It's The PC Gamer Show! Episode two is an RPGstravaganza with special guest Josh Sawyer, who stopped by to demo Obsidian's Infinity Engine throwback Pillars of Eternity. The PC Gamer US team also discussed the greatest RPGs of all time, played some co-op Divinity: Original Sin, and talked to Sawyer about his time as the director on Fallout: New Vegas.

In this episode...

Act I: Wes, Cory and Tyler talk about what makes a great RPG as Cory prepares the PC Gamer list of the 25 Best RPGs. Will action-RPGs make the cut?
Act II: Cory and Obsidian's Josh Sawyer talk about Fallout: New Vegas, including how the game drew from Black Isle's canceled Fallout 3 "Van Buren" project and the inspiration behind Sawyer's challenging JSawyer mod.
Act III: Cory shows Wes the basics in co-op RPG Divinity: Original Sin after playing it for 50 hours in a single week. Cory likes Divinity: Original Sin a lot.
Act IV: Josh Sawyer walks us through a new demo of Pillars of Eternity, showing off character creation, scripted interactions, and combat.

The PC Gamer Show is a new and evolving project for us, and we want your feedback to help make it better. What kind of segments do you want to see? What games should we play and talk about? Who should we have on as guests? What's coming up next?

Shout at us in the comments below, or shoot us an email directly at letters@pcgamer.com. We're listening. And we'll see you in two weeks.

The sprawling, open world of Fallout 3 is inhabited by all manner of humans, mutants and monsters, and packed with hundreds of things to do. It easily offers dozens of hours of gameplay in the Capital Wasteland, and hundreds for gamers who immerse themselves deeply into its bleak, post-nuclear world. But as speedrunner BubblesDelFuego demonstrated over the weekend, it can also be wrapped up a little more quickly than that.

Beating Fallout 3 in 24 hours is impressive enough in my eyes, but 24 minutes? I took longer than that to decide on my perks. And in all honesty, this world-record speedrun through the game doesn't look like a whole lot of fun. But it is almost unbelievably quick, thanks in part to gameplay tricks that take advantage of oddities in the Gamebryo engine. "Load clipping," for instance, lets players pass through solid objects, while the skillful use of quicksaves and quickloads allows sections of dialog to be skipped. The character build emphasizes endurance and intelligence to maximize survivability while running through enemy fire and irradiated water, and of course the player obviously has a pretty good degree of familiarity with the game as well.

The mark of 23:55 is the first recorded Fallout 3 speedrun under 24 minutes and bests the previous record, which DelFuego set himself earlier this month, by 25 seconds. And while it's never safe to predict such things, I'm going to go ahead and say that I expect it will stand for quite awhile DelFuego wrote on YouTube that he won't try to improve on it "unless something big is found, or if the record is taken by some good competition."

Ubisoft Montreal is making an effort to present players of the upcoming Watch Dogs with a more realistic depiction of hacking than usual. The studio behind Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed is recruiting help from internet security firm Kaspersky Lab to flesh out the “sexed-up” depiction of hacking found in, oh, every Hollywood movie ever.

“ really hardcore experts there on hacking. We send them some of our designs and we ask them feedback on it, and it's interesting to see what gets back. Sometimes they say, 'Yeah, that's possible, but change that word,' or, 'That's not the way it works,'" Watch Dogs Senior Producer Dominic Gray told Joystiq.

I'm overjoyed that the dreaded hacking minigame will be a restrained animal in Watch Dog’s futuristic Chicago setting. Unlike other games, hacking won’t be a word puzzle or a series of tubes that unlocks a secret room or a treasure chest full of gold. Hacking is Watch Dogs protagonist Aiden Pearce’s bread and butter, his main weapon in daily life. The challenge for players won’t be successfully beating a Frogger emulator, but in shooting a guard while they jump into an alley and hacked traffic lights stop traffic long enough for their explosives to go off.

"It's not about the minigame that will let me open the door, it's the fact that I'm making a plan,” Gray said. “I'm making a plan of how I'm going to chain hacking, shooting, traveling the city and driving to achieve an objective."

As someone who is routinely terrible at hacking minigames, this news could not be more welcome. A 100% true depiction of hacking, of course, probably wouldn’t make for a fun game, so I expect there to be plenty of liberties taken. Anything that keeps us out of Swordfish territory, though, can only make for a better game in the end.

