Welcome to the PC Gamer Game of the Year Awards 2013. For an explanation of how the awards were decided, a round-up of all the awards and the list of judges, check here.

Traditional storytelling techniques suffer in the transition to interactive entertainment. While many games choose to compartmentalise their storytelling and interactive sections, others experiment with new methods. In Gone Home, exploration becomes a form of authorship. The entwined stories of each family member unravel at your command as you flick through the detritus of their lives. The resulting tale was the most affecting of the year.

A warning for those who haven't played it yet, the discussion below does contain a few spoilers.

TYLER Gone Home s interlocking tales of love, rejection and regret are exposed almost wholly by the artefacts left by your family members as you explore their new house. The story is moving (although the sentimentality sometimes borders on schmaltzy), but what makes Gone Home extra special is how it s told. More than interacting with spaces and things, I m interacting with motivations and fears, solving a maze with empathy rather than spatial reasoning. In a medium rife with expository cutscenes and deus ex machina, Gone Home brings vital innovation to the art of the interactive narrative. Also, I teared up a little at the end, if you must know.

ANDY I was expecting the worst. I went into this game not knowing a single thing about it, and in every dark room, and around every dark corner, I was expecting something horrible. So it was a relief, and a pleasant surprise, to discover that it just wanted to tell me a story about people. This was far more interesting than serial killers or ghosts or whatever I was bracing myself to encounter in those gloomy, eerily quiet corridors. Even as I climbed to the attic I was preparing to stumble across something grim, but instead I found a beautiful, touching end to a wonderfully understated human story. Years of playing videogames have trained my brain to always expect conflict or danger, and it was nice to have those expectations subverted. I too have a low tolerance for schmaltz, but Gone Home was on just the right side of sentimental for me.

TONY It s all in the dad s room. It s set up so that the first thing you come across is his desk, where you discover what seem to be the scribblings of a would-be science fiction writer. This is a dad with dreams. Then, as you work your way around his den you find the boxes of books with his name on and realise he made it: he s a published author. That s great! Good for you, unfulfilled American 90s dad! Only... why are there so many boxes of his book? Then you read the publisher s letter, rejecting his latest manuscript because his books have all bombed. Lastly, you read the snarky editor s memo from the consumer electronics magazine the dad works at now, writing puff pieces about hi-fis, and realise that this is a dad who went for his dream and failed. A whole life in boxes, in a single room.

CHRIS It s been said that Gone Home subverts our expectations of what a game experience should be in order to tell a different kind of story but what I like most about it is that it s not about throwing away what games are good at. Games are a form of communication that demands mutual participation. Good games expect your critical engagement, and treat you like someone capable of interpreting situations and environments intelligently without the need for hand-holding. There s something positive and hopeful about entertainment that wants you to be active, not passive.

Gone Home is, as much as any other game on this list, a game about making choices. Not which soldier to turn into a robot, but where to go, what to look for, what to choose to attribute meaning to. It s about following lines of potential through to the point where you discover what is, a drama that celebrates the things your brain is doing when you re switched on and engaged with the world.

Welcome to the PC Gamer Game of the Year Awards 2013. For an explanation of how the awards were decided, a round-up of all the awards and the list of judges, check here.

As gaming genre boundaries continue to break down and old fashioned genre labels lose their relevance, designers are increasingly happy to collide once separate ideas into inventive new ones. None have done that with as much cleverness this year as Card Hunter, which fuses turn-based tactical combat with collectible card games, wraps it up in an endearing D&D homage, and then gives it all away for free.

CHRIS I really want Card Hunter to succeed. It s a free-to-play game with a fair and generous business model that never gets in the way of doing what you want to do, which is negotiate a series of D&D-style dungeons with a party made up of individually customisable CCG decks. It sounds convoluted, but Blue Manchu have managed to marry two complicated genres in a way that makes both more accessible. The collectible card game underneath helps to break down the principles of turn-based strategy into individual, easily-understood elements, and the strategy game helps to present card battling in a context that gamers will immediately comprehend. It s a phenomenal bit of design.

