The two-week delay to play Watch Dogs 2 on the PC has been worth it. As I suspected in my hands-on impressions of the PC version earlier this month, it runs well, has a ton of graphical options, and comes with a complete set of quality-of-life adjustments for mouse and keyboard players. 

I played the game for a total 15 hours on three different PCs to get a feel for how it runs on different hardware, and overall it’s a pretty picture.

HomeGPU: AMD R9 NanoCPU: Intel Core i5-4690kRAM: 16GB DDR4

My home PC can’t push Watch Dogs 2 to the max, with the anti-aliasing as the primary framerate culprit. Even so, it still looks nice, and I can run it on a custom arrangement of high to ultra settings at a constant 60 fps in 1920x1080.

WorkGPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 TiCPU: Intel Core i7-5960XRAM: 32GB DDR4

My work PC does a fine job as well, though my monitor’s higher 2560x1440 resolution means every graphical setting requires a bit more juice. On a mix of high to ultra settings, I’m able to run the game at around 60 fps (plus or minus 10 or so frames depending on weather effects and draw distance). Again, anti-aliasing is the biggest resource hog. Anything above 2x FXAA knocks takes me down to 45 fps or so, and I’m not happy using mouselook with anything less than 60 fps.

LPCGPU: Nvidia Titan X (2)CPU: Intel Core i7-6950XRAM: 128GB DDR4 

At 4K (3840x2178) with the LPC, our absurdly powerful computer, I could turn up everything and get a solid 40 fps. I know that 40 fps isn’t ideal for PC gaming, but at 4K and with as many bells and whistles as Watch Dogs 2 has, it’s pretty impressive. For a third time, anti-aliasing proved the biggest frame hog, and turning it down helps a ton—the 4K resolution makes it less important, anyway.

Graphics settings 

If you’re curious, here’s a look at all the graphics settings. Good news, there’s an FOV slider even though it’s a third-person action game. It’s not really necessary, but there anyway. Shadow and reflection options are broken down into several sections each, a few with some fairly advanced tech. One option makes shadows blur the further they are from their casting source—a small flourish that won’t make or break the illusion one way or the other, but a welcome one anyway. There’s even an option to turn San Francisco’s signature fog on and off. Since I live in a section of the city that’s always in a cloud, I was tempted to keep it off, but that wouldn’t be faithful. 

It won’t run like butter with everything turned up, even on the best PCs out there, especially if you’re pushing resolutions above 1920x1080. But that isn't an indication of poor optimization.  It's an indication of how scalable Watch Dogs 2's PC options are. If you want to run it on a PC with a few years under its belt, chances are you can without sacrificing too much fidelity. If you want a PC game to push your $10,000 custom build to its limits, Watch Dogs 2 has enough high-end graphical options to give it a run for its money. 

Control options

Having spent about 15 hours playing Watch Dogs 2 with a mouse and keyboard, it's easily a superior option to using a gamepad, at least in terms of accuracy and convenience. Controlling Marcus is as natural and quick as an FPS with mouselook since his animations have been sped up to accommodate jerky movements. Vehicles feel nice too, despite the typically awkward on-off analog control of key presses. You can tweak everything from steering sensitivity to how quickly the car camera auto-centers to face forward when you're making a turn. Every key for every control method—Marcus, vehicles, drones—can be reassigned. There's a lot to play with, more than we're used to with the majority of PC ports these days. 

Look for our Watch Dogs 2 review later this week. 

When it rains it pours. Following the release of the first major No Man's Sky content update earlier this week, comes a new patch designed to fix a number of smaller issues. Posted to the game's Steam page earlier today, the update might interest those who've encountered bugs preventing progress.

Chief among these is NPCs who refuse to engage in conversation, thus denying mission critical dialogue. This is fixed, as is a bug which caused important Exosuit inventory items to mysteriously transfer to the Starship. While this will no longer happen, those already affected by the bug will need to wait for the next patch for a fix.

Elsewhere, a notification will pop up now alerting users to any installed, unsupported mods; Azerty keyboards now have better support, and you'll now be told if you acquire a blueprint that you already own. Some instances of the game crashing have also been smited.

