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Minecraft on Hololens
The
100
The future of the biggest game in the world
GREATEST PC GAMES
No Man’s Sky
22-page special
the game of 18 quintillion planets comes to PC
XCOM
Why Firaxis’ strategy sequel is the PC exclusive you deserve
PREVIEWED
HITMAN
Did ABsolution Break the series?
Star Wars Battlefront Ghost Recon Wildlands Mirror’s Edge Catalyst The Division Dark Souls III EITR 282
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#282 september 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, Tyler Wilde, Jon Blyth, Edwin EvansThirlwell, Ben Griffin, Jordan Erica Webber, Daniella Lucas, Tom Marks, Matt Elliott, Dave James, Ian Dransfield, Tom Sykes, Keza MacDonald, Shaun Prescott 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
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GREATEST PC GAMES
76 C h r i s T h urs t e n
No Man’s Sky @cthursten “It’s great to see a game emerge from No Man’s Sky’s lofty promises.”
52 A n d y Ke l l y
Top 100 @ultrabrilliant “Our annual reminder of how amazing the PC is as a games platform.”
86 T o n y E l l i s
FFXIV: Heavensward “Because apparently the fluorescent pompoms of the Churning Mists is an actual thing.”
SEPTEMBER 2015
5
Contents
#282
september 2015
Subscribe to Check out our digital bundle! See p74
46
Monitor
08 THE TOP STORY
Using HoloLens with Minecraft.
10 OPINION
Andy vents about gaming diversity.
12 THE SPY
Is Dawn of War 3 about to happen?
14 FACE OFF
Do music games belong on PC?
16 SPECIAL REPORT
Developers react to Steam refunds.
18 ESPORTS
ESL One Frankfurt’s Dota finals.
Features 46 XCOM 2
Firaxis brings procedurally generated levels to Enemy Unknown’s PC-exclusive follow-up.
52 THE TOP 100 GAMES
Our annual countdown of the 100 greatest PC games you owe it to yourself to play, in 22 majestic pages.
76 NO MAN’S SKY
Hello Games’ Sean Murray on what you actually do on those 18 quintillion planets they’ve generated.
Network 80 PLAY
How to join the fun on our amazing Minecraft server.
81 SEND
Your letters on important matters.
get your free gIFT worth
£4 6
SEPTEMBER 2015
20
46
Find out what happens when the Clancy games get bigger and sillier.
Samuel talks to Firaxis about new enemies, procedurally generated levels, new classes and what else is coming in the next XCOM.
Ghost Recon Wildlands
XCOM 2
52
The PC Gamer Top 100 The PCG team assembles to figure out our yearly list of the best PC games.
20
52 TOP
100 GREATEST PC GAMES
76
Reviews
84 Infinifactory 86 Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward 88 Rocket League 90 Ronin 92 The Magic Circle 94 Lego Minifigures Online 96 THEYR’E BACK 96 Tales From The Borderlands: Episode 1 97 HuniePop 97 Tales From The Borderlands: Episode 2 97 Tex Murphy: Under A Killing Moon 97 868-Hack
Hardware 100 GROUP TEST
High-resolution monitors rated.
106 REVIEWS
Our round-up of new hardware.
108 BUYER’S GUIDE Get the PC parts you need.
Extra Life 112 NOW PLAYING
What we’re currently playing on team PC Gamer, including The Witcher 3 and The Evil Within.
116 TOP 10 DOWNLOADS
84
Enjoy a space adventure inspired by the fiction of Arthur C Clarke in our round-up of the web’s best free stuff.
99
120 UPDATE
Andy checks in with survival/crafting game Rust, and we all compare the size of our virtual penises.
122 REINSTALL
Andy goes on the defensive with Hitman Absolution. Feel free to write in and complain.
126 WHY I LOVE
76
84
99
What do you do in No Man’s Sky? You mine, you discover creatures, you craft, you upgrade. Hello Games talks to us about its PC-bound game.
Chris reviews the 3D puzzle game from the makers of SpaceChem, which has left Early Access with generous helpings of game.
We’ve had a clean-up of our hardware section to make it prettier and more useful to you, including a buyer’s guide for your next gaming PC.
