Article by Andy Chalk

Mark Morgan may not be as "instantly recognizable" as composers like Jeremy Soule, Jack Wall or Jesper Kyd, to name just a few, but to a certain subset of gamer nerd-dom he's easily the equal of any of them. He has more than a dozen titles to his credit in a career that began in 1995 with Dark Seed II, but there are three in particular--Fallout, Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment--that established him as one of the most unique and memorable talents in the business.

And yet Morgan's work in videogames represents only a slice of what has been a remarkably varied and successful career in television, film and even as a member of the band Starship. "In the mid-nineties, I was working mainly in television when an agent friend, Bob Rice, heard the score I was doing for a network show called Prey," Morgan recently told me. "He thought that vibe might translate to videogames and introduced me to a few developers. After doing a couple of games, I discovered that the medium offered a great opportunity for me to explore my goal of writing a score that was minimal, immersive and put the player emotionally inside the game."



His soundtracks for Fallout and Planescape are particularly distinctive because the developers specifically wanted to avoid a conventional orchestral score. "Although Planescape: Torment had some orchestral elements, it still came from an ambient place in order to tell the story, whereas Fallout was simply a very dark ambient game," Morgan said. "The developers knew they liked the ambient vibe, so based on some of my prior work they approached me to explore the possibilities for these games. With Planescape: Torment it was a conscious decision to be more thematic but keep it ambient."

Yet after 1999, the year in which his work appeared in both Planescape and Civilization: Call to Power, Morgan effectively fell off the face of the Earth, at least as far as gamers are concerned. He provided some music for the Giants: Citizen Kabuto soundtrack but otherwise appeared to have moved on to other things. It would be ten years before he returned to games with EA's 2009 release Need for Speed: Shift.



"During that decade, I found myself writing music for television again. Then out of the blue, Charles Deenan, who I had worked with at Interplay and was now at Electronic Arts, asked me to contribute some tracks for Need for Speed: Shift. I had always wanted to do that genre of game, so I jumped at his offer. Soon after, I was offered Prey 2, which I co-wrote with a fellow composer, Jason Graves," Morgan said. "The experience rekindled my love of writing for games. And luckily, soon thereafter I got a call from Brian Fargo, for whom I had worked when he was CEO of Interplay. He was now running inXile, and asked if I wanted to work on Wasteland 2, followed by Torment: Tides of Numenera. Since I had worked on what were essentially the prequels to both of those games, I was thrilled to revisit them."



Morgan said his approach to creating game soundtracks is "collaborative" but the specifics of the process depends on the individual game. He cites Miles Davis, Peter Gabriel, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Trent Reznor as some of his many influences, and added that architecture, specifically the Minimalist and Modernist movements, has played a huge role in his work and "profoundly influenced" how he writes music.

"I am moved by the simplicity in modern architecture. With its space and restraint, you can see it all without being detoured or interrupted by things that don t matter," he explained. "To borrow a quote, 'Subtle enough to not intrude, but bold enough to not become irrelevant.' That s kind of my goal. As this relates to games, I want to effect the player in subliminal ways by keeping them in the moment."

He also allowed that his rather sudden re-entry into the field is driven in part by the emergence of a strengthened indie sector, which has rekindled his interest in gaming. "With the advent of crowd-funding, smaller independent developers can make the style of games that avid gamers want to play. Without the constraints of 'corporate-think,' this freedom translates to the music as well," he said. That gamer sensibility is reflected in his participation in a third game, Stasis, a far more modest Kickstarter project he asked to take part in simply because he thought it looked cool.



"When I first saw the visuals I was hooked. The creators of Stasis, Chris Bischoff and his brother Nic, have such a passion for their game it was infectious," he said. "After seeing their teaser on Kickstarter, I emailed Chris to see if they had a composer. He emailed me back that they didn t, so I talked him into letting me do it."

Despite his early association with the franchise, Morgan said he hasn't been asked to take part in the next Fallout game, although he'd "love to do it" if he could. Neither is he aware of the status of Prey 2, which he is no longer actively involved with. "I don t have any idea of how the gameplay was working out but visually it seemed really cool. I loved working on it, but for me personally I felt I hadn t quite found the sound of the game yet. Before we delivered the final score I had always planned on reworking almost all of my tracks and adding the vibe I thought was missing, but I never got a chance. There were also quite a lot of time gaps between portions of the writing which, to be fair, does happen in many games, but I wish the process could have been shorter and more focused. That said, I think if you played Jason Graves' tracks and mine as a whole score, it had the makings of an interesting soundtrack."