You can see the full notes over here. Here's what Chris thought of the expansion when he played it earlier this week.

Update: Patch 1.3 is now out of open beta. Beta-phobic Dishonored players: you may now switch off camera motion blur.

Original story:

The drive to make Dishonored 2 all that it should be on the PC continued today with the release of the 1.3 patch in beta on Steam. Bethesda also repeated its recommendation that players upgrade to Nvidia's 375.95 driver (or newer, I assume), noting that it has "identified an issue with drivers 375.70 and 375.86 unique to Dishonored 2 which impacts performance." 

(AMD owners should be using the 16.11.4 drivers, although there's no mention of known issues with earlier versions.) 

The 1.3 patch makes "general performance and optimization improvements," adds an option to turn off motion blur, improves mouse functionality, and fixes various problems related to the interface, options menu, and multi-monitor support. The full patch notes: 

Options:

• Added a setting to turn OFF Camera Motion Blur
• Fixed a bug which caused some textures to be missing when Texture Quality was set above Medium for some GPUs
• Fixed a bug where the game sometimes launched in the previously saved resolution in the top left corner of the screen
• Fixed a bug where "Adaptive Resolution" was incorrectly set to "Manual"
• Fixed a bug where changing the Screen Resolution, Monitor, Windowed Mode or Triple Buffering did not properly revert after selecting "No"
• Fixed a bug where the player was incorrectly asked to confirm changes when no changes were made
• Fixed a bug where V-Sync settings did not match the monitor refresh rate when higher than 60hz
• Fixed a bug where pressing "No" in the confirmation prompt when changing Triple Buffering setting sometimes made the prompt appear again

Display / Monitor

• Fixed a bug with multiple monitors which caused the game to not display on the primary monitor by default
• Fixed a bug which caused some UI elements to be misplaced when using 5:4 or 4:3 aspect ratios
• Fixed a bug which caused the game window to appear off screen when resolution was set below the native resolution for 1440P and 2160P monitors.
• Fixed a bug which caused incorrect Resolution Scale FPS Target when changing V-Sync mode
• Set default value for Resolution Scaling Quality to "Quality"

Rendering / Performance

• Fixed a rendering bug affecting the lighting on some NPCs which sometimes caused a red glow
• FPS limiter set to 60 FPS by default
• Adjusted Shadow Quality settings – “High” setting and below have a more significant visual and performance adjustment
• Reduced performance impact of transparent surfaces & VFX

Mouse

• Fixed a bug impacting mouse movement speed

Known Issues

• Switching off the V-Sync a second time sets the FPS Limiter to 30 instead of 60 by default
• Changing the settings from TXAA to FXAA and not applying the change sets the TXAA Sharpness to 1 instead of its previous value
• Disconnecting and reconnecting a controller during gameplay may cause the controls to become locked ----->Alt-tabbing or pressing the Xbox button on the controller should return controls
• The game crashes to desktop when loading into gameplay on a Phenom II processor ----->Phenom II processors are currently not supported
• Adaptive Resolution can get stuck at -1 when restoring video settings ----->Changing the V-Sync option will allow the Adaptive Resolution slider to move again

Because the patch is still in beta, you'll need to opt in if you want it right away. Right-click Dishonored 2 in your Steam library, then select Properties, then Betas, and then BetaPatch from the available drop-down menu. Close everything, wait for the game to update, and when it's finished the title in your library will change to "Dishonored 2 [BetaPatch]." If it doesn't, exit and restart Steam, and you'll be off to the hound fights.

Rockstar has released a new patch for Grand Theft Auto IV—that's right, IV, not V—that marks the first time the game has been updated in six years. Don't hold your breath waiting for new GTA4 DLC, though, as the patch seems aimed solely at improving its operability on modern PCs. 

The patch notes: 

• Added error code "WTV270" to indicate a problem with connecting to Windows Live Sign in Assistant / Games for Windows Live Servers.
• Added Windows 8, 8.1, and 10 to compatible OS check.
• Added Display Controller image in Controller Configuration.
• Fixed a bug which made completing "Out of Commission" mission impossible when frame rate exceeds 60fps.
• Fixed a bug with the "Resource Usage" indicator on graphics cards with more than 2GB of VRAM.
• Fixed a bug that restricted settings changes when using modern video cards.
• Fixed a bug with the map crosshair on certain resolutions.
• Fixed a bug with text scrolling in "Brief" Menu.
• Fixed "drawlist overflow" crash.
• Minor performance optimizations.

