A wizard blasts away a hunk of hillside with an explosive spell. “Did you see what just happened?” asks David Georgeson, EverQuest Next Director of Development.

Until now we've been talking about races, classes, and weapons. You know, fantasy MMORPG stuff. Georgeson loops the animation and I raise my eyebrows as chunks of hillside fly and tumble out of the explosion. So, deformable terrain?
"We can blow up anything at any time, anywhere."
“Yes. Something that every designer I know of has always wanted to do, and which we’re doing in this game, is that every single thing in the world is composed of pieces,” he says. “We can blow up anything at any time, anywhere.”

Eyebrow levels are now stable at 50 percent elevation. What if a bunch of mages get together and try to dig as far as they can?

“Yep, they can,” says Georgeson. But certainly they can't just keep digging and digging, and, what—fall into a secret underground cave?

"Exactly," he says. My eyebrows flutter toward the ceiling as Georgeson explains that players can explore a procedurally-generated, randomized underworld by “phasing through with magical spells or digging through with equipment,” and this winter will get access to the developer’s voxel building tools in a separate free-to-play game, EverQuest Next Landmark, which he describes as Minecraft’s creative mode in thousand-player persistent worlds.

I thought this was just about elves, orcs, and hotbars?

Elves, orcs, and hotbars
 


Let me back up. I've just walked into the hotel room, and we're talking about elves, orcs, and hotbars. Georgeson tells me that EQ Next is “not the regular MMO that you’re used to playing,” and I think, a bit cynically, here we go, tell me how you’re totally reinventing the fantasy MMO genre.

“For EverQuest Next, we had been building what I consider the cardinal sin of any MMO, which is pretty much building the same game over again,” says Georgeson. That's true, two prototypes have already been scrapped on account of not reinventing the fantasy MMO genre totally enough.

"For EverQuest Next, we had been building what I consider the cardinal sin of any MMO"
“So we changed the team out—that’s when I got involved in the project—and we got this incredible veteran set of people together that had done like, four or five MMOs each, and had many, many years of experience." That team, says Georgeson, rethought everything—classes, guilds, friends lists—and rebuilt EQ Next as a "fundamentally different" MMO.

At the most superficial level, that rebuilding led to a multiclassing system. There will be “five or seven” classes available at the start, with “over 40” classes to be discovered in the world. Each class comes with four skills, which can be mix-and-matched to create wizard-rogues and other combos. Georgeson says these skills are all unique. "It’s not like this wizard has a damage spell and it's this color, and the thief has a damage spell that’s this color."

He feels the same way about weapons. "There should be a difference, in my opinion, between a longsword and a halberd," Georgeson says firmly, as if it's a controversial opinion. “If I have a warrior class and I have a halberd and a longsword, I might use the halberd to do sweeping attacks that clear out areas around me, or a shockwave effect on the floor, whereas if I use the longsword I might be able to do a lot of damage to a single foe, or do some blocks and parries and things.”

Below the surface
 


These features alone don't make EverQuest Next "fundamentally different." For instance, Georgeson wants players to keep their eyes where the monsters are, not playing the hotbar "whack-a-mole" game, but there's still a hotbar. It just has a maximum of four weapon skills and four class skills at any given time. It's still familiar.
"If we make the first player city destroyable, it’ll be a player parking lot, right?"
Likewise, movement has been redesigned with a parkour system. Contextual actions make long-distance traveling a series of vaults, tumbles, and double jumps rather than a monotonous run with a weighted-down ‘W’ key. Special abilities, such as the wizard's "Flash"—think Dishonored's "Blink" ability—add even more variety and platforming skill. This is a nontrivial new feature, but not the big, fundamental change I'm looking for.

And this is when Georgeson starts terraforming a hillside.

Everything in EQ Next's environment is destructible. Every building and every rock can be smashed. Can be, but players won't always have that power. “If we make the first player city destroyable, it’ll be a player parking lot, right?” says Georgeson. “But the monsters might be able to destroy it, so a dragon attack could come in and knock down your city wall.”


"If you can destroy stuff, how cool would it be if what you destroy had an effect on the world?"
Not only can matter be blown into its component bits, it can be created. “An earth wizard can raise a stone wall, so now for the monsters to reach you, they either have to break down that wall or go around it," says Georgeson. "That’s cool crowd control."

