Even though you won't be able to play Fallout 76 on Steam at launch, almost everything else in Bethesda's back catalogue is discounted on Valve's platform this weekend, just in time for QuakeCon 2018. 

While I can't find a dedicated Steam page for the sale just yet, probably because it began very recently and Dead Cells is currently occupying the homepage, you can see the discounts by heading to Bethesda's publisher page on Steam and scrolling down to 'specials'. Some highlights include Prey on-sale for £10/$15, and its roguelite-style DLC Mooncrash for $15/£9.74, which is 25% off. 2016's Doom is just $10/£7.49 (Fanatical has it slightly cheaper), which is reasonable for what's probably the best singleplayer FPS of the modern age. 

Fallout 4's GOTY edition is £20/$30, matching its best Steam price to date if you've somehow not played that yet. And of course, no mention of 3D Fallout games can go without also bringing up New Vegas, the vanilla edition of which is $3.29/£2.63. I paid double that for a chocolate-flavoured beer last weekend. The beer was fantastic, but New Vegas will definitely last longer. The excellent Wolfenstein 2, give or take two annoying final bosses, is $24/£16. The Elder Scrolls Online and its various expansions are also discounted, plus you can get the entire Elder Scrolls series for less, too.

If, like me, you have most of those, you can instead look forward to QuakeCon itself this weekend, where we'll be getting our first look at Doom Eternal gameplay. 

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Announced during Bethesda's E3 showcase, Wolfenstein: Youngblood is a co-op game starring B.J. Blazkowicz's twin daughters, set in Paris in 1980s. Granted, these aren't the '80s you might know. The Nazis are still in charge in Wolfenstein's alternate timeline. Watch the debut trailer above. 

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is releasing in 2019. 

Having worked on everything from Wolfenstein to Bulletstorm, Doom and Gears of War, game developers Tor Frick, Arcade Berg, Erik Gloersen and Jonathan Heckley have formed a new studio. Named Neon Giant, the new outfit boasts over 70 years of collective industry experience and will reveal details of its debut venture in the coming days. 

With investor support from Goodbye Kansas, Neon Giant joins the likes of Tarhead Studio, Fall Damage—a team founded by ex-DICE employees—and Palindrome Interactive under the former's umbrella. 

"Neon Giant consists of a real dream team that not only has enormous experience, they also have an incredibly efficient working process," says Goodbye Kansas Game Invest CEO Per-Arne Luundberg. "I usually explain that we first and foremost invest in people, no matter how promising their game projects in development are. 

"Neon Giant is a perfect example of this, but they coincidently also have something great in the works—I'm convinced that their first release will be a milestone in Swedish game development."

Boss fights are great. Except when they're terrible! Things got heated when the PC Gamer staff debated whether the boss fight is good design or an antiquated videogame trope, so we decided to present our strongest evidence for each case. First up: a collection of our favorite bosses, the battles that have stuck with us for years. On page two, the list of shame: a whole bunch of bad, stupid bosses we hated fighting but love talking shit about. They all deserve it.

The Master, Fallout

Jody: I've finished Fallout twice and never defeated The Master by just straight-up shooting him in the eyes or whatever other bits he has—he's a mutant lump of flesh so unfathomable if you try for an aimed shot half of him is just labeled "???"

The first time I made it to the end of Fallout it was with a sneaky, high-agility character who stealthed around his base and set off a nuke in it. The second time it was with a diplomatic, high-charisma type who talked the Master to death, choosing conversation options that exposed his flawed philosophy, made him realize his own monstrosity, and led him to suicide.

There's an option to just attack if you want to take the Master on with pulse grenades and a real big gun if that's your thing, but the fact you don't have to is what makes the climax of Fallout so great. Plenty of people hate bosses, so making them optional seems like such an obvious kindness it's baffling that 21 years later it's still uncommon.

Argus mech, Vanquish

Wes: Japanese videogames have been chasing what I'll call the Macross Aesthetic for decades: an overwhelming, awe-inspiring flurry of missiles crisscrossing the sky, white smoke arcing behind them. For years this was mainly a thing in 2D games: bullet hell SHMUPs and the incredible Bangai-o. Vanquish's Argus mech, while a pretty straightforward "shoot the weak point" battle, is one of my favorite boss fights of all time because it completely delivers on the promise of translating the Macross missile explosion into 3D. And it looks unbelievably cool doing it.

