You may recall that in Doom and Doom 2, multiplayer matches took place in standard campaign maps. In other words, deathmatch had no maps designed especially for PvP skirmishes. It seems unthinkable now, because nowadays multiplayer maps are a fine art of their own (though plenty of level creators ended up making special deathmatch maps for Doom anyway). 

With Quake, id Software started adding multiplayer maps of their own, and in a recent interview with PCGamesN, Tim Willits made the claim that it was his idea. Explaining how he wanted to use remaining map fragments from single-player levels to adapt for multiplayer, Willits claimed his idea was roundly mocked.

"They [John Romero and John Carmack] both said that was the stupidest idea they'd ever heard. Why would you make a map you only play multiplayer when you can play multiplayer in single-player maps? So I said 'No, no, no, let me see what I can do.' And that's how multiplayer maps were started. True story." 

But is it true? Apparently not, according to other id Software veterans including Romero, Tom Hall and American McGee. The former wrote a lengthy blogpost on the matter, specifically denying the exchange between Willits, himself and Carmack ever happened.

"This never happened (Carmack verified this to ShackNews)," Romero writes. "In fact, we had been playing multiplayer-only maps in DOOM for years already. There had been hundreds of maps that the DOOM mapping community had made only for deathmatch by that time. DWANGO was a multiplayer-only service that had many multiplayer-only maps that are legendary today. 

"American McGee even released a multiplayer-only map in November 1994 named IDMAP01. The incredible DOOM community invented the idea of designing maps only for multiplayer mode, and they deserve the credit. The game owes so much to them."

It's worth reading all of Romero's post for the nitty-gritty, where he also discredits Willits' claim that he had designed the first episode of Quake (it was a collaboration, with Willits designing less than half of the maps). He also points out that other FPS games, such as Rise of the Triad, had featured bundled multiplayer-only maps before Quake did.

Whatever the case, American McGee denied Willits claims on Twitter, and Carmack confirmed with ShackNews that he doesn't remember the conversation happening. We'll update this story when (or if) Willits responds.

There is a high school reunion backstage at QuakeCon. The silver pots of catered food delivered by the towering Gaylord Texan above keeps everyone buoyant, and occasionally a good samaritan wanders in with a short pyramid of Domino’s pizzas. The casters are hard at work on the corner of the stage, and the on-deck circle is filled with whirring computers hardwired to LAN cable for any enterprising team looking to get a few more reps in before showtime. For the most part, the Quakers are relaxed. There is laughter and shit-talk, and enveloping bear-hugs offered between friends who haven’t seen each other in far too long. 

In recent years, fans of the mercurial Quake franchise haven’t had much reason to play outside of id Software’s yearly love letter to the franchise, but the upper echelon of the scene remains sturdy. Tim “DaHanG” Fogarty and Andrew “id_” Trulli are both in their late-20s and play for Team Liquid’s Overwatch squad—but they’ve each taken a respite from that game to form a (slightly impromptu) team for this year’s Quake Champions tournament. The lithe Shane “Rapha” Hendrixson is here—since 2008 he’s traded titles in the 1v1 dueling bracket against Alexey “Cypher” Yanushevsky. He’s entering this year’s show defending championships from both 2015 and 2016. 

I spot Sander “Vo0” Kaasjager sequestered away from the rest of the crowd, playing endless deathmatches to keep himself frosty. In his jersey and trademark gamer grimace, he doesn’t look much different from the man who famously lost to Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel in the grand finals of the 2005 Cyberathlete World Tour in what was then the biggest prize pool in the history of competitive gaming. Together, they represent the first generation of esports—the first men who dared to make a living playing video games. The world has passed them by, but they’re not leaving without a fight.

“I started playing Quake in 2001, I’ve known some of these guys for 10 years,” says id_ backstage with a tub of lunch in his hands. “Quake has a longstanding community for over a decade, and those players will always come out of the woodwork to compete. Not just for money, but for the pride and the title, that’s something that Quakers live for.”

Quake reborn

For the past seven years, the Quake game de jure was Quake Live, the still-active browser emulation of the legendary Quake III: Arena. It served as the franchise’s testament and tomb. There hadn’t been a new Quake game since 2005’s middling Quake 4, and as the esports industry hit its tipping point, id software instead chose to focus on their single-player ambitions with the ambitious Rage and the long-gestating Doom reboot. The cadre of Quake pros still showed up to QuakeCon every year to reignite old rivalries, but there wasn’t much to play for beyond that.

However, the mood is different this year. For the first time in forever, QuakeCon is headlined by its namesake game. The free-to-play Quake Champions is on the horizon, and the QuakeCon tournament, which previously focused on minor bounties in stale Quake Live brackets, now features a million-dollar Champions prizepool. You could consider it a commencement ceremony for an esports initiative that aims to make Quake a crucial fixture in the scene again. Already, Bethesda has announced two Dreamhack Quake Champions tournaments before the end of the year, and both are paying out decent prize money. The marketing here is transparent—at this point it’s harder to find a game company that’s not doubling-down into esports—but the circumstances are unique given the heritage that was already present. These Quake players would’ve gathered here anyway, but now, they get to be professionals again.

Rapha fits the bill of the long-suffering FPS pro perfectly. He’s an incredible duelist who can track down railgun headshots with his eyes closed, but he hasn’t been able to find a game that fits his skillset since the Quake scene dried up during his prime. He had a brief affair with Ubisoft’s dead-on-arrival ShootMania, and he tried and failed to find his groove on the Team Liquid Overwatch team. But that was it. He was doomed to a purgatory of yearly Quake Live matches against the same tired competition he faced as a college kid. The Quake Champions announcement changed everything. He can finally go back home.

“It’s amazing for me. I’m just excited for the opportunity to play in multiple tournaments again,” he says. “I really liked Overwatch but it feels like a lot of the skills there are confining. … I gave it my all, but Quake is just my game.”

