Civilization 6 received a substantial update today in the form of its 'Fall Update' patch, ushering in DirectX 12 support as well as a host of sweet gameplay additions. As far as the latter is concerned, there's a new multiplayer scenario called 'Cavalry and Cannonades', as well as two new map types in the form of Four-Leaf Clover and Six-Armed Snowflake. According to the patch notes, these map types are "designed to encourage more conflict".
As the first major patch for the game, the list of updates and tweaks is extensive. The user interface has received a number of fixes and improvements; AI is better tuned, and the list of bug fixes is very long. You can read the whole spiel over here, and then compare and contrast with some of the beefs Evan had with the game earlier this week.
As far as DirectX 12 support goes, the patch starts with AMD cards, as well as Nvidia Maxwell series cards and upwards. Firaxis advises to make sure your GPU drivers are updated before booting the game.
A new update is available for Sid Meier’s Civilization VI today. The “Fall 2016 Update” will automatically install when starting the Steam client; if it doesn’t install automatically, please restart Steam.
This update adds DirectX 12 support to Civilization VI, starting with AMD cards and NVIDIA Maxwell-series-or-later cards; please make sure your drivers are up-to-date. Support has also been added for Logitech ARX. For more information on each of these, please click their respective link.
Today you’re also able to play a whole new scenario called “Cavalry and Cannonades,” and settle on two new map types, “Four-Leaf Clover” and “Six-Armed Snowflake.” These maps are playable both online and off, and were designed to encourage more conflict by forcing players to move toward the center. For the full list of what’s in this latest update, please see below.
Firaxis Games and 2K are committed to making Civilization VI the best experience possible and will continue to support the title. If you have any feedback on this update or just the game in general, please let us know in the 2K Forums or here on Steam. Stay civilized!
[NEW] • Maps - Added a balanced six player map. - Added a balanced four player map. • ‘Cavalry and Cannonades’ Scenario Added - Combat scenario with reduced unit maintenance costs and no strategic resource requirement for units. - Larger starting army and additional starting techs. - Time limit: 50 turns. - Goal: Possess the largest territory. • DX12 Support • Complete Logitech ARX Support
[GAMEPLAY UPDATES] • Added additional notifications. • Added a “time defeat” for running out of time. This is always disabled if a Score Victory is available. • Added additional Hotkey support (next unit, next city). • Added the ability to rename cities. • Added UI to show the next tile a city will grow to. • Added a visual cue for Barbarian Scouts that are alerted to your city. • Changed Dan Quayle rankings.
[BALANCE CHANGES] • Added prerequisite project (Manhattan Project) for Operation Ivy. • Added Metal Casting as a prerequisite for Economics tech. • Adjusted religious pressure when a religion is first founded to give them more resilience and convert the city. • Adjusted relationship decay rates. • Reduced the effectiveness of cavalry production policies. • Reduced Warmonger penalties in most instances, and adjusted how this reacts to returning versus keeping a city. The last city conquered from a player now provides a heavy warmonger penalty, even if you have a Casus Belli against this player, because you are wiping out a civilization. • Reduced border incursion warnings if the troops are within their own borders. • Increased the number of Great Works of Writing slots in the Amphitheater to 2. • Increased Counterspy operation time. • Increased the cost of Religious units and applied additional charges. • Units may no longer be deleted when they are damaged. • Deleting a unit no longer provides gold. • Updated Island Plates map to have more hills and mountains. • Units may no longer remove features from tiles that are not owned by that player. • Fallout now prevents resource harvesting. • Barbarian camps must spawn further away from low-difficulty players’ cities.
[AI TUNING] • Adjusted AI victory condition focus to increase their competitiveness in Science and Tourism. • Adjusted AI understanding of declared friendship. • Adjusted the AI approach to beginning and ending a war based on potential gain and loss. • Increased AI competitiveness in building a more advanced military. • Increased AI usage of Inquisitors. Especially Phillip. • Increased AI value of upgrading units. • Increased AI use of Settler escorts. • Tuned AI usage of units that cannot move and shoot, like Catapults. • Tuned AI city and unit build planning. • Improved the ability of city-states to maintain a strong military.