Deal the Argus mech enough damage, and it'll stop firing at you with its cannon to unleash a volley of hundreds of missiles. It's a stunning moment, but it's also a perfect embodiment of what Vanquish is as a game. It's a melding of over-the-top, distinctly anime Japanese action with the conventions of an American third-person shooter. In other words, there's a cliche, gruff American antihero, but he wears power armor and kicks giant missile-spewing mechs so hard they explode.

Artorias of the Abyss, Dark Souls 

Austin: Artorias of the Abyss reads like a Dark Souls boss. He's a tragic figure both emblematic of and integral to the overarching story of the Abyss DLC, and he's characterized through NPC dialogue and descriptions embedded in weapons and armor. You don't want to kill him, but he's too far gone and you have no choice. That's classic Dark Souls. But at the same time, he doesn't feel like a Dark Souls boss, and that's what makes him so great. 

Most of the bosses in the original game are slow, lumbering monsters that you fight by nipping at their heels until they fall over. Artorias is the total opposite. He's a relatively small but still incredibly imposing knight, and he moves wildly and quickly. His form and figure have been distorted by the abyss, but he's still got the moves. You spend the entire game plinking away at behemoths in the 19 seconds it takes them to wind up an attack, and here comes Artorias with some freakin' front-flips. He fights like you, the player. He rolls like you, swings like you, retreats like you. He's a refreshing, relentless wake-up call who gives you zero breathing room and feels like a Bloodborne or Dark Souls 3 boss, and I wouldn't have it any other way. 

Jubileus, The Creator, Bayonetta  

Austin: How else could a game as stylish and over-the-top as Bayonetta end if not in a galactic punchup? At this point in the game, you're picking basic enemies out of your teeth and scraping titan-sized mini-bosses off your heels. Then Jubileus, the biggest of the big bads, descends from on high with a dozen health bars and multiple forms just askin' for an ass-kickin'. 

Jubileus is cleaner and more varied than most giant bosses, which have a tendency to play themselves. She has several distinct forms with unique attacks that expose cleverly placed weak points, and she gets better and better as you whittle her down. The level around you changes. Different weapons excel at damaging certain parts. It's a long fight but it earns its runtime, and Jeanne's role as partner manages to tie a climactic bow on the game's otherwise tangled story. 

She's a great final boss too, a delicious mix of everything Bayonetta does right: bonkers vehicle sections, short and forgiving quick-time events, dramatic camera angles and, of course, unforgettable finishers. I can think of no better way to send off one of Platinum Games' finest than pile-driving a god into the sun. 

Flowey, Undertale

Wes Fenlon: What a hell of an ending. Undertale is a game that constantly upsets your expectations, but its final boss—not exactly the true final boss, but that's part of what makes the encounter so good—breaks away from Undertale's aesthetic, and really from its reality. The fight tears at the structure of the game, making you survive an intense gauntlet, tempting you again and again to break from pacifism, before finally setting you up to play through parts of Undertale again to see the true ending. That ultimate battle is more emotionally affecting, but the first encounter with Flowey is where Undertale truly shows off how brilliantly it can execute on its meta ideas.

Dragonslayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough, Dark Souls

Joe:  I've killed Gwyn loads of times. I've both lit and walked away from the final bonfire. I've tackled Lordran's brilliantly designed world in multiple configurations. I've watched countless walkthroughs and let's plays. And yet no matter how many times I complete From Software's gothic action role-player Dark Souls, I can never, ever, beat Dragonslayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough on my first attempt without the help of Solaire. 

But I love it. I love the anticipation of trekking through Anor Londo, and stocking up for the big fight. I love swapping polite exchanges with the Giant Blacksmith as I upgrade my lightning halberd. I love grinding out a few extra souls levels with the Royal Sentinels that guard the boss arena. I love concocting an ill-conceived strategy in my head beforehand. I love saying to myself: "This is it. This is the moment I finally defeat these bastards first time without the help of the sunbro", before inevitably peeling my splattered face from the forum's floor thereafter. 

