the talented writers of that game in one room, which is something I’ve wanted to see a magazine do since I played the original Mass Effect back in 2007. That’s why we’re here! Read that on p58 and enjoy the issue.
A member of the Audit Bureau of Circulations
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January-December 2014 Future is an award-winning international media group and leading digital business. We reach more than 49 million international consumers a month and create world-class content and advertising solutions for passionate consumers online, on tablet & smartphone and in print. Future plc is a public company quoted on the London Stock Exchange (symbol: FUTR). www.futureplc.com
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All contents copyright © 2015 Future Publishing Limited or published under licence. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced, stored, transmitted or used in any way without the prior written permission of the publisher. Future Publishing Limited (company number 2008885) is registered in England and Wales. Registered office: Registered office: Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA. All information contained in this publication is for information only and is, as far as we are aware, correct at the time of going to press. Future cannot accept any responsibility for errors or inaccuracies in such information. You are advised to contact manufacturers and retailers directly with regard to the price and other details of products or services referred to in this publication. Apps and websites mentioned in this publication are not under our control. We are not responsible for their contents or any changes or updates to them. If you submit unsolicited material to us, you automatically grant Future a licence to publish your submission in whole or in part in all editions of the magazine, including licensed editions worldwide and in any physical or digital format throughout the world. Any material you submit is sent at your risk and, although every care is taken, neither Future nor its employees, agents or subcontractors shall be liable for loss or damage. We encourage you to recycle this magazine, either through your usual household recyclable waste collection service or at a recycling site. We are committed to only using magazine paper which is derived from well managed, certified forestry and chlorine-free manufacture. Future Publishing and its paper suppliers have been independently certified in accordance with the rules of the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council).
SAMUEL ROBERTS EDITOR samuel.roberts@futurenet.com @SamuelWRoberts
bringing you the scoops this month...
Tony Ellis Was torn between finally finishing Baldur’s Gate, playing Pillars of Eternity or creating a game people will remember forever.
John Strike Significantly improved an important magazine meeting by putting his two sausage dogs on Google Hangout.
Chris Thursten @CThursten Actually went insane writing about Dragon Age this month. It was worth it. See p58.
MAY 2015
Phil Savage @Octaeder Is currently off his tits in Iceland, at EVE Fanfest. We’ll get him to write about it for next issue.
5
#278
may 2015
Subscribe to Check out the digital bundle! See p68
MONITOR 08 THE TOP STORY SteamVR kicks virtual ass.
10 THE SPY What’s going on with Hideo Kojima?
12 FACE OFF
Can VR fit in your house?
14 SPECIAL REPORT
The extraordinary videogames of PETA. PREVIEWS
16 Mad Max 20 Firewatch 22 The Flame in the Flood 24 The Westport Independent 26 Beyond Eyes 28 Volume 30 Might & Magic Heroes VII 32 Naval Action 34 Unreal Tournament
FEATURES 40 Rainbow Six Siege
Evan visits Ubisoft Montreal to sample this exciting shooter.
46 Guild Wars 2
Phil plays Heart of Thorns, the MMO’s big expansion.
52 The Best Strategy Games
In which the phrase ‘chinook full of Tanyas’ is used.
58 In Your Heart
Chris speaks to the writing team of Dragon Age: Inquisition.
70 Has Valve won the VR war?
Wes goes eyes-on with the SteamVR headset, AKA the Vive.
40
40
46
52
Breaking down the doors of this long-awaited Tom Clancy reboot, Evan enjoys an extensive hands-on with the shooter that won E3 last year.
Guild Wars 2 expert Phil Savage plays Heart of Thorns, the longawaited expansion to ArenaNet’s brilliant MMO. Find out what he thinks about it here.
Our criteria: the best games that let you invade someone’s base or territory. Twenty of them.
Rainbow Six Siege Guild Wars 2
GIFTAGEDDON Free starter pack for online shooter Warframe ! Turn to page 66 6
MONTH 2013
the Best Strategy Games
46
NETWORK
52
74 SEND
You fire opinions at us out of a Junon Cannon of opinions.
58
REVIEWS 78 Battlefield Hardline 82 Sid Meier’s Starships 84 Cities: Skylines 86 Pneuma: Breath of Life 88 Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number 92 Assassin’s Creed Rogue 94 Ori and the Blind Forest 96 LA Cops 98 Homeworld Remastered Downloadable Content
100 Far Cry 4: The Valley of the Yetis Episodic Review
102 République Remastered THEY’RE BACK
107
104 Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee 105 Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 105 Bully: Scholarship Edition
The Hard Stuff 107 SUPERTEST
The best small form factor cases collated by the majestic Dave James.
