We're getting closer to E3 every day, and we're bound to see some new games get revealed once we reach that fabled week. Bethesda is one of the companies we already expected to show off new games, but it seems the Fallout publisher is teasing a couple with its E3 media briefing invite.

The invite included an image (above), which is a cartoony mockup of a fictional theme park called Bethesdaland. Similar to Disneyland, there are several different themed sections to the park, all based on Bethesda franchises. There are areas for Dishonored, Prey, The Elder Scrolls, Doom, Quake Champions, and Fallout, but two of the park's locations seem to be under construction at the moment. This looks like it could point to two new game announcements at E3.

As for what these games could be, we can't be entirely sure. However, there is a sign that says "Pardon Our Dust" on one of the construction sites, so I'm guessing it's a sequel to 2009's Wet called Dust. Or maybe it's a sequel to Rage. Get it? Because the game has all that sand.

Alright, enough with all these dang jokes. Let's get serious for a minute here. There have been some teases and clues over the past year as to what these two games could be. One of the franchises missing from the park is Wolfenstein, and if you remember from last year, Bethesda seemed to tease a new game in that series. As for the other mystery game, it could be a sequel to The Evil Within. A job listing for Psycho Break 2 (which is what The Evil Within is called in Japan) was spotted last month. On top of that, Bethesda VP of marketing Pete Hines stoked the fire pit of rumours at last year's QuakeCon by saying The Evil Within sold enough copies to justify a second game.

Of course, it's important to note we don't actually know if either game will be revealed at this year's E3. This is just speculation. However, we will keep you updated as more information is revealed.

Bethesda's E3 briefing kicks off on Sunday, June 11. Hines tweeted back in February that the showcase would take place at the "same day/time as usual," so expect things to start at around 7 PM PT.

Those of you yet to sample the delights of Dishonored 2 will soon be able to do so at no charge. Bethesda announced today that a free trial version of the game will be available on April 6, giving players the opportunity to take on the first three missions of the campaign as either Empress Emily Kaldwin or the Royal Protector, Corvo Attano. 

Dishonored 2 takes place 15 years after the events of the first game, opening with a coup against the Empress that leaves either her or Corvo incapacitated, and the other on a ship bound for the tropical, but not particularly pleasant, realm of Karnaca. From there, it's a quest to return Emily to the throne, quietly or otherwise, with the help of a supporting cast including Anton Sokolov, the slightly mad genius from Dishonored,  and if supernatural giggles are your thing, the Outsider.   

The announcement gave no indication of a time or replay limit on the trial, but it did note that "players that decide to upgrade to the full game during or after the free trial will keep all of the saves made during the trial." That's good, because it means you can keep playing from where you left off if you buy it rather than being forced to start over, but the "during or after" part suggests that at some point the trial will go away. 

It could be a matter of poor wording, or it might be a situation similar to the Doom demo rolled out in 2016: Time-limited, except, eventually, not. (It's been almost a year and you can still get it from Steam.) I've emailed Bethesda for clarification, and will update when I receive a reply. 

We gave Dishonored 2 a towering 93/100 score in our 2016 review, making it one of our highest-rated games of the year—and also our choice for Game of the Year. It had a bit of a rough start thanks to some rather severe performance issues, but multiple updates (including one released just a couple of weeks ago) have addressed those issues for most gamers. If you've been anxious to give it a go, but uncertain about how it will run on your system, I'd say your problem has just been solved. 

This discussion was originally published in March 2017. With the release of Prey, which features prominently, we've brought it back to offer some insight into the development of Arkane's latest game.

Deus Ex. System Shock 2. Dishonored. Some of the PC's most celebrated games belong to a genre called the immersive sim, which emphasizes creating a complex world with tons of player freedom. They're some of our favorite games to talk about, and at the 2017 Game Developer's Conference we were lucky enough to do just that. We put together a roundtable of familiar faces, all of whom have had a major hand in exploring or creating immersive sims.

Our guests: Warren Spector (Otherside Entertainment), Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare (Arkane Studios), Tom Francis (Suspicious Developments) and Steve Gaynor (Fullbright).

You can listen to the hour-long audio version of this discussion here or grab it from our podcast feed. Consider putting it on while you play Deus Ex and pretend it's a brand new audio log. Or, if you want the good old fashioned text version, read on.

Wes Fenlon, PC Gamer: Thanks for joining me at GDC to talk about immersive sims, which I would say is PC Gamer's favorite genre. We love 'em. As food for thought, to start with, I want to open up with the idea of talking about why immersive sims are especially important to gaming, whether it's to you personally, as somehow it affected your career or way of thinking about games, as well as the broader industry, guiding what we hope to see from games as a medium.

Warren Spector: I have a firmly-held belief that to honor a medium, and for it to grow, you have to do what it does that no other media can do. When I look at what games can do that other media can't, I instantly go right to the immersive sim. That sort of real-time you are there, nothing stands between you and belief that you're in an alternate world, that is something that I guess LARPing gets a little close to, and D&D gets pretty darn close to, but we're the first mainstream medium that can actually do that. And the immersive sim is the perfect way to do it.

Steve Gaynor: And I think it's perfectly fair—I think we should start calling them instead of immersive sims, probably digital LARPing. That sounds good to me.

Harvey Smith: Let's alienate ourselves as much as possible.