Rapha isn’t the only one. Id_ tells me he’d consider making a full-time comeback if the Champions scene stays healthy. Anton “Cooller” Singov inked a deal with esports giant Na’Vi to return to his roots. Alexey “Cypher” Yanushevsky did the same after logging time with both Counter-Strike and Overwatch. Quake legends around the world are watching Bethesda put their money where their mouth is, and are graciously taking the opportunity to see if they've still got what it takes.

Art of the duel

It’s hard to articulate exactly what these pros find in Quake that they can’t in other FPSes, but one thing is certainly clear: there’s no true 1v1ing in Overwatch. If you’re familiar with those old CPL derbys you know what I’m talking about—two players coasting the circumference of an arena, stacking green armor, weapons, and health in hopes of winning a frantic, five-second engagement. The 1v1 format tested your twitchiness, but it also evaluated how well you could read and react to your opponent, a perfect marriage of mindgames and rocket launchers. It’s a unique, and rewarding style of play that’s been missing in our era of role-based skirmishes for quite some time. If you grew up on whip-around nailgun blasts, perhaps Soldier 76’s auto-aim might seem a little cheap. “It’s just you and the other guy. There’s no other factors. It’s just who can play more consistent, and who can outsmart the other guy,” says Rapha.

“It’s incredibly personal,” says James “2GD” Harding, another former Quake pro and someone who’s been around esports for a long time. “[In 1v1] all of your intelligence and all of your dexterity is being challenged by the best players in the world. It challenges you so much that you can never really master it, but you can try to be the best at certain things. Like, maybe you try to win a tournament by being the best at aiming, or win a tournament by being the smartest player, or being the most aggressive player. It’s very painful to lose in 1v1 sometimes, because it wasn’t the game you lost to, it’s your opponent.”

Bethesda values the format enough to corner off $330,000 of the QuakeCon prizepool to the 1v1 bracket alone. Tim Willits has called Quake Champions’ dueling the “secret weapon” to the company’s esports plan, reckoning that it’s the one thing Champions has that other games don’t. It remains to be seen if Quake can crossover like it did in the ‘90s and early 2000s, but in the meantime it’s wonderful to watch the veterans get a run at something they used to obsess over. The QuakeCon tournament was full of great matches: in 2017 we had the pleasure of watching high-stakes sets between Cooller and Rapha, DaHanG and Noctis, Av3k and Vo0. These men have wives and kids, and they were still blasting off their feet in acrobatic rocket jumps. No matter what happens from here, we at least had the chance to watch the founding fathers of pro gaming live the dream one last time.

But maybe that’s also the one thing holding Quake Champions back. Esports, like any other competitive field, needs a trickle of new blood to survive. Running back the same posse of professionals under brighter lights and a felicitous bankroll doesn’t bode well for the future. “I think in some ways we’re hoping to be replaced,” says 2GD, noting that the average age of the players at Dota 2’s The International landed somewhere around 21.

That might sound like a strange thing to say, but then again, everyone at QuakeCon was there for the same reason. They love and fear for Quake, and while they’re happy to play a brand new game for a significant wad of cash, their primary concern is the continued prosperity of their favorite game. They won’t fall on their sword, but they’ll happily welcome the next generation if they earn it.

New blood

That wish was granted on the third day of the tournament. Team 2z were completely anonymous when they walked through the doors of the Gaylord Texan. Their Twitter account sports a scant 199 followers. They are unsponsored, unsanctioned, and reachable by a blasé gmail address answered directly by the players. Mostly, they’re in their early 20s and late teens, green as grass, and stacked up against a combined century of Quake experience in the other teams.

And yet, they pulled off a clean sweep of every Quake Champions match at the show. 2z took home the team-based Sacrifice tournament with definitive wins over Team Liquid and the prodigious NOTTOFAST, and the 19-year old Nikita "Clawz" Marchinsky flat-out embarrassed Vo0 in the 1v1 championship with an icy 3-0 blow-out. They were, by far, the least famous players entering the weekend, and they exited as the undisputed best in the world.

“For me personally it was very special to compete against all the legends I grew up watching and idolizing. I think we were very underestimated LAN-wise before this event because all of them have so much more experience than us,” says Clawz, a few days after his victory. “It felt even more like that in the 1v1 tournament, where any predictions containing me among the top three were made fun of by the old legends. It felt amazing to prove them wrong and to show the world what I'm capable of.”

All four members of the 2z squad are excited about the upcoming Dreamhack tournaments: eager to defend their first-place status and clearly aware of the targets on their back painted by a legion of veterans. But they didn’t get to the top with any trickery or cheese, they’re simply outstanding FPS players who outworked their opponents in the film room and on the ladder. 

Frankly, I was surprised that they decided to choose Quake. You get the sense that 2z could easily excel at Overwatch, or Counter-Strike, or any other FPS with a healthier, less-nubile scene than Champions. One of the players, Kyle “Silentcap” Mooren has a history with Quake III and Quake Live, but the others are arriving without any ruddy nostalgia. It speaks to the game’s legacy that they still found their home here.

“I've played some Overwatch and a bit of CS:GO as well, and as much as I enjoyed them, none of them are quite like Quake,” says Clawz. “Quake is fast, brutal and ridiculously hard to become good at.”

“I like to keep this tradition, I mean to play the first and the very best, hardest shooter in the world,” says Alexander “Latrommi” Dolgov. 

QuakeCon is a high school reunion. They came across oceans to eat catered cheeseburgers, to reignite old rivalries, to remember how things were. There’s a brand new game, a lot of money, a lot of hope, and for the first time in a decade, they’re losing. For the first time in a decade, that’s the best news they could possibly get.

I’m not an athletic man, but in Doom VFR, the upcoming VR version of 2016’s hit reincarnation of id’s classic shooter, I am Death Himself. As a possessed soldier tries to shoot me, I point a teleport marker and watch as everything slows down. I duck his bullets, teleport close, and shoot him in the face with a shotgun.