Georgeson has only hypothetical scenarios, sharing the potential without committing to specifics. As part of a public quest, players could work together to build city walls. In a PvP scenario, one group might be defending a keep, while the other breaks down the castle walls with catapults. In a PvE scenario, players might have to destroy a giant floating island. And there's a jokingly-called "parfait" of procedurally-generated underground areas, for which archaeological lore dating back 10,000 years was written to inform, which we'll explore by digging into the surface of Norrath.

Players will be able to permanently build on land they acquire—details on that are a bit sparse—but day-to-day, combat related creation and destruction isn't persistent. The world heals the same way corpses fade out over time, Georgeson tells me.

But that doesn't mean your actions will be inconsequential. "If you can destroy stuff, how cool would it be if what you destroy had an effect on the world?" asks Georgeson.

A human wizard in Norrath's new Ashfang area

Orcs must die, or not, we don't care
 
"We’re embracing the fact that we want change in the world," says Georgeson. He uses orcs as his hypothetical example to explain how "emergent AI" enables permanent change:

"We’re embracing the fact that we want change in the world."
Orcs are bad. They like killing adventurers and stealing their gold. They don't like to be near guards or cities, because "they'll get their butts handed to them." Orcs like lonely stretches of road with occasional wanderers.

EQ Next knows what areas are patrolled and populated, and how many adventurers have traveled any given stretch of road. So, rather than the designers plopping down static orc camps, orcs are created with these likes and dislikes and "released into the void." They wander around looking for just the right stretch of road to camp near, and if guards start coming by, or players beat them back too often, they'll move.

Now that's interesting. I'm not excited by the "theme park" style of MMO design (yeah, I'm an EVE player), where content is added and then we stand in line to consume it. I don't even like the word "content" used to describe an experience. I do like the idea of logging in to find that orcs are encroaching on my town, and that players are grouping up to whack at their skulls until they leave—doing something for a reason.

A Void Goliath hulking menacingly, because that's what Void Goliaths do.

I hope—and now here I am with my own hypothetical dream—that these orcs cause a real problem and aren't trivial to fight. My biggest problem with the "theme park" design is that I never have to identify and solve a real problem. Instead, I'm given a target which I then mine for XP and loot until I'm powerful enough to fight the next target. Boring. But if a pack of orcs can really turn away merchants and mess up my town's economy—Georgeson tells me EQ Next will simulate a meaningful economy—and killing them comes with actual risk, I'm in. I want to make meaningful decisions.

"So there’s this barn burning up on the hill, and you can see humans running around screaming and orcs chasing them," says Georgeson with another example. "As a player in a normal MMO, you’d see the guy with the quest feather over his head, you’d click on him and he’d tell you what to go do. You ignore everything he said and you go do whatever gets you the reward, probably saving the humans.

"In our game, you’re going to decide as a player what you want to do. Ignore it, go put out the barn, help save the humans, or help the orcs slaughter the humans. We don’t care, because the game is going to remember everything you did. And then the world reacts to what you did."

Wait, what happens to Qeynos?
 


A burning barn is a small scale instance, but it could be the beginning of a world-shaping event. Georgeson calls expansions "Rallying Calls," epic stories that happen because of the players, instead of around them. In yet another hypothetical series of events, he describes the founding of a small town in a previously unexplored area. Crafters build a little wall around it and venture out into the woods to explore. And then, goblins. So the players drive the goblins out. The goblin king is pissed, so he sends more goblins. The players drive them away again and build a bigger wall—maybe the NPC townspeople build a stone quarry in the process and accidentally dig into ancient ruins, who knows?—and this town is becoming a city. Now the goblin king is really, really pissed, and he calls his allies in for war.
"Just because you helped build this city doesn't mean somewhere down the line it isn't going to get destroyed"
"Unlike most MMOs where expansion content just goes out, and out, and out, our expansion content can eradicate things you've already done before," says Georgeson. "Just because you helped build this city doesn't mean somewhere down the line it isn't going to get destroyed, like if the dragons attack. And then you end up with a whole set of new stories that nobody else has.

"A couple years down the line, somebody will say, 'What was it like back at launch?' and you’ll say, 'Dude, the dragons hadn't attacked yet, Qeynos still existed, that was before the civil war...'"