No Man’s Sky
Infinifactory
Hardware
In the first of our new monthly features celebrating the best bits of games, Phil spotlights Koth_harvest from TF2.
128 MUST PLAY
Andy makes his personal choices of the best games you should play on PC right now.
SEPTEMBER 2015
7
O P I N I O N T E C H G A M E S
The PC Gamer view of the world
the top story
Minecraft for real
Exploring a Minecraft world using the dream-weaving HoloLens
T
he HoloLens demo on Microsoft’s E3 stage blew my tiny mind, and judging by the internet’s reaction I was not the only one. I could not understand how what I was seeing was possible. It had to be smoke and mirrors, surely; I could imagine a static virtual hologram, like a diorama, but a fully interactive one on the scale of a Minecraft world? Naw.
the table, a VR hologram that he could interact with in a 3D space. It looked like something from a sci-fi movie, as well as a smart broad sell for Microsoft’s device. It was a slightly misleading demo, as it turns out. When a rather clunky prototype of the HoloLens headset was lowered onto my head at Minecon in London, I discovered that rather than bringing full-scale holograms to life right in front of me, the headset actually only lets you view
On-stage at the Xbox Conference in June, Microsoft’s Saxs Persson showed how, wearing the HoloLens, you could start by playing Minecraft on a virtual display on a wall and then map it onto a table just by saying the words “create world”. We saw, from the perspective of the HoloLens wearer, an entire Minecraft world rise from
I can see people using this to keep track of collaborative builds, or just to admire them
8
SEPTEMBER 2015
them in a window in the centre of your vision. As a speccy nerd who’s been wearing glasses for almost all of my life, I’m used to seeing the world through a letterbox, but if you’re normally blessed with peripheral vision then this will probably be a bigger disappointment. On the plus side, you can still see the people and objects in the room around you perfectly well, making it definitively easier to make a cup of tea wearing HoloLens than Oculus Rift. It’s like looking at the room through dark sunglasses, but the holograms themselves are super-bright and colourful. You can tell HoloLens to display a screen on any blank wall, or – and this is the magic part – you can look at a horizontal surface and make it do the thing where the Minecraft world rises up in front of you.
opinion
Minecraft builds can be positioned on any flat surface.
games
tech
Highs & lows
THE MONTH IN PC GAMING
highs Rocket League
It turns out all we needed to love football was futuristic cars.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
The footage of the game’s Dawn Engine looks completely nuts.
MGSV: The Phantom Pain
Looks like a GOTY contender based on the amount of game they’ve shown off.
Dragon Age: Inquisition DLC
Upcoming DLC is abandoning last-gen consoles – this hopefully means bigger and better new quests.
Chime Sharp
Brilliant rhythm action puzzler gets a successfully Kickstarter-funded sequel.
Assassin’s Creed Syndicate
The port will apparently be better, but it means we’re getting it after consoles.
Shenmue III
From this point onwards my HoloLens demo worked precisely as advertised at E3 – it was fully, impressively interactive and reactive. Walking around a virtual, tabletop Minecraft model in physical space, you can examine it in detail and lean over it like a giant to peer inside the buildings. You control everything by voice and gesture alone, and it made me feel weirdly powerful. Minecraft is the ideal toy to play with using this technology, because there’s so much to look at. HoloLens turns you from a player into a kind of omniscient deity, able to see far more of the world than the blocky players
within it can. Pinching two fingers in front of you, you can grab the world and drag it around, peering through the layers of cobblestone and dirt, discovering the underground ravines and strongholds hidden beneath a cheery village. Minecraft is all about the mysteries below the surface of the earth. You can’t actually place blocks, at least not in this early demo, but you can play with the world in the way that a god might: changing the weather, placing beacons to guide players, summoning lightning strikes to set things on fire for no good reason other than boredom. I can foresee people using it to keep track of collaborative builds, or indeed just to admire them. Imagine being able to see all of the incredible things that people have built in Minecraft in your living room like this. As a long-term Minecraft tourist, it’s a very appealing idea. Keza MacDonald
Successfully Kickstarted but missing some of its more exciting stretch goals.
Bad survival games
After playing three rough survival games in a row, Andy’s burning out on the genre.