[BUG FIXES] • Fixed some production Social Policies, Great People, and Pantheon bonuses that were not applying correctly. • Fixed Royal Navy Dockyard not getting the right adjacency bonuses. • Fixed some issues with how the Great Wall was built by players and AI, including proper connection to mountains and removing other players’ Great Walls as potential connection points. • Fixed a unit cycling error with formations. • Fixed a bug where the first military levy that expired would return all levied units (including those levied from other city-states) to that city-state. Now it should only return the levied units that actually originally belonged to the one city-state. • Fixed several issues when Airstrips and Aerodromes are occupied, including forced rebasing of enemy units and UI updates. • Fixed an exploit that allowed ranged and bombard units to gain experience when attacking a district with 0 hit points. • Fixed an issue with wonders when transferring city ownership – conquering a city with a wonder would not track that wonder, and could lead to problems when attempting to use Gustave Eiffel. • Fixed an issue where the Settler lens would not always show the right information to the player. • Fixed an issue where AI would counter gold changes with the change desired, rather than the total amount of gold desired. • Fixed an issue where the Tutorial intro and outro videos would appear off-center in certain resolutions. • Fixed some crashes with units. • Fixed an issue where multiple leaders of the same civilization would frequently show up in a game. • Fixed an issue where Trade Route yields were doubling in some instances. • Units in formations now break formation before teleporting between cities. • The achievement ‘For Queen and Country’ was unlocking too frequently. • AI with neutral relationships should accept delegations barring exceptional circumstances. • Can no longer declare a Joint War if it is invalid for either party. • Save game files should no longer be case sensitive. • Certain wonders were sending extra notifications. • Players will no longer receive any warmongering penalties from a joint war partner for actions in that joint war. • Liberating a civilization back to life will now bring them back into the game properly. • Observation Balloon range bonus was being incorrectly applied when stacked. • Text and grammar fixes.
[VISUALS] • Buildings on snow will now have snow on them. • Added an Industrial Barbarian Encampment. • Added a ranger tower to National Parks. • Fixed some issues with buildings not culling around other world items properly. • Fixed an issue with some Districts not showing properly. • Miscellaneous polish applied to multiple improvements, districts, and buildings.
[MULTIPLAYER] • Turn timers are always disabled on the first turn of a new game. This happens regardless of the advanced start or turn timer type selected. • Allow multiplayer lobby's private game status to be toggled once the lobby has been created. • Cap the max players to 12. • Added LAN player name option to options screen.
[UI] • Added the number of specialists working a tile. • Added some additional icons for espionage, promotions, etc. • Added additional Civilopedia shortcuts, including right clicking a unit portrait. • Added the signature to the diplomacy action view/deal view so that we can differentiate between duplicate players. Also added multiplayer screenname in diplomacy. • Added Trade Route yields to the Reports screen. • Added City Center to the City Breakdown panel. • Added rewards and consequences to mission completed popups. • Updated the leader-chooser when beginning a new game. • Updated the end game Victory screen. • Updated the multiplayer staging room. • Updated city banners. • Updated Espionage mission chooser flow. • Updated to display what cities are getting amenities from each resource. • Changed resource icon backings to reflect the type of resource it is. • Auto-scroll to the first Great Person that can be claimed. • Improved search functionality in the Civilopedia. • Removed Barbarian data from player replay graphs. • ESC now closes the Tech, Civic, and Eureka popups. • When loading a game, the era blurb will be the current era of the saved game, rather than the starting era of the game.
[AUDIO] • Added some missing mouseover sounds. • Fixed the Oracle quote. • Fixed an issue where the Advisor voice was not playing in some languages. • Fixed compatibility issues with some sound cards, especially those set to high playback rates.
[MISC] • Added a setup option "No Duplicate Leaders" that is enabled by default. This option prevents multiple players from selecting the same leader. • Updated leader screen to support enabling/disabling bloom according to the 'Enable Bloom' graphics option. • Plot Tooltip Delay is now available in the Options menu. • Auto Cycle Units is now available in the Options menu. • Benchmark updates. • Credits updated.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/289070 Follow the conversation on social media by using the hashtag #OneMoreTurn, and be sure to follow the Civilization franchise on social media to keep up to date with the latest news and information on Sid Meier’s Civilization VI.
A new update is available for Sid Meier’s Civilization VI today. The “Fall 2016 Update” will automatically install when starting the Steam client; if it doesn’t install automatically, please restart Steam.
This update adds DirectX 12 support to Civilization VI, starting with AMD cards and NVIDIA Maxwell-series-or-later cards; please make sure your drivers are up-to-date. Support has also been added for Logitech ARX. For more information on each of these, please click their respective link.