Watch Dogs will be released this November. Check out our full preview here.

Blink over to GamersGate and you'll find a selection of Bethesda published and developed games, their prices magicked in half for this weekend by Baargan'an, Daedric lord of cheap stuff. From there you can... er... damn. I was going to crudely shoehorn in a Rage reference, but I can remember almost nothing about that game. Oh, it had John Goodman in it. Maybe there's something there?

Highlights include Dishonored and Skyrim at £7.49 each, and Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition (the one with the added DLC bits) for £7.48.

Strangely, even the earlier non-Steamworks parts of their discounted catalogue, like Morrowind and Oblivion, require a Steam account to activate. It's unlikely to be a big deal for most, but it's worth bearing in mind if you don't want Rogue Warrior to Sulley your account.

"Sulley," get it? Because that was John Goodman's character in Monsters, Inc? Honestly, I don't know why I bother.

Head here for the full sale list.

Thanks, Joystiq.

The joys of being a PC gamer! Thanks to the modability of our platform, only we can patch the ugly out of a game, utilize tools to help us keep track of WoW's economy, and randomly slap Iron Man into GTA4, no questions asked. That's pretty badass. We understand that some folks, though, don't always have the time to unzip things, crawl through directories hidden all over their PCs, do forum research, and tussle with conflicting mods. Cue Gmod. This mod-management tool's aim is to greatly ease the mod-enabling process, expediting, say, the restoration of truly fearsome dragons in Skyrim again.

Crafted by Olympus Games, Gmod is a tool that wants to help you get your mods working "faster, safer, and easier than ever before!"

For the past few months, they've been running a closed beta that supports the likes of Skyrim, Torchlight, and Fallout: New Vegas. Now they're hoping to be able to support more games, including World of Warcraft, Half-Life 1 and 2, Minecraft, and even—amazingly—the Thief series.

"We've been pounding the code for more than two years constructing a system that will support all mod types for all games," they say, "and we're almost complete!" The Gmod client will allow automatic syncing, one-click enabling and disabling of mods, easy ways to find and share mods, and the ability to use mods from any source. This provides benefits over the Steam Workshop, which is limited only to games available on Steam.

Gmod is drumming up support right now, with a Kickstarter campaign that's seeking $75,000 to fund the thing. One can access the beta client for $5, or pony up $15 for that plus a year-long subscription. A small price to pay, surely, to facilitate the appearance of certain Marvel superheroes in our gritty, serious fantasy RPGs.

It starts with a dizzying shot of barbed wire. Then we see a glimpse of an LP—The Moonbeam Trio, directed by George Shackley. A quick Googling reveals that the Library of Congress has recordings. Then we see sheet music from Bach’s Air on the G String, and it's back to barbed wire. It's a four second Vine video tweeted by Bethesda Softworks. What it means is for us to futilely wave speculation at, but we're suckers for a puzzle, so why don't we try?

Air on the G String comes from Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, and gets its name from the violin and piano arrangement by August Wilhelmj, a German child prodigy. You can actually hear Wilhelmj—or a violinist suspected to be him—play a different song via the medium of wax recording.

Air on the G String is Wilhelmj's claim to fame, and one of Bach's most famous works. If it all sounds very Fallout-ey, Bethesda Softworks VP of PR and Marketing Pete Hines says, "Guess again."

Alright, we will. If we take The Moonbeam Trio to be a nod to the 1930s and 1940s, Wolfenstein is a decent bet, but let's go even deeper. Air on the G String and the Moonbeam Trio have something in common: violins. Rearrange "Vine Violins" and you get "I involve sin," so clearly we're talking about Doo—wait, that's stretching too far, isn't it?

There's no way to know for sure what Bethesda is teasing, but conversation motivated by curiosity is fun, so we'll let you take it from here:

The core group at Bethesda Game Studios announced on the studio's blog today that they will be leaving the jagged, snowy climes of northern Tamriel behind for an unknown location. While minor updates and fixes to Skyrim will continue, the bulk of the development focus is being shifted to the next major release, which they hope will be their "biggest and best work yet."

Skyrim was in pre-production from 2006, well before the release of Fallout 3, so the team at Bethesda has spent almost seven years in its shivering sandbox. "We’ve invested so much of ourselves into Skyrim and will never truly say goodbye to it," the blog reads. "We loved hearing your stories, your in-game triumphs, and your suggestions."