Deadpool
Average tie-in returns to Steam, breaks into the top-selling games for £30.
Broken Bat
Arkham Knight is still a mess on PC and no longer for sale at the time of writing.
LOws
SEPTEMBER 2015
9
opinion games I tech
o P I N I O N
Experimental music puzzler Fract OSC.
Gone Home has some light puzzling.
Her Story is told in a unique way.
Game or not game Are the following games or not games?
1. Her Story
2. Dear Esther
3. Proteus
4. Gone Home
5. To the Moon
6. Tom Senior
Answers > 1. Yes 2. Yes 3. Yes 4. Yes 5. Yes 6. No 10
SEPTEMBER 2015
opinion games I tech
Point of view
“We need to embrace games of all kinds” Dear Esther’s setting is as haunting as ever.
Dismissing games that are challenging, innovative, or subversive is narrow-minded and, ultimately, dangerous
O
ne of the best things about PC gaming is that it’s an open platform. Anyone can make games for it. The result is a huge variety of weird, wonderful indie games that challenge the very concept of what a game is. And, amazingly, people have a problem with this.
To the Moon is the saddest game ever.
Look at the Steam user reviews of any game that’s even vaguely challenging or imaginative – stuff like Dear Esther, Proteus, or Gone Home – and you’ll see the same depressing comments: “Not a game,” “Hipster garbage,” “Walking simulator.” These are people who declare Call of Duty an “actual game,” while anything experimental is automatically “artsy crap” – as if they’re the ones who get to define an entire art form. It’s a damaging, infuriating mindset, and it needs to die. It’s by no means a new phenomenon. Creative fields have always had their dissenting voices, whether it’s the German expressionist filmmakers of the 1920s, bebop jazz pioneers in the ’40s, or contemporary abstract artists. There have always been ignorant naysayers, terrified of having their narrow preconceptions challenged. “This is not what I understand this thing to be! And because of this I choose to angrily reject it!” The same old story. The not-a-game crowd are no different. Their unwillingness to experience new things is, in fact, stifling the very medium they claim to love. Yet ironically, they’re the same people who’ve been complaining their whole lives that games aren’t taken seriously. Now that the medium is maturing, and being subjected to the same critical and social analysis as other art, they feel threatened. Last issue I reviewed Her Story, a brilliant example of interactive fiction that tells its story in a way completely unique to videogames. And, predictably, some of the
comments were of the not-a-game variety. To me, this is madness. To reject a game that actively tries to make the medium you cherish better – by advancing storytelling beyond cutscenes and the rules established by cinema and literature – is self-defeating. It should be embraced. But some look at Her Story and reflexively see a game that justifies their baseless, backwards prejudices. “There’s no goal!” “There’s no reward!” “IT’S NOT A GAME!” But Her Story IS a game. It’s a puzzle game. The difference is, you’re not slotting together Tetris blocks: you’re solving it in your mind, shaping and connecting a narrative from fragments of video. It’s a game, but played in a different way. It’s daring, imaginative, brilliant. There’s a myth that critics favour these games more than others, because it makes them feel superior. But that’s bollocks, and stems from the same kind of pig-headed anti-intellectualism. In the very same issue that I gave Her Story 90% we ran a cover feature on Hitman, one of the least niche games in the world. Part of the problem is that people think they need to take sides. But it’s entirely possible to enjoy both mainstream and experimental games equally. I do, because I love games. Not just some games or certain games, but games. The heartening thing is that, despite everything, a lot of bold, artistic, subversive games sell well, giving their creators the incentive, or means, to make more of them. As I type this, Her Story is riding high in ‘popular new releases’ on Steam. So despite the not-a-game crusaders, there’s still an open-minded audience out there willing to give them the time of day. If videogames are ever going to grow, we need to stop bluntly categorising and dismissing them. Weird, experimental games that push the limits of the medium can happily co-exist with big budget blockbusters. Without them, the world would be a very boring place. Andy Kelly
the naysayers are terrified of having their preconceptions challenged
SEPTEMBER 2015
11
opinion games tech
T H E S P Y
T
w h o wat c h e s t h E s p y ?