You see, no matter how many times I'm floored by Ornstein and Smough, the fact that I'm yet to topple them on my lonesome gives me an excuse to return to one of my favourite games. With two hulking baddies—and one final form nemesis—this fight's scope for change and incidental moments makes it, for me at least, near impossible to predict. It's fast, it's frantic, and no matter how many tries it takes, I'm yet to feel a similar sense of accomplishment from any other game. 

Of course, Dark Souls Remastered is just around the corner too. We go again, boys.

Mr Freeze, Batman: Arkham City 

Samuel: The bosses in the Arkham series are uneven, but the second game showed considerable progress over the first, which mostly featured repetitive encounters with larger enemies. Mr Freeze is a smartly-designed battle, letting the player use each technique at Batman's disposal once—electricity, explosives and so on—before Victor Fries remembers that method and it can't be repeated. 

Worse than that, he's iced up the gargoyles so there's no hiding from him above, which is a key part of your arsenal when trying to play Arkham stealthily. You're stuck on the ground with Mr Freeze as he stalks you. A former colleague of mine compared it to a great Metal Gear boss fight, and he's right—it's similarly tricksy and demands clever thinking from the player.  

Monster Zoo, Dungeons of Dredmor 

Evan:  Can a room be a boss? I submit that a room can be a boss.

 Jack Krauser, Resident Evil 4 

Samuel: Resident Evil 4 is one of very few games that gets away with QTEs, which have mostly died out in games over the past decade. Leon's knife fight with Krauser is mostly cutscene-led, but it's a great example of the form—a tense sequence where you finally get to see the two characters face off. 

The boss fight proper is great too, set in a maze of ruins where he'll run at you with a knife, and it later escalates to a final battle on a precarious platform as Krauser mutates. Sometimes this encounter will transition into a QTE knife fight in-game, too, which is a nice touch. Resident Evil 4's story is hokey but fun, and while you're never quite emotionally invested, it's fun to take the journey. You wait a long time to see Leon and Krauser finally face off, and the battle is exciting, over-the-top and even cinematic—it's Resident Evil 4 at its best. 

The Transcendent One, Planescape: Torment

One of the biggest failings of boss fights is how often they abandon the principles of the game they're in, robbing you of agency or creativity in favor of a big arena slugfest or fancy cinematic. The opposite of that is Planescape: Torment, maybe the best RPG of all time, which utterly commits to letting you talk your way out of conflict, up until the very end. There are a number of ways your encounter with The Transcendent One can end, including combat if that's your wish. But dialogue, as always in Planescape, proves to be the more interesting option. Gaming rarely manages to get this philosophical, and even more rarely pulls it off.

Twisted Marionette, Guild Wars 2 

Phil: The Twisted Marionette was available for about a month during Guild Wars 2's first update season. You can't fight it anymore—you haven't been able to fight it for over four years—but I still think it's one of the best bosses I've defeated. Rather than an instanced encounter, the Marionette was an open world event that triggered every two hours. Players on the map would have to organise themselves into five lanes of (if you were lucky) around 25 players each. The fight had two main phases. The bulk of your time was spent in your lane, defending against waves of enemies. In addition, each lane took turns in the central chamber, where they were distributed across five mini-arenas—each with a Champion to defeat. Succeed, and one of the Marionette's chains was cut. Fail, and you were one step closer to annihilation.

If each lane succeeded, the battle was won and the Marionette would collapse. It felt elegant—requiring more coordination than just chipping away at a big monster's health, but not so much that only the most hardcore servers had a shot of bringing it down. There was an arc—our server spent days unable to make the kill, but slowly started to refine our approach. We failed loads, but the process of learning, optimisation and eventually overcoming the challenge remains one of my favourite journeys within the game.

Aquifers, Dwarf Fortress 

Wes Fenlon: Yeah, goblins and elves and running out of booze are all bad news. But the truest enemy of any fortress builder is the mighty aquifer, an underground water source that can quickly and brutally flood your fortress if you don't know how to deal with it. There's an entire Dwarf Fortress wiki page devoted to aquifers and the strategies for defeating them. That's a boss fight if I've ever seen one.