After a few shots, a Mancubus starts to flash, indicating it's ready to be torn asunder. I point my cursor into the center of the Mancubus and release the trigger, teleporting myself into the center of the obese demon. The Mancubus explodes and his immense body sags to the floor, the corpse so large that I have to step out of the empty shell to move on with the fight. Clearly, VR is cool.

But even for a relatively young technology, there have been very few major game releases for virtual reality headsets. It makes Bethesda’s all-in approach a confounding surprise, but by bringing Skyrim, Fallout, and Doom to VR, the company is in a good position to change the pace. In associating some of the biggest names in gaming to VR, Bethesda is trying to set itself up as a leader in VR development, build its own internal expertise, and help jumpstart a technology that has grown in fits and starts.

“If you believe something is going to be big, you can't just say, ‘oh, this will be big in six or eight years, so let's ignore it until it's big, and then we'll jump on the bandwagon,’” Doom VRF executive producer Marty Stratton tells me at Quakecon this year. “There's so much to be learned, and there's so many opportunities to be leaders. We want to be technical innovators, so when we see something we believe in, we want to be at the forefront.”

Of the three VR prototypes heading for release this fall, Doom is by far the best. The closed-in spaces of the UAC’s corridors look sleek and sci-fi inside a VR headset, and teleporting up and down hallways to blast imps and shotgun cacodemons feels spectacular, fast, and smooth. Time slows for teleportation or switching weapons, so I always felt able to react faster and be more badass than my weak, fleshy mortal body could ever allow. No matter which weapons I used, pulling the trigger of the controller felt as natural as aiming down the sights.

Shooting for the Skyrim

Sadly, all of these reasons are exactly why Skyrim VR, which is coming to PSVR first in November and PC sometime in 2018, is the weakest of the bunch. The wide-open vistas of Skyrim look pixelated and low-res running on the Playstation headset, and the 180-degree motion detection of the PSVR meant that I had to constantly use physical buttons on my controller to rotate myself and change direction. 

Descending one of a Skyrim dungeon’s many spiral staircases was dizzying as I used a teleport button to hop down a step or two, then tap-tap-tap-tap-tap to rotate my body, teleport, then rotate again.

None of this compares to how disappointed I was when I first heard the call of an enemy bandit. I readied my sword only to find myself waving a wand in space, awkward and unsure if I was even making contact. I wiggled it around a few times and the bad guy fell over. Both of us looked embarrassed about the whole thing. Instead of feeling bold as the Dovahkiin, legendary hero of Skyrim, I felt like a child playing Fruit Ninja on a Nintendo Wii.

“Everybody says that,” says Pete Hines, VP of Marketing for Bethesda, when I complain about how the melee weapons feel. “The problem is that when you do this [he pulls a trigger on a gun], you don't detect the funkiness of the action because it's on a predestined path.” The gun behaves like a gun, in other words, and you’re pulling a trigger just like you’d pull a real-life trigger. “But when the sword swings however you move it, you notice it a lot more, now it does feel more like Fruit Ninja.”

Even though Skyrim will be coming to VR mostly unchanged, with all its quests, dialog, and NPCs in place, Hines expects that players will change how they play the game based on what feels good. In particular, he expects more players to become mages. “Because of the nature of VR and magic, it works exactly like you'd expect it to, because you're not missing the feedback.” Dual-wielding magic, in particular, works better in VR. Being able to move your hands independently gives you the chance to shoot fireballs in two directions at once, or hold a shield against one enemy while you shoot lightning at another.

Waiting for the Fallout

I enjoyed Fallout VR more than Skyrim VR at least, because the world running on a PC looked a lot better and my ability to turn in a full circle was unrestricted. Though I had the option of attacking raiders with a baseball bat, Fruit Ninja Skyrim style, I could easily ignore it since Fallout has a huge array of guns that feel good to use. Launching a mini-nuke at a Deathclaw and watching the blast in VR was every bit as fun as it sounds.

Still, it wasn’t quite right, and I’m not sure if the trade-offs are worth the momentary wow-factor of stepping into VR. Can I explore the Commonwealth Wasteland for hundreds of hours in this gear, or will I always start to feel green like an irradiated ghoul after half an hour?

These are limitations that come with taking an existing game and bringing it into VR. Problems with movement and feedback just aren’t solved yet, and these problems wouldn’t exist if a game was built for VR from the beginning. I can’t help but compare my time with Skyrim VR with Lone Echo, an incredible game that was built to showcase everything VR can do right now, and nothing that it can’t.

But for Bethesda, getting experience is worth it even if the end product isn’t quite perfect. They’ll put out the best version of their games that can exist in VR right now, and they’ll gain valuable internal experience with VR design. I can see how it’s a win-win for Bethesda to take a risk with these experiments, but I’m not as confident that buying these experiments offers much to long-time fans of these games desperate for a familiar experience in their seldom-used VR gear.

Skyrim VR is only scheduled to come to PSVR in November, with a PC release possibly coming in 2018. Fallout VR is coming to PC on December 12, and Doom VFR is coming to both platforms on December 1.

Remember Brink? Don't feel too badly if your answer is "no." Developed by Splash Damage and published by Bethesda in 2011, it was intended to blend single and multiplayer combat in a futuristic tale about a battle between the Resistance and Security aboard a crumbling floating city called the Ark. We scored it a very positive 76/100 in our review, but overall it tanked pretty badly and was quickly forgotten. 

All of this leads to today's very short and sweet announcement that Brink is now free to play on Steam. Just download it and start shooting—if you enjoy the experience, you can also opt to spring for one of three DLC packs: The Fallout/Spec Ops combo pack or the Doom/Psycho combo pack, which go for $1 each, or the beefier Agents of Change DLC, which includes new maps, abilities, weapon attachments, and outfits, which is currently on sale for a little under $2.

In case you missed it in 2011, here's the Brink launch trailer.