he Spy understands that change is a good thing. A change of trousers; change for the bus; even a spot of regime change, if it’s a suitably slow Thursday. Even so, The Spy understands that change is also scary. Think about the things you’d never want to change. A defused bomb. A sleeping grizzly bear. The games industry as you remember it ten years ago. Well, good news! The games industry agrees with you (the bear’s mind is its own). Novelty and innovation will always lurk on the periphery of this business. You can hear it calling to you on Kickstarter, in the sound of people trying out virtual reality for the first time, even in the deafening silence that used to be known as the human Peter Molyneux. Here’s some comfort: reboots are coming. Reboots, sequels, prequels, requels and preboots. Deus Ex! Mirror’s Edge! Hitman! Io Interactive is, to its credit, trying something new. On December 8 this year you’ll be able to buy the game, become a dour bald man, and creatively murder people. However! The game is not actually out until 2016, when all the missions will be in place. Early adopters get to play an ‘in-progress’ version, with live events adding new targets to existing
areas and so on. But Io seems more than a little confused about what this method of game development is actually called. It’s giving players an early access option, but Hitman won’t – the studio says – be an Early Access game. “All of the content we release live to our players will be complete and polished,” reads the FAQ. An episodic game, then? Hm. “We think the word ‘episodic’ sets up the expectation that we will sell individual content drops for individual prices,” Io continues. “That’s not something we’re planning to do. That said, there are some episodic elements to the story in the sense that it’s being delivered in chunks over time.” The Spy is sure that there’s a word for when something is delivered in chunks over time, but let’s move on. “The thing is, there isn’t really a term to describe what we’re doing,” Io writes. “That’s why we’re calling it a ‘live’ experience because it feels like
showing the surface of an alien world and helpfully subtitled ‘alien worlds’. Said world has rivers of orange goop, coral-like fungal growths, and a yellow sun peeking through Venusian fog over towering mesas. It doesn’t give much away, but suggests that Frostbite is capable of generating far more natural and detailed open worlds than the ones we tumbled around in the first game.
A new dawn
Sega has registered a web domain for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III. This was rumoured as far back as 2010, but THQ’s collapse seemed to put the idea to rest. When Sega acquired the Games Workshop licence, a sequel was what many fans asked for – what they got was Creative Assembly’s exciting-looking, silly-named Total War: Warhammer. Now it looks like they’re going to get both. Relic reinvented Dawn of War between the first and second game, transitioning from a more traditional RTS to a squad tactics game with RPG elements. It would be exciting to see another shake-up: perhaps by the time 2016 or 2017 rolls around we’ll be controlling our Space Marines in third person, or, at a stretch, ushering them through the mundanity of day-to-day life in a grim future where there isn’t war any more because we all got together and hashed it out. Speaking of Warhammer spin-offs: the Warcraft movie is coming. The Spy has heard many reports of strictly embargoed footage from Comic Con. These paint a (largely positive) picture of a CGI-heavy tale of worlds colliding. The orcs are far more sympathetic than in the original game – many are simply looking for a new home. The humans, meanwhile, have very shiny armour but are probably assholes – just like real humans. Into this conflict baby Thrall is born, and is even seen floating off down a river at some point just in case you didn’t pick up on the Moses metaphor. The Spy is a little torn on this one, honestly: by all accounts it should be terrible, but director Duncan Jones hasn’t made a bad movie yet. Still, that could always change. The Spy
rivers of orange goop, coral-like fungal growths, and a yellow sun
The Spy doesn’t know what you’re talking about. The Spy has always looked like this.
that’s what it is – something that lives, grows and evolves.” How do you pronounce ‘live’ in that sentence? Is it ‘live’ if players encounter the same missions at different times? Does it ‘live’ simply by virtue of the fact that it changes? Change and life aren’t the same thing: just ask that bomb from earlier. Lost in all of this confusion is how much will actually be available to players this December. As for when it might make sense for reviewers to offer a verdict on a game that is both episodic and not, early access and not and, in the manner of cosmic horror both live and not, well, The Spy leaves that up to the reviewers. And possibly an exorcist. A single new piece of concept art for Mass Effect: Andromeda slipped out of San Diego Comic Con
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