I love permadeath in games. (Also in reality, too, I guess, but one thing at a time.) Permadeath imbues every decision with consequence. It makes every HP loss a terrifying proposition. It can turn some games into dramatic, terrifying, exhilarating adventures. It can lead to soul-crushing defeat, or fist-pumping jubilation. It’s why XCOM, Spelunky, and Invisible, Inc. are three of my favorite games of all time.

There are many other games that don't use capital-P Permadeath as a core aspect of their design but still manage to create immensely satisfying experiences when played with self-imposed permadeath rules (and maybe a few other restrictions). 

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

Self-imposed restrictions: Minimal upgrades. You can only purchase Execution, Impact, Strike from Above, Poison, Brutalize, Detonate, and Wraith Stun.

Shadow of Mordor is a fantastic game by any stretch, but at a certain point—say, about five or six hours in—you become an unstoppable juggernaut. The orc captains who once terrorized you no longer pose much of a problem. You check out their strengths and weaknesses more out of blind curiosity than strategic necessity.

As fun as the game is after you’ve reached this point, I missed that sense of disempowerment and forethought that defined the opening hours.

To that end, I highly recommend you try a permadeath, minimal-upgrades run: Don’t invest in any upgrades beyond the borderline-necessary ones (executing people from stealth, shooting barrels to make them explode) If you die, you have to delete your save file.

Suddenly, it really, really matters if an orc is immune to ranged attacks, because now you have to put yourself in harm’s way to kill him. Suddenly, the question of whether you should brand or kill an orc becomes drastically more difficult: The deadlier an orc is, the more you’ll want to recruit him, but recruiting him will be drastically more dangerous than killing him.

And you know those moments where you’re about to stealth kill an orc captain, only to be ambushed by a vengeful orc you thought you’d killed? Those bits are a hundred times more terrifying in a permadeath scenario.

Prey

Difficulty: NightmareGame options: Activate all “survival mode” options: weapon degradation, traumas, and oxygen scarcity.Self-imposed restrictions: Don’t buy the slo-mo skill, because it makes things way too easy.

Prey really doesn’t get the credit it deserves. It’s probably the best Spooky Space Station game ever made after System Shock 2, and it’s so nonlinear that it makes permadeath runs an absolute joy.

Succeeding in a Prey permadeath run (on Nightmare difficulty—Normal is too easy, and Hard seems like it can’t be that hard because it’s not Nightmare, but it is that hard, so you’ll get complacent and die in stupid ways) is less about memorizing specific strategies for specific levels and much more about mastering Talos 1 as a whole. 

Because the game’s mission objectives are sprinkled throughout the station, and because resources are so devilishly important to your survival, a Prey permadeath run requires you to make constant risk-versus-reward decisions about how you’re going to empower yourself. Do I head to Halden Graves’ office so I can unlock unlimited Neuromod fabrication and jab myself full of skill points? That could be a great plan, but his office is protected by a Nightmare—maybe I should go to Psychotronics first and get the Psychoscope so I can research some more typhon and get a bunch of cool psi powers.

But, shit, if I do that then all the turrets I’ve been relying on in the lobby are going to start shooting at me, because they’ll identify me as an alien.Okay, so maybe I’ll… okay. I’ll invest in weapon upgrades and just bumrush the Nightmare with a shotgun. But—goddammit. When I started this run, I turned on the optional survival mechanics, and now my shotgun only has four more shots before it breaks in my hands. So maybe I need to spend my neuromods on crafting and repair?

And so on, and so on, until you either become a goddess of Talos 1 or end up dying at the hands of your own damn turrets that you just told yourself you’d remember to deactivate once you started buying typhon skills.

This has happened to me three. Separate. Times. I love it.

Hotline Miami

Self-imposed restrictions: Permadeath, except for the instafail stealth hospital levels.

You’ll never successfully complete a Hotline Miami permadeath run. At least, I haven’t. It’s way too random, way too quick, and way too lethal.

But hoo boy, is it fun to pretend you’ve got a shot. 