As for the future, Morgan said he's never really sure what it holds, but he sounds happy about his recent resurgence in games. "A lot of the music I m asked to do style-wise is a departure from what I do in TV, so it s really satisfying from a creative point of view," he said. "I also love the fact that, at least with the games I m working on at present, I'm asked, 'Can you make it even darker?' That always works for me."

So far it's worked pretty well for us, too. Of the three game projects Morgan currently has on the go, Wasteland 2 is expected first; no release date has been announced, but it's well into beta testing. Stasis should come next, nearer the end of the year, while Torment: Tides of Numenera is slated to arrive in 2015. To find out more about Mark Morgan and his music, hit up markmorganmusic.com.

School can be a drag, especially when a bunch of atomic bombs have turned your classmates into flesh-eating ghouls. This week, however, class is back in session in the Afterschool Special mod for Fallout: New Vegas, which lets you take an abandoned, decaying schoolhouse and transform it into an awesome high-tech base of operations, with a lab, a crafting center, a health station, and best of all, the CIMS: an awesome computer that can sort, organize, and store all of your worldly possessions at the touch of a button.

(Please note, the picture above of me decapitating a Fiend's attack dog with a laser rifle doesn't specifically have anything to do with the mod. It's just more exciting to look at than a picture of a schoolhouse.)

Afterschool Special (originally released a while back but recently updated with some new tweaks and features) takes place in Springvale, which is based on an actual town in Nevada, and focuses on Springvale School, which is based on an actual school in Springvale, Nevada. The in-game school isn't much to look at: just another rotting, dilapidated building in a world full of them.

Hopefully the interior of the real school is a bit nicer.
That is, until you come along. Poke around in the rubble until you find a scribbled journal entry, and you'll discover that a fellow named Paul Edgecomb had some plans to renovate the school, but the guy he hired has since gone missing. Paul lives nearby in a small repair shop with his Ghoul buddy Dean, and offers you the chance to take over the renovations and inhabit the school yourself. It's also worth noting that the custom voice work done on Paul is incredibly well done: it feels authentic and fits perfectly into the game.

This isn't simply a matter of Paul handing over the keys to the school: you've actually got to roll up your sleeves and get to work. First, you ll need to empty out the junk that litters the school floor: busted wood, desks, chairs, and other odds and ends. Being something of a jerk, I decided to dump it all in my neighbor's yard, and was a little disappointed when the desks and chairs, instead of falling into a big messy pile, just hung motionless in the air for some reason. Then I realized that a bunch of desks floating in your yard would probably be even more annoying then a pile of them. That made me feel better.


Why are these desks hovering in mid-air? Just another mystery of the Wastelands.
Once the place is cleared out, it's time to mop the floors. Two notes about mopping the floors. First, you'll be happy to know you don't actually have to mop the floors, you just have to press a button and the mod tells you that you've mopped the floors. Second, I am actually disappointed that I didn't get to literally mop the floors. Something about mopping the floor in Fallout, I dunno, it just seemed like it might be fun. How often do you get to mop in a video game? Not terribly often.
The next step is to gather some of the goodies for your new pad, like toolboxes, lockers, and other items. They will become part of the centerpiece of the restored school, the CIMS, or Computer Inventory Management System (more on this in a bit). Paul is nice enough to give you some clues as to where to look for the items you'll need, and you'll also wind up doing some random scavenging and visiting traders to fill your order. Or, you might just root through people's houses and hope they don't get too upset.


It's not what it looks like! I just killed this guy so I could steal his stuff! Okay, it is what it looks like.
Once the interior of the school is in good shape, you'll need to restore the building's electricity to power the lights and computer system. The mod is actually quite detailed in this respect, and I wouldn't be surprised if the mod s creator was an actual electrician. In additional to gathering some electrical components and batteries, you'll need to find a spare solar panel, which means another trip out into the world to hunt down the gear you need.


Surely they'll never miss it if I take just ONE of these.
You think this place looks high-tech? Well, wait until you see my setup:


Even in the post-apocalypse, it's nice to be eco-friendly.
Once you've gotten the power running, you can finally use the new CIMS, and discover what a great time-saving device it is. Typically, when my inventory is full, I'll waddle over to some container in my house and start dropping things into it, being careful not to store things I want to keep on me at all times. This isn't difficult or anything, but it tends to take a while, requiring a lot of scrolling and clicking and thinking, and then retrieving items out of the box, which is stuffed with a bunch of everything, also takes more thinking.


Punch a button on that computer, and your belongings are all neatly sorted into those lockers.
With the CIMS, you just walk up to the computer and ask it to sort any category you want. If I want to unload all my crafting supplies, I just tell the computer, and boop, all my crafting supplies are neatly stored in one location. Do I have a bunch of extra sets of armor or clothing? Beep. Same deal. Do I have 28 different guns I'd like to keep but not carry with me? Do I want to figure out which to sell and which to save, but I don't want to do it right this second? Click.