CORY It s also an incredibly charming game. Right from the start, you can see the love Blue Manchu have wrapped up in its art style. This is a game made by tabletop fans, people who grew up sitting around, rolling 20-sided dice and scribbling furiously on graph paper. I love how it expresses its mechanics through cardboard cutout figures, and delight at every D&D in-joke the designers have baked into the various cards and actions. Card Hunter is charming as hell, and I would have easily paid full price to play its campaign. That its developers let you log in for free and only want to charge you for the smallest of details is, frankly, unbelievable. Even if you re not into CCGs, you should give the first few singleplayer missions a try. They re just delightful.

CHRIS I played singleplayer for about a dozen hours before graduating to competitive play, but I m glad that I did. I love the room it provides for creative plays the Flying Wizard Telekinetic Dwarf Slingshot is totally a thing, because I invented it. The game s CCG foundations allow for turnarounds and upsets, too and as frustrating as it can be to be on the receiving end of one, they always make for good stories. Card Hunter is easily the year s second-best wizard em up.

PHIL As someone who doesn t like CCGs, I m grateful to Card Hunter for the way it mitigates random chance. I ve yet to move up to its competitive modes, so while being dealt bad cards is frustrating, it s mostly an opportunity for creative tactical problem solving. Even drawing a purely defensive hand isn t disastrous thanks to the pass system. By moving to defensible locations and skipping my turn, I can ensure I get first go when the new, hopefully more powerful cards appear even using my apparent weakness as the basis for an ambush.

More interesting are the low-level cards that offer seemingly undesirable effects. What at first seems like a near-useless compromise can suddenly make all the difference. If a Warrior s bludgeon can t quite finish a monster, maybe that boobytrapped healing card can briefly turn your Cleric into an offensive unit, killing the enemy before the healing is applied.

That s what I love about Card Hunter: the necessity of invention. Experimental strategies aren t about showing off, or trying to be creative in the face of a more sensible or more effective option. They re the result of an intuitive deck-building system, that is then reduced down to a manageable and interesting set of choices to be made on any given turn.

You've devoured your chocolate coins. You've tired of festive telly. You've grown bored of or broken all your new toys - Christmas is officially over, and the New Year's drunken festivities are lurking tantalisingly around the corner. How to fill the void? Well, you play a bunch of free games, selected by yours truly to minimise the amount of time spent watching Christmas episodes of terrible talent shows with your parents. Read on for titans, bad dreams, digging and darkness, and absolutely no Christmas-themed games. Enjoy!

Titan Souls by Mark Foster, David Fenn, Andrew Gleeson Download it here.



The theme of Ludum Dare 28, you'll remember, was You Only Get One, and here it refers to the paltry single hit point and arrow your little warrior has at their disposal. Titan Souls' name may have clued you in on the game's twin inspirations Dark Souls and Shadow of the Colossus but it's Team Ico's masterpiece that this hugely impressive action-adventure game resembles most. It's hugely impressive because it was made in a weekend, yet features four different bosses with varying attack patterns, a hero with one of the best roll maneuvers I've encountered in a top-down game, a beautiful soundtrack and an equally beautiful world. It's pretty damned difficult, however, so the easily frustrated may want to click elsewhere. (Via RPS)

Bad Dream: Butcher by Desert Fox Software Download it here.



Bad Dream: Butcher is an unsettling adventure game that does neat things with the notion of pointing and clicking on stuff. Pick up one of the game's many dangerous objects without the proper equipment and you'll find yourself losing a digit I only had one or two fingers left by the end, but then I guess you only need the stump to hover around the environment, like some kind of superpowered Thing-from-Addams-Family. There's not much sense to be found in the game's surreal nightmarescape, but there are several wonderfully scribbled scenes of minimalist monochrome horror, and isn't that what Christmas is all about?

Excavatorrr 2: CWOUN by Hempuli Download it here.



The sequel to Hempuli's lo-fi arcade platformer Exvacatorrr updates the pixel art by a few generations, along with adding a couple of new features to the game's subterranean, procedurally generated treasure hunting. The new look makes the comparisons to Spelunky a little more apt, but this is a smaller, more arcadey affair. Your goal is to retrieve a golden crown stuffed somewhere in the game's lone stage, while snaffling as much treasure as you're able along the way. Your bearded caver is able to carry two items at a time (well, along with the block-busting pickaxe): one in his hands and one on his back, and you can trade in treasures at shops in order to purchase more powerful tools. You'll need them, as Excavatorrr 2 is a game that wants you dead. (Via IndieGames)

Match Girl by DDRKirby, xellaya Play it online here.