For two or three months, I would attempt to beat Hotline Miami permadeath at least once a day. I knew I’d probably never succeed, but the thrill of beating each new level—the way your heart skips a beat when an enemy’s shotgun blast somehow barely misses you—is just too damn good. Plus, it's so short that failure never feels too punishing; I think my longest run was something like fifteen minutes, compared to the dozens of hours I’ve lost to Prey permadeath mishaps. 

Metal Gear Solid 5

Game options: Deactivate “reflex mode.”Self-imposed restrictions: Never play as Big Boss; upon dying, release your soldier forever.

As a die-hard Metal Gear Solid fan, I was really excited for MGS5 to delve into how Big Boss turned into a sociopathic monster who treated soldiers more like disposable assets than human beings. Unfortunately, MGS5 has very little interest in telling that story. But with a little creativity on our end, we can do what Kojima didn’t.It’s not clearly signposted to the player, but you don’t have to play MGS5 as Big Boss. You can, in fact, play as any soldier you kidnap from the field. Other than their VO and a potential special ability or two, these grunt-level soldiers play exactly the same as Big Boss.

But when they die, you should immediately remove them from Diamond Dogs. They did some good work for you, but they’re dead now. Bring in the next meatbag, give them a rocket launcher, and tell them to take on a bipedal tank single-handedly. Maybe they’ll do better than the last idiot.

NOW you’re thinking like Big Boss.

Dark Souls

Self-imposed restrictions: Permadeath. Period.

Okay, here’s the thing: a Dark Souls permadeath run is hard, but it’s not quite as hard as you think. Maybe you’re imagining that a failed run means you’ll have lost dozens of hours. But that’s not the case!

One of the many beautiful things about Dark Souls’ design is how its rhythms, strategies, and geography just sorta seep into your brain through the act of repetition. Your first run of Dark Souls might take forty hours; your second, half that; your third, half that again. At this point, the no-glitch speedrun record for Dark Souls is about 90 minutes. Ninety minutes! 

Any Dark Souls veteran can tell you that while there are a few parts of the game that remain pretty damn difficult (the snipers on the Anor Londo rooftops, Ornstein and Smough, the stupid-ass Bed of Chaos), almost every challenge in the game can be reliably dealt with if you just possess the knowledge and the perseverance.

So, yeah, you might die and lose two hours of progress. But you’ll be surprised by how quickly you can make that time up in your next run. 

I love permadeathing Dark Souls because it enhances the gameplay themes that are already there: Don’t give up; you’re better than you think you are; knowledge, failure, and mastery are all intertwined; the Bed of Chaos is some bullshit.

Far Cry 2

Difficulty: InfamousSelf-imposed restrictions: Go into the game knowing the twist ending. For extra fun, don’t buy any sniper rifles—only use the crappy ones dropped by enemies.

In order to properly enjoy a Far Cry 2 permadeath run, you need to know how the game ends. So, spoiler warning:

For the first 99% of Far Cry 2, you rely on a small cadre of NPC “buddies.” These folks will fight alongside you, they’ll offer you alternate ways to complete missions, and most importantly, they’ll revive you when you die. They’re awesome.

At the end of the game, however, your best buddy—whichever one is left alive that you’ve spent the most time with—will team up with all the other remaining buddies and ambush you.These buddies have at least twice as much health as any random bad guy, and they’re armed with pretty good weapons, and they used to be your friends. It’s a brilliant and utterly cynical climax.

And now that you know that, you’re ready to permadeath Far Cry 2 on its hardest difficulty setting.

Your buddies are the single best resource you have to keep you alive in the brutal wilds of Unnamed African Country. But if you leave too many of them alive, that’s just more firepower that’s going to inevitably be turned on you at the end of the game. It's a foreboding puzzle that you'll spend the entire length of the game working out a solution to.

So, what do you do? Do you systematically murder your buddies through the course of the game, praying you don’t get into too much trouble before you can find a new one? Or do you let your buddies live, knowing the chance you’ll be taking at the end of the game? And is it, like, morally okay to summon your buddy and shoot them in the face before they’ve even done anything wrong?

You get to answer these questions for yourself just by playing a permadeath run.