112 REVIEWS
Dave checks out a half-laptop, half-desktop hybrid in our monthly hardware round-up.
114 THE PC GAMER RIG
The best PC you can buy for less than £1,000, not counting go-faster stripes.
EXTRA LIFE
78 58
How BioWare Makes RPGS
Chris gets unique access to the Dragon Age: Inquisition team in this massive making-of feature.
78
Battlefield Hardline
Tyler tackles Battlefield at its stupidest, arresting hardened criminals to make them sleep.
116 NOW PLAYING
Chris has one memorable experience in Evolve and absolutely no more.
120 TOP 10 DOWNLOADS
107
small case supertest
Thinking of building a tiny games PC this year? Dave James can help you find the right case.
Take selfies in the ever-changing Doom, and discover the best free games.
124 UPDATE
Andy checks out how regular updates have affected EVE Online.
126 REINSTALL
Andy heads back to Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto III.
128 MUST PLAY
The best games of each genre.
may 2015
7
MONITOR
T HE P C G A MER V IE W OF T HE W ORL D
Bigger than Half-Life 3 THE TOP STORY
Valve and HTC make a bold claim for the virtual reality throne
A
t the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March, HTC revealed a new virtual reality headset created in collaboration with Valve: the Vive. The Taiwanese hardware giant says the headset will be available to 8
may 2015
buy before the end of 2015. A release date for the Oculus Rift remains unconfirmed. “In recent years we’ve seen the first forays into creating virtual reality experiences,” said HTC CEO Peter Chou. “But no one has defined the ideal experience. We will bring you VR that no one has seen before.”
Until now, the Rift has been the posterchild for VR. But even with a $2 billion Facebook buyout, there’s still no sign of a retail version – only developer kits. And the Vive has dual 1200x1080 displays, 70 sensors, and a 90Hz refresh rate. In terms of raw specs, it’s the most powerful VR headset around. And while headsets like the Rift and Sony’s Project Morpheus relie on cameras for positional tracking, the Vive uses lasers. This means you aren’t restricted by the narrow field of view of a camera, and can move around freely in a virtual world – provided you have the space. HTC says a roaming space of 15x15 feet is ideal. “The tracking is perfect and it’s super fast,” says Sylvain Cornillon, CTO of Bossa
70 sensors
190 countries
38 on Metacritic
MONITOR
WINDOWS 10 INCOMING
RELEASE NEW MICROSOFT OS COMING THIS SUMMER
Microsoft quietly announced that Windows 10 will be released in 190 countries this summer. It also revealed that the free upgrade that’s being offered to users of older versions of the OS won’t just be limited to those with genuine licences. That means dodgy pirated copies will be upgraded too. Windows 10 will come bundled with DirectX 12, the next version of Microsoft’s graphics API, which will offer performance enhancements similar to ATI’s Mantle technology. AK
CO-OP WALKING DEAD
DEADLY PAYDAY DEVS ARE KIRKMAN APPROVED
At this year’s SXSW festival, Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman has described the new game, being developed by Payday’s Overkill, as similar to the heist’em-up, but with bigger environments. He also said it won’t slavishly follow the plot or characters of the show, giving them more freedom to do their own thing. “A lot of the stuff they learned from Payday will be incorporated into the game,” said Kirkman. “ No release date has been set yet, but it can’t be any worse than the abysmal Survival Instinct. AK
HEALTH BAR CHECKING THE GAME BIZ’S PULSE WINNERS You might say it’s re-Viving interest in VR.
Valve and HTC For actually giving a VR headset a release date. Sort of. Cities: Skylines Finally, the SimCity game we’ve been waiting for.
Studios, which holds regular VR events in the UK. “It’s really reactive and doesn’t need a camera to analyse the image, and uses very little CPU power.” Special ‘base stations’ capture your movements with sub-millimetre precision. This means you can stand up, walk around, and actually explore virtual spaces. You can do this with the Rift DK2, but the instant you step out of the infrared camera’s limited range (and it doesn’t take much to do so), the simulation stops working. Oculus is almost certainly working on a better solution to this, but HTC has beaten the company to it. This, combined with the promise of a release this year, makes the Vive the first serious challenger to the Oculus Rift.