Another Ludum Dare game, and one with an entirely different interpretation of the compo's recent theme. Here, you only get one candle to light your way through a series of puzzley platform stages. When the light diminishes, you have to rely on your memory (and the occasional torch) to guide your character to the exit door. This initially basic setup soon expands to contain enemies, deceitful blocks and moving platforms later stages are tough, but you can always head straight for Hard mode if you find Normal's slowly ramping difficulty a little patronising. Whichever mode you play hell, why not play both? be sure to keep the sound on, as Match Girl's glorious chiptune soundtrack is the stuff of legend. (Via IndieGames)

Typing is a dying art, what with everybody communicating via txtspk these days, so it's a relief to see that my school typewriting lessons weren't entirely in vain. The Typing of the Dead games have been carrying the torch for the nascent type-'em-up genre for a few years now, most notably with the recent Overkill, but now a contender has entered the ring. Literally. Skullgirls is set to receive a new mode in a future update that will reward players for their keyboarding skills.

The mode, entitled The Typing of the Skullgirls Encore, lowers damage for other types of moves and places more importance on super ones, their damage determined by how well you type out the giant word that now appears onscreen. Tap the word out perfectly within the time limit to do 150% damage to your rival combatant; screw up completely and you'll only deal 10% of the move's base power. It's a fun idea, but I get the feeling it may be a little awkward to reach for a keyboard several times in the middle of a fight - dedicated Skullgirls players will likely be using a controller or arcade stick instead.

The mode was shown off in a Twitch stream several days ago, but it will be added to the version of Skullgirls you see before you (er, if you have your Steam library open) next year, at the same time the game reappears on consoles after its recent publishing difficulties. If you're still unsure whether you should pick up Skullgirls, have a read of our review.

Thanks to PCGamesN and Shoryuken.

Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. This week, the other defining Christmas movie of our time. Well, his time, at least. He saw it in the cinema when it came out. (Turns out he's getting depressingly old.)

It's amazing what a difference a sequel makes. In Home Alone, Hollywood presented the ultimate child fantasy that didn't involve a chocolate-spitting Super Nintendo - a movie of freedom, of good times, and ludicrously convoluted cartoon traps brought to life in a war that is even now talked of in movie lore as "Joe Pesci vs. The Swear Jar". Then Home Alone 2 happened, proving quite effectively that Kevin McCallister was less a bright kid in a bad place as a gleeful serial killer in training. Wow. A blowtorch was bad enough, but an arc welder? It's a wonder The Good Son wasn't officially Home Alone: Part 3.

By Hollywood law though, every movie must become a game. How did this one fare?

Pesci hasn't looked that bad since his last scene in Goodfellas. Well chosen images, guys.

Surprisingly well, actually. I know. I'm shocked too. Now, to be clear, that doesn't mean this is a good game. It's not. So not. Even at the time, it wasn't, pulling scores in the bottom half of the bell curve. When it comes to looking back at film licenses though, you kinda have to use different criteria - like Die Hard last week, it's really more a question of how they use the movie to make an experience that you're unlikely to get from anything else than whether or not that experience lives up to the best of the best of the best.

Or indeed, the most mediocre of the 'meh'.

In what I doubt will be much of a shock, the structure of the game is rather more about traps than a more free-wheeling Gone Home - lots of dropping water next to staircases, not much in the way of making silly faces after using aftershave or uncovering the secrets of your sister's developing sexuality. This is pretty standard for Home Alone games, the most famous of them ('famous' being a little strong, admittedly), being the festering pile of 8-bit fail that is the NES version, or the 16-bit abomination that is its SNES version (based on the Gameboy one, to ensure that every platform gets to share the humiliation)

All of them have a few similarities, notably being set in a side-scrolling house and fighting the crooks. The PC/Amiga versions are the bravest though, trying to replicate what happened in the movie - just Kevin vs. Harry and Marv with traps, rather than bulking out the Wet Bandits with more goons, adding gratuitous platforms to the house, or giving Kevin a gun. True, we're talking things like a water pistol and slingshot, but even so. The NES version also focused entirely on traps, but... not very well. It was more about dropping the idea of a trap than actually setting one, with the burglars obligingly falling over but not really conveying the oomph and blood that feeds Kevin's growing demonic core and will one day lead to the rise of Akakatkakakakateshikalonika and the prophesied obliteration of all flesh. Still less painful than sitting through another Hobbit movie, mind. Who knew 'desolation' meant 'drawing out beyond all sanity'?