The recommended system spec for Grand Theft Auto IV sounds like what you'd find in a contemporary mobile phone these days, including a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Quad CPU, 2GB of RAM (2.5GB on Windows Vista!) and a 512MB video card. Given that you can snag a video card with twice as much RAM as that entire PC for less than $200 right now, it's not super-surprising that GTA4 might hit a few bumps in the road on modern rigs.  

One thing the patch doesn't do is remove the Games for Windows Live framework. Rockstar has instructions for working around that (which are not new, but potentially helpful) here. 

In September, the UK's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) launched an investigation into No Man's Sky following several formal complaints pertaining to the game's allegedly misleading promotional material featured on Steam. The independent regulator has now dismissed the claims and has stated "no further action [is] required."

As a non-statutory body, the ASA—whose role is to “regulate the content of advertisements, sales promotions and direct marketing in the UK [by investigating] complaints made about ads, sales promotions or direct marketing"—can’t interpret or enforce legislation, however can have advertisements which fall foul of its code of practice removed. 

The regulator now suggests this is not the case. The ruling is thorough and comprehensive, however the following excerpts cover the main points: 

"The ad contained several screenshots and two different video trailers for the game, as well as a text description. We understood that, as NMS was procedurally generated, player experiences would vary according to what material was generated in their play-through. The summary description of the game made clear that it was procedurally generated, that the game universe was essentially infinite, and that the core premise was exploration. 

"As such, we considered consumers would understand the images and videos to be representative of the type of content they would encounter during gameplay, but would not generally expect to see those specific creatures, landscapes, battles and structures. We therefore considered whether the game and footage provided by Hello Games contained gameplay material of a sufficiently similar type to that depicted in the ad.

"We understood that the user interface design and the aiming system had undergone cosmetic changes since the footage for the videos was recorded. However, we did not consider that these elements would affect a consumer’s decision to purchase the game, as they were superficial and incidental components in relation to the core gameplay mechanics and features. We therefore did not consider the ad was likely to mislead in that regard.

"We understood that the screenshots and videos in the ad had been created using game footage, and acknowledged that in doing this the advertisers would aim to show the product in the best light. Taking into account the above points, we considered that the overall impression of the ad was consistent with gameplay and the footage provided, both in terms of that captured by Hello Games and by third parties, and that it did not exaggerate the expected player experience of the game. We therefore concluded that the ad did not breach the Code."

The ASA's ruling can be read in full here. 

After several weeks of silence, No Man's Sky launched its base-building update last weekend. There's more to come, so says developer Hello Games, however here's Chris' thoughts on the new features in the meantime. 

Base building is now a thing in No Man's Sky, thanks to the recent Foundation Update. Typically enough, there are limits to what you can build: you're relegated to a large but still-somewhat-stifling region, and building upwards will only get you so far. That is, unless you make a change to one of the game's files.

As this helpful tutorial explains, you only need to edit the tkgraphicssettings.mxml file, which is hidden in BINARIES / SETTINGS within the main No Man's Sky directory. If you set the property "RemoveBaseBuildingRestrictions to "true" then you'll be on your way, but as always, you do so at your own risk. 

I've not done this myself, but there are examples of some of the resulting shenanigans circulating on reddit, in particular this one:

Some redditors are questioning whether it'd be possible to build a connecting tunnel between two planets. Since someone has already travelled between planets using a jetpack mod, I'd hazard a guess that it's probably possible. Possible but, you know, a lot less efficient than just flying between planets. 

I've been playing a little bit of the update and am finding my initial No Man's Sky cravings are returning. Chris offered up his impressions yesterday, and you can read them over here.

You might be surprised to learn that being a good mayor is not entirely compatible with being a wrathful supreme deity. Case in point: The Cities: Skylines Natural Disasters DLC that went live today, adding "new systems for disaster alerts and responses," and of course the disasters themselves, including earthquakes, tornadoes, forest fires, and, somehow, worse. Disasters can strike through simple bad luck, or they can come about for more sinister reasons. 

