It's no secret PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is on a tear—the Early Access battle royale shooter has been raking in sales and drawing new players at an incredible rate. It climbed ahead of CS:GO in player count (over 500,000) less than a month ago, and hit 8 million copies sold earlier this week. Now it's claimed a new, perhaps inevitable victory: surpassing Dota 2 in terms of player count, making it the top game on Steam (as of this writing).
PUBG's seat in the top slot might not last long: Dota 2 often boasts over a million concurrents on any given day, and is only a little below PUBG at the moment, but this is the first time Bluehole's multiplayer shooter has topped it and it certainly won't be the last.
"I welcome the new world of Steam and digital sales," said Mikami. "I used to put all of my games in their physical boxes on my bookshelf to look at them. Now I have a digital collection, and that's better for Japanese people anyway because our houses are so small."
Perhaps it's only a surprising statement in the sense that four to six years ago, most of us never expected to see Metal Gear or Bayonetta or just about any mainstream Japanese console exclusive come to PC. This new era came about so quickly it's easy to forget how unchangeable the PC's drought of Japanese games used to seem.
As for the prospect of seeing his older games on PC, Mikami says that God Hand is a game he'd "love to do again and bring it to Steam," though it's out of his hands. "Unfortunately you'd have to ask Capcom or Sony about all of my old games," he added.
Joe got to play The Evil Within 2 at Gamescom—read his hands-on impressions here, and look for more out of Quakecon soon.
No Man's Sky's Atlas Rises update has added a bunch of interesting biomes that Chris has enjoyed exploring. But it's also brought some bugs to the game—bugs that developer Hello Games hopes to squash with its latest patch.
The update will fix a number of issues, the most pressing of which was players being unable to save their game because of artificially bloated save files. Unfortunately, some players are still having trouble post-patch, and Hello Games says it is continuing to investigate.
The patch also fixes bugs linked to the terrain editor, glyphs, unresponsive NPCs and some missing animations, all of which are detailed in the patch notes.
But it's not just a repair job: the patch tweaks teleporters so that players can now warp from one space station to another, rather than just back to their base. It should take a bit of hassle out of getting around its functionally infinite world.
It's the third patch in the last 10 days, and you can expect more to come to fix other problems with the Atlas Rises update.
I've still not jumped into No Man's Sky, but most of what I've read about the update— which overhauled the game's central story, added a new mission system and introduced watered-down online co-op—has been positive. For those that have played around with it: is now a good time to hop on board?
It's the final day of the 2017 PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Invitational at Gamescom, and you can tune in above to see who claims the last available chicken dinner. It kicks off at 7:20 am Pacific, 4:20 pm (woo) CST.
So far, the Invitational has been a mix of high-octane action and low-octane camping as players hid underwater and crouched inside blue electrical fields while healing themselves for long minutes, waiting for everyone else to die. Well, in PUBG, it's not about how many people you kill, it's about being the last one standing, and hiding is often the best way to stay alive.
There were also some scoring issues when a leaderboard didn't display the correct information, according to community manager Sammie Kang in this write-up over at Kotaku. "There was a bug in the leaderboard," said Kang. "We thought Bosphorus was second place but due to the ranking system for this event, they were third place. We didn’t clarify this in yesterday’s stream enough."
Divinity: Original Sin 2 was never meant to have voice acting. With more than 1,000 NPCs, developer Larian Studios decided from the off that it'd just be too much work. But it quietly changed its mind earlier this year, hired 80 actors, and recorded more than a million spoken words.
"We thought there would be no way, either time or budget-wise, to voice it all. So we started small, hoping to improve the soundscape by voicing some one-liners and voice barks. But it just didn’t feel right. We wanted to hear our beloved characters talk. So we crunched some numbers, poured some coffee and decided: Oh heck, why not. Let's fully voice Divinity: Original Sin 2!"
The cast includes Downton Abbey actor Harry Hadden-Paton, who was one of the male Inquisitor voices in Dragon Age: Inquisition as well as Edmund in Divinity: Dragon Commander.
Alix Wilton Regan, who voiced one of the female Inquisitors in Inquisition, is also on board, playing Elven assassin Sebille.
You can watch the team chat about the process and have a listen to the game's rousing orchestral soundtrack in the video below . The game is out September 14.