I JUST REALISED I SHOULD JUST HAVE CALLED THE POLICE THIS WAS A BAD IDEA AAAAAIE!

One of the best things about the PC version is that it offers prep time. The game starts at 8PM and gives an hour of in-game time to run around and both find the pieces that you need to set traps, and to... uh... set the traps. As in the movie, it doesn't seem the best idea, though since this is a movie series that recommended children befriend crazy pigeon ladies and that every scary adult is a potential comrade in arms just waiting for a child to open them up, we probably shouldn't use it as a textbook for life.

Once 9PM rolls round, Harry and Marv enter the house and begin a search-and-destroy mission. They move quickly and act like Kevin-seeking missiles, with just one touch meaning death. They however have Bugs Bunny levels of resilience, with each fall merely being a notch on Kevin's belt - a little like in the movie. Traps are set up largely by solving puzzles, such as using a hosepipe outside the front door to put a slippery puddle in front of some steps or heavy paint-cans over doors. There are over 20 of them to find and set up. Then, once the timer finishes, all that's left is to painstakingly lead the crooks into them until they take enough punishment to stop getting up, and victory and a movie career is Kevin's for the taking.



There's not really much more to say about it. It's a simple premise that's weighed down by a few things - the graphics not really being good enough for the injuries to be funny, a lack of randomness that means there's not much to discover after a while, and most notably, the name Capstone on the box - Capstone being one of those companies whose catalogue was less a list of titles as a rap sheet. Amongst their highlighters were the shooter based on William Shatner's TekWar, a game of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and demonstrating the kind of skill at choosing licenses that probably explains why nobody's ever heard of them, The Beverly Hillbillies. Of all the games that didn't need to exist.

Oh. And speaking of games that didn't need to exist...

Lost in New York? Why doesn't he have an iPhone 5S? Maybe his parents only loved him enough for the 5C. Sad.

The original Home Alone may not have been great... or even non-rubbish... but at least it was slightly defensible. For the time. A bit. Its sequel, not so much. Instead of playing evil mastermind, which is always fun, this one sees Kevin constantly on the run with the Wet Bandits in hot pursuit. So, steaming pursuit, probably. The first stage sets up what a staggeringly bad idea this is, as Kevin runs past about a million adults completely oblivious to the small terrified child picking up dustbin lids and hurling them at the two grown men close on his tail in an obvious state of child-choking fury, not even pausing to try and sell him a banana skin or complain as he scoops up handfuls of gems to throw at his pursuers.

Every level continues in the same vein, through the hotel, toy store and the second house of horrors, with traps replaced with just desperately grabbing for things and throwing them behind. You do get an inventory of items, sure, but there's no tactical element and no satisfaction. It's as if Harry and Marv have been imported from the Terminator license, just as this lady obviously came from a different game...

Helloooooo, nurse!

It's the most half-assed take on the game you could imagine, short of having Kevin simply sit down in front of a TV and actually watch the movie. Levels flat out repeat, only in reverse. The closest it gets to showing the plot is to pop up some pictures that remind you Tim Curry was in the movie. All you do - all you do - is run away from Harry and Marv, hitting one button to pick up crap and another to throw it back at the pursuers, or dump things on the floor that will slow them down for a second or three.

That's it. That's the entire game. Now, sure, those things are sometimes peas from dinner in the hotel that are somehow slippery (try that some time, especially on carpet; see how it works out). Sometimes they're ballistic toilet rolls. They all do exactly the same thing though. The only real challenge - and I use that word in a sense normally applied to stool in the middle of a Christmas morning chocolate-binge driven case of the squits - is that the screen is so small and the characters so well matched in terms of speed that if you're on the wrong horizontal level, you're screwed. You have absolutely no time to move up or down and even the slightest mistake is usually enough for the crooks to close the gap. It is awful, with the only thing you can say in its favour being that it's also mercifully short. I hear that when it was released, Santa liked to give this to the bad kids instead of coal, on the grounds that you could at least have some fun playing catch with that or throwing it at the victim that got them on the naughty list.

It cares so little that in the house level, the crooks literally appear through a wall.