This is all still hypothetical—Qeynos is just fine, probably—but the ideas are exciting. Why live in a world that doesn’t change? Why kill goblins if, in ten years, they’ll still be spawning in the same woodland camp? Here is one solution to that problem: a story collaboration between developers, players, and artificial intelligence. I hope that, ten years after launch, there really is a player who can say, “This all used to be farms, you know? Those were the days.”



We don't know when that launch will be—no release date has been announced for EQ Next, which, like all SOE games going forward, will be free to play. It's in a playable state now, but not quite populated with all of Georgeson's dreams of giant floating islands, castle sieges, orc bandits, burning barns, and goblin wars. I'd wager that it has a ways to go.

EQ Next's companion game—EverQuest Next Landmark, a creative voxel building environment which players can harness to help build EQ Next along with SOE—however, will be available before the end of the year. Really, that could have been the only announcement and I would have still lost my eyebrows—read all about it here.

Every week we pull an interesting review, feature, or bizarre ad from the PC Gamer magazine archive.

In the spirit of id Software's QuakeCon, we thought it'd be appropriate to share a Doom feature from our premier US issue in 1994. "Doom has taken control of my life," admits former editor Matt Firme. "And I'm not alone."

For full-sized images, click here and here. You may need to right-click to open these images in a new tab.

The world of Shadowrun is one where freelance trolls with dreadlocks punch transdimensional giant insects to death with their bare hands. You can't really dress it up as anything other than what it is, and the same goes for Harebrained Schemes' Kickstarted RPG, Shadowrun Returns. It's an affectionate adaptation of the tabletop game built on a low-tech engine with a surprisingly interesting story... and not much else.

Returns is set in an alternate future in which magic returned to the world in 2012, bringing elves, witches, and dragons along with it. Shadowrunners are the smugglers, mercenaries, freelance ghost busters, and master hackers for hire that make their way in between the cracks of the magitech-meets-futuretech dystopia. The player takes on the role of one such 'runner, on the trail of an old friend's killer while putting together a diverse team of up to four to pay the bills. This takes place across a top-down, isometric world supported by turn-based combat and text-based dialog trees.

You won't starve for character creation options, with most of the tabletop game's core abilities represented.

You'll have your pick between the standard fantasy races (who are actually mutated humans in the Shadowrun universe) like elves, dwarves, and orcs, each with different strengths and limitations. Class options range from support casters to spirit summoners to the self-explanatory Street Samurai. The possibilities are bountiful. I picked a troll with dreads who punches things in the head.

Thrust into the world with only a thirst for violence and an '80s action hero disdain for authority, my character, Punchgar the Blooded, found himself wrapped up in a mystery wrapped up in a conspiracy wrapped in a bigger conspiracy. While the first two acts kept my attention with their sense of paranoia and slow trickle of clues, the third overstayed its welcome a bit. I felt like Jack Bauer in the latter half of any season of 24, asking, "Okay, who's the real main bad guy? And do I get to punch them in the face yet?"

Special dialogue choices feel pointless, since lacking them never impedes your progress and rarely even makes your life harder.

The narrative is aggressively linear for an RPG, shepherding you from one map to the next without any real opportunity to explore or forge your own path. Situations in which a character's skills come into play out of combat—such as having enough charisma points to talk past a guard—are largely pointless, as they seem to only save you time in the dialogue tree at best. I never even ran into a situation in which my lack of conversational skills (Punchgar isn't what you'd call a "people troll") made me have to fight anything. Asking "pretty please" a few more times almost always gets the same results, making points in those non-combat skills feel wasted.

While the storytelling has its ups and downs, combat is definitely a strength for Shadowrun Returns. With a diverse crew, any given round of combat could see you summoning a spirit, throwing a concussion grenade to force your enemies to skip a turn, and unloading with machine gun fire. All this while your Decker (read: super hacker) is in cyberspace, represented by a completely different map, trying to complete a combat mini-game to cut off the enemy reinforcements. Early on, most fights will feel like pushovers (and too far between), but some of the later encounters can be on par with XCOM: Enemy Unknown's Classic Mode. Even with the best party and the best gear, a couple of small mistakes could kill you.