It’s a quaint slice of 1960s Americana: a little town, a busy diner, a chatty friend. With the sounds of a July 4th parade marching down main street, a blonde woman gossips with a waitress. As she turns to go, she stops and turns back. “Oh and dear, please let your auntie know that I’ve got several strong slaves for sale.” Her laugh tinkles across the sidewalk.
Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus has gotten a lot of attention for its alternate history portrayal of a Nazi-conquered USA, and it’s easy to see why. Hooded KKK members wandering the streets and Nazi flags flapping in the American breeze make for dreadful images, especially because it's not pure fiction. But the little touches of smart worldbuilding are just as arresting, and they’re evidence that the MachineGames team feels free to chase bold ideas—by their account, that attitude is borrowed from the original Wolfenstein from 1992.
“We decided to focus specifically on the original Wolfenstein 3D [for inspiration],” creative director Jens Matthies tells me at QuakeCon earlier this week. “What's so amazing about that game is that it's so totally a pure expression of creative freedom. You can see that the people who did this didn't have a marketing department, didn't have to worry about a publisher.” The early developers at id were unfettered by what Matthies calls the “videogame bureaucracy,” so they were free to have fun and be ridiculous. That sense of freedom created a boss battle against Mecha-Hitler and gunfights with a gatling gun in each hand.
In New Colossus, one mission puts a badly-injured BJ in battle with Nazis from the seat of a rickety wheelchair. While BJ wheels himself into gunfights, Set, the mad scientist from New Order, is setting up microwave traps that fry passing Nazis. The slapstick dopiness of Nazis falling for the same trick over and over is exactly the kind of silliness that characterized Wolfenstein 3D.
“On the surface level you can look at [Mecha-Hitler and silliness] and say, ‘oh that's very juvenile,’ but if you take a more generous view of it, it's people who just don't give a fuck,” Matthies says. Feeling free and unafraid of consequences made Wolfenstein 3D really popular, and that’s the ethos that MachineGames is deliberately emulating. If they like something, they’re putting it in the game. They want to microwave some Nazis, so they do. They don’t give a fuck.
Cavalier freedom comes across in some jokes: soldiers complain about “tiny American glasses” in the bar and visibly enjoy harassing a couple of hillbillies wearing Klan robes. But the freedom to make jokes also carries into MachineGames' unrestrained comments on fascism: A desperate young woman flirts with a Nazi officer with racist flair, dismissing jazz as “jungle music.” It’s the kind of thing that would make a PR department nervous and it’s exactly how Wolfenstein 3D would have handled it.
I’ve only seen bits and pieces of Colossus, but so far I think the Wolfenstein 3D approach is working. After dropping a Nazi with a fire axe to the head, I hefted two automatic shotguns and went sprinting down a train corridor, mincing Nazis with the speed of an industrial meat processor. The rush of noise and blood is so much fun that I don’t care how silly the whole thing is.
Following 2016’s Doom, Colossus is the second game to run on id’s new engine, idTech6. The New Order is still a joy to revisit a few years later, but by comparison Colossus looks and feels incredibly smooth. The guns feel heavy and violent, and no matter how many pieces of shrapnel and Nazi helmets fly into the air, the game just never seems to chug or slow down. It has the same soft, glossy look that made Doom such an attractive game, but here that colorful perspective has been applied to Nazis and steel instead of sci-fi demons.
But while the wackiness and the worldbuilding are fun, they do deal with deadly serious ideas—one hopes without being dishonest about them, or treating them too lightly. That is also on Matthies' mind. “One of the decisions we made early on was that we wouldn't cartoonify the ideology," he says. "In a way of course it's all exaggerated, but we didn't want to pull any punches on what that ideology is all about.”
Killing Floor: Incursion is basically a VR version of the zombie splatterfest Killing Floor, although as we said in our preview, the actual gameplay is somewhat different. There's still plenty of killing—"Killing Floor: Incursion has some good killing," as Steven opined—but instead of "wave-based hordes that slowly wear you down," the action is interspersed with puzzles, object interactions, exploration, and trading.
But it's always smart to play to your strengths, and that's what Tripwire Interactive is doing with its first content pack. The central element of the update will be a new game mode called Holdout, a "continuous onslaught of enemies for you (and a friend) to fend off, before succumbing to the horde."
"After players complete a level in the campaign, that level will be opened up to be played in Holdout. Inside this level will be a single location that players are tasked with defending as long as possible," Tripwire explained. "Starting with a pistol and knife, players will need to scavenge for better weapons as time goes on. As players progress, the Zeds will start getting more aggressive and more challenging Zeds will enter the fray, including multiple bosses at once!"