How did it stack up to the console versions though? Once again, it was very different, with the NES version taking a ludicrously surreal approach to things, and the Sega one apparently mistaking Kevin for an action hero. It does however have the truly fine ending text: "Mom, I knew you'd find me by the giant Christmas tree. This is my friend, the pigeon lady! Can we go home now?"

The spirit of Christmas, right there. Bye, new friend! Enjoy dying alone in the cold!



"Capstone: The Pinnacle of Entertainment Software" indeed. Presumably "The Pyramid Of Poop" was taken, or the creative genius who felt the company could get away with such a high claim disappeared in mysterious circumstances before it released the dullest named shooter of all time: "Corridor 7".

Brr.

And that, if my calendar is to be trusted, is another year of Saturday Crapshoot in the bag. Thanks for following along with me, and I look forward to catching you in the New Year for both more ludicrously long looks at obscure games, and more livestreams where we can jump into the archives together and have a bit more in-depth fun with the good, the bad, the obscure and the most deservedly forgotten. Until then, I've put together a list of some of my favourites from this year that you may have missed or enjoy reading again now, and while the archive here is still unfortunately having a little trouble of the Gremlin variety, here's a complete list of every Crapshoot so far. Goodness, aren't there a lot? So many words.

And with that, that's it for me this year. Hope you had a Merry Christmas/other festival/entirely secular but still enjoyable break from work, and have a Happy New Year next week. Catch you in 2014!

Welcome to the PC Gamer Game of the Year Awards 2013. For an explanation of how the awards were decided, a round-up of all the awards and the list of judges, check here.

A good sim pursues the lofty, unreachable goal of total realism. They shun accessibility in favour of complexity, but in doing so allow devoted and patient players to access marvellously detailed facsimiles of reality, which can inspire great gaming stories and player-driven drama. In the case of our simulation of 2013, it's a beautiful, sprawling and customisable depiction of modern military conflict, Arma 3.

EVAN It isn t any one piece of Arma s fidelity the ballistics modelling, the variegated island, the intricate military gear that wows us. It s how the sum of those replicates the experience of being a soldier something very distinct from being an avatar who happens to fire guns. You ve got to know how to read a topographical map. You ve got to know how to communicate with brevity and clarity while being shot at.

You have to think critically about stuff like encumbrance. When I m gearing up for a mission, throwing a satchel charge in my backpack may help me knock out a hard target, but the extra weight will tire me out more quickly when I sprint. So maybe I ll have a teammate taxi me across the map on an ATV. But wait the sun is setting, so we ll probably have to drive with the headlights on and risk detection, since we don t have nightvision goggles. Unless we find and kill an enemy who does. Again: it s not the individual realisms but how they knit into each other and prompt thoughtful decisions.

CORY I scoffed when Evan offered to teach me the ropes in Arma 3. Nothing sounds more boring to me than yelling out bearings and scrambling to find 7mm ammo instead of 6mm ammo. The UI is intimidating and the level of detail is daunting. I play games to escape from realism, not embrace it.

Evan s enthusiasm won me over, however, and he finally convinced me to join him on a mission. With a little bit of guidance, I was leaning around cover and marking coordinates on the map like well, not a pro, but like someone who might actually survive a mission. I marvelled at how seriously Arma takes its systems. Evan showed me how to move through all nine of Arma s infantry stances, when I was perfectly comfortable with crouching the entire game. And after he showed me how to use Alt to move just my soldier s head while moving forward, it became a feature I want in every FPS.

Eventually, we had to defend a compound from nondescript soldiers driving camouflaged, armoured jeeps with heavy machineguns (or so Evan tells me). Evan was pinned down in a far-off area (or maybe he just wanted me to feel useful), so he had me take over a downed jeep and use its HMG to hold off troops and vehicles at a distance. A quick keypress activated thermal vision, and I spent 15 minutes picking off enemies at range. It was glorious.

I was sceptical, but now I m a believer. Arma 3 is not only an impressive simulation of battle, but it s an incredibly compelling co-op sandbox. I ve played some janky Steam Workshop content that was still fun because of the group I played it with. I ll probably never play Arma alone, but I ll always jump in with some friends.

EVAN Even if you don t set out to roleplay, you inevitably end up doing something military like reciting compass directions as individual numbers (like bearing one-eight-zero to indicate south), or acronyming everything, or freely yelling phrases like suppressive fire! Because it feels like the appropriate thing to do. It s wonderful that something centred on realism can stimulate such playfulness.