Steve: The interesting thing about this discussion is that there are a couple of us here, me and Tom, who really came to an understanding of immersive sims as fans first, and then got to actually do work in that space. For me, I think it is what you're saying, Warren. Immersive sims are incredibly powerful in that they allow you that full sense of being in another place, not just through visual fidelity or it looks like I'm here, but the systems of the game allow you to express your role within that space in a way that makes you feel like what you're doing is part of it, as well as just being near it, observing, watching.

And that can be anything from: you're a cyber secret agent and here are the things you'd be able to do, and how to express that role when you're in that place. To something that's more subtle, like Thief, where it's not so much about all these wild powers, but what could a Thief do here, what would a Thief do here, and how do we let the player put that on screen.

Tom Francis: The immersive part and the sim part are the two parts that you kind of carried over to Gone Home, right? Gone Home was not an emergent combat game, but it was immersive, and it was a sim, and you put a surprising amount of effort into making sure that you could interact with the world around you in a way that would realistically make sense, even though that wasn't core to the story.

Steve: Yeah, there's this feeling I think that immersive sims are about having this consistent ruleset of how the world works and how you work within it. So yeah, if we're making a game about exploring a house, you need to be able to open the cabinets and turn the lights off and on and kind of exist as an intentional agent within that space, even if it isn't about controlling AI to fight each other.

Ricardo Bare: I think it's interesting that Warren brought up Dungeons & Dragons. I've always thought that people who made good Dungeon Masters also often made really good level designers for immersive sims, in particular, because it's this really magical blend of representing the game rules, the RPG system, but also being responsive to the fact that the players around the table are part of the narrative and driving the narrative. Which I think is what happens in a good immersive game. The player feels like a really powerful agent, affecting things, but they're also interacting with a system of rules that are predictable and they can use to make plans.

Harvey: I think that you guys have touched upon some of my favorite things about this sub-genre. It's that sense of presence, exploring a place that doesn't just feel like a series of puzzles someone's erected for you, but rather a coherent place that you can actually explore in the real sense of the word. And part of that is the pacing. Immersive sims often go very fast, and very loud, but generally only if you trigger the right sequence of actions. Otherwise they can be very slow-paced.

One of the great pleasures of my current position is not only did we just finish Dishonored 2, the team in Lyon put years of effort into that, but I now roll into playtesting and commenting on Prey, which is the first game in a long time that I find myself, even on the weekends when I'm home, toying with the idea of driving in to play the game. In my mind I'm solving problems, considering rooms and other approaches, and that's a very good sign. I'm in love with the game that Raphael and Ricardo and the team here in Austin have made.

But what I was going to say is the pace is incredibly important to me, and the non-combat verbs. Being able to say 'how can I get into that security station? I don't have hacking. There must be another way. Let me toy around with mimicking a small object and rolling up to the window and going through the little slot that the guard asks for papers through.'

Just solving all those little problems. I look up and it's been 30 minutes, and all I've done is roll around as an object, getting into a small space that I couldn't have gotten into otherwise, noticing some narrative detail. It's the consistency of the rules and the fact that so much is not hand-crafted, but behaves according to system-wide rules that enable this player toy exploration process. The fact that it's in an emotionally evocative backdrop, where you're reading about the lives of people, seeing the traces they've left behind, the mood is powerful, and part of that is that I'm going at my own pace, often just toying around.

Warren: There are about 10 things I want to say. I know I'm the one who first brought up D&D and then Ricardo brought it up again. One of the most interesting things to me is that though that's a really apt comparison in a lot of ways, in some it's really not. Because one of the defining characteristics of the immersive sim for me is that it's about roleplaying not roll-playing. D&D had its own 'simulation' I guess. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were using the best tools they had, which were funny dice.

We have different, and frankly I think more effective, ways of simulating a world. And so there's an interesting discussion to be had about whether die-rolls and characters classes and all that stuff have a place in immersive sims. No, they don't.

But the other thing Harvey brought up, pacing. I'm working on System Shock 3 now, and I've got a team of people who haven't really worked on this kind of game before. One of the things I have to constantly remind people about is that the pacing of these games is very different. It's not run, gun, gogogogogogo. If you do that in an immersive sim and you're really good maybe you can succeed, but when I think about these games, the pacing is more... Okay, I get to a decision point. I stop, I assess. I make a plan. Then it's gogogogogo as I execute. Then it's stop, assess, make a plan. Gogogogogo. So it's this kind of staccato thing that I find really appealing. I love it. Probably because I suck at gogogogogo, but pacing is critically important in these games.

Tom: Something that's come up a lot talking to people about immersive sims lately—Dishonored 2 has kind of kicked it all off again, because all my friends are playing it, and a lot of my friends are Deus Ex fans and have the same taste as me and are loving it. The ones who don't, the common criticism I hear, and it's by no means unique to Dishonored 2, but all immersive sims support multiple playstyles. And most of the ones we're talking about support the very slow, very careful nonlethal ghosting playstyle which Dishonored even sort of marks out as... it doesn't explicitly say it's the best one, but it gives you big check boxes and says 'yep, you did that, yep, you did that' and those are the only two checkboxes, so it kind of seems like the thing you're supposed to do.

A lot of my friends who haven't clicked with these games feel obliged to play that way. Because they know they can, and it's morally better, and the game rewards it in some ways. They feel they can't play any other way. And I know some people don't enjoy playing that way, but just feel compelled to, because they feel like that's how you play these games, and if they screw up they feel like they've got to reload. Maybe there's a challenge there that we haven't solved yet in terms of persuading people to play in their own way and explore new playstyles.