Damage dealing is the most selfish of gaming roles. It's not about mending the wounds of your buddies or taunting off the bullies attempting to harm them in the first place; it's about the ecstasy of climbing to the peaks of damage meters and watching ever-larger numbers splash the screen. If gaming in general is a power fantasy, a strong DPS build is the wet dream.

And sometimes they gets out of hand. Some builds are so powerful that developers pull the plug, worried that they're damaging the game itself. This is a celebration of those builds that have achieved or come near those marks: the most famous, powerful, interesting builds that disrupt a game's conventions as violently as the power chords of an Amon Amarth riff at a Chopin recital.

We know we've barely scratched the list of great builds here—almost every game has one! If there's one you think we should have included, tell us about it! 

Skyrim: Sneak Archer with Slow Time (2011)

Subtlety isn't really the first thing that comes to mind upon a first glance at Skyrim—after all, it's largely a game about some rando shouting dragons to death. But for years nothing struck fear into the hearts of giant flying reptiles and creepy Reachmen quite like Skyrim's Sneaky Archer build. It's still quite beastly, but YouTuber ESO describes it in its most broken form.

The build's cornerstone was the Slow Time shout, which you could extend by 20 percent with an Amulet of Talos and up to 40 percent by visiting a Shrine of Talos. Slap some Fortify Alteration enchantments on your ring and swig a Fortify Alteration potion, and you could push that over a minute. That's longer than the shout's cooldown. Pick up the Quiet Casting perk in the Illusion line, and you could wipe out a whole band of Stormcloaks before they even knew you were there.

Combine that with plenty of points in the Sneak line, Fortify Archery enchantments on every bit of gear, and paralysis or fear enchantments on your weapons, and you might be tempted to ask the fur-clad denizens to worship you in place of Talos. Unfortunately, Bethesda killed the fun with last year's Special Edition. Slow Time now slows down time for you as well. But even without it a Sneak Archer remains a force to be reckoned with.

The Witcher 3: Alchemy and Combat build

Most crazy damage builds feel as though they're breaking with the lore of their parent games, but The Witcher 3's combination alchemy and combat builds tap into the very essence of what it's mean to work in Geralt's profession. You're a badass swordsman thanks to 36 points in Combat, and 38 points in the Alchemy line see you chugging potions and decoctions along with making sure you're using the right oil for the right monster.

YouTuber Ditronus detailed the best incarnation of this monster setup, which focuses on stacking everything that gives you both critical hit chance and critical hit damage. Ditronus claims he can get hits that strike for 120,000 damage for the build at Level 80 and on New Game+. 

The tools? Pick up the steel Belhaven Blade for its crit potential and the Excalibur-like Aerondight silver sword for its damage multiplier. Use some other crit-focused gear along with two key pieces of the Blood and Wine expansion's alchemy-focused Manticore set and use consumables such as the Ekhidna Decoction. Toss in a few key mutagens and frequently use the "Whirl" sword technique, and Geralt becomes the spinning avatar of Death herself. It's bewitching.

World of Warcraft: Paladin Reckoning Bomb (2005) 

World of Warcraft has seen some crazy damage builds over the course of its 13-year history, but none has reached the legendary status of the Paladin class' "Reckoning bomb" of WoW's first "vanilla" years. It wasn't officially a damage setup, but rather an exploit of the Reckoning talent from the tank line that some Retribution (damage) Paladins would pick up. Originally, Reckoning gave you a charge for a free attack whenever you were the victim of a critical hit, and in 2005, you could stack this to infinity and unleash them all at once for your next attack. Build enough stacks, and you could one-shot other players in PvP.So how imba was this? In May 2005 a Paladin named Karmerr from the guild PiaS (Poop in a Shoe, if you must know) got his rogue friend Sindri to attack him for three whole hours while he was sitting down, guaranteeing critical hits, until the stacks reached a staggering 1,816. Their mission? The Alliance server first kill of Lord Kazzak, one of WoW's first 40-man raid bosses. Knowing their plan was controversial, PiaS asked a Blizzard Game Master for permission, and the GM claimed it couldn't be done. But Karmerr popped his invincibility bubble and, boom, killed Kazzak in a single shot. Alone. The devastation was so intense that it locked up Karmerr's PC for 10 seconds and the system was so unprepared by the 1,816 attacks it could only register the blow in second-long ticks until Kazzak died. PiaS posted a video, and within 24 hours Blizzard nerfed Reckoning from a 100 percent chance to a mere 10 percent chance and limited the stacks to five.

Diablo 2: Hammerdin 

Overpowered Paladins are something of a Blizzard tradition. One of the most infamous overpowered DPS builds of all time is the so-called "Hammerdin" from Diablo 2. The Blessed Hammer skill was the heart of the build, which shot out a spinning floating hammer that smacked any monsters foolish enough to get near. 

Hammerdins had been around in various incarnations for months, but the build came into its own in 2003 with the introduction of synergies. With Blessed Aim, Paladins could increase their attack rating; and with Vigor, they could boost their speed, stamina, and recovery. Damage, too, got a boost with Concentration Aura. But nothing made the build so broken as the Enigma Runeword, which sent the Paladin immediately teleporting into huddles of nearby enemies and clobbering them for up to 20,000 points of damage each. Watching it in action looks a little like watching a bugged game.

The catch? Almost everything needed to complete the build was outrageously expensive. But as the obscene number of Hammerdins dominating Diablo 2 came to show, that was never much of a deterrent.

Borderlands 2: Salvador

Forget specific builds for a second: Borderlands 2's Salvador is kind of broken by default. His class ability—"Gunzerking"—lets him fire off two weapons and reap their benefits at once, all while taking less damage and constantly regenerating ammo. Nor does this kind of destructive divinity come with any real challenge. If you've got the right weapons equipped, all you really need to do is sit still and fire away. Dragon's Dogma had the right of it: divinity can get kind of boring.