Beyond all that, Arma 3 s Altis map was the most detailed world in a videogame this year a slab of Mediterrania jigsawed with salt flats, jungle shrubs, solar power plants and postcard-worthy beach resorts.

Kerbal Space Program has been in development for three years, but at Kerbal Kon last week a vision for what the final game will look like finally began to emerge. Developing the game s confirmed multiplayer modes will start next year after the single-player game has reached what Squad is calling scope-complete : not finished, but with no more major features left to add.

PC Gamer attended Kerbal Kon in Mexico City and got a chance to sit in on Squad Con, the team s in-house planning session the day before the global livestream event. The big news is that the game is very close to having all its moving parts installed.

The two most critical things for career mode are contracts and budgets, lead developer Felipe Falange said. We re going to see how much we can squeeze into the first one, then if it doesn t fit, it will go to the next one. It s the very near future, because it s something that needs to happen for scope completion.

Though each part in KSP s craft-building modes theoretically has a cost, that cost has never been a hindrance in the current build of the game. Eventually, though, players will have to keep their rockets within budget in order to move over to the launchpad. If players find themselves short on money, they ll be able to take on contracts.

The thing with contracts is that they re not missions, per se, Falanghe said. They re more like objectives that you subscribe to you can take as many as you want. You take on a risk when you accept a contract because that contract may reward you when you complete them, but failing will harm your reputation Reputation will also serve as a currency, and keeping your promises and bringing Kerbals safely home will open doors for new contracts.

The game s three currencies reputation, cash, and science will each be exchangeable for the others. If you re short on cash, you can sell some science in the form of patents. If an unplanned, spontaneous disassembly has tarnished your reputation, some money in the right hands will help ease your woes. If your agency is well-regarded but cash poor, your reputation can bring in some emergency funding for that one big mission.

Once these remaining systems are in place, Kerbal Space Program will finally be scope-complete, but the developers still have a laundry list of things they hope to add to the game, like air-friction for ships entering the atmosphere, new spaceplane parts and revamped visual effects. After three years of work and an influx of global attention, it seems that the end is finally on the horizon, if not actually coming up soon.

The holidays are a time for family gatherings, massive dinners, mildly disappointing presents, and visitations by ghosts who show you harrowing visions of what might have been. This year, the Ghost of Video Games Past showed me what the games of 2013 would have been like if graphics cards had never been invented! I have no idea why he did that. The Ghost of Video Games Past is a little weird.

However you feel about the Call of Duty series, we can all agree that the visuals are among the most cinematic in gaming. What happens when you remove the visuals? Follow me (and do exactly what I tell you when I tell you) and we'll find out with Call of Duty: Ghosts: The Text Adventure!

World of Warcraft is nine years old. If you want to take a moment to let that sink in, that s perfectly understandable. It has remained the biggest subscription-based MMO in the world throughout that period: it s still huge, even if the prevailing narrative surrounding it is of an empire in gradual decline. 7.6 million players doesn t really feel like decline: more like erosion, in the sense that a mountain erodes.

Warlords of Draenor is the first of a new kind of expansion for World of Warcraft. It s leaner, in some senses, than the expansions that have come before. It adds a new continent the orc homeworld of Draenor, predestruction and new features, plus tweaks to raids, the UI, and the game engine, but no new classes or races. On the surface, it appears more considered and modest than Cataclysm or Wrath of the Lich King and, in returning the focus to the orcs, it s less of a tonal departure than Mists of Pandaria.

Blizzard are gearing up production on World of Warcraft with a view to putting out boxed expansions every year rather than every 18 months-ish as it was before. They talk about having plans for the WoW expansion after this one, and the one after that, and the one after that: a salvo of erosion-slaying magic bullets loaded in a revolver, with Warlords of Draenor sitting ready in the first chamber.

At least, that s how Warcraft boss Chris Metzen put it, announcing the expansion at Blizzcon. I asked WoW producer John Lagrave about it later how possible is it, in reality, to plan for the needs of a gaming community that far in advance?