The later combat encounters exude the creativity of a clever tabletop gamemaster, and are some of the high points of the campaign.

While the bundled campaign offers a decent amount of content for a $20 game, Shadowrun Returns also comes with a flexible editor that will feel intuitive to anyone with at least a basic understanding of scripting and triggers. The editor, in fact, is a fair bit more powerful than the campaign would suggest, offering functionality you wouldn't even know existed from having played through. If you're all right setting your campaign in Shadowrun's futuristic Seattle, you'll have access to all of the assets used to make the game. Otherwise, you can import your own or even edit existing ones without an external program.

Shadowrun Returns' bang-to-buck ratio is largely going to depend on the quality of content that springs up from the devs and the community after release, but as it stands today, it's a mostly average RPG running in a visually underwhelming engine. Between the varied, challenging combat encounters and the somewhat above par (if barely interactive) plot, it's worth the 20ish hours it will take to complete. Like the life of a Shadowrunner, it drags in places and shines in others.

Remember Microsoft making some noises about the Xbox One’s cloud-rendering power? To somewhat offset the fact they’re jamming a weaker GPU into their gaming slab than Sony is with the PlayStation 4, Microsoft is employing 300,000 servers to bolster processing of “latency-insensitive computation”. And now Nvidia has just announced CloudLight, something which sounds more than a little bit similar.

Nvidia released a technical report on CloudLight on their website outlining what it could mean for games. They call it a system “for computing indirect lighting in the Cloud to support real-time rendering for interactive 3D applications on a user’s local device.” In practice, this means Nvidia can use GeForce GRID servers to compute a game engine's global illumination to ease the load on your gaming device of choice.

And that seems to be key here - CloudLight is being designed to run across both tablet, laptop and desktop gaming rig, and adapt the way it works according to the device you're using. A gaming rig, for example, would use photons to represent global illumination, which is a more hardware-intensive than the irradiance maps Nvidia use for tablets. Both would still utilise cloud-based computing to aid the lighting of a level, but the higher quality option would require a higher-powered PC.



Lighting is a useful process to move to the cloud, because lighting lag is far less noticeable than other game elements like sound, or physics. In Nvidia’s video presentation they show the impact of latency on moving light sources, and it’s not until they get above the 500ms mark that lag becomes an issue.

“We found, empirically, that only coarse synchronisation between direct and indirect light is necessary and even latencies from an aggressively distributed Cloud architecture can be acceptable,” the technical report states.

One of the big worries about this sort of tech is what happens when our connection to the cloud drops out, as it inevitably will - I’m looking at you . Nvidia claims that as indirect illumination is view-independent, it’s robust enough to stand up against short network outages. “In the worst case,” the report claims, “the last known illumination is reused until connectivity is restored, which is no worse than the pre-baked illumination found in many game engines today.”

DiRT Showdown's global illumination is a struggle for Nvidia cards

It sounds like a rather neat way for Nvidia to get around their current hardware’s limitations when it comes to processing global illumination, especially for rigs with weaker graphics hardware. But quite what it’s going to be like for developers to code for - and whether those Nvidia cloud services will still be serving your games a few years down the line - is still up for debate.

I’ve got my own questions for Nvidia about this, but what would you like to know about CloudLight?

In typical sci-fi fashion, Prey 2 has been through more than a few plot twists. It was dead, then it wasn't, then it was in suspended animation. There was talk of political machinations, of failed expectations, and - most surprisingly - of a developer switch, with the game rumoured to be in the hands of Dishonored developers Arkane. Now, in an interview with RPS, Bethesda's Pete Hines has helped separate fact from fiction.

"All of that stuff, I have no idea where it came from," Hines said, of the rumour that Arkane were now developing Prey 2. "The Human Head Prey 2 thing is the Human Head Prey 2 thing. Arkane is over here, and they’re doing their thing, and that’s for them to work on. We’ll be ready to talk about what they’re working on when it gets closer to release."

So what is the status of the "Human Head Prey 2 thing"? Hines says that while it definitely isn't dead, it also "wasn’t where it needed to be."

"It wasn’t meeting expectations that we had and – in some respects – Human Head had. We’re not just gonna proceed with a plan of putting this thing out until that gets addressed in a way that we feel like will be worth all this time and attention."