Want to empty your pockets into neat, labelled collections? There's an app for that.
When I want to do some crafting or peruse weapons or whatever, it's just a matter of opening the correct labeled storage spot. Couldn't be easier. Once you ve got your CIMS set up, you can also purchase other improvements for the school: a healing station, a crafting oven, a science lab, and a workbench. You don t have to stop there: further quests can lead you to repair the old, busted fence outside and add a garden and picnic area, essentially turning the schoolhouse into a schoolhome.
As you can tell, this isn't a massive, dramatic, or even particularly dangerous mod (unless you run into some random enemies while scouring the world for parts). It is, however, a great add-on, good for those who have run out of things to do, or providing something enjoyable to work on while taking a break from other, more strenuous quests.
The end result is a comfy and extremely useful base of operations in Springvale, with the inventory management system, an extraordinarily comfy bed that gives you the well-rested perk after just an hour s sleep, and a custom map marker for easy travel. There s even a switch on the outside of the building that, when flipped, toggles between the school's vanilla version and modded version. And, like I said, the voice work is surprisingly great.


The best kind of school: one with no annoying kids in it!
Installation: Download the latest version here. Drop the contents in your FNV data folder and make sure the mod is checked when you begin. Then head to the schoolhouse and find the note in the rubble. The only issue I noticed was the CIMS occasionally couldn't sort items that were added by other mods.

Internet. Internet never changes. Which is why, once again, we're having to cross the irradiated wasteland of rumour and speculation. There's a chance - remote though it may be - that Bethesda are readying the broadcast signal and preparing to announce Fallout 4 to whichever isolated pockets of humanity care to listen. Of course, there's also a chance that this is nothing, and that Fallout fans will be left to starve on a diet of broken, empty dreams. It's how they would want to go.

The first clue was the emergence of the website TheSurvivor2299.com. It's a countdown site, ticking down to the 11th December, and featuring the logo of the series' Vault-Tec company. The site also plays a Morse code signal, which translates to '11-12-13'. A WHOIS lookup of that site shows that, apparently, it was registered by Bethesda's parent company Zenimax.

So far, so good, but a number of factors cast doubt on the site. You can find a great rundown of evidence for and against the site's legitimacy on the Fallout Subreddit, but, to summarise, it was both registered by a different company than Zenimax usually use, and is using a different, self-branded DNS. Eyebrows were also raised at the date, which is in the dd/mm/yy format so beloved by myself and my countrymen.

Of course, the counter-argument is that Bethesda have done this to foster such uncertainty - with believers citing when Blizzard did a similar thing with one of their viral teaser sites. It's also worth nothing that the 11th December is the date of the VGAs, an award ceremony which is known for its game announcements. And for being embarrassing to watch. People have also pointed out that of course they were going to use dd/mm/yy, because 11-12-13 looks cool.

We're not done yet. There's another twist: a Fallout 4 trademark has been registered by Bethesda Softworks. Even that's far from definitive. A recent EU trademark for Half-Life 3, supposedly from Valve, was later removed when it turned out to be a hoax.

Given all this, we turned to Bethesda in the hope that they could act as the Geiger Counter against these deadly rumours. Their response? "No comment". Make of that what you will.

Those silver metal briefcases you see secret agents using in movies are cool. Walking away from explosions as if you’ve seen a million of them is cool. Destroying your enemies and slipping away scot-free is cool. You can find all of that combined cool in Briefcase Bombs, a mod for Fallout: New Vegas, which lets you build timed charges into briefcases, plop them at the feet of your enemies, set the timer, and then stroll casually away. Boom.
First things first. If I’m going to be carrying around slick silver briefcases like some kind of secret agent, I need some secret agent duds. When I load my game I find myself looking like this:


I can't carry a briefcase around in this get-up. I'll look insane.
This look is fine for bashing in members of Caesar's Legion, but I'm going to be carrying out calculated assassinations in population centers. Too suspicious.


That's more like it.
Playing as a woman, naturally, I had to use this mod just to be able to put on a suit. Also, I killed a gangster and took his fedora, but when I put it on my womanly-woman head, it turned into a pillbox hat with a veil. BOOOO. I’m an agency assassin, not a debutante. Stupid magic hat.
Now, I visit my contact, Mr. Holdout, outside a casino in Vegas. The mod lets him sell me schematics for the briefcase bomb, both versions: regular ‘splodey version, and nuke version. Yup. Nuke in a briefcase. Want. I buy both, and start gathering the ingredients. First up: briefcases! The mod makes them not just storage containers but items you can pick up and take with you. As chance would have it, I was recently at the Atomic Wrangler Casino, and noticed a bunch of briefcases in the cashier’s booth.