All told, Skyrim received a similar amount of content as past Elder Scrolls games. Bethesda seems pretty set on the "two big expansions, and a handful of smaller stuff" model when it comes to TES. As for what this new project is, the most obvious answer would be Fallout 4. Then again, it could be something completely new—which we haven't seen out of Bethesda proper since the studio as it stands today was founded to work on Morrowind in 2001.

If you still pine for the Nine Holds, the modding community will likely maintain a steady flow of new Skyrim content until the heat death of the universe (or, possibly, TES 6).

Bethesda Vice President Peter Hines has confirmed the publisher will announce new games later in 2013, and by new games he doesn't mean Dishonored DLC. Speaking to OXM, Hines specified that the publisher has news forthcoming that is related to neither the Elder Scrolls Online or Dishonored, and that the publisher will be "making considerably more noise" than they did in 2012. "We will be announcing new stuff and making some noise, and I think when we get the chance to show you guys what we're up to, that you'll sit up and take notice."

There are a few possibilities: Fallout 4 is widely rumoured to be in production, and Bethesda was hiring for an unannounced next-gen title back in February. Elsewhere, there's the long given-up-on Prey 2, the rumoured Fallout MMO and of course, Doom 4, which is similarly unlikely to release any time soon because it looks to be in development hell.

So, Fallout 4 then?

I'm always excited to start a new game of Fallout 3. The early stages are my favorite: those wonderfully scrappy first few levels where every bottle cap is a fortune, every trashcan a treasure chest. This time around I'm looking for more of a challenge, something to make the early days of my new character, Kurt, even scrappier than usual, but I'm a little daunted by some of the more popular rebalancing mods. Many of them completely overhaul every single element of the game. I'm just looking for something simple.

A mod called Simple Realism sounds about right. It doesn't reshape the entire game, it just juices some of the behind-the-scenes math relating to weapons, damage, health, and loot. Perfect.

By now you know how Fallout 3 starts, so let's just fast-forward: I'm a baby, I'm at my birthday party, I'm shooting my dad in the butt with my BB gun, I'm bribing my way out of taking the G.O.A.T. test, Butch's head falls off because I'm doing something violent to it, yadda yadda yadda, I've escaped the Vault. Hooray!

Pew pew! That's for abandoning me seven years from now, Dad! Pew pew!

Now, I'm preparing to heal the various injuries I sustained during my escape. I've got a couple bullet wounds from guards, a few roach bites from saving Butch's Corpse's mother, and my shoulders are probably a little sore from frenziedly beating the Overseer to death with a baseball bat in front of his daughter. Injecting myself with a stimpak, I get to see one of the changes of Simple Realism: my health slowly increases for a few seconds before the injection wears off. There will be no more bringing up my Pip-Boy, injecting myself while the game is paused, and instantaneously recovering health. Health is now recovered slowly, and in real-time, and each stimpack only lasts a few seconds.

I head to Megaton, taking a brief moment to stand ankle-deep in the puddle formed by the town's giant unexploded atom bomb. In just a few seconds I've gotten radiation poisoning, which is another feature of the mod: irradiated water is immediately and incredibly hazardous. Why the noisy lunatic praying to the bomb hasn't dropped dead yet, I don't know. I guess he hasn't installed the mod. After selling Moira my collection of Vault jumpsuits, I head back out into the wastes to start some trouble. The Springvale School is nearby and full of raiders, a good place to see how combat has been tweaked.

Realism has been tweaked, but surrealism is still intact.

Weapon damage has been increased, and shooting someone in the head tends to kill them pretty darn quickly. This definitely smacks of realism, but after creeping through the building and popping raiders in their domes, it seems like it might actually be making the game easier instead of harder. Most of them never even manage to get a shot off at me.

Then I step outside and ow ow OW. A raider on a ledge spots me, opens fire, and immediately almost all of my health is gone. Not only do my weapons do more damage to NPCs, but their weapons do more damage to me, which sounds perfectly fair but doesn't really feel fair at this particular moment. I hunch behind some cover, inject a stimpak, and anxiously wait, bullets zinging by my head, as my health slowly creeps back up to tolerable levels. Crouching there as I slowly heal, wondering if the raider will charge me in the meantime, is pretty tense. I actually like this stimpak change a lot.