A couple of weeks ago, Assassin's Creed Wiki user AlifMorrisonudin noticed something very interesting in The Division 2: A poster in the game that he thought could be an Assassin's Creed Easter egg. This eventually led to excited conversations on Reddit and at least one YouTube video explaining why it might be significant.   

The poster has a Viking-looking fellow, wearing what could be an Assassin's style cloak, holding a spear and gazing stoically out over what I imagine is the sea, or maybe a winter-swept field or something appropriately Nordic. The word "Valhalla" is plastered across the top, in case there's any doubt about where this guy comes from.   

But what really sells it as an Assassin's Creed tease is the orb he holds in his hand, which bears a distinct similarity to the Apples of Eden, technology created by the humanity-preceding race known as the Isu that are basically deus ex machina gizmos that do whatever they need to, whenever it's needed. If you want to get really deep into the lore, a Viking connection to the Apples of Eden was established all the way back in Assassin's Creed 2 through the Nordic goddess Idun.

Taken altogether, it's pretty convincing, especially since Ubisoft has done this sort of thing previously. But what really seals the deal, at least as much as a deal can be sealed when it's still purely rumor, is this Kotaku report saying that its own anonymous sources said a few months ago that the upcoming game will in fact be about Vikings. Kotaku has a pretty good record when it comes to this sort of thing, and the fact that it's willing to go to print with the rumor lends it considerably more credence.

No other details are known (or rumored) at this point, and probably won't be for quite a while. Ubisoft said last year that the next Assassin's Creed game won't be out until 2020. 

There are games like Doom that forever change their genres. Then there are games that don’t necessarily come to mind on a day-to-day basis, but which constantly re-enter the conversation when developers get together and talk. Far Cry 2 is a real developer's game: an imperfect gem to be sure, but one that changed the industry by changing how people thought about games.

Far Cry 2's central genius is that it’s an open world that doesn’t exist to glorify you, the player. At best, you’re a villain. Most of the time, you’re honestly of little consequence. The intro sets the scene with you as the world’s least prepared mercenary, visiting Africa on the hunt for a wanted weapons dealer called The Jackal. It goes poorly. Before you can even begin the hunt, you catch malaria, end up bed-ridden, and have the Jackal himself pop round to go through your things, point out that you’ve failed miserably and won’t be paid, before wandering off with a “So long.” Few games have been quite so happy to lower the stakes to something that non-existent.

Of course, you don’t just go home. Instead the mission quickly descends into the kind of nihilism that wouldn’t be matched until the underrated Spec Ops: The Line. You kill because that’s what you do, working for two factions who were criticised at the time for being basically the same collection of psychopathic arseholes before people realised that yes, that was the point. There are no good guys in Far Cry 2, and no glorious crusade to save the war-torn country from some handy moustache-twirling dictator. There is only war, malaria, death and greed.

As would become a series staple, Far Cry 2 had next to nothing to do with the game that came before it save for being a shooter, and certainly none of the mutants and other silly elements that slowly took over its storyline. The developers, led by Clint Hocking, explained that the goal was to capture the spirit of the series, though it often felt (maybe cynically) like the money-men just weren't paying attention until it was too late.

Far Cry was a level-based game that just happened to have really big, open-feeling levels. Far Cry 2 was a playground. True, it wasn’t completely open, in that the story was still tied together with missions and specific objectives, and no matter how much you drove around killing things, nothing would change until the plot dictated it did. But once you were actually on assignment, it was anything goes. Snipe enemies from a distance, steal a car and go smashing into a base, run in guns blazing, set things on fire…

What made Far Cry 2 different from the average open world game was how it managed to embrace the potential of this freedom without either descending into anarchy or coming across as ridiculous. You’re certainly no godlike presence. Along with needing regular malaria treatments to prevent vomiting your guts up at the worst possible time, every system and plot point is there to reinforce the darker elements of the setting—whether it’s tracking down blood diamonds or conducting brutal assassinations that can only lead to more trouble.

Another legacy of Far Cry 2: one of the all-time great game trailers, thanks to perfect pairing with Massive Attack's Angel.