I'll be back.
I pick the lock, creep in, and take ‘em all (along with the money). Next, I’ll need dynamite, and I know where to find that: Powder Gangers have got plenty. I apparently was very helpful to the Powder Gangers at some point in my life, because they're all very nice and think nothing of me visiting their camps, poking through their things, and killing them to search their bodies. Weirdly, killing them in cold blood gives me karma, but stealing dynamite from their camps loses me karma.
Now I’ll need some egg timers, and that’s where being a slick secret agent is put on hold for a while as I scour every kitchen and scrap pile I can find. Since the Powder Gangers are being so nice about everything, I head to their stronghold, the NCR Correctional Facility, and nose around in all their drawers and boxes. Eventually, I find one near some guy named Hannigan, and later (much later) locate a few more in random spots in the world.
I head to Novac to use the workbench there and raid the shelves for the rest of the scrap needed. Now, to dispatch my enemies. Which enemies? The ones I’ve just made. See, every secret agent knows the first rule is to leave no traces. And I’ve been leaving traces all over the wastelands. Mr. Holdout, for instance. He knows I bought the schematics. When people start dying of exploding briefcases, he'll know who's doing it. He's got to be dealt with.


Hey? Can you watch my stuff for a minute?
I approach Mr. Holdout, put a briefcase down beside him, and set the timer for 25 seconds. Then I stroll casually away.


Thanks.
No one suspects me or comes running. It's just an unfortunate explosion with no one to blame, especially not the woman walking calmly away in the other direction. Now, to take care of that cashier at the casino. He's missing seven briefcases. He's bound to wonder why. He might start asking questions about that woman who came up to his cage and stared at his seven briefcases thirty seconds before they vanished.


Looks like he... CASHED OUT.
Next, I head back to the NCR Correctional Facility where I found that egg timer. Egg timers just don’t disappear, and that Hannigan guy has probably been wandering around asking if anyone’s seen his egg timer in a loud voice. Time to silence that voice.


Hey, Egg Timer Boy. Looks like your TIME...

... is EGG. I mean, UP. Your time is UP.
That’s all of my enemies taken care of! Of course, I still want to build a briefcase nuke and blow something up with it, but I haven’t come across any mini-nukes, which is the main ingredient. I finally find one, at Nellis Air Force Base, where a Boomer tending to a cornfield has a nuke launcher on her back. I try to pick-pocket a mini-nuke off her, but she catches me. I’m super popular here at the base, for doing good deeds I exactly can't remember, so it’s not a big deal, but I still need that mini-nuke. How to get it?
I decide to use my last briefcase bomb to bomb the Boomer to death so I can take her nuke and make a new briefcase bomb. If that sounds convoluted and pointless -- bombing someone just so you can build another bomb -- you just don’t understand the secret agent game. I shadow her until she stops to water the crops, then place a briefcase at her feet.


Looks like this year's HARVEST...

... is going to b-AGGGGGH STOOD TOO CLOSE TO THAT ONE. WAY TOO CLOSE.
After healing my wounded limbs, I build my briefcase nuke. Where to use it? Where have I left evidence that needs to be erased? Oh, wait, I know.

No witnesses. No evidence. Mission accomplished. And listen, don’t tell anyone about this, okay? I still have a briefcase or two lying around. I’d hate to have to use them.
Installation: You'll need the official Gun Runners Arsenal DLC to use this mod. It's a couple bucks on Steam.
Download the mod, extract both the .esp and .bsa files and drop them into your New Vegas data folder. Make sure you checkbox the .esp file when you load the game.

Remember when buying a game didn’t feel like a guarantee of seeing the ending? There are still hard games out there, Dark Souls flying the flag most recently, but increasingly, the challenge has dripped out or at least softened, often leading to sadly wasted opportunities. What would Skyrim be like, for instance, if its ice and snow wasn’t simply cosmetic, but actually punished you for going mountain climbing in your underpants?

With a quick mod – Frostfall in this case – you’re forced to dress up warm before facing the elements, and things become much more interesting. That’s just one example, and over the next couple of pages you’ll find plenty more. These aren’t mods that just do something cheap like double your enemy’s hit-points, they’re full rebalances and total conversions. Face their challenge, and they’ll reward you with both a whole new experience and the satisfaction of going above and beyond the call of duty.

Misery
Game: Stalker: Call of Pripyat
Link: ModDB



All those weapons scattered around? Gone. Anomalies? Now more dangerous. Magic mini-map? Forget it. Valuable quest rewards? Good luck. Things you do get: thirsty, and factions who send goons after you if you anger them. On the plus side Pripyat is much more active, with a complete sound overhaul, and new NPCs to meet – who all have to play by the rules too, with no more infinite ammo. If you can survive here, you’ve got a good chance when the actual apocalypse comes.