After I finish off the remaining raiders, I head to a nearby overpass and find a few more. I take several of them down, then spot another in the distance. He notices me as well. I also notice he has a sniper rifle. Then I notice I'm dead. Hey man, nice shot. I reload the game, and this time he misses me with his shot but hits the ruined car I'm hiding behind. It explodes. So do I. I'm dead again.

Oh yeah. Cars explode pretty seriously in this game. I'd forgotten.

On my third or fourth try, I finally manage to drop him with a lucky, long distance pistol shot. I kill the remaining raiders, and I'm excited to find one of them was carrying a flame-thrower. Excellent! I might get to try another feature of this mod shortly: when NPCs are set on fire, they panic and run away, which sounds like some pretty darn realistic behavior.

Since I'm out of stimpaks (the mod makes the chances of finding them in stashes quite unlikely) and low on health, I slowly limp back to Megaton (the effects of crippled limbs has been enhanced) and head to the clinic. With stimpaks appearing less frequently in the world, they're more valuable, and thus more expensive, costing 200 caps each. Oddly, the doctor offers to heal me completely for just 100, which should probably be increased. Even more oddly, he doesn't notice as I rob the clinic of every stimpack I can find. You'd think a ragged maniac with a giant fuel tank strapped to his back crouch-walking around the office might make the doctor a little suspicious. I guess the mod doesn't do anything to make stealth more realistic.

Ignore me, my odd scuttling, and the opening and closing sounds you're about to hear. Thanks.

After selling my collection of refuse to Moira again, I head back out to set some things on fire. A molerat attacks me, I flame him, and sure enough, he flees in a trail of smoke. More molerats approach and it just takes a toot from my flamer to send them sprinting away. Cool!

Come back, coward, so I may sear thee once more!

I'm keen to see if this works humans, but before I can find one, I stumble upon a Mr. Gutsy robot who is ironically using his own flamethrower to scatter a pack of dogs. Mr. Gutsy, on the other hand, doesn't flee when I set him on fire. I guess robots don't fear the flames the way organic life does. Makes sense.

How about a little fire, Tin Man?

Rather than trying to burn me back, Mr. Gutsy shoots me with a plasma bolt, which strikes my flame-thrower, instantly breaking it. "My new toy! Nooooo! You'll pay for this, Mr. Gutsy!" is a thing I want to shout but I'm dead roughly a millisecond later from Mr. Gutsy's second plasma bolt.

By the way, another thing the mod does is to slow down level progression. For instance, Kurt advanced to Level 2 after escaping the Vault, and currently, Kurt's dead body is still Level 2, whereas in the un-modded game, he'd probably have earned enough XP by now to be closing in on Level 4, and thus perhaps would have survived Mr. Gutsy. Sorry, Kurt! You're probably not enjoying this mod, but I definitely am.

Installation: Simple Realism is also simple to install, but there are different installation methods depending on if you have the Mothership Zeta and Broken Steel DLC. Note: you don't need the DLC for Simple Realism, but the installation method is different if you do have it. Rather than try to sum up the various install options, I'm just going to sternly insist you view the Read Me files in the download folders.

There’s some scuttlebutt regarding a new Fallout floating around the internet: the radioactive smoke is curling up from the burning, irradiated embers. Bethesda have been registering names, and the in-game DJ’s voice actor has promised more from him. Could it be? Is it possible?

With Skyrim out of the stable, there’s definitely room for Bethesda to get irradiating the world again. There’s a really good base, but there’s always room for improvement. And, what do you know, I’ve written down some thoughts on what they could work on.

Livelier roads, cities, and towns. There's a reason these things pop up time and time again on the Fallout mod sites. It’s a basic incompatibility at the heart of Bethesda’s game: most games are a bit more fun with a livelier world, but the world of Fallout follows on from the razing of the human race. Bethesda tend to err on the side of caution with this, though tech issues are probably to blame for the rather empty casinos of New Vegas, but creating a world means populating it, and the mods that add new travelers and people still do that without impacting the overall feeling of loneliness. As it is,the roads of the Wasteland are a bit too quiet for the game they’re part of.



Make it about survival. In Bethesda’s hands, the Wasteland is fun. By the middle of a run through you’re clobbering Deathclaws with concrete capped rebars and sipping irradiated water without a care in the world. Possibly with a pinkie out. The point being is that the notion of survival becomes obsolete in a world dripped in caps to find, traders to sell to, and junk to collect. New Vegas has hardcore mode, forcing you to think about food, water, and rest, as well as altering the way meds and stimpaks work, but it’s still a world that can easily and comfortably be lived in. It needn’t be the main difficulty level, but the option to make the world a harsh place to live, to make the players think about every move, not just their weapon and perk choices, would give the ashy flavour of survival.