"We could ship it and put it in a box and be done with it, but it won’t meet anybody’s expectations. Not ours, not yours, not the consumer’s. It’d just be like, ‘What happened to this?’ Well, that’s what we would like to know. It’s not fun to make a call to pull back the reins on something like that and say it’s not coming out this year. It’s certainly not an easy decision, especially after you spent years and millions and millions of dollars creating it."

Asked whether Prey 2 still resembles what we were originally shown, Hines was less forthcoming with information. "It probably doesn’t help me to define that any further. The reason that it got delayed the way it did is because it was not hitting the quality bar that it was supposed to and needed to. That was ultimately the problem. It had nothing to do with what it was trying to do. It just didn’t hit the quality bar. It’s kind of like Wolfenstein, which is getting delayed to next year because it’s showing promise, but it needs more time and polish to hit the quality bar we expect. Prey 2 is not the first time that we’ve moved something because of that. It’s gonna come down to quality."

Giving power to the people can be a dangerous prospect - especially when those people are a game's community. There's always a chance they'll be completely unhinged. Luckily for Eugen Systems, when they turned to their fans to get feedback on Wargame: Airland Battle, they instead received a collection of features that could drastically improve the already top real-time strategy. Those features have now been implemented, and released for free in the Vox Populi DLC pack.

Wargame: European Escalation's Conquest mode has been re-introduced, and will let players fight battles requiring them to hold territory, rather than annihilating opposition forces. The mode has been introduced as an option for multiplayer and AI games, and will work across all existing maps.

For those wanting to pair up with a friend for a good old-fashioned comp-stomp, the Campaign mode now supports co-op, as well as versus play. You're also now able to select the nationality and equipment of enemy AI for skirmishes. Finally, the game has been expanded with 24 new units and 5 new maps.

Vox Populi is out now, and should automatically download the next time you launch the game.

Not Titan, but still pretty big.

Last night, Activision Blizzard reported their second quarter financial earnings. The majority of the conference call focused on the publisher's ongoing split with Vivendi, and just how rich the Call of Duties have made everyone. But, during the Blizzard section, Mike Morhaime revealed some brief information about their still-unannounced project, codenamed Project Titan. He also gave a fuller picture of World of Warcraft's recent subscriber decline.

As PCGamesN note, Morhaime hinted at a new direction for the mysterious project, suggesting that it was unlikely to arrive as a subscription based MMORPG. Morhaime reassured that the iterations Titan had undergone mirrored the development process of Blizzard's other games. He finished by confirming that no official release date had been announced, despite recent reports suggesting the game is on hold until 2016.

For World of Warcraft, Morhaime noted a "relatively quiet quarter", confirming the reduced 7.7 million subscriber figure as of June 30th, and saying that the drop was evenly split between East and Western markets. He did, however, reveal that the decline had slowed over the first quarter, something attributed to the last content update of May. With the Siege of Orgrimmar update due in the next few weeks, Blizzard hope to attract more returning players.

As for Blizzard's other projects, Morhaime said the free-to-play CCG Hearthstone was due to begin external testing "very soon", and claimed that lane pusher Blizzard All-Stars would "put our own spin on this genre, and challenge some existing design paradigms." Because that's the sort of thing that people say in a quarterly conference call.

Big numbers are certainly good for headlines and the new RAM kits in ADATA’s XPG V2 range have some of the biggest in the system memory world. Their new DDR3 modules are rated at 3,100MHz - which is some 100MHz quicker than RAM rivals G.Skill have managed so far. But how important is RAM in a modern rig? Are all those hertz necessary? Let's talk more numbers.

These new Gundam-styled memory modules are built with the new Haswell Z87 chipset in mind and have been created so that all the overclocking pain has been taken out of hitting those headline speeds. The Intel extreme memory profiles will allow you to simply select the 3,100MHz profile from your motherboard’s BIOS (yes, you’re going to have to delve into that murky world). One reboot later, and you’ll be flying along with huge amounts of memory bandwidth.

At that top speed, you're sadly going to hit some incredibly high CAS latencies (the time it takes your memory controller to call and retrieve data from your stick). Without messing with your BIOS and the XMP settings the modules sit at timings of CL9-9-9-24 when they’re running at 1,333MHz. Push them up to a nosebleed-inducing 3,100MHz though and those timings soar to CL12-14-14-36.