Project Nevada
Fallout: New Vegas
Link: Nexus Mods



Nevada is a good example of making things more difficult without being openly psychotic. Levelling is slower, players and NPCs get less health, and obvious features are now in, such as armour only being a factor in headshots if the target actually has head protection. It’s also possible to toggle some extra-hardcore options, such as food no longer healing and taking care of hunger/thirst/ sleep on the move. There’s a sack of new content, and an Extra Options mod is also available, offering even more control.

Brutal Doom
Game: Doom
Link: ModDB



Despite what modern ‘old-school’ shooters would have you think, Doom was a relatively sedate experience – fast running speed, yes, but lots of skulking in the dark and going slow. Not any more! Brutal Doom cranks everything up to 11, then yawns and goes right for 25.6. We’re talking extra shrapnel, execution attacks, tougher and faster monsters, metal music, and blood, blood, blood as far as your exploding eyes can see. It’s compatible with just about any level you can throw at it, turning even E1M1 into charnel house devastation. The enemies don’t get it all their own way, as Doomguy now starts with an assault rifle rather than simply a pistol, and a whole arsenal of new guns has been added to the Doom collection – including the BFG’s big brother.



Full Combat Rebalance 2
Game: The Witcher 2
Link: RedKit



This streamlines the combat and makes the action closer to how Geralt’s adventure might have played out in the books. He’s more responsive, can automatically parry incoming attacks, begins with his Witcher skills unlocked, and no longer has to spend most fights rolling around like a circus acrobat. But he’s in a tougher world, with monsters now figuring out counterattacks much faster, enemies balanced based on equipment rather than levels, and experience only gained from quests, not combat. Be warned this is a 1.5GB file, not the megabyte Hotfix that’s claimed.

Requiem
Game: Skyrim
Link: Nexus



Elder Scrolls games get ever more streamlined, and further from the classic RPG experience. Requiem drags Skyrim back, kicking and screaming. The world is no longer levelled for your convenience. Bandits deliver one-hit kills from the start. The undead mock arrows, quietly pointing out their lack of internal organs with a quick bonk to your head. Gods hold back their favour from those who displease them. Most importantly, stamina is now practically a curse. Heavy armour and no training can drain it even if you’re standing still, and running out in battle is Very Bad News. Combine this with Frostfall, and Skyrim finally becomes the cold, unforgiving place it claims to be.

Radious
Total War: Shogun 2
Link: TWCenter



Not only is this one of the most comprehensive mods any Total War game has ever seen, its modular nature makes it easy to pick and choose the changes that work best for the experience you want. Together, the campaign AI is reworked, as are the skills and experience systems, diplomacy and technology trees. There are over 100 new units. Campaigns are also longer, providing more time to play with all this, with easier access to the good stuff early on in the name of variety. There’s even a sound module that adds oomph to rifles. Add everything, or only the bits you want. It’s as much of a tactical decision as anything else on the road to conquering Japan.

Game of Thrones
Game: Crusader Kings II
Link: ModDB



Real history doesn’t have enough bite for you? Recast the whole thing with Starks, Lannisters, Freys and the rest and it will. This doesn’t simply swap a few names around, but works with the engine to recreate specific scenarios in the war for the Iron Throne. Individual characters’ traits are pushed into the foreground, especially when duels break out. Wildlings care little about who your daddy was. It’s best to know a fair amount about the world before jumping in, and the scenarios themselves contain spoilers, but you’re absolutely not restricted to just following the story laid down in the books.



Realistic Weapons
Game: Grand Theft Auto IV
Link: GTAGarage



Guess what this one does. A bowling league for Roman? Cars that drive themselves? A character who appears to tell Niko “You have $30,000 in your pocket, you don’t need to goon for assholes” after Act 2? No, of course not. These guns put a little reality back into the cartoon that is GTA. The missions weren’t written with that in mind, obviously, but there’s nothing stopping you from giving it a shot. Worst case: murdering random civilians on the street is much quicker, easier and more satisfying. At least until the cops show up to spoil the fun. Range, accuracy, damage, ammo and fire rate are all covered, though be warned that you shouldn’t expect perfect accuracy from your upgraded hardware. This is GTA after all. Realism is not baked into its combat engine.

The Long War
Game: XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Link: NexusMods



You’re looking at eight soldier classes, many more missions, invaders as focused on upgrades as your own science team, and a much longer path to victory. Research is slow, not least to make early weapon upgrades more useful, while the aliens are constantly getting more powerful. Their ships are better, their terror missions are more regular, and more of them show up for battle. In exchange, you get to field more Interceptors, the council is easier to appease, and the ETs don’t cheat as much.