The right weapons push this already preposterous setup to absurdity. Pick up the Grog Nozzle pistol from the Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon's Keep DLC, which heals Salvador for 65 percent of all the damage he deals out. In the other hand, equip a double-penetrating Unkempt Harold pistol, which hits enemies as though seven bullets had hit them twice. Then pick up the Yippie Ki Yay talent that extends Gunzerking's duration for 3 seconds for each kill and "Get Some," which reduces Gunzerking's cooldown after each kill, and you'll always be firing, always be healing, all the time.

Elder Scrolls Online: Magicka Dragonknight Vampire (2014)

Ever wanted to be a raid boss in an MMORPG? You could in 2014, not long after the launch of Elder Scrolls Online, if you were a magicka-focused Dragonknight who'd become a vampire. You were both DPS and tank, able to take on dozens of players in PvP at once and kill most of them as well.

The root of the problem was the vampire tree's morphed "ultimate" ability, Devouring Swarm, which sent a swarm of bats down on everyone else in melee range while also healing you for everyone hit. But every class who became a vampire had access to that.

Dragonknights, though, could also use their Dark Talons skill to root all those players in melee range while roasting them with fire damage at the same time. A huge magicka pool made it even deadlier. Then a passive ability called Battle Roar factored in, allowing the Dragonknight to replenish health, magicka, and stamina based on the cost of casting Devouring Swarm. And it gets crazier. If you were wearing the Akaviri Dragonguard Set, you enjoyed a 15 percent deduction in ultimate ability costs, essentially allowing you to spam Devouring Swarm.

This was already hellish with regular Dragonknights, but players who earned the "Emperor" title in PvP might as well have been Daedric lords. Being the current emperor granted buffs like 200 percent ultimate and resource generation, leading to situations like the one in the video above. 

The easy way to stop this nonsense was always just to stay out of range (although the DK's charge ability from the Sword and Shield line complicated that). Within a month, though, ZeniMax Online nerfed it to hell.

Diablo 3: Inarius Necromancer 

How do you bring interest in your four-year-old dungeon crawler back from the dead? With a Necromancer class, obviously! At least that's what Blizzard Entertainment was apparently thinking when it introduced the class to Diablo 3 in June 2017.

That makes the Necromancer the "youngest" entry on this list, but it's no less deserving of the honor. The damage Necromancers have been dishing out this summer is so crazy that the "best" broken builds change every few weeks. Not long ago the top dog was the Bones of Rathma build, which basically let the Necromancer kick back while an army of skeletons and undead mages did all the hard work. 

Nowadays it's the Grace of Inarius build (which YouTuber Rhykker calls the "Bonestorm" build), which centers on the set's six-piece "Bone Armor" bonus that smacks enemies who get too close with 750 percent weapon damage and boosts the damage they take from the Necro by 2,750 percent. Then the Necro goes around whacking everything with his Cursed Scythe skill with the help of another bonus that reduces his damage taken. Choose the right complementary skills and weapons, you'll soon be tromping through Level 107 Greater Rifts as easily as a katana slicing through yarn. Getting the set pieces will take a bit of grinding, of course, but it's worth it for the payoff. Until, you know, Blizzard nerfs it.

The retro-FPS Dusk, as we said in our preview earlier this week, is "not shy about its Quake-and-Doom inspiration." It's fast, bloody, loud (Brutal Doom composer Andrew Hulshult created the soundtrack), and looks (and plays) like it fell out a rupture in the space-time continuum that leads directly back to 1994. It is also, with very little fanfare, now available for pre-purchase on Steam. 

Dusk, like Doom, will ultimately offer 33 levels spread over three episodes, the first of which, "The Foothills," is playable now. One of three "Endless" survival mode arenas is also in there, if you just want to run around and shoot stuff until you die, without worrying about... well, anything else at all, really. Multiplayer doesn't appear to be live yet, but it's on the way as well. It goes for $20/£15/€20.   

When the game's good enough, the mod scene lives eternal, and there may be no better proof of that than Quake. The most ambitious Quake map ever completed was uploaded on Quake mod site Quaddicted in June, and it looks unbelievable for a game that's now more than 20 years old. Called The Forgotten Sepulcher, the map is a modern reinterpretation of the original Quake map E1M3: The Necropolis.

Built by two Quake level designers, Simon "Sock" O'Callaghan and Henrik "Giftmacher" Oresten, The Forgotten Sepulcher is a stunningly intricate and densely interconnected map that pushes Quake far beyond its natural limits. As the download page notes: "This release exceeds several limits and the only engines currently capable of running it are specially modified versions of Quakespasm and Quakespasm-spike."

Put it this way: while the original E1M3 is made up of around 1,000 brushes, which is the term for each individual shaped block that makes up a map, The Forgotten Sepulcher features 60,000. Thanks to id releasing Quake's source code online, modern updates to the engine have been able to push it further and further, doing things that would've been impossible in 1996.

But the Forgotten Sepulcher isn't just detailed—it's also huge compared to most Quake maps. There are 297 monsters to defeat and sub-bosses, if you can find the keys to their locked doors. Nearly 90 secrets are tucked away waiting to be uncovered. There's a multitude of destructive objects. Enemies burst from doorways. Also, there are fishing ogres.

It was initially designed by Oresten, a teacher from Sweden, who'd been following Simon O'Callaghan's work on creating a campaign and mod for Quake called Arcane Dimensions, and decided to make a level for it himself.

"My intention with the map was to rehash the original E1M3, a swampy green-brick monster," Oresten says. But he wanted to build on it, taking advantage of Arcane Dimensions' additional monsters and weapons, tools and engine tweaks.

"I really liked the organic look and feel of the original map Henrik made and asked him to join the team," O'Callaghan, who has worked on level design for Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Crysis: Warhead, tells me. "We then worked together over last summer and developed the map further."