The studio said that the details aren't locked down yet, and that "everything is subject to change as we continue to iterate on the gameplay." A release date for Holdout hasn't been set, but it's expected to be ready later this year, and will be free for all Incursion owners. Tripwire said it will share more information about the mode as development progresses.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus’ downtown Roswell is a ticky-tack, Kennedy-era township replete with strawberry-frosted milkshakes, sun-faded storefront facades, and charcoal-armored S.S. stormtroopers on every street corner. Supersonic warplanes blaze overhead, leaving red-and-white jetstreams in their path. A propaganda film, "America: The New Order," flickers away in a movie theater. Two housewives happily chat about the slaves they’re putting out to market.
Nazi America has been a fixture of speculative sci-fi since the demise of the Third Reich, and out of context, Wolfenstein II’s dystopian story of resistance is informed more by pulpy splash panels than socio-political treatises. But right now, the billowing Nazi banners and casually hooded Klansmen absolutely evoke the carnage of Charlottesville. Over the past few months we’ve all been reminded that white supremacy, as a political value, is alive and emboldened across the country—and The New Colossus isn’t afraid to touch on that reality.
"No Wolfenstein game has ever taken place in the U.S."
In my brief time with the game at QuakeCon I found patriots and freedom-fighters, but I also found Americans who’ve found personal deliverance in Nazism and racial hegemony. Afterwards I caught up with Jens Matthies, creative director on The New Order, and asked him about what it’s like to be designing a game that’s fixed in the middle of a fresh national wound.
PC Gamer: How long have you known that you wanted to go to America with the second game? Was that a decision you’ve had in mind for a while?
Jens Matthies, creative director: Oh yeah, I think that was the summer of 2010 in Mesquite, Texas. We were in the offices and thinking we wanted to do something with Wolfenstein, and we came up with this idea of “well, what if the Nazis won the war because they access to this amazing technology?”
We always envisioned it as a trilogy, and when we were making the first game we had an idea of where we’d take the sequels. So it’s very gratifying to do a sequel because we seeded so much stuff in the first game that we can build upon now.
Obviously you were not expecting to be releasing a game about Nazism in America in the midst of our current political climate.
[laughs] It was a bit of a surprise.
So, over the past few months, what was the reaction to the team to all that, given that you’re handling a surprisingly relevant topic right now?
I don’t know, it’s an unexpected development for sure. It’s not something that has any real bearing on the game, because the game isn’t a commentary on current topics. But we always wanted to make… we are making a game about Nazis and Nazi ideology, so on some foundational level it is a political game. Or at least it is if you want to deal with those topics in some serious manner.
You are addressing aspects of Nazi ideology in this game that gets left out in a lot of other adaptations. You have people casually walking around in Klan robes. Was it important to you guys to address the true realities of Nazism?
For sure, I think that whole level [the Roswell level, which is being demoed at QuakeCon] was our… it was really important for us to show what mainstreet America looked like after the Nazis had taken over. It’s something we spent a lot of time thinking about. It might have been the first level we knew we were going to put into the game.
You have Americans walking around in that scene who are pretty sympathetic and on-board with Nazi ideology. The Klan robes, like I said, or the woman talking about the slaves she’s putting up for sale. Was it important for you guys to show a version of America with some of the white supremacist attitudes that already exist in the country empowered by the Nazis?
Yes, but that was true for Nazi Germany as well. There was always a segment of the population who were “winners” in an oppressive regime, and they were willing to look past what the ramifications were to the other parts of the population. I think that’s what’s interesting universally, because I don’t think that’s uniquely German. Anyone is susceptible to that.
You just mentioned that handling Nazis in Germany is easier than handling Nazis in America, I’m curious to know more about the differences you had in mind from presenting a post-war Nazi United States vs. a post-war Nazi Germany.
Yeah, America has freedom as a foundational goal. This country is founded on freedom in many ways. And it’s the ‘60s, and historically there was a tremendous cultural revolution with civil liberties movements and all these things happening. But on a more personal level, it’s B.J’s homeland, and no Wolfenstein game has ever taken place in the U.S. So all those threads together I think would make a really interesting, and personal narrative.
As you said, this game will be thrust into political dialogue that you weren’t necessarily expecting. Is the team preparing itself for that scrutiny?