Harvey: Definitely. I think that's less about immersive sims and it's actually inherent to stealth games, in my opinion. Seth Shane is a designer that worked with us on Dishonored 1 and is now lead systems designer on Prey, and funny enough, he and I were talking about that this morning. Where as soon as you have this perception that I could've done that better, I could've done that more elegantly, it does set up for a certain percentage of players, an obsession with redoing it or doing it right. And the whole point of the Dishonored games and the Deus Ex games was there's no right way to play, you can do this your own way, except Tom's right. There's an implicit narrative value judgment there.

But I think it's similar to the problem—there's a community of people who contacted me through Twitter who said 'hey, I know this is weird, but we're a group of people who like to find every coin in the Dishonored games, and we think that there are a few that have fallen through the world that can't be collected. Can you help us?' I was just like, 'Oh my god, I love you guys, but the best way I could help you is to tell you not to collect all the coins.' But they wouldn't accept that, so I did help them. You can get all the coins in Dishonored 2, by the way. But one of the coins was, like, over on a rock to the side of Addermire Institute in the grass, and we had to look for it with the level editing tools to tell them where to go.

In a way, if that's how you enjoy playing the game, and that scratches an itch for you, who am I to say don't do that? But on the other hand, that's definitely not the spirit... I would hope you'd be free to find your own path, and if you want to stand on the roof of the building and look at the bird's nest on top of Addermire with the black bone charm in it and watch the waves rolling in, that's just fine. On the other hand, if you want to go across the objectives, that's fine. If you want to try to ghost the game, that's fine.

But it is weird, how some of these games definitely set up the desire or the obsession in players to do it a certain way. From my personal perspective, I'm only saying this for me, it does feel like that would interfere with the general enjoyment of the game. I don't know. Maybe it's a flaw inherent in systems. Systems driven by computers are basically optimization machines, they're against the true spirit of the word 'play' in that sense.

Steve: I feel like the real sense of joy, when you do play an immersive sim, is the idea that when you're able to let go a little bit and say 'part of what's interesting about this is, if I do screw up and I do get made, there are ways to use my tools to recover.' Even if it's sloppy, even if it's not perfect. If you want to play the perfect ghost run, then that's the goal that you've made. But I think that part of the beauty of these systems, and games like the new Hitman game, or when you play Far Cry 2 or things that are even adjacent to a traditional immersive sim, that feeling of saying 'I'm going to use the rules of the world to scout this area. I'm going to make a plan, and I'm going to attempt it. And then if I didn't notice there was a guy around the corner and he sees me trying to be sneaky, and now I can say, okay, how can I knock him out before he alerts anyone else, or use Far Reach to get up onto that ledge and circle back around' and live within that mistake in a way that can often be much more satisfying.

Rather than saying 'Ah, he saw me, and now I'm going to know where he is for the next time.' But that said, that's sort of a higher-level request of the player than what is actually inside the rules and possibility space of the game itself.'

Warren: It's funny, people ask me all the time: 'Do people go out and play extreme playstyles?' Most of the people I hear from play a kind of balanced style. They sneak when it feels right, they fight when it feels right. So I think most people play down the middle and we're talking about the outliers. But the thing that surprised me a lot, that's relevant here: when we were working on Deus Ex I thought players were going to just pick a playstyle and stick with it. 'I like fighting, so I'm going to fight my way through the game.'

Instead, very early on, I remember watching normal humans playing the game, I mean, well, gamers, but I remember watching them play, and they'd get to right on Liberty Island, an early choice point. We tried to reveal the choice points especially early on. They'd get to a choice point and two things would happen. First, they'd put the mouse down and push the keyboard away like 'Oh my god, I have to make a real choice!?' Because games had trained people not to make choices effectively. It's just, okay, kill everything that moves, or I get seen by nothing. And we were trying to do something different.

I would see that, and then the one that frustrated the hell out of me at first, I would watch people save their game at an obvious choice point, and then try something. And then go back to their save and try something different. And go back to their save and try something different. In one sense that's one of the strengths of the game, that they could try all those things. But then they would pick the one that they liked the best. That was not at all what I thought they were going to do, and it really bugged me for awhile. But then I realized, like you guys were saying, once it's their game, it's their game. As long as they're finding fun, who am I to say how they're playing the game? That's another one of the defining characteristics of an immersive sim. You don't judge the player. You don't tell the player how to play your game. It's their game.

Ricardo: Something that we're all sort of brushing up against, a little bit, that's inherent to the immersive sim, is just the complexity, and difficulty, of onboarding players into a game like that that aren't accustomed to it already.

Harvey: Wow, did you just say onboarding?

Ricardo: Yeah...

Harvey: Oh my god. Go ahead.

Ricardo: Just teaching them, this is a game where there's more than one way to do stuff is really challenging. We've made several games already and we still struggle with how to do that. Warren, you mentioned the beginning of Deus Ex. I remember when I let my brother-in-law play the game. He plays a couple games a year, probably. And when we had the PlayStation version of Deus Ex, I remember handing him the controller, and within 20 seconds he had accidentally thrown his weapons into the water, fell off the dock, and drowned. And I thought, oh my god, we are not making games that are easy for people to get into. At all.

Warren: We are the kings of the cult classic, I know.