Giant Terminator Baby, Mass Effect 2 

Wes: I'm not even going to dignify Mass Effect 2's final boss with its proper name, such was its stupidity. The first Mass Effect culminated with a battle against an imposing, badass rogue agent whose role turns out to be more nuanced than pure evil, followed by a series of dramatic decisions that affected the fate of the Citadel. It was the perfect mix of action and roleplaying, exactly what Mass Effect should be. The second game, despite the overall brilliance of its suicide run final mission, decided to end with the equivalent of a Contra boss battle. A Contra boss battle that was too easy and looked absolutely ridiculous. When people complain about Mass Effect becoming too much of an action series, this fight is exhibit A.

The Arkham Knight drill fight, Batman: Arkham Knight 

Jody: The Arkham games had a couple of decent boss fights, but way more bad ones. They loved the kind where you have to lure some jacked-up beefy boy into charging, then dodge so he hits a wall instead. Arkham Knight managed to do the most drawn-out version of this, because you have to drive the goddamn Bat-Tank at the same time.

The Arkham Knight attacks in the tunnels under Gotham, driving a digger drill like he's a Bananaman villain. You have to lure him into sections wired with explosives, avoiding barriers and spinning fan blades, repeating this for what is probably just shy of 10 minutes but feels like hours. Meanwhile he shouts bland taunts like "You can't hide!" and "I'll find you!" to remind you that, after two games of Mark Hamill's excellent Joker, now you're up against a man who smolders with generic rage. I like the Arkham games, but they're textbook examples of why 90 percent of boss fights could be dropped to no great loss.

Zerstörer Robots, Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus 

Austin: I'm generally a boss fight proponent, but Wolfenstein 2's Zerstörer Robots make a good case for cancelling bosses entirely. They simultaneously lack everything that makes Wolf 2 fun—multiple methods of approach, creative sightlines, playing execution leapfrog, satisfying feedback on kills—and exacerbate its biggest problems, like the way it sucks at telling you when you're taking damage and where it's coming from.  

These robots have so much health and deal so much damage that you have no choice but to clear out the H-shaped airship you fight them on and take potshots from the interior tunnels, alternating exits each time. On higher difficulties at least, fighting them is a slow, repetitive process that isn't even in the same hemisphere as fun. I played through the entire game a few notches above normal difficulty and loved the added challenge, but these piles of junk were so dragging and infuriating that I spitefully cranked the difficulty to easy just to get past them. And I'd do it again. 

Alma, F.E.A.R. 2

Wes: What a piece of shit ending.

Ghaul, Destiny 2 

Austin: The final fight against Ghaul, leader of the Cabal's Red Legion and the Darth Vader walrus-thing who destroyed the Tower, is a disappointment not just because of what is, but because of what it is not. 

It is a run-of-the-mill arena fight against a glorified Cabal Centurion. Ghaul himself is just a health bar with some knock-off powers. He's removed from the fight most of the time, and whenever he does raise his ugly head you just one-shot him with your constantly refilled super. You spend more time fighting the basic enemies scattered around the ship, and doing so never feels climactic because the arena is boring, they're the same old enemies and there aren't even that many. Like, this is it, Red Legion. We are on your flagship. This is the final battle. The least you could do is bring the A-team. 

But the true misery of the fight is the cutscene that follows, in which Ghaul transforms into a much more interesting-looking plasma phantom and soars up to the Traveler. At this point, I—and by I, I mean everyone except the folks at Bungie apparently—thought, "Awesome, we get to kill him for real in the raid." But no. He just melts right there, so instead we fight some random fat dude in the raid. Destiny YouTuber Datto said it best: "I want to fight the big thing." Destiny 2 doesn't let you fight the big thing, and that's a bummer. 

Pinwheel, Dark Souls  

Joe: According to this Dark Souls wiki, Pinwheel is: "A flying, multi-masked necromancer who stole the power of the Gravelord and reigns over the Catacombs. [It] spawns multiple copies of itself and attacks the player with projectile blasts." All of which sounds pretty badass, right? Except in practice it's not really like that. At all. 

In a game that prides itself on its challenging encounters, Pinwheel is an anomaly. This run in is not only easier than every other boss battle in Dark Souls, it's easier than a fair whack of its standard enemies too. Its moveset is predictable, its cloned subordinates are a pain, and its drops—bar the Rite of Kindling—are rubbish. I almost lost the plot after my umpteenth death at the hands of Ornstein and Smough—yet the feeling of finally besting them was second to none. Pinwheel, on the other hand, robbed me of that eureka feeling by being so damn weak. 