Today you’re also able to play a whole new scenario called “Cavalry and Cannonades,” and settle on two new map types, “Four-Leaf Clover” and “Six-Armed Snowflake.” These maps are playable both online and off, and were designed to encourage more conflict by forcing players to move toward the center. For the full list of what’s in this latest update, please see below.
Firaxis Games and 2K are committed to making Civilization VI the best experience possible and will continue to support the title. If you have any feedback on this update or just the game in general, please let us know in the 2K Forums or here on Steam. Stay civilized!
[NEW] • Maps - Added a balanced six player map. - Added a balanced four player map. • ‘Cavalry and Cannonades’ Scenario Added - Combat scenario with reduced unit maintenance costs and no strategic resource requirement for units. - Larger starting army and additional starting techs. - Time limit: 50 turns. - Goal: Possess the largest territory. • DX12 Support • Complete Logitech ARX Support
[GAMEPLAY UPDATES] • Added additional notifications. • Added a “time defeat” for running out of time. This is always disabled if a Score Victory is available. • Added additional Hotkey support (next unit, next city). • Added the ability to rename cities. • Added UI to show the next tile a city will grow to. • Added a visual cue for Barbarian Scouts that are alerted to your city. • Changed Dan Quayle rankings.
[BALANCE CHANGES] • Added prerequisite project (Manhattan Project) for Operation Ivy. • Added Metal Casting as a prerequisite for Economics tech. • Adjusted religious pressure when a religion is first founded to give them more resilience and convert the city. • Adjusted relationship decay rates. • Reduced the effectiveness of cavalry production policies. • Reduced Warmonger penalties in most instances, and adjusted how this reacts to returning versus keeping a city. The last city conquered from a player now provides a heavy warmonger penalty, even if you have a Casus Belli against this player, because you are wiping out a civilization. • Reduced border incursion warnings if the troops are within their own borders. • Increased the number of Great Works of Writing slots in the Amphitheater to 2. • Increased Counterspy operation time. • Increased the cost of Religious units and applied additional charges. • Units may no longer be deleted when they are damaged. • Deleting a unit no longer provides gold. • Updated Island Plates map to have more hills and mountains. • Units may no longer remove features from tiles that are not owned by that player. • Fallout now prevents resource harvesting. • Barbarian camps must spawn further away from low-difficulty players’ cities.
[AI TUNING] • Adjusted AI victory condition focus to increase their competitiveness in Science and Tourism. • Adjusted AI understanding of declared friendship. • Adjusted the AI approach to beginning and ending a war based on potential gain and loss. • Increased AI competitiveness in building a more advanced military. • Increased AI usage of Inquisitors. Especially Phillip. • Increased AI value of upgrading units. • Increased AI use of Settler escorts. • Tuned AI usage of units that cannot move and shoot, like Catapults. • Tuned AI city and unit build planning. • Improved the ability of city-states to maintain a strong military.
[BUG FIXES] • Fixed some production Social Policies, Great People, and Pantheon bonuses that were not applying correctly. • Fixed Royal Navy Dockyard not getting the right adjacency bonuses. • Fixed some issues with how the Great Wall was built by players and AI, including proper connection to mountains and removing other players’ Great Walls as potential connection points. • Fixed a unit cycling error with formations. • Fixed a bug where the first military levy that expired would return all levied units (including those levied from other city-states) to that city-state. Now it should only return the levied units that actually originally belonged to the one city-state. • Fixed several issues when Airstrips and Aerodromes are occupied, including forced rebasing of enemy units and UI updates. • Fixed an exploit that allowed ranged and bombard units to gain experience when attacking a district with 0 hit points. • Fixed an issue with wonders when transferring city ownership – conquering a city with a wonder would not track that wonder, and could lead to problems when attempting to use Gustave Eiffel. • Fixed an issue where the Settler lens would not always show the right information to the player. • Fixed an issue where AI would counter gold changes with the change desired, rather than the total amount of gold desired. • Fixed an issue where the Tutorial intro and outro videos would appear off-center in certain resolutions. • Fixed some crashes with units. • Fixed an issue where multiple leaders of the same civilization would frequently show up in a game. • Fixed an issue where Trade Route yields were doubling in some instances. • Units in formations now break formation before teleporting between cities. • The achievement ‘For Queen and Country’ was unlocking too frequently. • AI with neutral relationships should accept delegations barring exceptional circumstances. • Can no longer declare a Joint War if it is invalid for either party. • Save game files should no longer be case sensitive. • Certain wonders were sending extra notifications. • Players will no longer receive any warmongering penalties from a joint war partner for actions in that joint war. • Liberating a civilization back to life will now bring them back into the game properly. • Observation Balloon range bonus was being incorrectly applied when stacked. • Text and grammar fixes.