Ricardo: Yeah. But it's still difficult.

On the next page, our panel share stories about their favorite moments playing and designing immersive sims.

PC Gamer: I think that gets to an interesting point: all this player freedom you have in an immersive sim, it generates good stories like that. The thing that people love about these games is the stories they generate out of the game, the same way you generate a story in Civilization where you were at war with Gandhi for 200 years or something. In an immersive sim, people don't usually talk about the story that was written. They talk about the story of that time they played it and these seven systems interacted in some insane improbable way. So I want to get you guys to tell some anecdotes, either from playing or designing immersive sims, maybe your awakening moment to 'oh shit, this game or genre is amazing, and this is why.' 

Harvey: That improvisation thing you're talking about is definitely one of my favorite aspects. Doug Church is probably the first person I heard talking about that. We were standing in my office one day and he was like, 'people talk about their D&D experiences or their experiences in games like these as if they actually happened to them. I did this, and then this thing fell over, and then this happened.' It's so true.

There were epiphanies like that with Adventure, the Atari 2600 game, because it was so procedural. But really, Ultima Underworld, I remember getting to the temple of the bullfrog or something, a puzzle where you can un-invert a ziggurat so that you can cross this big pit. And I hate puzzles like that. There are a couple dials on the wall. It's like, oh my god, another puzzle. But I found that if you jump—the far lip is a little higher than the lip you start on, so you can't just cast levitate and glide across. But I found that if you jump and then cast levitate at the apex of the jump, you could levitate across and land on the other side. And you feel very clever for defeating the puzzle without solving the puzzle. That is a magical moment in my life, and in my career, for sure.

I have a bunch of those anecdotes from Far Cry 2, of course. We had one recently with Dishonored 2 where the Game Informer guys were there, and we had a very controlled demo that we gave people, where there were a bunch of Overseers executing a heretic, and there was a certain way we did it, just before the guy on the firing squad pulled the trigger, we used Emily's Far Reach to yank him up to the balcony where we were. Anyway, the demo went super well, they loved the game, but they said 'hey, our heads were down, we were writing, can you run through it one more time?' So Dinga, our lead designer, Dinga Bakaba, was like 'hey, you know what, you've seen the game, you like the game, you get the game. I'm going to just leave the beaten path and improvise here and do some stuff that maybe isn't as expected.'

So he went back to the firing squad scene and used Emily's Domino power to link the heretic in front of the firing squad with the guy who was about to pull the trigger. We had no idea what was going to happen, because we literally didn't set that up. We didn't say, explicitly, in the code anywhere. We just said 'if you're Dominoed to to someone else you take the damage type that they receive.' So the guy in the firing squad pulled the trigger and killed the heretic, and he died at the same time. Everybody in the room, their heads just popped, like 'Holy shit.'

What they didn't realize at the time was we had no preparation for that. Dinga was worried even as he tried it that maybe for some reason it wouldn't work. But those improvisational moments, as Ricardo says it's hard to train the players to play games like this, but once they do, especially if they'll play a second time… If you go play System Shock or Far Cry 2 or Prey or Dishonored a second time, the intimidation of learning the systems and knowing the game space is gone, and you get back to that joy Steve Gaynor was talking about where you're playing at this point. You're improvising and experimenting and it's beautiful.

Ricardo: If I can just piggyback off of that, I know exactly the moment you're talking about, because I played through Dishonored 2 with my daughter, who's never played a game like that before. And it was so amazing to see the game through her eyes. She's never played an immersive sim, and that specific scene, I did the same thing with the Domino, and it was a magical experience to her that something like that could even happen, and that then afterwards the guards were baffled like 'someone's here, there's a murderer, search the area.' It was really cool to see someone experience that for the first time.

Harvey: That's really gratifying to hear.

Steve: Something that's interesting about immersive sims is that oftentimes, like you're talking about, players will find exploits that are a legitimate combination of systemic interactions that the designers weren't expecting. I feel like the classic example is using wall mines to climb walls in Deus Ex.

So when I was playing Dishonored 2, I really like doing the slide move, and also I'm playing totally non-lethally. And at some point I was like, can I do a non-lethal takedown on a guy while I'm sliding into him? And I just tried it out. And I found that, beautifully, you have a whole set of custom animations for doing a non-lethal takedown while sliding. When I found that, I thought, that's cool. Then I thought through how the systems work and I'm like 'wait, this is an instant non-lethal takedown on a guy, whether he's aggro or unaware,' which is the only way aside from a tranq dart that you can non-lethally take down a guy instantly no matter what state they're in. If they're aggro on you you have to deflect their blow, then take them out.

At that point I realized the only way I'm going to defeat anyone for the rest of the game is sliding into them and knocking their head into the ground.

That was about the mid-point through the campaign, and for the rest of the game my entire playstyle was about how do I set up this encounter where there's three patrollers around, maybe Domino all three of them together so I can slide-tackle into one of them, or XYZ. Setting up those challenges for yourself, saying 'oh, wait, here's this edge case of how all these systems interact, and that allows me to act like a freakin' weirdo.' But the game supports it, and there's the satisfaction and the robustness of saying 'yes, I'm doing something totally strange and comical, but the game is there for it.' It's actually a legitimate way to play even though that was probably not something QA was going through saying 'let's do an all-slide tackle run, make sure that doesn't break anything.'