The suggestion that From Software expected players to invade the Catacombs early on goes a ways to explaining why Pinwheel in so underpowered later in the game, but the Catacombs itself is surely no place for pre-Anor Londo/Sen's Fortress/Blighttown players. In any event, FTRichter’s Prepare to Die Again mod reimagines a more formidable Pinwheel.

Fontaine, Bioshock 

Wes: "It's terrible. You have this great game, and then you end up fighting this giant nude dude. We didn't have a better idea," Ken Levine once said. Well-put. Bioshock's final battle ditched everything brilliant about the game to end with a cliche slugfest with a big muscular guy. The game clearly didn't quite know where to go after the encounter with Andrew Ryan, but it definitely should've gone somewhere else. Maybe force the player to sit through a reading of John Galt's 80 page monologue from Atlas Shrugged? That would've been a better tonal fit, and a far greater challenge.

Eli, Metal Gear Solid 5 

Samuel: Hot damn, I hated this scrap with baby Liquid Snake where you couldn't just use deadly weapons against him and be done with it. Fair enough, he's a kid, but he'll grow up to cause such trouble, what with the walking nuclear robots and inhabiting the mind of a man dressed a bit like a cowboy. Instead, you need to chase him around a beached ship until you can knock him out. And at that point, you're really ready to do so. 

None of the boss fights in Metal Gear Solid 5 are that great, unfortunately, which is a shame for a series that has produced so many great ones in the past. MGS and MGS2, which both came to PC ages ago, have a slightly better hit rate, with the likes of Gray Fox in the former and Vamp in the latter. Luckily, The Phantom Pain is great at just about everything else. 

Vaas, Far Cry 3 

Chris: There's a lot of bad boss fights in the Far Cry series, so it's hard to pick just one. I'm going with Vaas because he's probably the most enjoyable and memorable character in the series, and thus the crappy boss fight stings more than others because he frankly deserved a better sendoff.

Creating a satisfying boss fight in a game where you're essentially a superhero bristling with weapons and capable of withstanding tremendous amounts of damage yourself… it's a challenge, really, because you're a damn boss. So, Ubisoft does what it always does when it's painted itself into a corner: stuffs you full of drugs and makes you hallucinate. Welcome to a gloomy netherworld corridor paved with TV screens (for some reason) where Vaas after Vaas after Vaas run at you, die from a single bullet, and disappear into a puff of smoke. It's not a test of endurance and skill, just patience. When every ghost Vaas is dead you get a cutscene where you do a cool hand-switching knife move that you can't actually do in the game, then you watch him expire. You're left with nothing other than a sense of disappointment and the sad fact that you're still Jason Brody.

The second DLC episode for Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus released earlier today, in the form of 'The Diaries of Agent Silent Death'. As the name implies, it traces the adventures of protagonist Agent Silent Death (her real name being the comparatively benign Jessica Valiant). 

Much like the first episode in the Freedom Chronicles series, this is its own self-contained campaign, albeit a comparatively short one. Unusually, Machine Games and Bethesda haven't (yet) released a trailer for this one, so we've only got the Steam screenshots to guide us. This description is helpful:

"Play as former OSS agent and assassin, Jessica Valiant, AKA Agent Silent Death! Hot on the trail of a sinister plot, Valiant finds herself in the offices of Paragon Pictures, Tinseltown film studio turned Nazi propaganda machine. Stalk, shoot and stab from the shadows in pursuit of your prey in the Diaries of Agent Silent Death!"

The pack is $9.95, or comes in the $24.95 season pass. It follows the first DLC pack, The Adventures of Gunslinger Joe, which released mid-December.

Without context, Wolfenstäche: The New Censorship might make you extremely uncomfortable. You, a faceless G.I., glide down burgundy, Quake Engine corridors until you come face to face with a Reich-era portrait of Adolf Hitler. The supremely on-the-nose "Ride of the Valkyries" starts kicking up dirt, and his infamous toothbrush moustache detaches from his face and propels towards you with evil intent. Your soldier picks up an MP5, with a Star of David mounted on the iron sights, and shoots it down. Suddenly, the chamber is full of Hitler moustaches, angrily fluttering around your field of view like a disoriented swarm of bees. World War II ended a long time ago, but the international wounds in its wake are relevant enough that generally, the world's satirists reserve a certain threshold of tact when targeting Nazi racial policy. Weaponized Fuhrer whiskers seem a little beyond the pale.