The main route winds around and through towering cathedrals, climbing to upper levels and crossing areas you've been through before, and then descends into broken chapels and flooded catacombs. Along the way, you'll open up shortcuts to previous areas, giving The Forgotten Sepulcher the feel of some kind of super-compressed Dark Souls. It's always a good idea to examine the environments for broken doors you can blow open and for places you can jump up broken masonry to reach walkways above.

In other words, it feels modern, even though it's written in Quake's super-blocky and monumental level architecture. 

O'Callaghan and Oresten subdivided the first draft of the map into primary and secondary routes. You can access many areas in several different ways, often by climbing, but the primary route is lit with torches to make it visually obvious.

There are also all the little touches that remind you of its source material. There's explicit stuff, like the room early in E1M3 where there's an ogre behind bars, shooting grenades at you, and stairs that go down to the right and a great doorway to the left. This level is emblazoned on my memory from when it played at 15fps on my 486-66, but I'd forgotten how interconnected it is, just as The Forgotten Sepulcher is, too. E1M3 only had 47 monsters, though.

"I think a lot of the Quake style in [The Forgotten Sepulcher] comes from the consistent architecture and artwork," says O'Callaghan. "I really tried to keep the palette consistent and try to show progression with architecture. Like the place has been built over time and they re-used and upgraded things." 

Look across the stonework of the opening space and you can see layers of geometry that show how it's been crumbling away. The harsh angles and lighting that Quake imposes make for powerful silhouettes. "Quake is very brutal with shapes, so the architecture has to look strong and stable, like it's stood the test of time." 

The Forgotten Sepulcher is the newest addition to Arcane Dimensions, which is both a campaign of maps designed by various different Quake map designers and also a set of functional tweaks and features that are focused on making it easier to build complex maps.

A couple of months before release, though, The Forgotten Sepulcher hit even the limits of Arcane Dimensions and QuakeSpasm, the modern Quake engine on which it runs. Its 60,000 brushes are way in excess of even contemporary maps, which are usually 4,000-5,000. 

Enter a third member of the team, Eric Wasylishen, who massively optimised the compiling process by transforming hand-placed elements such as vines and corpses into special entities to reduce the load on the engine, as well as shortening compiling into minutes, rather than the days to weeks that it used to take.

"Ha, there were horror stories of maps in the late 2000s and early 2010s when they were taking a month to compile," Wasylishen says. O'Callaghan says that his work on the compiler, which has allowed designers to design and playtest a lot more fluidly, has given new life to Quake's mapping community.

And the detail and scale it's lent to The Forgotten Sepulcher makes it a real joy to explore, and a perfect place to be reminded of Quake's super-smooth feel. The gib noises are perfect, even 20 years later.

Installation is fairly straightforward if you own Quake:

Download a specially adapted version Quakespasm and drop its files into your main Quake directory.

Make an "AD" folder in your Quake folder and drop Arcane Dimension's files into it.

Download ad_sepulcher and drop its files into your AD folder.

Run it from the Quakespasm shortcut, go to MODS in the main menu and navigate to the AD folder, and you're in Arcane Dimension.

To go directly to The Forgotten Sepulcher, take the portal to the left of where you start into the second level hub, and then it's directly to your right.

Skyrim, located in the icy northern reaches of Tamriel, is an unforgiving land of freezing blizzards, ruthless bandits, and fire-breathing dragons. But nestled among all this danger, warmed by fires crackling in stone hearths, are the taverns. These cosy, calming sanctuaries offer weary adventurers respite from the cold and chaos, if only for a few minutes. The hardy, resourceful people who call Skyrim home have mastered the art of comfort and hospitality, as anyone surviving in a place as cold and brutal as this would have to. 

And as you step into one of their inns, stone walls lit by the orange glow of the fire, tables stacked with cold mead and hunks of red meat, you feel like you can rest easy. Like you’ve come home. No mudcrabs or skeevers are going to scutter out of the bushes and attack you here. No fur-clad bandits are going to try and shake you down for gold with their bows and arrows. And, best of all, those pesky ancient dragons are too big to fit through the door. 

The perpetual howl and chill of the wind is replaced by the soothing music of a strumming bard, the murmur of the other patrons and the clinking of glasses. It couldn’t be more different from the white, wild outside, and it’s the perfect place for a tired, hungry adventurer to grab a cold drink, a warm meal and a soft bed for the night. You could always just sleep on some grotty old bedroll outside, of course, but the Dragonborn deserves better.

Entering a tavern in Skyrim perfectly recreates the feeling of escaping into a homely country pub after a long walk on a cold, windy day. That instant sense of tranquility and peace. You know you’ll have to go back out there eventually, but for now it’s just you, the fire and a pint of ale. Your troubles seem like they’re miles away, although the concerns of the average person in today’s world certainly can’t compare to the Dragonborn’s quest to save Tamriel from an ancient, evil dragon which wants to devour the world. 

You’re spoiled for choice when it comes to taverns in Skyrim, and their atmospheres reflects their locations. In the city of Riften, a hangout for criminals and other ne’er-do-wells, you’ll find The Ragged Flagon and the Bee and Barb, which are the kind of establishments where you’d get a dagger in the ribs for so much as looking at someone’s pint. While the Imperial capital of Solitude boasts The Winking Skeever, a luxurious, spacious watering hole with a fine selection of quality booze and grub. And as well as these city inns, there are plenty of smaller ones dotted around the countryside, including the Four Shields Tavern.

As well as offering food, drink, and beds, taverns in Skyrim are also great places to meet reliable mercenaries. You’ll often see these warriors sitting in the corner, like Strider in Lord of the Rings, waiting for an adventurer with enough coin to hire them. In The Drunken Huntsman in Whiterun, for example, you’ll find Jenassa, a Dunmer ranger who’s handy with a bow and arrow and doesn’t seem to mind if the Dragonborn slaughters innocent people. But you’ll need 800 gold pieces to retain her dubious services.