"More sinister reasons" of course means you, because if there's one thing more fun than building up a thriving, modern metropolis, it's calling forth great burning balls of rock from the sky to smash it all to pieces. But whether it happens through vengeful whim or the vagaries of fate, once the carnage has begun you can choose to stand back and watch, or help with the effort to keep the lights on and the traffic moving. 

The Natural Disasters expansion includes five pre-made scenarios with custom game objectives, an emergency broadcast network to help spread the bad news, and new hats for Chirper, the in-game social media mascot. There's also a Natural Disasters Scenario expansion to the regular scenario editor, which is free for everyone. 

Naturally, no disaster is complete without Chris Livingston, and he's been playing with the expansion over the past few days. Find out what he thinks about it here. 

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.

The Cities: Skylines community has been clamoring for disasters since day one, and this week they're finally getting their wish in the form of tornadoes, tsunamis, sinkholes, earthquakes, meteor strikes, and more. But the Natural Disasters expansion doesn't just give you fun ways to lay waste to your cities, it also provides the tools to save your residents with early warning systems, emergency shelters, and disaster response teams. I've been playing with the expansion the past few days, and both the disasters and the tools you're given to deal with them are good fun.

First, though: senseless destruction! There are a few different ways to play with disasters, but the easiest is by firing them off manually. Simply pick one from the new menu, target a section of your city, click, and wait a couple in-game days. Or, pick a bunch of them and blanket your city in impending doom. You can also enable them to strike randomly while you play, and there's a slider to adjust the frequency of the disasters.

The disasters are all nicely rendered and fun to watch in a horrifying sort of way. Tornadoes will weave a path from one side of the map to the other, pulling apart houses, yanking vehicles and pedestrians into the air, and leaving behind a trail of wreckage. Meteors create a huge blast, fling debris into the sky, and leave behind a charred impact crater. Tsunamis will slosh around in the ocean for a while, then slowly but brutally creep ashore, submerging everything in their path. Earthquakes and sinkholes will cause buildings to collapse, and there's even a disaster that will simply make a building collapse on its own.

Some disasters cause others. An earthquake will do damage, but if it's near water it may also cause a tsunami. Meteors and lightning strikes will cause fires. If your power plant or water systems are destroyed or damaged, you'll have to contend with blackouts and sewage problems as well as the event that caused them. If you like destroying the things you build, these disasters can lay waste to your creations quickly and efficiently while you watch in either horror or happiness.

If you're not content simply blowing things up and killing people, there are measures you can put in place to mitigate the disaster. To protect your city from tsunamis, you can build sea walls. Add a deep space radar dish to look for approaching asteroids, weather detection equipment to warn you of lightning storms, buoys to detect tsunamis, and radio towers to make sure your citizens can be alerted in time. And for all disasters, you can build a huge emergency response team headquarters, which will dispatch choppers to search for survivors and turn rubble into buildable areas so you don't have to spend days clicking ruins with your bulldozer tools before rebuilding. Thank god.

You'll also want to set up emergency shelters for your citizens to flee to (if you like your citizens, that is). These buildings can protect your population, but they still need management: make sure they're in an area accessible by industrial zones to keep them stocked with food and goods, because even after the disaster residents may need to remain there if their homes have been destroyed. You can even create evacuation routes in your neighborhoods in a similar fashion to how you draw bus lines. It's an enjoyable extra layer of management when it could have easily just been a building you drop into place and forget about, and it's fun to see how well you've planned ahead when a disaster finally lands on your city.

Even if you don't buy Natural Disasters, there's a nice free goodie for the base game: the scenario editor. You can set conditions for a city, and trigger an effect when those conditions are met, like a cash reward for hitting a certain population count or a fine if your citizens aren't healthy enough. If you've bought the Disasters expansion, you can make baffling scenarios as well, like triggering an earthquake once 10,000 citizens have ridden the bus or unleashing a tsunami if you take out too many loans (or, even more confusingly, if you haven't taken out enough loans). I've only been tinkering with it, but I already can sense some fun to be had there, since you can share these scenarios with your friends.