Tom: It's funny how once you're immersed in these games, learning the rules and then using those rules becomes entirely what your brain is occupied with and you don't really care if it's realistic or makes sense. When you asked for anecdotes from playing immersive sims, the one that sprang to mind is one in Deus Ex where I had started to hack into a terminal that could open Gunther's cell on Liberty Island. As I hacked it I was looking through the camera that shows the view of the room I was in, I could see myself hacking the terminal, and a guard ran in. And guards aren't allowed to shoot you when you're using computers in Deus Ex.

[Warren puts his head in his hands and shakes it, moaning softly]

Tom: So I could see he's pointing his gun to my head, but can't fire, because I'm busy! I had to figure out, I was playing on Realistic where you just die in one shot from those guys at close range. I can't leave the terminal now because I'll die instantly, so I had to figure out a way, with just the tools I have now, to try to block this guy from shooting me. The turret couldn't shoot him. But I figured out if I open Gunther's door it'll nudge him a little bit around the corner so he no longer has line of site, so I can leave the computer and attack him.

Warren: I'm so proud.

Tom: And there was never a thought in my head that this was any way unrealistic or strange. I just thought, this is amazing!

Warren: I have two anecdotes. One, on Ultima VI, which is kind of where I realized that all this improvisational stuff could really be magical. It was unplanned, kind of a bug. There was one puzzle where the Avatar and his party came up on one side of a portcullis and there was a lever on the other side of the portcullis that you had to flip to raise the portcullis and keep on making progress. I watched one of our testers, a guy named Mark Schaefgen, playing in that area. And he didn't have the telekinesis spell, which was the way to get past that portcullis. I was sitting there rubbing my hands together going 'oh ho ho, he's screwed, he can't do it.'

He had a character in his party named Sherry the Mouse. You can probably see where this is going. The portcullis was 'simulated,' and here the air quotes are around simulated, simulated enough that there was a gap at the bottom that was too small for a human to get through, but not too small for Sherry. He sent Sherry the Mouse under the portcullis, over to the lever, she flipped the lever, and then the rest of the party went through. And I fell on the floor. At that moment I just said to myself, 'this is what games should do. We should start planning this, not having it happen as a bug.' That was where I realized this was really powerful.

The Deus Ex story that kills me, though. A year after we shipped, I was out in San Francisco at the Eidos offices, and our publisher-side QA lead, a guy named Charles Angel, was playing the game, demoing it for some executives. Now why Eidos executives needed a demo of a game that had shipped a year earlier that had won like 35 game of the year awards I will never understand. But they did. I'll probably never work again for having said that, but anyway.

I was watching him on Liberty Island, and there was a spot where a guard was standing on one side of a doorway, there were two or three guards on patrol on the other side of the doorway, and there were laser triggers covering the doorway. And so what he did was, he secretly was sneaking around, moving explosive barrels around and stuff. I was watching him, and I kind of knew what he was setting up. He crept back and got out the pistol, which was the weakest weapon in the game, and with one shot he took out the guard that was guarding the door, took out the laser triggers, and because he had waited for the right exact moment, took out the two guards on the other side of the door. With one shot. And I fell on the floor again. Because I'm completely certain that no human on the face of the earth had tried that before. No one on the team... Harvey, if you knew that was going to work, I'll buy you lunch next time I see you.

Harvey: No, of course, we didn't set those things up explicitly, that's just one of the pleasures, you know. Warren and I both had this experience, and we have it now with Prey and Dishonored games, going down and watching the QA testers play is just magical because they chain things together, they use powers in unexpected ways, and then often they require a little support. Because to Steve Gaynor's example, nowadays the production values have gone up so you might need animation support and things like that.

But yeah, it's amazing, and to get back to the critical side of this conversation from the love side so much, it gets back to one of the inherent problems with what we do. Which is, I've played Prey a lot and commented a lot, but I've started, instead of playing across many different builds and powers, I'm in one big contiguous playthrough now that I know the game super well. That always contextualizes your experience at the end of the project. It's magical.

There are several steps like that. The other is taking an Xbox home and playing on your own rig or whatever. The environment even changes it for you. In any case, getting back to the critical part, we have a game that if you play twice, or three times or four times, and you become a virtuoso with the systems and understanding the narrative and the world, little epiphanies are popping off in your head all the time and you're having these improvisational experiences. In Prey I'm not only doing that game mechanically but I'm doing that narratively and emotionally. I won't spoil anything but I gave an example to Ricardo yesterday related to what one of the monsters mutters, and how it connects back to a human in the world, who has a real history in the world.

Ricardo: I think we've talked about that if you want to mention it.

Warren: You're choosing your words reeeeally carefully right now, aren't you?

Harvey: The point is if you've played a lot, you get a lot out of these games, but the downside is if you haven't played, you struggle initially with the sheer complexity of it, or you're thrown right in. It almost works like a novel where to fully understand it you feel like you have to have seen the beginning, middle and end. They're very complicated economically and narratively and in terms of systems, and in order to make them sing you have to be a performer. You have to practice and learn. Whereas in other games you just drop in and look like a badass instantly, even if you're following a trail of breadcrumbs and kicking off a sequence of scripted events over and over.

On the next page, our panel talks about the challenges of designing immersive sims and their many interlocking pieces.