Bethesda's Design, Obsidian's Characters. There I was, wandering beneath a line-up of broken satellite dishes, looking for things to do when I spied a door. What could be behind it? A gang of gangers? A terrified NPC? A few steps towards it, a glance around to make sure there was nothing sneaking up. I popped the door. Behind it was a wall with “Fuck You” written on it. Bethesda’s worlds tend to be packed with detail, big and small. They’re places to live in and enjoy, and just brilliant places to explore. Their characters, however, are a lot less engaging. Obsidian’s take on New Vegas was packed with morally dubious Wastelanders with dark stories. Acquiring Boone as a follower, for example, meant leading a person out into a field for the deranged sniper to shoot. That’s dark enough, but as a player you could happily lead an innocent into Boone’s sights. Somewhere in the middle of Fallout 3 and New Vegas is the sweet spot they should be aiming for: dark, compelling characters in a curated world.




Treat us like PC gamers. I've never loaded up a Bethesda game and felt the studio really understood what PC gamers want from them. We have screen space and we have a pointing device that just seems to baffle them. I understand there’s a fictional reason for the Pipboy’s clunkiness, but all too often Bethesda will choose that over usability. Fallout 3 and New Vegas are remarkable examples of how to not lead a player through a game’s menus. I *have* to install a UI mod to deal with the endless scrolling of the inventories. When it comes to pure usability, divorce the theme from the menus

The same is true for FOV: the first thing I have to do in any Bethesda game is to hunt for an FOV hack. That I can do it is evidence that the engine is capable, and I’m still baffled that it’s not a native selection. Give me a damn slider.

Meaningful Character Creation. There are a fair number of perks, abilities and skills to begin with in Fallout. But there’s nothing to set allegiances or race. Bethesda’s Fallouts give you plenty of opportunity to interact with factions, and alliances will be built from your actions, but what if you don’t want to put the work in, or want to roleplay from the opening bell? It needn't allow you to select playing as a Ghoul, but predisposing you towards the NPR would make an interesting challenge to overcome.



Think about the Karma system. I nuked Megaton. I actually destroyed a town full of people. I can’t imagine any game allowing me to claw my way back from that, but Fallout 3 let me. Through good deeds I managed to reclaim my karma and end-up with a reasonably decent character sheet. I wouldn't mind my deeds being somewhat recognised, but I blew up a town. There are no meaningful consequences that you can’t undo. Make it harder to turn myself around, and make some choices indelible. By the same token, if I’m stealing things from bad people, don’t make that a hit on my karma. By all means make the faction hate me, but the world should recognise the good I just did.

More than one city. Bethesda’s games just don’t have the scope of the original series, because building all that content and the space in between in the sort of game that they make would take a decade. But the DLC that they've added to the game has shown a willingness to allow the player to simply hop to another area without worrying about the space in between. Or just choose a reasonably close cluster of cities that the fiction hasn't totaled.

Make it it hurt. My violent streak has never been well-served by Fallout 3 or NV (I like Skyrim’s bows, though). VATs is nice touch, and certainly enhances the basic combat, but whether it’s swinging a concrete caked rebar, or zapping with the Wasteland’s most advanced lasergundeath tech, there’s weediness to it. There’s little heft to the melee weapons, and the report of the guns doesn't match what they do to enemies. Please, Bethesda, play Dark Messiah and Red Orchestra, two games where the combat feels utterly perfect. That’s the level of combat excellence that an action Fallout needs.



A use for everything. Speaking of that, Fallout New Vegas allowed you to mod your guns a little, augmenting them with scopes and such. That’s a good start. This is a world where invention is a necessary part of survival, and where scavenging should be part of a crafting system that allows you build everything and anything, and to mod things on top of that. I’d even lobby for individual components to be brought in from the Steam Workshop. Oh yeah...

Use The Steam Workshop. This is kind of a lock: the Skyrim Workshop is the third busiest of the modder’s distribution platforms. But what I would urge is for Bethesda to make the tools available on launch day. It will help with content, and if none of the above in the list makes it, it’ll give the modders a jump on fiddling with and fixing everything on the list above.