[VISUALS] • Buildings on snow will now have snow on them. • Added an Industrial Barbarian Encampment. • Added a ranger tower to National Parks. • Fixed some issues with buildings not culling around other world items properly. • Fixed an issue with some Districts not showing properly. • Miscellaneous polish applied to multiple improvements, districts, and buildings.
[MULTIPLAYER] • Turn timers are always disabled on the first turn of a new game. This happens regardless of the advanced start or turn timer type selected. • Allow multiplayer lobby's private game status to be toggled once the lobby has been created. • Cap the max players to 12. • Added LAN player name option to options screen.
[UI] • Added the number of specialists working a tile. • Added some additional icons for espionage, promotions, etc. • Added additional Civilopedia shortcuts, including right clicking a unit portrait. • Added the signature to the diplomacy action view/deal view so that we can differentiate between duplicate players. Also added multiplayer screenname in diplomacy. • Added Trade Route yields to the Reports screen. • Added City Center to the City Breakdown panel. • Added rewards and consequences to mission completed popups. • Updated the leader-chooser when beginning a new game. • Updated the end game Victory screen. • Updated the multiplayer staging room. • Updated city banners. • Updated Espionage mission chooser flow. • Updated to display what cities are getting amenities from each resource. • Changed resource icon backings to reflect the type of resource it is. • Auto-scroll to the first Great Person that can be claimed. • Improved search functionality in the Civilopedia. • Removed Barbarian data from player replay graphs. • ESC now closes the Tech, Civic, and Eureka popups. • When loading a game, the era blurb will be the current era of the saved game, rather than the starting era of the game.
[AUDIO] • Added some missing mouseover sounds. • Fixed the Oracle quote. • Fixed an issue where the Advisor voice was not playing in some languages. • Fixed compatibility issues with some sound cards, especially those set to high playback rates.
[MISC] • Added a setup option "No Duplicate Leaders" that is enabled by default. This option prevents multiple players from selecting the same leader. • Updated leader screen to support enabling/disabling bloom according to the 'Enable Bloom' graphics option. • Plot Tooltip Delay is now available in the Options menu. • Auto Cycle Units is now available in the Options menu. • Benchmark updates. • Credits updated.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/289070 Follow the conversation on social media by using the hashtag #OneMoreTurn, and be sure to follow the Civilization franchise on social media to keep up to date with the latest news and information on Sid Meier’s Civilization VI.
AMD has a new hotfix (16.11.4) available for Radeon graphics card owners and guess what? It introduces DirectX 12 support for Civilization 6! Just kidding (apologies to anyone who just spit coffee onto their monitor in surprised delight), Firaxis and AMD are still working on that.Update: The DirectX 12 patch finally went live, just half a day later than expected. Along with Civ6 getting DX12 support, this driver release helps to ensure everything works optimally with the new DX12 code.
Besides Civ6 tuning and support, the driver release notes mention other items, one of which applies to Titanfall 2. Here are the bugs it stomps out:
H.264 content playback may experience playback issues on internet browsers with hardware acceleration when also running gaming applications or content.
Radeon R9 Fury Series products may experience minor graphical corruption in Titanfall 2 when inside a titan.
There are some known issues AMD continues to work on. They include:
A few game titles may fail to launch, experience performance issues or crash if the third party application "Raptr" has its game overlay enabled. A workaround is to disable the overlay if this is experienced.
DOOM may experience a crash when launched using the Vulkan API on some Graphics Core Next products.
DOTA 2 may experience a crash when launched using the Vulkan API on some Graphics Core Next products.
Flickering may be experience while playing Overwatch in the main menu or viewing character models using AMD CrossFire mode.
FIFA 17 may experience an application hang or black screen on launch for some select Hybrid Graphics or AMD PowerXpress mobile configurations.
H.264 content may experience blocky corruption when streaming using P2P content players on some Radeon RX 400 series graphics products.t
#15: Gilgamesh's superfluous second pinky fingers.