PC Gamer: I'd like to dig in a little bit to the process of creating and designing an immersive sim. I think most people who pay attention to videogames know that it's not a linear creative process where you build from the beginning of the story to the end. A game is usually not really playable or fun or 'complete' until very late in development. In the case of immersive sims you're potentially talking about a dozen systems, from AI to weather to hacking, or combat, all these incredibly complex things. How do you go about building these and testing them when it's not fun, or when certain things aren't online, when it's only half complete? What's the process of choosing those elements and testing how they work together?

Steve: That is a really interesting question for the guys here who have worked on the big titles. I've worked on, basically, sequels to immersive sims. I worked on Bioshock 2 and Infinite, but I didn't work on the original Bioshock, and obviously that's kind of a continuation of System Shock 2. So I'm interested to know, when you are building a game that is based on this bedrock of multiple strata of systems, do you try to block in as much of the different player abilities and AI systems as you can as early as possible, or is it an ongoing glazing of 'what if we added this, what if we added this' over a long period of time.

Ricardo: There's a lot we could say there. Some of it is what you're saying, Steve. I think we try to get a 60 percent version of as much as possible in, as quickly as possible. Because part of the fun, of course, is not just the thing existing in isolation, but when it interacts with all the other systems. People have likened it, a little bit, to making a stew. Individual elements aren't that great, together they're okay, but they kind of have to live together in the pot for awhile so that you can begin identifying, like 'this one mechanic doesn't contribute very much. This other one, though, we should double down on.'

By the end, maybe we make 25 percent more than necessary, mechanics, that end up getting stripped out, and we focus on the ones that end up being really successful in the whole mix altogether.

Steve: It feels like it's inherent to this kind of game that for it to actually be the game at all, there's this critical mass that's required. You can't work on Dishonored for six months and only have two player powers, because it's just not relevant to what it's going to end up being. But also you obviously don't just write your perfect design bible and you're like, 'here's the dozen powers and exactly what all the enemies can do' and just make it. Finding that balance must be really challenging.

Warren: Design documents are always right. [laughs] There was one point on Deus Ex where the documentation was 500 pages, but we're not going to talk about that. It was ridiculous. The final version was 270 pages that nobody read. Anyway, the interesting thing about making this kind of game is that you guys are all right, until those systems are online you don't even know what you have. Alpha is the point on a game like this where the game is complete and finishable and playable and sucks. 

To make this all work—the money guys love this, while you're working on it the first two years or whatever it is, the game is not there, it's not there, it's not there, and everybody's going 'oh my god,' biting their fingernails down to the nub, because they're giving you all this money and they can't see the game yet. You have to go and say 'relax, it'll be okay, everything will come together.' And then you hope they'll give you enough time in alpha, at least this is my take on it, they give you enough time in alpha to make it right.

On Deus Ex we implemented the skill system that a couple of us came up with pretty early on. I think we actually got to alpha with that in there. And then we invited guys like Doug Church and Mark LeBlanc and Rob Fermier, and even I think Gabe Newell came down, and they played it, and they said 'wow, this skill system really sucks.' And I think it was like 24 hours later, Harvey, you had a completely redesigned skill system. Thank god! Because it wasn't at all what we thought we were going to make. Until we played it, and saw it in context with all the other systems, you're just taking your best guess.

Harvey: I wish Raphael Colantonio was on the line with us today, he's traveling to GDC. But one of the things he talks about a lot is how much iteration games like this actually require, and how flexible a studio has to be, and how you have to train the team not to think like traditional developers. You have to be willing to react very quickly. So much of this kind of game is a synergy, and the magic only happens very late. And I can tell you from experience, sometimes they don't give you the money to finish it, to get that final three months or whatever. But in almost all the best cases of these types of games, the ones we've worked on here and the ones that friends have worked on, Deus Ex, Dishonored, Bioshock, you hear these stories about how things almost came together at the end but then we got three more months or six more months and then we just started hitting it with the magic in place.

By contrast, you have developers who say 'on day one, you need a loop, and if that loop is fun, you just iterate it and your game will be fun. If your game is not fun on day one, your day will never be fun.'

Warren: I FIGHT THAT EVERY DAY!

Harvey: Like it's some sort of dogmatic blueprint approach. Well, for some games that is true if they entirely depend on one arcade game loop, then yeah, probably. But these games are something different. They're a sense of presence, they're exploration, they're player pacing, they're toying with systems, and they really rely on this gestalt.

Steve: I think there's something interesting you're saying about that last three or six months that can also be extended to things like DLC and direct sequels. I worked on Bioshock 2 which was a direct sequel to Bioshock 1, and I was the lead designer on the story DLC for Bioshock 2, and at that point as a developer you're kind of in that space of saying this has been developed to such a degree that you have the familiarity with it, you have the stable base to say 'now our job is to know this stuff well enough to do something really good and really interesting with it' that you don't find in that initial build-out. And that's kind of what you're doing in those extra three or six months. You spent all that time making the game. Now we know what it is. And we can actually use this time to express what we've learned that we might not have been able to otherwise.

Ricardo, you worked on the Dishonored 1 DLC, right?

Ricardo: Absolutely, the Knife of Dunwall and Brigmore Witches stuff.

Steve: I think that's sort of an extension of that idea that these games are such a, the end product is greater than the sum of its parts. Having that ability as a designer to work within that established space and do things with it that I wouldn't have thought of or known how to do earlier in the process is especially relevant when you're making games of this complexity and this relation to the player's role.