More directly, even standard elements like taking a bullet go a little further than most. Get injured and you'll be ‘treated’ to unpleasant examples of your wounds being patched up in the field. Throughout the game you’re regularly paired with mercenary ‘buddies’ willing to lend a hand, drag your injured corpse out of danger and offer their own objectives, but none are saints. By the end of the game, the glitter of diamonds and chance of escape is more than enough to shatter any friendships.

Really, Far Cry 2 was to the military shooter what Deus Ex had been to sneaking around urban environments—a game that made those environments into another weapon, and gave them the weight that had been lacking from most prior open world games like 2006’s cartoony Just Cause, or GTA and its endless copycats. It was also first and foremost a shooter, unlike RPGs like Fallout 3 or the clunky hybrid that was Stalker. 

That greatly contributed to how smooth the action was, as well as the nature of Far Cry 2's basic play loops: clearing outposts, the simple act of navigating the world, and using its physics, tools and AI to prompt emergent action. These things made Far Cry 2 feel natural in small, vital ways. 

Everything from checking a real map to the effect of a grenade (spoiler: it explodes) flowed realistically from your basic understanding of reality, with no need to think of the action in terms of hit points, levels and game mechanics. If something felt like a good tactic then it probably was, and when things went horribly wrong or right, it was usually in a way that made for an interesting story.

Despite all this, Far Cry 2 can feel clunky today. Much of it did at the time, too. Particularly strange is the way that characters speak twice as fast as they should and without much of that human thing we call emotion. The shooting isn't the best the genre has to offer. And it’s hard not to chafe at NPCs you’re working for still taking a pop at you every time you meet their patrols, or the world being a bit too static—there being no way to carve out safe spaces or even permanently deal with an outpost. It’s fitting, but still annoying. It’s also unfortunate that despite all the strides taken with the open world, Far Cry 2 ultimately backtracked on an initial plan where the point of the game would be to simply track down and kill the Jackal, and you could ignore the story in favour of making a beeline for him and putting a bullet in his head. The actual game had no such possibility. A real pity.

What it accomplished in the end, however, is even more impressive. It entertained players, but more importantly inspired an industry to widen its perspective and explore the power that open worlds truly offered. Later games have refined these techniques, with elements appearing in everything from Ubisoft’s own Assassin’s Creed, to the later Just Cause games, to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Even where there isn’t direct influence from sitting down and playing Far Cry 2, there are few designers who haven’t at least heard whispered tales of what it accomplished and what it showed was possible. It may have spawned several official sequels over the past decade, but the true legacy of Far Cry 2 is the freedom it quietly inspired.

Ubisoft will not release a new Assassin's Creed game in 2019, chief executive Yves Guillemot has confirmed.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey is due out this October, less than a year after the release of 2017's Assassin's Creed Origins. But this quick turnaround was only possible because the two games were being worked on simultaneously, Guillemot said. There will therefore be no new entry to the series next year—instead, Ubisoft will concentrate on updating Odyssey "on a regular basis" with "new possibilities for play".

"When you get [Odyssey] this year, you're going to get in for a couple of years, actually," he said at Gamescom. "On Assassin's, we had a game [in 2018] and we have one this year, but we are not going to have a full-fledged Assassin's next year. It's just because the team were working separately, so we have two games now, one year after the other. But next year you're not going to have a fully fledged one."

It's not entirely surprising: there was no major Assassin's Creed game in both 2016, between Syndicate and Origins, and 2008, between the original and second games. Odyssey is also "much longer" than Origins, and has probably required more resources to make.

Ubisoft released a new Odyssey trailer yesterday, featuring plenty of fighting and an appearance by a snake-haired Gorgon. 

Thanks, Gamespot.

Deep down, I think we've all wanted to burn down a house.

Not out of vengeance, or a half-baked insurance scam, or to send a message to a crosstown mob boss. To me, pyromania is simply the most relatable form of gleeful mass destruction. Who isn't a little bit entranced by a towering inferno? Of course, in real life you can't work out your emotional baggage through incendiary therapy without getting the cops called on you, but videogames fill the void.