Yes, I want Half-Life 3 too, but it’s clear Valve has greater ambitions. The company wants to be in at the ground floor of this amazing new tech, which could dramatically change the landscape of videogames. Just the same, no one wants to see Valve become entirely dedicated to Dota 2 and virtual reality. Reaction to the Vive has been overwhelmingly positive. The MIT Technology Review calls it “the best virtual reality experience so far.” PC Gamer sister site TechRadar say it’s “finally starting to fulfil the promise of VR.” Now the ball is in Oculus’s court, and it’ll need to do something pretty special to get back on top. Andy Kelly
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood More Wolfenstein! Set in a castle! Yes, please.
Hotline Miami 2 It’s like they didn’t know why people liked the first one. Star Citizen The space sim is set to take up 100GB of hard drive space. Jeez. Game sales Dying Light sold three times more than Alien: Isolation. Sigh.
LOSERS may 2015
9
THE SPY
BUT WHO WATCHES THE SPY?
The Spy supports underdogs. Also sea-level dogs, slightly elevated dogs, and overdogs.
T
he Spy remembers the first time he made somebody ‘disappear’. He was eight years old and a magician was telling him to wave a little magic wand at a curtain. An audience volunteer called Nigel was behind that curtain. He never saw Nigel again. Twelve years later he was strangling a would-be assassin with a set of floral drapes. It’s funny what comes back to you. Or what doesn’t come back. Respected developer and on-demand bratwurst eulogy coordinator Hideo Kojima is rumoured to be departing Konami, where he has worked as the head of Kojima Productions since time immemorial. Kojima is one of very few developers whose name can sell a game by itself, and his creative directorship of the Metal Gear series has earned him a devoted following. But where will they be following him to? Currently, that’s the mystery. Kojima’s name is nowhere to be found on press materials for MGS V: The Phantom Pain, having been elided overnight by the game’s publisher. It’s an act of political erasure rarely seen in games, where anything that can sell a game is normally used to sell a game. This is like Firaxis deciding to remove ‘Sid Meier’ from Civilization: it just wouldn’t happen. You don’t take a Golden Goose and turn it into a Trotsky Turkey. The Spy read that in a book, once. A business book. In a press release in March, Konami announced a shift towards a more ‘headquarters-controlled’
management structure, which suggests an attempt to reduce the power held by rogue wings of the company. Which is a shame, because those ‘rogue wings’ have traditionally produced all of Konami’s good games. What does this mean for fans of Metal Gear? MGS V will be fine as it’s bound to be in the final stretch of development at this stage, and the company issued a statement quoting Kojima that confirmed he’ll be around to finish it. He’s already said that it’ll be his last Metal Gear game. This also suggests, however, that the series will subsequently enter the drab corridors of publisher-mandated-sequeldom, the saddest place for any fan-loved series to end up. Do not fret. When we’re all staring down the barrel of Heroes of Metal Gear Saga Online, a free-to-play collectible action figure MMO, The Spy will be here for you. The Spy will join you in weeping into a much-loved cardboard box. We do not ultimately know that Kojima has been forced away from Metal Gear – he could have left voluntarily and Konami are hedging their bets. Bethedging is not, necessarily, a bad thing. Unless you’re Atari, and ‘hedging your bets’ means ‘threatening legal
If you shoot for the king, you better not miss action against one of the people who made your company’s name’. Jeff Minter’s company, Llamasoft, released a Tempest-a-like arcade shooter called TxK last year on the PlayStation Vita and planned to release it this year for PC and home consoles. Standing in the way of those plans is Atari, which threatened legal action over the game due to its similarity to Tempest 2000. Jeff Minter is, of course, the creator of Tempest 2000. This hasn’t been a popular move. Minter represents the company’s heyday – he is a large part of why people associate the name ‘Atari’ with a certain era and a certain type of game. The Spy would argue that he has the right to produce a tribute to his own work. It’s not like he’s built a tribute to one of modern Atari’s recent original releases, like... er... like... hang on. Give The Spy a moment. Like Atari Fit App or Atari Casino. Classics, The Spy is sure! Classics. But they’re not Asteroids or Tempest or Centipede, which are names that nu-Atari still trades heavily on. After all, this is the company that is turning Asteroids into a gritty multiplayer survival game. Its reasoning for getting lawyer-happy over Tempest makes sense, in awful drab cold terrible business terms, but it’s already a massive backfire in terms of their standing with the games development community. They’re going after Jeff Minter. If you shoot for the king, you better not miss. And if you do miss, you’d better hope you hit a gigantic neon trapezoid that shatters into a lightning kaleidoscope so you get a million points and then you’re like “shiiiiiit” and when you come to your senses it’s 1994 and you’ve just stumbled out of the Hacienda and somebody has stolen your shoes. Spy out. The Spy
10
MONTH 2015
FACE OFF
let the flame war commence
Chris Thursten did not truly know what a living room was for before this day.