Civ 6 is real good. I agree with most of the stuff that T.J. had to say about it in his enthusiastic review. I think Civ 6's elegant map breathes a ton of life into the series, and I love the Pixar-quality expressions of the leaders. I like most of the UI, how much individual tiles matter, and that barbarians are smart and annoying. I think the changes to combat are smart.
But alongside these improvements are a pile of annoyances that I am compelled to put on the internet. Here are some discomforts that've sapped my enthusiasm for Sid's Sixth.
This is the big one. When you're about to build a district, Civ 6 tells you what bonuses you'll get for that tile immediately if I drop a campus beside two mountains, I'll get two bonus science per turn, for example. But you can't really check in on those adjacency bonuses mid-game. Is my aqueduct boosting my theater district? How much are my mines helping my industrial zone? It's bonkers that I can't just hover over a tile and have it tell me in detail what benefits it's giving me.
2. My kingdom for a tooltip
Likewise, some of Civ's biggest nuances go un- or under-explained. For my first playthrough, I struggled to figure out why a city I'd conquered was suffering occupation penalties hundreds of turns later because the (I guess) inconsequential topic of city conquering is afforded a single sentence in Civilopedia, which itself has tons of information gaps. What do you do with captured spies? If I agree to not move too close to my neighbor's borders, will I violate that promise if their borders advance, or if a scout passes by? What determines which type of artifacts spawn from an antiquity site? What's the threshold for gaining or losing the war weariness penalty? If I found a city atop a luxury resource, do I get it?
3. Amenity allocation
On that note: I like amenities. I think they're an interesting counterweight to population growth. But they aren't well explained. Civ tells you that amenities are distributed evenly between cities, automatically. But if I have four cities and five amenities, with equal population, who gets the fifth one? Again, it's frustrating to not have perfect information when you're deciding whether to build a zoo or a spy. It also took me too long to understand that duplicate luxury resources provide no benefit, other than being tradable extras.
4. UI scaling doesn't work at 1440p
5. Distance-based benefits
Some buildings and wonders, like zoos, or a power plant, grant their benefits to all owned cities within six tiles. Getting two improvements for the price of one can be game-changing. Unfortunately, Civ 6 gives no indication of how that six-tile range is determined. If my neighboring city is four tiles north and two tiles east, does that mean it also gains the benefit? You can calculate it out yourself after a building is completed, but again, why isn't there any visualization of this when you're making a building decision?
6. Camera snapping to units
You can disable this easily by tweaking a text file, but the default camera behavior can be pretty aggravating depending on how many 'awake' units you have and how widely they're distributed over the map.
7. Tourism is the loneliest number
I enjoyed my run as Teddy Roosevelt. I founded New York and Yosemite on the same turn! Hell yeah. Accumulating great works and great people remains a satisfying part of Civ: deploying Chopin or Mary Shelley or Dvorak and seeing their creations spring to life, fullscreen, feels like grabbing epic loot off a boss in Diablo.
Ultimately, though, tourism in Civ 6 is a number that you watch go up until you win. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, there's no visualization to help me delight in the idea of citizens visiting my museums and resorts. I don't get the same visual payoff that I do with a science victory, where I get to see each stage of the Mars mission shot into space. That's a shame because Civ 6 has some wonderful, handcrafted details: if you build Cristo Redentor, for example, its appearance changes depending on the time of day. But there's no expression of Berlin or Jerusalem being thriving hubs of travel and culture.
Broken record time: tourism's nuances are also poorly explained. I have to do a lot of mouse-hovering over icons to figure out that India's religion is boosting the tourists I get from them, or that, because Germany grabbed the Enlightenment civic, I'm getting fewer tourists from them. Culture also doesn't interact with many of the game's other systems, other than spies. What if tourists had a negative impact on housing?
8. The religious endgame
For many of the same reasons, I find Civ 6's religious victory unsatisfying. Because you've only got three units, it's attrition with very little strategy underneath it. Although some civs like Kongo have interesting interactions with religion, and the 'faith race' to earn a great prophet is interesting, religious warfare essentially operates on a parallel plane from the rest of the game, disconnected from Civ's other systems and goals.
9. The spy assignment UI
Please, just let me click on the tile I'd like to place my spy.
10. The hidden unit selection menu
"Now where did I put Leonardo da Vinci?" Seriously, I had to help two different people find this thing.