Taverns are also rife with gossip, which can lead to some interesting quests. Talk to the bartender and you’ll hear clues about various goings on in the world, including the Imperial boy Aventus Aretino attempting to summon the Dark Brotherhood: a rumour that ultimately sees you joining its ranks. Or you might hear about a shrine to the Daedric Prince Azura, which leads to you obtaining a powerful Daedric artefact. It’s a good thing the proprietors of Skyrim’s inns are so unashamedly nosy. 

The tavern is an important part of any fantasy world, whether it’s the Prancing Pony from Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones’ Inn at the Crossroads, and Skyrim is no different. Wherever you drink and whatever your poison, these are fine places to spend your coin

One of the best things about the original Doom was how fast Doomguy could run: you weren't so much a "guy" as you were a "hurtling rocket of death". So it might have taken some adjustment when Quake released, considering how slow the player-movement was by comparison, though the then-novelty of true 3D no doubt compensated for it.

But now we know why Quakeguy ran so much slower: it was because the levels were smaller. That's according to John Romero, who posted a lengthy blogpost at the weekend explaining the adjustment. Basically, all Quake levels needed to be less than 1.4 megabytes in filesize, and to achieve that, the levels naturally had to be smaller than many of those found in Doom.

So how to make them feel less small? Reduce player speed, of course!

"John Carmack decided that we could get more gameplay out of the levels if he slowed down the player's running speed," Romero writes. "In DOOM the player went at crazy-fast speeds and it was incredible. In DOOM we could make huge maps and player speed was not a problem. 

"With Quake's maps, the hallways, rooms, and outdoor areas were all smaller because of the file size. So slowing down the player meant it took longer to finish a level, and longer to finish the game overall."

The post also goes into some detail regarding the rather clumsy (by today's standard) level editor used to create vanilla Quake's levels. Check out the whole post over here.

Like the rest of Earth’s population, I had a wonderful time with Skyrim when it released in 2011, and for hundreds of hours afterwards. Then one fateful Sunday I realised I’d spent six hours smithing weapons and mining for ore, and decided it was probably time to stop playing now. 

It turns out I got off the train early: in the intervening years the modding community has gone from strength to strength, doing its best to keep The Elder Scrolls V looking like it was released last week. With Skyrim Special Edition’s arrival in 2016 those modders have a new and improved base game to work with, and the results are getting seriously close to the hyperbolic promises made in my YouTube sidebar. ‘PHOTOREALISTIC SKYRIM: INSANE MOD!’ they shout. And ‘ULTIMATE SKYRIM GRAPHICS 2017’. And ‘Justin Bieber FORGETS words to "Despacito" LIVE’, although I’ll concede that’s not immediately pertinent here.

Curiosity got the better of me. Exactly how good can you make Skyrim look these days, using Special Edition as the new baseline and cherry-picking the finest community-made visual mods? Deadendthrills achieved a frankly fearsome level of fidelity with the original version, but years have passed since then and graphics cards have gained multiple zeros on all their spec sheets. Is it possible to get Skyrim looking so realistic that it takes a second for your brain to distinguish it from reality?

The results of my own personal quest surprised me: not only did I get the game looking beautiful enough that I want to play it all over again, but those gorgeous graphics mods have fundamentally changed the way I play now.

Finding the right mods

There’s a particular alchemy to selecting a series of mods that work well together. Very often one mod will want to overwrite another’s files, or there’ll be some overlap between seemingly disparate mods (like a snow replacer and a water overhaul) which will end up cancelling each other out. I’ll throw my hands up at this point and admit I let YouTube’s sizable Skyrim mod content creator community do the hard work for me on this front. Taking the recommendations of Fevir, NcrVet, Ultimate Immersion, and others, I compiled a list of texture mods, weather mods, flora overhauls, water improvements, armours, and NPCs—in addition to essentials like the Static Mesh Improvement Mod—that looked believable, consistent with Skyrim’s world, and above all, beautiful.

Personal preference is the ultimate deciding factor in any mod list like this, but to make Skyrim SE look like my screenshots, these are the ones to use:

Immersive Armors - Really high-quality, high-resolution and lore-friendly apparel for NPC and player alike.

ApachiiSkyHair SSE - In all honesty the vanilla hairs were fine by me, but this hair overhaul is required by Diversity (see below).

Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch - If you only install one mod, make it this. It squashes bugs and refines things you never noticed were broken or clunky before. It won’t make your game look better, but your experience will be much more polished.

Realistic Water Two - A water overhaul that improves everything from transparency effects to foam texture resolution and coloring. I like the watercolor version, but that’s just my preference.

Verdant - A Skyrim Grass Plugin - Fills the outdoors with wonderful grasses, mosses, ferns, bushes and flowers to frolic in. One of the most immediately transformative mods on the list.

Vivid Weathers - I tried out a few different weather mods, and Dolomite Weathers nearly prevailed, but to my eye Vivid Weathers produces the more realistic lighting conditions in conjunction with the lighting mods below and my chosen ENB (more on that later).

Cutting Room Floor - A lot of unused assets were found in Skyrim’s code after release, probably relics of content that Bethesda ran out of time to include. This mod puts it all back into your game, and is required by several other mods.

Simply Bigger Trees SE - Sprawling new four-hour expansion which… just kidding. It makes the trees bigger.

Forgotten Retex Project - Improves the textures of commonly found items and quest items.

LeanWolf’s Better-Shaped Weapons SE - Turns the vanilla weapons into artisanal masterpieces. You can see the individual marks on each blade and the texture where it’s been hammered into shape. Incredible. Works well with Immersive Armors to make the game feel new (and look new in screenshots).

Nordic Snow - Improves snow textures to higher-resolution images, simply. 

Ruins Clutter Improved - Like Forgotten Retex Project, this mod improves a lot of the incidental items used as set dressing throughout Skyrim—specifically, in this case, those found in dungeons and caves.

Skyrim 2017 Textures - Another hugely transformative mod, with enormous scope. Retextures much of the wild and several cities up to 4K. Use this as your base retexturing mod, upon which other more specific textures can be added.