Andy Kelly thinks flat screens are enough. He also drives a horsedrawn cart.
12
Is there a future for roomsized VR gaming setups? YES We need more space for new ideas. Fifteen feet, specifically. NO A flat screen is, and always will be, the best way to play a game.
CT The obvious problem with Vive is that HTC and Valve expect you to carve out a room-sized space to play with it in. This isn’t just a headset you stick on to be transported inside of a game: it’s a hobby in and of itself, like Rock Band or an exercise bike. And, like Rock Band or an exercise bike, that carries the risk that you’ll look at it once and never use it ever again. I don’t think that’s right. If anything, the Vive’s inflated setup requirements attest to the fact that it actually works. Oculus hasn’t come up with a proper solution for movement in 3D space yet and, if it does, it’s likely to look a bit like what Valve is doing. This is what practical virtual reality looks like. If you want to crawl around inside Portal, you’re going to have to move a few chairs. I think that’s a worthy sacrifice. AK Transforming an entire room into a 3D virtual reality space is undoubtedly a cool idea. It’s like having your own holodeck! Sort of! I love the Oculus Rift, but the limitations are obvious. You can stand up and walk around, and the positional camera will track you, but you’re still tethered to your PC by a wire. But all this Vive stuff just makes me think of the Kinect, which Microsoft always demoed in vast, cavernous mansion living rooms that very few normal humans actually have. Turning a room into a gaming space isn’t practical in the real world, especially if you share a flat with someone. It’s a rad idea, but it feels more like a proof of concept to me than a thing people will actually use in place of a monitor or TV.
AK OK, that does sound amazing. I want to be in that spaceship, right now. But I question whether I or anyone else would want to spend hours in that virtual starship. One of the biggest problems with VR is comfort. I haven’t tried Vive yet, but it’s still a big plastic box you strap to your head. Valve will definitely design some amazing demos that may be even more impressive than anything we’ve already seen on the Rift. But I can’t see this tech benefiting people who like to just sit down and play a big RPG. It’s like you said earlier about Rock Band. You have to wheel the thing out, push chairs aside. That’s why the games released for Vive, or Rift, or whatever, will have to be shorter experiences. And that’s not really what playing games is about for me. Sitting on a chair looking at a flat screen is. We don’t need anything more than that. Forget it. Scrap the entire project, Valve.
CT All right. Try this. You put on your Vive – let’s say that it’s light and comfortable, which it is popularly reputed to be – and your face doesn’t end up hot and slick with sweat as can be the case with the Rift. You put it on and find yourself transported into a VR replica of the room you’re already in, but your chair looks like a cool space chair from the future. Your keyboard and mouse map onto their real-world counterparts, but they are composed of pure light like those cool iPads everybody has in Mass Effect. Your monitor is no longer a lowly 26 inch 1080p deal, but a 3D portal into European Truck Simulator 2 or whatever it is you’re currently playing. You look around the CT I don’t think anybody’s arguing that it’ll replace room: you’re in space! Again. your monitor. The point is that it can deliver The You get your sitting-down, flat-screen experiences that the monitor simply can’t. I experience – but better. Virtual reality. agree that calibrating the space required debate is That’s the dream. against cavernous American living rooms over – but whose is going to lead to problems for people argument has AK While I’d love nothing more than to everywhere else in the world, but we’re moved your transform my living room into the cabin told that the minimum it requires is six furniture? Let us of a heavy goods vehicle (and I’m not even foot by four foot. That seems reasonable. know @ being sarcastic), I think it’s ultimately a I’d be willing to make space for that. pcgamer. step too far. We’ve reached this weird stage Here, I’ll sell it to you: imagine a game with technology where we do things because where you’re the commander of a fleet of we can, not because anyone actually wants it. The starships, issuing commands from a living room-sized Vive is another example of this. We can turn our command deck in a glass dome on the roof of a capital bedrooms into Portal chambers, but does that really ship. You walk around the actual space, checking maps offer anyone more than just playing on a regular and hitting buttons to FIRE EVERYTHING. You screen? No. It doesn’t. want to do that, don’t you? Don’t lie to me. May 2015
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