Disasters have been greatly missed from Colossal Order's city-building sim, and I'm happy they've finally arrived even such a long time after the base game was released. Whether you're simply into senseless destruction or an additional management challenge, I think it's a nice addition. Best of all, now we get to see what modders will do with the new material. I'm hoping Godzilla, The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, or giant Zoidberg will join the collection of city-smashing disasters.

The Darksiders Warmastered Edition is out, and that happy news brings with it a brace of trailers and a nice surprise: Owners of the original Darksiders on Steam or GOG will automatically be upgraded to the remastered version. The price isn't quite so good if you own the original retail release of the game, but there's still a good deal on the table. It's available for 80 percent off until December 2, which drops it to just $3 on GOG.   

Darksiders tells the tale of War, the coolest of the Four Horsemen, as he quests to prove that the apocalyptic war between Heaven and Hell was not actually his fault. 

The original was quite a good game—we reviewed it way back in 2010—and the Warmastered Edition boasts a number of visual improvements: Doubled texture resolutions, 4K support, re-rendered cutscenes, post-processing effects, a number of graphics options (FOV, anti-aliasing, texture filtering, and so forth), plus native Steam controller support and Steam trading cards. 

You can see some of those upgrades in action in the release trailer above, and the new-and-improved intro trailer which is located below. Where your eyes no doubt already were.

The rendering of game worlds tends to be the focus of their praise: The haunting decay of Metro 2033's subway cities, the attention to detail in GTA V's storefronts, the postcard beauty of The Witcher 3's grand vistas. Often, though, these discussions skip over the less tangible aspects of a place: its atmosphere, its purpose, its people. A world’s inhabitants define it as much as its appearance, and can transform a familiar environment into a foreign one without shifting a single polygonal brick.

Hitman—the game and the franchise—exemplifies the notion of systemically-defined space. The clockwork routines of its people imprint themselves on the environment: this rooftop is where the guard takes his smoke break, that apartment is where the trainee chef argues with his sister, oblivious to the professional chameleon sneaking in and stealing his uniform. AI routines dictate how we navigate the world, directing us down certain paths and establishing distinct associations between form and function. Our passage through a place becomes part of its identity.

The game I always come back to when thinking of the effect people have on a space is Dragon Age: Origins. Depending on your chosen origin story, you begin your adventure in either the Dwarven city of Orzammar, the Elven Alienage, the Mage Tower, the Brecilian Forest, or the town of Highever. Aside from Highever, you'll revisit each location later in the game from the perspective of The Warden. Thanks to the war with the darkspawn, your home is not the same place you left it, with the Alienage on the brink of riot, Brecilian Forest plagued by disease, and the Mage Tower overrun with abominations. Though each location looks the same, the atmosphere is far more grim, with hopeless faces and hostile glares emphasizing the human, Dwarven, and Elven cost of the war in a way no bombastic battle can.

Hitman recontextualizes familiar locations even more dramatically than Dragon Age with its bonus episodes, which modify the Sapienza and Marrakesh maps by repopulating them with fresh actors and different AI routines. Because Hitman is all about manipulating and deceiving the AI, the new denizens provide a raft of new challenges, forcing players to switch up tactics and approach the familiar locations from a fresh perspective. Hitman is at its best when you're exploring the interplay of its systems, overflowing sinks near exposed electrical wires and dropping weapons on patrol paths to trick guards into leading you to the security office. This is the kind of experimentation the bonus episodes focus on, giving you a whole new batch of virtual puppets to knock out, strip down to their underwear, and dump inside empty refrigerators.

The first bonus mission, set in Sapienza, is an excellent example of how an environment’s actors can transform it. Sapienza is Hitman’s second location, and in the original mission it features an elegant Italian town basking beneath the midday sun, its majestic villa and sweeping seaside vistas evoking a sprawling grandeur. It's the largest level of the first season—or at least it feels that way because it's so packed with possibility. Secret passages lurk behind loose walls. A valuable disguise lies waiting inside a church morgue. Gunpowder cannons peek from the crenellations of a ruined castle. The possibility space is as large as the town itself.