If we're being honest, games have only recently really helped us get in touch with our latent pyromaniac instincts. It was difficult to program inspiring flames on a Commodore 64, and the less said about Doom's pepperoni pizza take on lava the better. But that started to change in 2008, with the release of Far Cry 2 and its unprecedented wildfire mechanics.

"To me [Ubisoft] really nailed how fire should feel and I loved how it would burn the grass and environment, such a wonderful touch," says Bill Munk, creative director of Killing Floor 2, which itself is a game with an incredibly satisfying flamethrower. He's right. Open world sandboxes weren't exactly a rarity in the late-aughties, but Far Cry 2 was one of the first times our machines packed the processing power to handle the physics estimations necessary to set those open-worlds on fire. We haven't looked back since.

"I really think flame weapons are so fun because of the extreme destruction they cause to NPCs and to the environment," continues Munk, when I ask him why he thinks players enjoy a healthy bit of incineration every now and then. "It's such a fun power trip, not to mention fire-based weapons are generally more forgiving on how accurate you need to be with your aim." 

Today, we're seeing games that play with fire on a more granular, mechanical level, rather than the engine-porn stagecraft it's been used for in the past. The best example I can think of is probably Larian Studios' Divinity series, which has persistently injected an immersive suite of environmental effects into the relative solemnity of a turn-based RPG.

I've always found this screenshot, where a rustic wooden platform is scorched to the depths of hell, to be an effective shorthand for why people who don't necessarily play a ton of strategy games still fall in love with the absurdity of Original Sin's magic systems.

"We tried to tweak duration, area and availability of fire skills so that the player is frequently put into position where their battle plan is spinning out of control and they need to improvise and take risks," says Nick Pechenin, systems designer of Divinity Original Sin 2, when I ask him how fire has been a useful tool in Larian's game design. "It was also important to us that although the ways in which surfaces are created and interact with each other have almost no randomness, smallest deviations in how the player targets their skills and positions their characters lead to wildly divergent outcomes, essentially generating fresh combat experiences every time."

It was fun to hear someone speak so intelligently about the mechanical theories behind cauterizing your enemies. For me, fire effects in videogames aren't about all clever design. Fire taps into my baseline, brain-bypassing id—the caveman wants and needs of my idiot gamer brain. But I suppose that's how it should be. A good blaze should be emotionally and aesthetically resonant, and when done right, it serves a distinct gameplay functionality buried deep below our perception. To borrow a J-school aphorism; it is showing, not telling, to the highest degree. With that, here are some PC games that excel in the art of pyromania. 

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

The urtext of video game flamethrowers; a lot of people's first quintessential next-gen experience back in 2001 was torching bunkers in that gorgeous, liquid-orange id Tech 3 goodness. I remember this thing being a little bit overpowered, mostly because of its ridiculous range, but frankly any good flamethrower should be. The only good Nazis are the ones conflagerating to death at your feet. 

For bonus Nazis-on-fire action, check out this trailer for the 2009 Wolfenstein's Flammenwerfer.

Far Cry (series)

We talked about Far Cry 2 above, which will always and forever be the crown prince of video game fire effects. But we also must give a nod to the other games in the series, specifically Far Cry 3, which had its finger on the pulse of the nation when it included a level where your shit-for-brains protagonist burns down a marijuana growing operation while a Skrillex/Damian Marley collaboration blasts off in the background. (It was 2012, what did you expect?) Truly a magnificent moment in the history of gaming that will only continue to get more hilarious as time goes on. 

Terraria

Terraria does such a great job with its physics for a 2D platformer, and one of my favorite ways that manifests is when you're digging through the sediment and throwing down an endless bread crumb of torches to guide your way back to the surface. It can be a pain to farm gel and wood to make sure you never run out light, but there's something kinda dramatic about zooming out and seeing the vast network of dimly-lit mineshafts you've inadvertently created. Especially for someone like me, who's always been bad at the aesthetic parts of crafting games. 

Alien Isolation

Alien Isolation is a game about being completely screwed, but one of the very, very few times you feel like you have a chance in that awful, no-good, godforsaken spaceship is when you've got the flamethrower on your side. One big angry ball of flame is all it takes to put the xenomorph on its bony heels, and that respite can be downright euphoric. The flamethrower as the odds-evener, as it should be. 