In a way, I guess, but I don’t think you can really obsess over that. Our goal is always to make the best possible game we can make, and what the outside world does with that, that’s up to them. If you worry too much about that, it’ll just mess up the process.
There are a lot of indie games that aren’t afraid to deal with some pretty hot-button topics. Wolfenstein is a Bethesda game, and obviously has a lot of triple-A backing. Do you think it’s important for more games on this side of the industry to take on these topics?
I don’t know if I look at it that way, but I think everyone benefits from more creative freedom in games. I think that’s amazing about Bethesda, they have such amazing respect for the creatives within the organization. That’s also why we love working for them, and making Bethesda games.
Crypt of the Necrodancer developer Brace Yourself Games has announced its new project, which is about as unlike its previous effort as you could imagine. It's called Industries of Titan, and it's an "industrial city building sim/strategy game" set on Saturn's largest moon.
Industries of Titan promises the usual array of city-building excitement—process resources, keep everyone happy, and nurture a small settlement into a "massive metropolis"—coupled with a competitive strategy game that will pit you against the administrative abilities of other Great Houses. You can outmaneuver or outmuscle them politically, technologically, and/or economically, or you can just blow them into nothingness with your custom-designed battleships. And while you probably can't dance to it, it will feature music by Necrodancer composer Danny Baranowsky.
Details are short right now, but the screens and teaser throw off a real Blade Runners-meets-Sim City visual vibe, and that alone is enough to grab my interest. A release date hasn't been set but the Steam page says it's "coming soon."
Don't look now, but right now might be the best time ever for multiplayer FPSes. I'm old enough to have experienced the [to the tune of Bryan Adams] 'FPSummer of Ninety-Nine' that gave us, egad, Quake III, Unreal Tournament, Team Fortress Classic, and the beginning of Counter-Strike. I think 2017 surpasses that.
In terms of depth, frequency of support, and contrasting kinds of multiplayer FPSes I can dig into, I don't think there's been a better moment for the PC gamer. The appropriate way to make this argument is with bullet points:
An Arma mod on steroids is the most popular FPS on Steam. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is a story generator that balances intense firefights with goofing around. It's a 100-person free-for-all on a massive map that also respects your time. This week PUBG is running its first major tournament at Gamescom, with a $350,000 prize pool.
Even with PUBG alongside it, Arma 3—an intricate and often demanding sim—averages about 22,000 concurrent players daily. That's five times the playerbase it had at launch in 2013.
Blizzard's first FPS is colorful, competitive, and inclusive. But maybe most noteworthy is the tenacity and transparency with which Blizzard has iterated on Overwatch over time: it's been patched more than 120 times since launch, with seven seasonal events so far.
Investment money is pouring into Blizzard's Overwatch League, which will hopefully lay the groundwork for stable team rosters and great tournaments.
Valve's support for CS:GO has been inconsistent, but the shooter has nevertheless cemented itself as an insanely deep competitive game. You could spend months working on your grenade technique alone. With its massive tournaments and a little help from online gambling, CS:GO has paved the way for all other FPS' esports scenes.
Quake is back. Even with a free-to-play business model, rentable characters, and 'ultimate' abilities attached to each champion, Quake Champions bunnyhops and talks like a pure Quake game.
One of the biggest game publishers in the world made a multiplayer-only, PC-first, tactical FPS and has supported it well for two years. Rainbow Six Siege has 2.3M daily players on all platforms.
One decade after Halo 2, Destiny 2 is coming to PC.
Tripwire and Antimatter Games are quietly making some of the best FPSes on this list. Killing Floor 2, which just ran a great summer event, deserves some sort of blood-soaked Emmy for its gore system and gun animations. Rising Storm 2: Vietnam represents one of the best midpoints between authenticity and accessibility, continuing the series' ambitious focus on asymmetry.
Battlefield 1, with easily the best infantry combat in the series, chugs along with paid expansions.
March's Day of Infamy is a worthy successor to Day of Defeat, with great co-op to boot.
Unreal Tournament is being remade as a unique collaboration between modders and Epic.
Expect a major update to Team Fortress 2 when it turns 10 on October 10.
Call of Duty: WWII is getting a beta on PC.
20 years after GoldenEye came out on Nintendo 64, the best version of it exists on PC and is maintained by a team of passionate fans. It's free.
Most of these games are funded by cosmetic microtransactions that don't affect gameplay, rather than expansions or map packs that would fragment the player base.