Fortunately, there is context.

Wolfenstäche, which you can play for free right now on itch.io, was programmed by Shalev Moran, Alon Karmi, and Nadav Hekselman, three indie developers based in Tel Aviv. Mechanically, the game works as a stripped-down Serious Sam lead-pumper—gleefully inane like other browser-based Unity classics such as The Room of 1,000 Snakes. But politically, it aims to lampoon Bethesda, who refused to sell Machine Game's excellent Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus in Israel—an action that this trio of developers call both "lazy" and "cowardly." Bethesda did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

To be clear, Nazi iconography and artistic immunity has always made for an uncomfortable marriage. German bowdlerization laws famously threaten any use of the Swastika—even for mordant purposes—with criminal punishment. However, Bethesda still released The New Colossus in the country after applying an airbrush to the red armbands and Reichskriegsflagge, and waxing the mustache off of their deranged Venusian Hitler. 

Israel, on the other hand, did not get the same treatment. In late October, shortly after the game's release, Israeli gamers ventured to Steam to find that the The New Colossus' prodigal re-conquest of North America was missing from the marketplace. Confused, they petitioned Zenimax for an answer, who responded with a curt announcement clarifying that Wolfenstein 2 wouldn't be available in the region. Zenimax apologized for the inconvenience, but offered no specific reason why. 

This is an especially strange call for Bethesda. Israel doesn't have the same municipal censorship laws you find in Germany, and Karmi tells me it's completely legal to display swastikas and make references to the Third Reich in the media, "so long as you're not genuinely supporting Nazi ideology." (He points to a primetime Israeli TV series called The Jews Are Coming, which routinely sends-up Nazism with no edits or concessions.)

"When Inglourious Basterds was first screened, the audience cheered whenever Nazis were killed. We’ve come to an era where teenagers, whose grandfathers breathlessly escaped from Auschwitz, have poetic, digital, cathartic revenge on the ones who annihilated their people," he says. "And to most people here, it’s a wonderful catharsis. Film distributors see no issue with uncensored Nazis here. Neither does the court. Neither does the public. Only game publishers, it seems, are afraid of a 'PR disaster.'"

Heckselman agrees, noting that the depiction of Nazism in Israel is a fading, decrepit taboo, which was only especially prominent during the post-war founding of the state. Furthermore, Nadav tells me that if you follow local politics closely, you'll find the occasional parliament member trying to drum up support for an administrative prohibition of anti-Semitic iconography, but a tangible law never make it across the finish line. "[It's] only done for show," he says.

Wolfenstein itself doesn't hold any specific anathema either. Before Bethesda took over the rights from id Software, every game in the series was published in Israel, including that (entirely forgotten) 2009 reboot. Karmi highlights this post by Israeli blogger Ido Keinan, where he remembers playing Wolfenstein 3D with his grandfather who served in the Red Army, both of them reveling in the death of Hitler 2000. So the decision to suspend Wolfenstein 2's proliferation in a Jewish state appears to be handed down by a corporate boardroom rather than a closed government channel. "[Bethesda] has decided to pull the game of their own volition," says Karmi. "Should they release the game here, as far as I know, they could just do it, and very few would bat an eye."

In that sense, gunning down the bristles on Hitler's upper lip might be the perfect parody for Bethesda's tentativeness. There are plenty of somber, respectfully pointed moments in The New Colossus, but this is still a pulpy action game where you venture to Nazi space bases and confront a bedwetting Fuhrer. It’s a mashup of silly American pastiche and tyrannous Reich-era politics meant to to portray the Nazis as the soulless flunkees they always were. Censoring it in Israel makes The New Colossus' message ring hollow. If you fear the ramifications of your satire—if you fear that you may be going too far in the face of the population you're supposedly advocating for—is it still satire? 