Diablo (series)

Blizzard prefers a heavy touch when it comes to their aesthetic design, so it's no surprise that their darkest franchise lays it on pretty darn thick whenever we make a journey to the underworld. Diablo's hell is absolutely unreasonable; a giddy orgy of blood, lava, blackened gothic chapels, and belching geysers of flame. Personally, I'm partial to Azmodan Lord of Sin, best known for lobbing infernal orbs of molten rock at your hapless barbarian (a mechanic that was later beautifully integrated into Heroes of the Storm). Good on you, Blizzard. We can only hope that Diablo 4 brings an even heavier dose of hellishness. 

Shovel Knight

This is PC Gamer, which means we can't mention Super Mario 64, or Banjo Kazooie, or Sonic The Hedgehog on this list. That's a shame, because the mascot platformer is forever betrothed to lava levels—nothing quite ups the ante like the chance to singe the overalls right off of Mario's nubile body. Thankfully Yacht Club, who has dedicated its existence to bringing picture perfect 8-bit-esque adventures to Steam, picked up the slack. Of course Shovel Knight has a lava level, and of course it learns from the masters by bringing a candyflipped Bowser's Castle that's challenging, dramatic, and thoroughly retro. If we could bottle and administer the feeling you get when you use that indestructible shovel to traverse the lakes of Hell, everyone on earth would realize that videogames are a force for good. 

World of Warcraft

It's been a long, long time since I played a Fire Mage in World of Warcraft, but one of the most satisfying feelings that MMO ever produced was the Presence of Mind/Pyroblast combo back in vanilla. I'll break it down for you: Pyroblast was this ridiculous, deep talent-tree spell that let you hurl a massive fireball at an enemy after a six second casting time. That made it kinda useless, because the downtime was so heavy. That is, unless, you also specced into Arcane to pick up Presence of Mind, which, when activated, would make your next spell cast instantly. You see where I'm going now, right?

Presence of Mind/Pyro quickly became my favorite thing to do to people in Warsong Gulch. I'd reckon to guess that it led to more Alt-F4s than anything else in Warcraft's early years. Well, that's not true. Remember when Rogues could stunlock you for, like, half a minute? Man, maybe World of Warcraft Classic is a bad idea.

Team Fortress 2

It's pretty hard to balance a flamethrower in a multiplayer game. Usually they're either totally weak and watered-down, or an ultra-scarce pickup that you see once every 20 games. So hats off to Valve for not only building out the Pyro as a crucial part of the Team Fortress fabric, but also making him fun to play! Torching a crowded control point feels great, but every good Pyro knows the value of the secondary shotgun when you get locked down in a dual with a Scout or a Soldier or something. The variation between the loadout makes you feel useful and multi-dimensional, rather than the kid hogging the cool weapons and sandbagging the team.

BioShock (series)

I love the way Jack's hand looks when he's got the Incinerate plasmid equipped. All of the biological upgrades in Rapture are horrifying in their own visceral ways—I never ever need to see that Insect Swarm cutscene ever again—but something about walking around BioShock's dead corridors with a left hand that's smoldering from the inside out is awesome, and troubling, and could probably serve as a tentpole for some half-baked fan theory. In this Randian dystopia, the Left is on fire! I also think BioShock does perhaps the best job of letting us live our deepest, truest arson fantasies. Just snap your fingers and set anything on fire. Easy as that. Great for clearing out crazy people in a fallen kingdom, and also probably great for party tricks. 

Dark Souls

You have to think that From Software knew their take on pyromancy was awesome, considering how it's, by far, the easiest school of magic to use in a game that's famous for its abstruseness. No degenerate attunement system, no gatekeeping stat requirements, just throw on your fire glove and start roasting skeletons. Everyone who's spent some time in Lordran knows exactly where they were the first time you were invaded by some refined griefer who rained ungodly hellfire on your poor, PvE-tuned knight. We all rushed back, retrieved our souls, and vowed to get our revenge in New Game Plus. And probably started learning pyromancy.