Let me continue the analogy, he says. First we have to build the bullet and we re building a bullet for a gun we don t know the calibre of yet, so there s a lot of give and take. We have a plan for Warlords of Draenor that s in the chamber and is being fired. For the next expansion, we re in talks about it. We focus, initially, on the story we re going to tell. Once we ve got that, we try to figure out a sentence or two about what the vibe is. What s going to be engaging? What s going to be fun? What is interesting about it?

Warlords of Draenor is intended to recapture the feel of orcs-and-humans-era Warcraft, and to reintroduce the characters and conflicts that fans have followed for decades but that recent WoW acolytes might have missed among the panda warriors and world-consuming dragons. It s a time-travel story, and the Draenor it features is one that has been referenced but never actually presented in a Warcraft game. It s the same place as The Burning Crusade s Outland, but this isn t a Cataclysm-style overhaul: it s a full alternative take on the planet with entirely new zones to explore.

As players, our dimension-skipping adventure will be prompted by the escape of rogue horde warchief Garrosh Hellscream following his arrest at the conclusion of the Siege of Orgrimmar update. Chasing his dream of an all-orc horde to a new extreme, he binds himself to a mysterious time-travelling ally and journeys to Draenor before the orcs became corrupted and invaded Azeroth. There, he stops the orcs from drinking demonic blood and, in its place, gives them loads of technology from the future and sets about building his own portal to Azeroth. So give a little, take a little, then.

Both factions have an interest in stopping Garrosh s Iron Horde , and that leads them to Draenor. An initial suicide mission tutorial experience will take the Alliance and the Horde to Tanaan Jungle formerly Hellfire Peninsula. After that, the Alliance will help defend a Draenei temple in Shadowmoon Valley, a temperate zone of rolling hills trapped in perpetual night. The Horde head to Frostfire Ridge roughly where the Blade s Edge Mountains will eventually be to help the Frostwolf Clan defeat some local ogres.



The Frostwolf Clan in this case is led by The ogre empire is in decline. You re slightly to blame. Orc architecture orchitecture , if you will hasn t changed. Thrall s dad, Durotan, and the sequence I played through involved helping both of them lay siege to an ogre fortress at which point, through Pandaria-style phasing, it transitioned into being the Horde base of operations on Draenor. Blizzard have had a lot of experience bending and twisting the WoW engine into new shapes, and their work here displays the same inventiveness and attention to detail that marked out the best bits of Wrath of the Lich King. Post-conquest, the player is asked to free some orc scouts from a nearby ogre village. The path takes you back out of the ogre fortress, pushing through a crowd of Warcraft-style peons carrying stones and lumber back up the hill. It s a nice little nod to the past, and it made me smile.

You ll have to take the long way around, by the way: flying mounts are disabled in Draenor until some point post-launch. The journey to the new level cap of 100 will be made on foot.

In addition to seven new PvE zones, Warlords of Draenor will add seven dungeons three at max level as well as two raids with sixteen bosses between them. Blizzard are also taking a pass at Upper Blackrock Spire as part of their programme of classic dungeon reboots, and there ll be a new set of world bosses too. There will also be a full PvP zone on Draenor, called Ashran. It s intended to recapture the old days of World of Warcraft battlegrounds the skirmishes over Alterac Valley that took days to resolve. Combatants will be drawn in from multiple servers using the cross-realm technology also used to fill out parties in the dungeon finder.

The current structure of WoW PvP is being revised. Blizzard regard the current system as too deterministic, leading players towards fixed rewards through a long grind they want to shake it up, and they re approaching the problem from multiple angles. PvP matches will now grant random rewards on completion, from bind-on-equip items to rare PvP equipment and bonus Honor. The idea is to surprise players with rewards they weren t expecting, to lead people towards upgrade paths they might not have considered by adding a degree of chance.

The other approach to freshening Player vs Player is the exact opposite. Warlords of Draenor will introduce Trials of the Gladiator, new arena combat events where players use standard, balanced gear creating a competition that is entirely about skill.





On the PvE side, raid sizes are being reworked again to create a more accessible experience. Raids will be available in Raid Finder, Normal and Heroic difficulties for any number of players between 10 and 25, their encounters scaling on the fly to match the number of friends you bring. If someone drops out, you won t need to wait for a replacement. The best rewards, however, will be available to guilds who crack raid encounters on Mythic difficulty, which will be balanced for and require 20 players. It seems like a smart compromise between the needs of the hardcore set and weekend warriors who just want a chance to see dungeons they d previously been locked out of.