Tom: There's also a huge technical benefit of being that late in the project. Particularly with these systems-driven games, you have to build the systems, and then once you've done that, making a new ability or a new item is actually almost trivial. You hook it into the systems that already exist. And the whole point of these games is those systems have to be consistent, have to be universal, so you have to get that right first, anyway. And once you've done that, making an ability that uses those systems is super easy.

I've just hit this point in Heat Signature, so I'm really excited about it. Now if I want to make a gun that hacks things when you shoot it, it's literally create a gun, add the hack damage type to it, and it's just done, it just works.

Steve: That even happens in a story game like ours that is not about these deep, dynamic, interactive systems. As a content creator, making these kinds of games the arc is really on a logarithmic scale. It's ramping and then you hit that tipping point where now, working on Tacoma, I have enough of the tools to say 'oh my god this room is so empty, it needs stuff in it,' and then you work on it for a day, and you're like 'oh, we've built enough that we can make this feel very populated and unique and like a real place very quickly' in a way you couldn't have earlier.

Or you can say 'I know how our AR character system works, I can extend this scene that we already have to do something else' because we've been building up those tools over time. Once you have the toolbox, which takes a long time to get to, and you have the familiarity with what all of those tools can actually do, that ability to quickly and very creatively extend what you already have into things that feel very unique and memorable to the player finally appears.

Ricardo: What you're citing is one of the reasons I actually love being finished with the main game and getting the chance to work on DLC. You have that baseline there that you can build on top of, and it's so easy to add things. In the Dishonored DLC it was really fun to get to experiment with Corvo's base powers to make new powers for Dowd, the main character in the DLC. Like adding the ability for when Dowd targets his Blink power, the whole game is frozen. So it's more like a tactical, thoughtful consideration where you're going to Blink. That was only possible because the main game, all that stuff was already executed and established, and we could play in that sandbox.

Warren: You do need to be thinking about player improvisation early, though. We did build those proto-missions [on Deus Ex]. That's what I called them, I can't remember if anybody else did. We built that White House mission where everything was sort of hacked together, which didn't show how the game was going to play but showed the potential of it.

I can't really talk much about System Shock 3, but I will say that we're just beginning to prototype a bunch of stuff, and if you think about giving players the ability to improv early, you can start to see the fruits of that early. 

We built one thing out—I should not be talking about this—where there are a couple ways to get past a problem. But I found one that no one knew was going to work. Instead of taking five, six minutes to play through this space, I did it in 10. Ten seconds. It was pretty magical when I figured out something that no one on the team knew was going to work, even early. And we've got another system that I'm not going to talk about that we've started prototyping. And already we're starting to see people use it, family and friends testers, they're starting to do things with it that we had no idea would work. When you start seeing that, even early on, that's the magic of these games. It's what makes them different.

If everybody on the development team knows what every player is going to do, my advice to them is just go make a movie.

PC Gamer: We've got a few minutes left before we need to head off to other GDC events. Does anyone have a question they'd like to ask anyone here, before we have one closing question?

Warren: Yeah, could you guys stop working on Prey? [laughs]

Ricardo: We are about to start working on it! [laughs]

Warren: I can't wait to play it.

Steve: Yeah, I'm super excited about it. I guess there's three of us in the room that are making space station games, but you guys get to ship yours first, congrats. I assume you guys haven't announced a release date? God dammit, I hope you guys don't ship the same time as us.

Tom: Is that your question? When's your release date?

Steve: Yeah, can you announce your release date, please?

Ricardo: Oh, it's May 5.

Warren: It's on the trailer, it's in there.

Steve: Oh, that has been announced? Fine, you guys get to be first!

Harvey: Honestly, I say this with all humility because I didn't work on Prey, it's a game made by the Austin studio with Ricardo and Raph and Seth and Susan running the show, it is one of the best games I've ever played. I tweeted something recently about having finished Dishonored 2, and now looking at Prey back to back, Brian Eno had this write-up, and it really made me stop and think about me as creator vs. me as player, what I like to play, and it's really an interesting contrast. In my career I don't think I've ever had the opportunity to do this back-to-back within the same studio. We finished one game and are about to finish another game with a different team, and just to look at the two and decisions they made differently than decisions I would've made, yet I love both games. I think Dishonored 2 is the best game I've ever done and Prey is one of the best games I've ever played, but they're very different in their decisions and how they arrive at certain decisions is fascinating to me. So May 5, yeah.

PC Gamer: So I'd like to close with a question, looking beyond Prey, where immersive sims are going to be going in the next few years, the far-off future of 2020, what do we still have to improve in immersive sims? What have they not quite cracked yet? Is it AI? Is it elements of level design, maybe moving beyond the conveniently human-sized vents placed on the backs of buildings?

Tom: Never! [laughs]

PC Gamer: Where are we going next?

Warren: Non-combat AI is an area where games in general really have some work to do. In the more linear cinematic games that we're not talking about today, I think there are some pretty amazing things going on. But in terms of characters who can react to you, whether they hate you or love you or are neutral towards you, we still have a lot of work to do on that front. I would say non-combat AI is one, and accessibility is another.

We talked about that a bunch, but making this so normal humans, non-gamers, can actually get to this, so we're not just making cult classics. We're making mainstream games that show the world what games can and should be. Accessibility is a big problem for us.