Ziggy's Mod
Game: Far Cry 3
Link: NexusMods



Ziggy makes Rook Island a more natural place, removing mission requirements for skills, cutting some of the easier ways to earn XP, increasing spawn rates to make the island busier, and throwing away the magic mini-map in favour of a compass. The second island is also unlocked from the start. Smaller changes include randomised ammo from dropped weapons, being able to climb hills that you should realistically be able to, and wingsuit abilities made available earlier to get more out of them.

Terrafirmacraft
Game: Minecraft
Link: Terrafirmacraft



Minecraft has a Survival mode, but it’s not desperately challenging. Terrafirmacraft takes it seriously, with hunger and thirst that must be dealt with at all times, and key elements added such as the need to construct support beams while mining to prevent cave-ins, and a seasonal cycle that determines whether or not trees will produce fruit. Many more features are to be added, but there’s enough here already to make survival about much more than throwing together a Creeper-proof fort.



Synergies Mod
Game: Torchlight II
Link: Synergies Mod



This adds a new act to the game, over a hundred monsters, new rare bosses, a new class – the Necromancer – more and tougher monsters and the gear to take them on. There are also endgame raids to add challenge once the world is saved yet again, and more on the way – including two new classes (Paladin and Warlock). It’s the top-ranked Torchlight II mod on Steam Workshop, and easily the most popular. Be aware that it’s still in development, and has a few rough edges.

Civilization Nights
Game: Civilization V
Link: Steam Workshop



While Brave New World has officially given Civ V a big shake up, for many players Nights remains its most popular add-on. It’s a comprehensive upgrade, adding new buildings, wonders, technologies and units, with a heavy focus on policies and making the AI better. The single biggest change is how it calculates happiness, citizens adding cheer simply by existing, but the slow march of war and other miseries detracting from the good times. Annexed a city? Don’t expect too many ticker-tape parades. Yet keeping happiness up is crucial, as it’s also the core of a strong military. This rebalancing completely changes how you play, while the other additions offer plenty of scope for new tactics and even more carefully designed civilisations.

Ultimate Difficulty Mod
Game: Dishonored
Link: TTLG Forums



This makes Dishonored’s enemies more attentive, faster and able to hear a pin drop from the other side of the map. When you get into a fight, it quickly becomes an all-out street war. The biggest change is to Dishonored’s second most abusable ability: the Lean (Blink of course being #1). Corvo can no longer sit behind scenery, lean out into an enemy’s face and be politely ignored. He’s now much more likely to be spotted – especially in ghost runs, where his advantages are now limited to the Outsider’s gifts rather than the Overseers’ continued lack of a local Specsavers.

Hardcore
Game: Deus Ex
Link: ModDB



New augmentations! Altered AI! Randomised inventories! Also a few time-savers: instead of separate keys and multitools for instance, a special keyring has both, while upgrades are used automatically if necessary. Difficulty also changes the balance considerably, from the standard game to ‘Realistic’ mode where you only get nine inventory slots, to ‘Unrealistic’, which makes JC Denton the cyborg killing machine he’s meant to be, but at the cost of facing opponents who warrant it. In this mode he gets double-jumping powers, and automatically gobbles health items when he gets badly wounded. Good luck though, I still got nowhere.

You may remember clashing with the overly gruff Monster of the East in one of Fallout: New Vegas' endings. Legate Lanius—whose name is Latin for "butcher," naturally—wasn't terribly complex beyond being New Vegas' token Bad Guy, but a fan film is seeking to change that by attempting to color in his backstory. This here is the first teaser for the fan film Fallout: Lanius, which is debuts this weekend.



Haven't played New Vegas? How convenient, then, that Steam is currently selling it for a mere $2.50. You won't need to overly familiar with the wasteland to appreciate this high-concept action flick, however. Lanius' origin story is a lovingly put-together project by filmmaker and gamer Wade K. Savage, with the likes of New Vegas writer Chris Avellone being amongst those who donated to its crowdfunding campaign last year. While this teaser doesn't reveal very much at all, it won't be long till we learn fully about Lanius' frenzied ascension to brutality—the world premiere happens this Saturday at PAX Australia.

Ever since I saw an Imp attack a Zombieman in the original Doom, I've been fascinated with NPCs fighting each other in games. (My recent attempt to review a Doom mod, which devolved into hours spent making Half-Life 2 and Doom entities fight each other, is a good example.) The Endless Warfare mod for Fallout: New Vegas allows you to easily spawn as many monsters and NPCs as your computer can handle, and watch them engage in pitched battles with each other in the Mojave Wasteland. If you feel like joining in, you can also spawn dozens of different companions to help you out. War never changes? Clearly you haven't met my army of loyal prostitutes.