11. The ancient secret of tile swapping
It's strange that the Very Useful ability to swap tiles between bordering cities is buried under the citizen management button. Swapping a big farm or production tile can make all the difference when you're managing population growth or wonder progress.
12. And Civ's secret spreadsheets
Blame this on my own illiteracy (or on #4), but I didn't find the incredibly useful "View Reports" button until about 40 hours in. It's right there, staring at you in the top-middle of the screen, ready to table a bunch of valuable info your cities' output.
13. Diplomacy menu 'lag'
I can click on things within the diplomacy menu while a turn is processing, but that my inputs don't resolve until the turn is done processing. It's weird to be able to push these buttons and have them not immediately respond. Likewise, visualizations like the worker allocation view aren't usable while a turn's being processed.
14. Housing isn't visualized
Housing becomes a big concern in the mid-game before you unlock neighborhoods, and yet Civ 6 hides where housing is distributed across your tiles. There is a UI mod for this, but it's not great.
...And, yeah, the AI, which T.J. dug into in greater detail at the bottom of his review.
Ubisoft is having an open beta for Steep this weekend, its open world extreme sports game that has players grabbing life by the horns like in Point Break, minus the illegal activities, of course. If you're planning to partake and own a GeForce graphics card, there's a new Game Ready driver release ready, version 375.86.
"Game Ready drivers provide the best possible gaming experience for all major new releases, including virtual reality games. Prior to a new title launching, our driver team works until the last minute to ensure every performance tweak and bug fix is included for the best gameplay on day one," Nvidia says, in case anyone needs a refresher.
In addition to being optimized for the Steep beta, the 375.86 driver release also provides tweaks for The Division Survival DLC, Battlefield 1, and Civilization 6. Nvidia also added a temporal SLI profile for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and fixed a handful of issues, several of which are carryovers from previous driver releases. Here are the ones the release notes list for Windows 10:
[375.70] Smearing and ghosting reported with latest NVIDIA drivers.
[375.63, GeForce GTX 980 Ti] Artifacts in GIFs after driver update.
[SLI, GeForce GTX 1080] Unable to enable Surround with SLI HB bridge; single ribbon SLI bridge works fine.
Battle Carnival is falsely detected as Bionic Commando.
[G-SYNC, 372.70, GeForce GTX 1080] G-SYNC monitor flickers at 144Hz, not reproduced with 368.81.
[SLI, 372.54] Wrong memory usage values in games on Pascal GPUs in SLI mode.
[G-SYNC, GP102] Periodic flickering on desktop at 165Hz when dragging or resizing windows with G-SYNC enabled.
And here are the two that apply to Windows 8/8.1 and Windows 7:
GeForce Experience icon missing on system notification tray.
[GeForce GTX 980 Ti] Unable to detect multiple TV models from Loewe Technologies GmbH.
There are several open issues that Nvidia is working to fix. One of them is a bug that crashes The Division Survival when changing from full-screen to windowed full-screen, which only seems to happen in Windows 10.
Sid Meier’s Civilization® VI - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Robert Zak)
Civilization 6 [official site] is a wonder in singleplayer, though we do have some complaints: the AI still struggles at times and diplomacy isn’t quite the revolution we’d hoped for. The perfect way to sidestep would be to play with non>artificial intelligences, who can conduct diplomacy using swear words and cruel deceptions. We sent our cultural ambassador Robert Zak onto the internet to test out Civ 6 multiplayer in all its forms. Here is his report.
We’re nearly at the end of silly season: most of the big releases are out now, with only Watch No Underscore Dogs Two really still to go. It’s been a messy one for a lot of the big companies, by all accounts. Let’s see how it shook out during Dishonored 2 launch week.
Sid Meier’s Civilization® VI - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Adam Smith)
I’m a positive person. In life, I tend to find a bright side even if I’m lost in the dark, and I look for the best in people even if they’re concealing their best incredibly well. As a games critic, I tend to think of myself as harsh though, because analysing the best qualities of a thing often means finding all the fine points that fail to work along the way. Despite that, looking back at my reviews over the last couple of years, I can’t help but notice that I appear to like games. Quite a lot actually. I am almost always positive about the games I play and I figure it’s worth explaining why that is.
Last week, like drinking mulled wine on a chilly November evening, I found great comfort in a Steam top ten that seemed to reflect the wide, weird and wonderful nature of modern PC gaming. After months of recurrent names, it was a bright new dawn of variety. Anything is possible.