"They could have written a forum thread asking Israelis what the public thinks about Nazis and whether it’s safe. It would have taken them, at most, 30 minutes," says Karmi. "But the industry has gotten complacent and sheltered; so much so that us Israelis have to develop our own Wolfenstein game and say: “Here’s all the things you plugged out of your game. We’re cool with it. The Germans are cool with it. Why aren’t you?"

In a couple years, when Bethesda concludes this Wolfenstein trilogy, perhaps the company will reconsider their censorship policy and let the global Jewish population participate in the ultimate toppling of The New Order. Until then, Israelis will happily demonstrate just how happy they are to laugh at Nazis, and force the rest of us to reckon with our hypocrisy.

"We made Wolfenstäche to remind Bethesda that what they’re doing is wrong and hurtful and ignorant, and to encourage gamers and journalists to keep pestering them because we really do want this to change," says Moran. "I really do want to buy Wolfenstein on PSN and play it. I really do want publishers to stand behind the politics of their games, not half-heartedly, and not just in American culture."

Every year we round up our favorite screenshots, with preference to those taken at ultra-high resolutions with custom camera controls for beautiful HUD-free compositions. Previously, we've mainly included shots of our own, but this year I asked the community to submit their own. Special thanks to Larah Johnson (aka HodgeDogs) and Andy Cull who've lent us their collections for the year, as well as Cinematic Captures and The Gamers Zone for their great Battlefront 2 shots.

For the sake of space, we haven't included every screenshot submitted, but do check out these comments for more, and leave your best in the comments here.

Star Wars Battlefront 2

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

Assassin's Creed Origins

More on the next page!

Ghost Recon Wildlands

Middle-earth: Shadow of War

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus

Mass Effect: Andromeda

Destiny 2

Nier: Automata

More on the next page!

theHunter: Call of the Wild

Prey

The Evil Within 2

What Remains of Edith Finch

Night in the Woods

It’s been a long time since you could judge the quality of a game on the size of its budget—particularly in PC gaming, where the democratisation of tools and resources mean that better results are more available to more developers. Yet the notion persists that the advancement of games as a medium is inherently technological, that better technology leads to better experiences, and that better games means bigger budgets.This is the legacy of an arms race that—truth be told—was already becoming irrelevant a decade ago. Once, you’d say that studios like id, Ion Storm, Epic and Valve held the future in their hands because the future looked like a better FPS engine. That hasn’t been the case for a very long time.Even so, there’s a temptation to look to the most expensively-wrought games for leadership—for a sense of what can be achieved with the vast resources wielded by the biggest publishers. Disappointment necessarily follows when those publishers aren’t investing in traditional experiences like singleplayer campaigns, because these are how the forward march of progress was traditionally judged. 'Triple-A' game development took a step sideways when it became about the curation of better and more effective services, leaving players frustrated that the aspirations of the developers wielding the biggest budgets no longer aligned with their own.

That frustration takes the form of blanket statements—‘singleplayer games are dead’—that aren’t true in any measurable sense but importantly feel true to the people who think them or type them into comments boxes. The business of games has a tendency to dominate the conversation, with outrage outpacing curiosity when it comes to assessing the actions of the largest publishers. EA did, for example, respond to complaints about the absence of singleplayer from their Battlefront reboot by ensuring that it was present in the sequel: but that point has become a footnote in Battlefront 2’s public record, dominated as it is by microtransaction grief and 11th hour interventions by concerned Disney execs.I don’t think players are at fault for being distracted by the business of games. In fact, I think it’s a reflection of the way that the attention of big publishers has shifted. The games-as-service gold rush has dominated the thinking of the biggest studios for years. These are companies that, in most cases, have shareholders to appease—and suddenly one day this industry of one-off $60 purchases gained the potential to yield millions more in microtransactions and season passes. Of course they went for it. Of course these were the kinds of conversations that were happening in publisher offices throughout triple-A development; it was where the money was.It follows that the conversation around games would follow suit, that it would become concerned not with how something is designed or what it looks like but what it costs, how much it asks of you and how frequently. Spare a thought for the developers who work as part of this apparatus—the artists and programmers and designers who pour years of work into experiences that are ultimately undermined by the profit-boosting scaffold that gets thrown up around them. Another good example of this in 2017 was Shadow of War: an ambitious sequel and follow-up to a true surprise hit hamstrung by the inappropriate insertion of modern monetisation.