I told you there’d be more numbers.

System memory...Gundam style

High frequency at low latency is the ideal situation, of course. I'll have to wait until I get the sticks in my test rig to see whether high freq/high latency RAM speeds beat lower freq/low latency sticks when gaming. I foresee a lot of memory benchmarking ahead. If I had to guess, I'd be chasing lower latencies for my gaming PC instead of the Mhz.

Memory is becoming important again, and not - as you might expect - because of the new kits released for Haswell. It's AMD and their APUs which really see a massive benefit from high performance system memory.

AMD's APUs love a good bit of high-frequency memory

There's also a lot to be said for high-capacity RAM when you're running your system from a solid state drive. Tom's Hardware recently ran an experiment to see what effect more system memory had on the SSD's workload. The TL:DR of it all is that with more RAM your intensive apps are writing less to the SSD and therefore extending its operational lifespan. If you're running an AMD setup with an SSD, speedy RAM may well be a worthwhile investment.

At QuakeCon last night, Bethesda announced The Elder Scrolls Anthology, a special edition retail release containing every TES game, expansion and DLC pack. That's a hell of a lot of prison escapes, grand adventure, and stilted voice acting being packed into a single box. But if you're not tempted by an attractive re-release of games you likely already own, the developer is also packaging the ultimate in PC gaming physical rewards: five maps, covering Tamriel, Iliac Bay, Morrowind, Cyrodiil and Skyrim.

Here's what you'll get:




The Elder Scrolls Arena
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
The Elder Scrolls III DLC: Tribunal
The Elder Scrolls III DLC: Bloodmoon
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
The Elder Scrolls IV DLC: Knights of the Nine
The Elder Scrolls IV DLC: Shivering Isles
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
The Elder Scrolls V DLC: Dawnguard
The Elder Scrolls V DLC: Hearthfire
The Elder Scrolls V DLC: Dragonborn


Given Bethesda's tendency to bundle the official Oblivion add-ons onto retail discs, it's a likely bet that they'll be included as well. After all, it's not much of an anthology if it doesn't include Horse Armour.

It's a lovely looking artefact for fans of the series, but if you just want the games, there are cheaper options. With Bethesda running Steam sales this weekend in celebration of QuakeCon, expect to see Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim all get heavy discounts at some point. As for Arena and Daggerfall, both have been released as free downloads directly from Bethesda.

The Elder Scrolls Anthology will release September 13th in Europe, and September 10th in North America. It will cost £49.99 / $79.99 / €59.99 / $89.99AUD

Thanks, IGN.

Saints Row 4 now has a slightly more innocent twin, and it's planning a backpacking trip to Australia after its lewder brother was twice denied entry. Following the Australian Classification Board's decision to give the absurd sequel a "Refused Classification" status - effectively banning it from sale - developer Deep Silver Volition have released a "slightly modified" version, which, according to local distributor AIE Interactive, has been awarded an MA15+ rating.

AIE claim that the Australian version is different to the international release, "only insofar as a single short optional mission has been removed in order to comply with Australian legislation." As suspected, the sticking point for the board was down to "drug use related to incentives and rewards", and so the offending section has been cut.

" mission has been the subject of much discussion recently for featuring the use of virtual alien narcotics by the player character, which could potentially improve certain superpowers temporarily within the game," AIE said.

The other suspected trouble spot - an alien rectal probe - will, er... pass smoothly. "The Rectifier Probe weapon, which has also been part of the discussion, is still due to be released as part of the Season Pass DLC package, as has always been intended both for Australia and the rest of the world." Presumably, this makes it part of the already announced Enter the Dominatrix DLC, which has been revealed as a mockumentary style look at the game.

In a statement by publisher Deep Silver, it was revealed that the cut content was a loyalty mission featuring Shaundi - with the player using the alien narcotics to obtain superpowers. “This mission represents approximately 20 minutes of gameplay out of the hours available to purchasers,” they said. “The removal of this mission has no negative impact on the story or the superpowers and will not detract from the enjoyment players will get from their Saints Row 4 experience."

Saints Row 4 is due out August 23rd.

Thanks, VG247.