The Sapienza that features in the bonus episode, though, is a different beast. Night cloaks the town in shadow, reducing visibility and forcing you to sneak in closer than normal to suss out the situation. Fences close off access to the beach and the villa, adding a claustrophobic pressure to the challenge of remaining unseen. Streets that once felt breezy and boisterous now seem cold and cloistered, their crucial lines-of-sight blocked by barricades and movie props. Guards travel in pairs and workers cluster beneath a handful of floodlights, refusing to wander off for an easy takedown. Despite the darkness, silent assassinations are tougher than ever.

Gone are the town's ordinary residents, replaced by rabid movie fans scrambling to catch a glimpse of the blockbuster being filmed in Sapienza's main street. Hired thugs give way to professional security guards, their focus keen and their trigger fingers notably less itchy. Cleaners and gardeners sleep the night away, their valuable blue-collar invisibility stripped from Agent 47's toolkit. In their stead, camera operators and pyrotechnicians hurry to and fro, their hawkish eyes quick to out 47 as an imposter. To survive their gaze, you must approach Sapienza as if it were an entirely new location. The architecture of the buildings and byways may remain the same, but the people have changed dramatically.

Consider Sapienza's Gelateria Bella café. Formerly a hotbed of civilian activity best avoided, at night it shuts its doors and becomes a break room for exhausted film crew and catering staff, a sanctuary where they vent their frustrations and helpfully clue you into valuable opportunities. What was once a hostile place loosens its tie and untucks its shirt, adopting the laid-back air of school grounds after the end-of-day bell. Its locked doors and inattentive inhabitants give it a sense of safety, as much your sanctuary as it is the film crew's. Forget avoiding the café; at night, it's one of the first places you'll want to visit. 

The purpose a place serves informs its character just as clearly as its aesthetics. Take the clock tower overlooking Sapienza's main street: during the daytime, its stairwell echoes with silence, its empty roof the perfect sniper's perch. It is a monument to cold, clinical death, a place for those wanting to distance themselves from intimate assassination. 

The second time around, though, the roof of the clock tower becomes a camera nest, playing host to both a cameraman and a security guard. Stripped of its solitude, the tower takes on a new purpose. Eliminating its occupants away from prying eyes and ears nets you two disguises, all the more precious given Sapienza’s night-time crowd. Its elevated vantage is equally useful, affording a clear view of the clockwork routines whirring away in the street below—an opportunity denied by the decentralised nature of the level during the day. Physically and conceptually, the tower becomes a pillar of your second trip to Sapienza.

If there's one word to describe the Sapienza bonus mission, it's focused. Beyond its smaller area, the mission foregoes roaming targets for a fixed one: the movie star Dino Bosco, revealed to you right as you begin the level. By centering your attention on a single location, the level becomes more directed than its previous incarnation, a case of focusing on the how rather than the who and where. 

This design produces a Sapienza divided into regions of tiered intensity, concentric zones of escalating danger focused on the boisterous Bosco. On the periphery, the streets are quiet, the thick shadows masking the evidence of your misdeeds. As you work your way onto the film set, security steps up its presence and its vigilance, demanding patience and planning to remain incognito. Danger rises like the clicking of a Geiger counter, its steady ascent in sharp contrast to the fluctuating tension of stalking Silvio Caruso and Francesca De Santis during the day-time.

Bosco's preference for standing in the spotlight instead of wandering secluded alleyways drastically alters the pacing of the episode. Impulsive hit-and-run tactics are out of the question; patient observation is the only way to complete your mission undetected. Guns are suddenly useless against Bosco's Iron Man suit, while his massive ego ensures he's always being watched, waited on, and fawned over. Just like the movie under direction, you're going to have to throw your practiced script out the window if you want a hit on your hands.

As Sapienza shows, how we perceive a location is as much about its people, its mood, and its focus as its aesthetic. If the first trip to Sapienza was a lazy summer vacation, the second is a guided tour, its intimidating freedom exchanged for a smaller, tighter task. From Paris to Hokkaido, Hitman is a shining example of spatial economy, leveraging assassination challenges, escalation missions, and elusive targets to squeeze every drop of blood out of its exotic locations. Season Two might not have a release date yet, but with so much left to explore in Season One, I'm more than happy to wait.