Of course, not all triple-A games are like this. A distinction is forming in the upper echelons of game development between ‘big business’ games and ‘big budget’ games—of course the former often implies the latter, but a gulf is forming between the proposition made by a company like Activision or EA and that of a publisher like, say, Bethesda. Games like FIFA, Call of Duty, Battlefield and most recently Battlefront 2 represent the speartip of triple-A-as-service design, studios bent to the dual purpose of creating more compelling things for players to do and more compelling things for them to buy.Then alongside this you have publishers like Bethesda, who must certainly be counted among the ranks of ‘triple-A’ publishers but whose resources have consistently been invested differently. Dishonored, Prey, Doom, and Wolfenstein are evidence that there’s still interest in big budget singleplayer experiences. It’s telling that all of these games all throw back in some way to a previous conception of what ‘big budget’ meant—that they all gesture at the future with at least one foot planted squarely in nostalgia.To me, this suggests that the landscape of game development as we used to understand it hasn’t actually changed all that much. Instead, a stratification has occurred in triple-A between games-as-services and games-as-products: skim off that top layer, with all of its microtransaction controversies and loot crate gambling, and you're left with a picture of a medium that is looking increasingly hale.

Developers are still making, and profiting from, singleplayer games made with substantial resources. A healthy middle tier of studios and publishers has emerged—companies like Larian who are making the year's best games on a more modest budget. Lavishly-produced singleplayer experiences like Hellblade, What Remains of Edith Finch and Tacoma attest to the talent of independent developers and the quality of the tools available to them. We have seen the striking return of the traditional CRPG and the steady emergence of new experiences.

As far as PC games go, in fact, it's only that noisy end of triple-A that reliably disturbs this picture of an industry that is providing more (and better) traditional singleplayer experiences than it ever has. Equally, it's this extreme that bears the most risk. When legislation or simply changing public attitudes move against games-as-service design—which they have begun to do this year—then games whose design has been led by these phenomena will necessarily have to adapt or die. Or they'll find their own market and survive on their own terms: but that doesn't mean you have to invest your money in them, or even pay them any mind, as long as reliably excellent work is being done elsewhere in the industry.

Samuel spoke fondly of Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus in his review, but was less taken by its The Freedom Chronicles: Episode 0. While acknowledging the latter serves to tease the base game's three-part DLC, he reckoned it'd have benefited from showing more. 

Part one—The Adventures of Gunslinger Joe—is however out now. Here's a trailer:

"In our first DLC installment, you'll play as a former professional quarterback named Joseph Stallion, who will smash through Nazi hordes from the ruins of Chicago to the vastness of space," explains Bethesda in this Steam Community post, before informing us the game's next chapters will follow in January and March next year. 

Sam's impressions of prelude chapter zero can be read in full here, however here's an excerpt that speaks to Joe's moves, as well as those of his forthcoming comrades:

Those three playable characters are former football player Joseph Stallion, formerly retired spy Agent Jessica Valiant and US army captain Gerald Wilkins. This prelude offers a short introductory scenario for each protagonist, who each embody one of BJ Blazkowicz's contraptions: Stallion can charge through doors and enemies, Valiant can sneak through tiny spaces, and Wilkins can become a large, awkward stilt man to reach higher places. I expect each episode to be built around that one ability, then, rather than all three like in the main game's later stages. 

At the time of writing, a handful of Steam reviews appear to criticise this chapter for its modest runtime—two hours, according to some players. Bear that in mind before forking over £7.99/$9.99 or committing to a Season Pass.

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus is really good: "A fun and frantic FPS," we said in our 81/100 review, "even if it doesn't feel quite as fresh as The New Order did." That pretty much settles it, then. It's also on sale for 50% off, a surprisingly big discount for a game that came out just under a month ago. You'll find that sale at Green Man Gaming, where the FPS is marked down to $30/£20. It's also on sale at Gamestop (download for US only) and Steam. Neat!

If you'd prefer to give your own opinion a chance before you buying, a free demo that covers the first level of the game is now available on Steam. And if you choose to upgrade to the full version, your progress will carry over. Also neat!

To get the demo, just head over to Steam and hit the "Download Demo" button on the right, just above the game descriptors.