Skyrim Flora Overhaul SE - More lovely plant life to populate Skyrim’s once brown and barren tundras. It’s compatible with Verdant, but be careful which files you overwrite when installing. Load Verdant after this to get the best from both mods. 

Static Mesh Improvement Mod - SMIM - An absolutely staggering piece of work which improves the 3D modelling of items and architecture throughout Skyrim. 

Diversity - An NPC Overhaul - Diversity completely changes the appearance of every NPC in Skyrim. The end result is a slightly disconcerting uniform attractiveness, but if you’re sick of everyone you encounter looking like Danny Trejo this is the mod to fix it.

Enhanced Lighting for ENB (ELE) - Special Edition - It’s not an ENB, but more of a pre-ENB lighting mod which changes light values so that all lights look better after you apply an ENB. To be honest I’m not sure whether I have this working with the below mod or whether one is cancelling the other out, but I’m really pleased with the end result so I’m too scared to upset the apple cart.

Enhanced Lights and FX - Removes all lights that don’t have sources, and modifies the values for the lights that do. That means it gets really dark outside at night and in unlit areas of dungeons. It also means, together with all the other mods in this list and my chosen ENB/Reshade, the lighting always looks believable. 

Enhanced Textures Detail - An incredibly clever mod that doesn’t overwrite any of your current textures but instead uses actual magic to make them look nicer in your game. Magic or .ini file values, at least.

Using the Nexus Mod Manager to install these mods and set their load order is basically essential. It’s theoretically possible to do it all manually, but in the time it would take you to modify the .ini files correctly and ensure the right files live in the right locations, you could have coded The Elder Scrolls VI from scratch. It also affords you the advantage of swapping particular mods in and out to observe their effects.

On to the installation.

Choosing an ENB

Initially I was almost disheartened when I installed this giant list of mods, loaded my game, and found a familiar-looking Skyrim staring back at me. The textures were much improved, yes, and the landscapes populated by much more realistic plant life. But it didn’t look like a generational shift. It was still recognisable, and that was exactly what I wanted to avoid. Applying an ENBSeries preset, a popular community lighting mod available for games like Fallout, Skyrim, and Grand Theft Auto, would change all that in an instant.

You’ll hear it said a lot among the modding community, but there’s no more dramatic change you can enact on your game than applying an ENB to it. Therefore, my particular pick would be paramount. There are so many competing ‘photorealistic’ or ‘next-gen’ variants of Boris Vorontsov’s famous lighting mod that you could lose days watching those transitional wipe videos on Youtube demonstrating them all, but in the end I landed on one I was very happy with: the catchily named PhoenixVivid ENB Reshade. While the majority of ENBs feature way too much contrast and bloom for my taste, this one works beautifully with Vivid Weather and my existing lighting mods. It produces dramatic but believable lighting conditions at any time of day, indoors or outdoors, and also exaggerates the depth-of-field and ambient occlusion effects for a more cinematic view.

Downsampling

At this point Skyrim started throwing out some really impressive imagery, so it was time to take things to the extreme. GeDoSaTo from Peter “Durante” Thoman will let you render games at resolutions far exceeding your monitor’s native output, and then ‘downsample’ the image so that it fits back on your screen. But you likely already know that, because you’re reading an article about making Skyrim look photorealistic. The question, really, is how much closer it can bring us towards that goal. 

My monitor’s native resolution is a slightly unusual 2560 x 1600, so I used GeDoSaTo to render Skyrim at twice that: a retina-seducing 5120 x 3200. All those high-res texture replacements really come into their own at this resolution, and the confluence of ENB, mods, and resolution produced natural landscapes that approached photorealism, given the right framing. 

It’s a frame rate killer, of course. My specs (GTX 1070, i7 2600K, 16GB RAM) were no match for that downsampled resolution and could only render the game at around 14fps. Attempting a 12K resolution resulted in a single-figure frame rate, which was frankly too unwieldy even for screenshot-hunting.

Making Skyrim playable again

My longstanding reservation with mod collections like this when I see them elsewhere is: yes, but is it actually playable? There’s fun to be had by being a photojournalist in Skyrim and scouting out the best locations for screenshots, but after you’ve spent all that effort imbuing all that beauty into the game, it’d be a shame if you didn’t actually play it. 

I was able to pull it back to around 45 fps (I know, I know) by disabling downsampling and making use of BethINI. Simply put, it’s a handy tool that modifies your prefs.ini file and comes with new graphics presets which really boost performance. Using BethINI’s ‘ultra’ preset is much kinder to frame rates than the vanilla ‘ultra’ setting, without compromising any visible fidelity. 

Meaningful gameplay improvements

I was surprised by how far I could push Skyrim, which is another way of saying I was surprised by the sheer talent and enduring commitment of the modding community. What surprised me even more, though, was that the concessions I made on my photorealistic screenshot quest actually improved the gameplay experience, too. 

Firstly: play without the HUD. Really. I disabled it just to take screenshots at first, and my inherent laziness meant that it stayed disabled while I played. I soon found that not having a bunch of quest markers, a crosshair, dialogue subtitles and health meters is, to use the Skyrim modder’s favourite word, a hugely immersive experience. Archery was suddenly satisfying again, and in the absence of a big quest arrow guiding me forth I engaged with the environments properly, looking for signposting cues and navigating using landmarks. 

All my efforts to produce realistic lighting changed the way I played, too. Suddenly going out at night without a torch was a terrible idea (a mechanic I always loved about Dragon’s Dogma), and certain areas of caves and dungeons were simply pitch black unless I illuminated them. It meant I had to treat lighting like a game mechanic, like Skyrim had suddenly become a Thief game. 

Having those little moments of revelation as I realised I had to play the game differently was a wonderful thing. It’s inspired me to go through Skyrim all over again, which is what I always secretly hoped the right collection of mods would do. And now as I do it, I’ll perpetually be on the lookout for killer screenshots.