Once installed, Endless Warfare adds two new tools to your Pip-Boy, the Spawn Controller and the Companion Controller. You'll find them in the Aid section of your Pip-Boy's display (at the very bottom of the list). Just click on the one you want to use, exit your Pip-Boy, and you'll be greeted with the menu for the controller.

Have you ever wanted to order everything off the dessert menu? Now you can.

First things first: I've only got the sullen Boone and a buzzing Eye-Bot as followers, and with the amount of monsters I'm planning to spawn I'll definitely need some new followers to help protect me. I bring up the Companion Controller and flip through the menu, picking anyone who looks interesting. A Securitron robot? I'll take one. Giant Radroach? Sure! A Legion Vexillarius? Semper fi! A supermutant? ME WANT! A Radscorpion? No. Wait, yes! Twelve hookers? I don't see why not!

Bartender? My robot, supermutant, prostitute, radscorpion, giant roach, and I would like a drink.

Of course, suddenly being surrounded by friendly mutants, robots, and prostitutes, it's a little tough trying to walk around indoors without bumping into someone. I'm also a little afraid that once the fighting starts, I'll get confused about who are my allies and who are my enemies, so I decide to cut some of my team from the roster. It's easy to delete companions: simply talk to them, and the option to remove them appears (you can also erase all your companions at once with the Controller.) I get rid of the bots and monsters, and just spawn a crowd of prostitutes. They're pretty easy to recognize.

"Okay, team! I'm not big on inspirational speeches. Also, you're all dressed very silly, which isn't helping."

Now that I've got a deep bench of heavily armed sex-workers willing to go to bat for me, I'm ready to start spawning some monsters. The Spawn Controller works a little differently than the Companion Controller, however. If you spawn a monster, it doesn't just appear behind you like your companions do. Instead, the mod has added a number of new spawn points to the map, and the monsters will spawn there instead of directly at your location.

I figure the best way to find one of the new spawn points (the mod adds 3,000 of them, so I figure it won't take long), is to spawn some NPCs that will automatically fight each other, and then just stand outside and listen for the sound of combat. I spawn a few NCR soldiers, as well as a couple ghouls, then close the menu and wait, my ears perked for any sounds of nearby violence. A few seconds pass, and I hear nothing. Then: the distant popping of gunfire.

By the time I reach the NCR soldiers on a nearby hilltop, they've already won, but at least I know I'm near a spawn point. I bring up the menu again, and choose to spawn a few Legion soldiers, figuring I'll be able to watch the remaining NCR grunts fight them while I take pictures. Some Legion of varying ranks appear a few yards away. A few more appear in another spot, and a few more in another.

See, the mod doesn't just drop the selected entities at a single point, but at all the spawn points in your vicinity, meaning that rather than just one collection of combatants, you get several, hence the title of the mod. I seem to be standing quite close to several spawn points, so I've summoned a large crowd of uptight Legion soldiers all looking for something to kill. Thank goodness I have a dozen armed hookers following me around or I might be in trouble.

Prudes vs. Lewds. Go!

Within moments, it's over. The Legion dudes are dead, and my prostitutes stand triumphant. I'm proud of  them! They did great, and didn't sustain even a single casualty. I'm a little suspicious, though: I recall Legion solders being pretty tough, and I also recall that depending on the game's difficulty level, companions may never actually die. Well, I'd hate to think I'm cheating the game by leading around a massive army of invulnerable hookers, so I decide to test my prostitutes against something truly deadly: a Deathclaw.

Nope. Not invulnerable.

With my army (quickly) wiped out, I decide to eschew companions for a while and just whip up some entertaining fights that won't leave me staring aghast at a pile of dead prostitutes. Back to spawning monsters, robots, and a handful of human factions, which all appear in clumps around the map, take a moment to look around, and then start brutalizing the hell out of each other.

Mutants and mechs, ghouls and gangs, and a flying bug for good measure.

The nice thing about monsters cropping up at multiple spawn points is that even if the battle happening in front of you finishes, you only have to look around for a few moments to find another one taking place elsewhere on the map. Plus, if the spawn points are close together, the fights will bleed into one another.

And, if you want to wrap things up, just introduce a pack of Deathclaws. Game over.

There are all sorts of options available in your Spawn Controller. You can choose how many entities you'd like to appear, how often you'd like them to respawn, and even let random chance decide who will spawn by adjusting the spawn percentage chance in the settings. With some tinkering, you can fill the empty wasteland with massive constant battles or just pepper it with a few additional random skirmishes.

There's also a setting for allowing spawns to take place inside interior spaces. If, like me, you found  Gamorrah's casino a bit dull and underpopulated, now you can really bring the excitement of Vegas to life.