Blizzard walk a thin line between giving their community what they want and telling them what they need but they seem to walk it confidently, at least in Warlords of Draenor s case.

We want you to stay engaged in the game and not become dispassionate about it, says John Lagrave. We have our own internal testing sessions, and I ll tell you the session for our Blizzcon build was brutal. We re very critical, and there s lots of things that we will be doing and changing from our own criticism plus what we get from the community. It s a constant process.

Some of the biggest cheers I heard at Blizzcon were for Warlords of Draenor features that seem innocuous from the outside. WoW s inventory is being updated, so that you ll be able to easily set filters for your bags and sort them quickly. Collectible items such as heirlooms, toys and tabards are becoming part of the collections system as opposed to taking up bank space and quest items will no longer go into your inventory at all. You ll be able to craft using materials that are in your bank, Guild Wars 2-style. These quality-of-life improvements will likely shave off millions of hours busywork across the breadth of WoW s audience.

No one feature received an outpouring of approval quite like the update to character models, however. Vanilla WoW s original races are all getting upgraded with more detailed models, high-res textures, and new animations that include facial expressions for emotes. Blizzard are recording new voice work, too, so expect to hear a bunch of new variations on ungh! and I can t cast that now! The Burning Crusade races are set to be updated shortly after the expansion launches.



World of Warcraft is also, at long last, getting a form of player housing. You ll be able to create and manage a garrison on Draenor that works a little bit like a base in the original strategy games. You ll pick from plots of land, and build and upgrade structures that provide game-wide benefits. You might build crafting buildings that give you limited access to professions that you don t otherwise have, or buffs that you take with you into the wider world.

Garrisons will also act as the basis for a new kind of daily quest. Through your town s inn you ll build up a party of NPC adventurers who can be sent on adventures that take hours of real time to complete. They ll have their own traits and levelling paths, and sending the right people on the right jobs will yield rewards such as exclusive items, mounts and randomised chests. It s a substantial extension of the Tillers farm system from Mists of Pandaria, with much further-reaching implications for your daily life within the game and for your free time. It s also equivalent to Pet Battling, in that it s an addition to an expansion that looks a bit like a nonsequitur on the surface, but which will probably end up being the most strikingly new-feeling addition for players who have had almost a decade to get used to the game it s attached to.

Your garrison will be a part of the open world, separated from those of other players using again seamless phasing. If you want to invite a friend over, that ll be Some parts of Draenor will be more familiar than others. ...even purple forests trapped in eternal darkness. Player-built garrisons can be set up anywhere... possible but it s unclear at this stage whether or not it ll be possible to discover other people s towns or followers in a more informal manner.



Every purchase of Warlords of Draenor will, additionally, give you an accountbound token that lets you boost any character you like to level 90. It s a measure that Blizzard are taking to give new or returning players a chance to skip straight to the new stuff, but it s likely to be possible with veterans too. Haven t finished a full set of max-level alts yet? You just got one for free. These insta-90s will start with a set of equipment and some consumables appropriate to their level.

I imagine that some dedicated players will feel their investment has been cheapened by letting total newbies skip nine years worth of content, but it s a pragmatic move by Blizzard and there s a good chance it ll be the last little push required by those of us who are at any point only a few clicks from resubscribing. Blizzard make changes like this from a position of authority: even after all this time, World of Warcraft is the game to beat and even when a new contender improves on this or that system, its like can be replicated within WoW and improved upon in no time at all. This expansion modernises the game across the board.

Warlords of Draenor strikes me as an attempt to level the playing field in anticipation of the future. It s varied, certainly, but safe in the sense that it in no way reaches deep into the crust of the game to find something new. Even its narrative moves backwards rather than forwards to find something fresh to present to fans. At its most radical, the expansion rethinks systems like raiding without ultimately changing the purpose they ve always served. Lapsed players and dedicated fans alike might have expected something a little more dramatic, this long into the game s life but then again, perhaps it s not a surprise. Blizzard are still sitting at the top of the mountain, and they ve got no reason to shake the foundations.

Before running away for a few days of competitive eating and cooperative gaming, Evan, Cory, and Tyler gathered to reflect on the most memorable victories, losses, and stories they virtually experienced in 2013. Watch the whole five-video series on the PC Gamer YouTube channel, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more regular content, gameplay footage, and conversations.