I hate when there's a line at the cashier cage.

The mod actually works better indoors, I found. Spawning too many baddies outdoors tends to slow the game down quite a bit (and crash it, in one instance), but even when I turned the casino into a warzone, everything chugged along smoothly.

This guy isn't running from the fight, he just knows the buffet just opened.

Installation: I didn't see any instructions for a manual install, so it's best to have the Nexus Mod Manager up and running, in which case you only need to download the latest version of Endless Warfare (using the manager option) and activate it in NMM.

Project Brazil, a mod project for Fallout: New Vegas, is the type of labor of love that makes the PC modding community a very special thing. The mod features a new Fallout 3-size map, a new vault, an original cast and 5,000 lines of professional quality dialog from over 20 actors. Creator Brandon Lee headed a small team of dedicated die-hards who spent four years building an unofficial sequel so they could release it into the great big internet for absolutely free.
The game is set in the secluded Vault 18 near the San Bernardino mountains sometime after the events of Fallout 2. Vault 18 has managed to stay out of the war until a prominent member of the vault community is revealed as a member of the Enclave, and the entire vault erupts into civil war.

Released in three installments, the first of which drops tomorrow on NexusMods, Project Brazil focuses a lot on what Lee calls Black Isle-style character-driven content. “We really focused on your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats with our own internal Fallout: Project Brazil philosophy, and those 7 stats really show up everywhere, especially in dialogue options,” Lee writes in the Nexus Mod writeup. “Your skills largely affect things like combat, crafting, healing, but we took the "speech" skill, and made it exclusively a skill that affect things like standing at a podium and delivering a legit speech to an audience, and how high your speech skill is will determine if a small army or group will help you, and how much they're willing to sacrifice.”



Episode 1 will take about three hours to complete and about seven hours to completely explore. The only thing required for installation is a vanilla copy of Fallout: New Vegas. Watch the Nexus Mod page for release sometime tomorrow.

Obsidian's Feargus Urquhart recently spoke at a GDC Russia panel entitled "The decline of the gaming industry as we know it—is there a way out?" While he cast doubt on the notion that huge, console-focused, "AAA" titles are going anywhere, he declared them "not relevant for the development community as a whole." The inflated budgets and team sizes required to make such titles, he cautioned, can also be detrimental to the creative process.

"Trying to manage a team of 1,000 people, I think is just crazy... and it costs a ton of money," Urquhart said of the model used to produce games like Call of Duty and Battlefield. "The result of that is we get fewer games. And I just don't think that that's good. It means we're going to get less innovations... No one wants to try new things. Because if you're going to go spend $100 million, $200 million on a game, it has to make its money back."

Urquhart revealed that some games we think of as AAA actually cost significantly less—Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas were called out specifically—due to a different development philosophy. He also stressed that better tools allow high quality games to be made for less money, and that the big publisher model is ultimately something that will remain restricted to a very small percentage of studios going forward.

"I question the relevance of AAA," he said. "AAA is not relevant for the development community as a whole, unless you want to go work on a team of 300 people, 400 people, and you want to make five specific games."

You can check out the full video above (though it's mostly in Russian). Obsidian's own Project Eternity became one of the most successful Kickstarted games ever last year, bringing in well over $4 million. While impressive, it's only a small fraction of the budgets for titles like Star Wars: The Old Republic, which was rumored to have cost as much as $300 million. This all seems to serve as an apt illustration of Urquhart's point: the games that get the most attention are often made by a very small percentage of studios working with wildly unusual development resources.

We've heard a lot of numbers thrown around relating to game piracy—everyone from the ESA to Crytek has put figures out there, usually suggesting that the problem is larger than we might think. An academic paper published recently tells a different story, however. Using state of the art BitTorrent tracking software, the new data obtained has led Aalborg University researcher Anders Drachen to conclude: "the numbers in our investigation suggest that previously reported magnitudes in game piracy are too high."

The study was conducted over three months, beginning in late 2010 and concluding in early 2011. During that time, about 12.6 million unique peers were identified pirating games. The most pirated title was Fallout: New Vegas, with 967,793 downloads. That's a lot, but the overall piracy rate still falls well below past reports. Perhaps owing to the window of the study, RPGs were easily the most pirated genre, followed by the somewhat vague "Action-Adventure" (a category that included Darksiders and The Force Unleashed 2). 37 percent of the pirated games were M-rated, and a strong correlation was identified between Metacritic score and how often a game was pirated.

Of course, a three-month period may not represent the lifetime piracy rate for a game. The study is also quick to point out that it was not aiming to speculate on how pirated copies translate in terms of lost sales. You can read the full report for yourself here, and Wired has broken down the methods used to obtain the data in a more digestible format.