Tom: Coming at this from the indie side of things, I'm excited about stuff to do with the structure and format around the actual missions that you do. In a triple-A immersive sim it's almost a story that is told from beginning to end and there's maybe some branching, but you're playing as one character throughout the whole thing. I think that problem I was talking about earlier with people feeling obliged to stick to one playstyle even when they're not enjoying it stems from that.

I'm trying a game where each character you play as is a new life. Every time you die it's permadeath, but each time you restart you're a new person. I'm suddenly finding loads of immersive sim problems just go away if you just change the structure completely. It's a completely different format of game. This is just a baby step towards it with Heat Signature, but I'm excited to see what other people do with that, as roguelikes are a big trend with indie games. I just want to see that mashed into immersive sims in as many ways as possible because I think there are some really interesting things that happen there.

The thing about playstyles, I just have a missions listing board, and I've just realized recently, I've added the ability to have missions that you have to do stealthily. You'll fail this mission if you get spotted. And so you can just work playstyles into the mission listing board, then let people pick which one they want to do, and it's just natural that they would vary if they wanted.

Steve: From the other side of indie development, something that I think is really fascinating and valuable is immersive sims as a lineage is it's a very long lineage that has kind of continued to accrete properties over time. Warren, you've been there for the entire run—

Warren: Thanks for reminding me of my age, I appreciate it. [laughs]

Steve: Well but you were working on Ultima Underworld and System Shock 1, and our approach to exploring that, as a small independent developer, is rewinding the timeline and removing factors and thinking of it in terms of, if we went back to an earlier point in what these games are and explored a branch from there, and tried to find aspects of that experience that are inherent to it, but have not been the focus in a lot of ways...

I guess what I'm saying, to your question Wes, that there's one way of looking at this as: 'Where do what immersive sims have become go next, and how do we solve more problems and add more on?' And I think there's this incredible potential to saying: 'Well, but what have they been, and what was not on the main trunk of where they've gotten to, and what else is there?'

You think of an immersive sim now and you think of things like upgradeable player powers, AIs that have emergent abilities when they interact with each other, and having an economy so you can buy equipment and all that stuff. When I was working on Minerva's Den, and it was a reference forward design wise, and then I was working on Gone Home, I replayed System Shock 1, and it was sort of a surprise to me to realize there is no skill tree. There is no economy. This is about a place, and you as a character with a role in it. It has enemies in it, different ways you can address problems, but there's so much that we think of as being part of what an immersive sim is that is really just the version of it that we've arrived at.

Being able to say 'System Shock 1 is an immersive sim because it has a sense of place and it has you being able to fulfill a role within that space,' and so a game like Gone Home is kind of an exploration of how we apply that to a mundane setting. How we apply that to a space that's more familiar to you. How do we apply that to something where finding the audio diaries is the actual game, not just a thing you do while playing the game. Continuing to explore what else is already inside immersive sims is a really exciting thing to be able to do.

Warren: In some sense, actually, System Shock is actually the purest expression of what an immersive sim can and should be. All the character stats, upgradeable this and economy that, all that stuff you were talking about, it kind of turns things into a hybrid RPG-immersive sim thing that I love, I absolutely adore that kind of game, but in a sense if you're talking about the absolute purest form of the genre, for me it's going to be System Shock.

Ricardo: I don't have anything specific to say, other than the thing that's exciting to me is to see, Steve was talking about different ways it's affected other games, and I'm really interested in the family tree, or the lineage, of immersive sims. Seeing how that bleeds into other games. There's sort of a core essence to immersive sims. But I love it when people experiment with that. I think a game that draws from immersive sims doesn't have to be first person, for instance. There are some 2D games that sort of have that same fundamental philosophy of strong sense of place, plus very expressive interconnected game mechanics, that have come from the developers being fans of immersive sims, and that's why they made the game that way.

I love seeing more expressions of that sort of development philosophy in other genres and independent games. I don't have a super recent example, but I really loved Mark of the Ninja.

PC Gamer: Great game, yeah, from Klei.

Ricardo: That's a 2D game, or sidescroller, but just the way that you play that game, it's clearly founded on similar principles. Just the open-ended nature of the game mechanics. They're super fun. Like Steve was saying, the Gone Home and Tacoma-like games, they're more stripped down than the giant triple-A action immersive sim. But they're an interesting offshoot. I look forward to seeing more things like that. Offshoots that come from that lineage.

PC Gamer: Anything from Harvey?

Harvey: Yeah, in part, I would echo what other people have said, but I've been thinking about it a lot lately. And the thought that comes up over and over is purity. Right now we have a lot of stuff that we've accreted that we put in through legacy or because commercial audiences deserve a game of a certain size in order to pay a certain amount for it. Just to do one of these games, with AI for instance, with physics interaction, with the scope of the game, the development budget is pretty large. There are all these forces that pressure you to go one way or the other. You either go full-on where it's got tons of stuff in it and layers and layers and lots of different ways for the player to switch playstyles as they're going, or you go the other way and strip it all down to the bare essence and find something interesting. Whether it's the setting or a particular form of interaction, a particular tool.

One of those works better in the commercial space and one works better in the indie space. For my money, I would love to have the opportunity to just play around with, what is the minimum, here? I appreciate the hell out of games like Gone Home, of course, because it was innovative and revolutionary in terms of subject matter and the feel as you play the game, it was one of my favorite games that year. But our games are so big in terms of economy and sheer scope that I would love to make a more stripped-down game, but I wouldn't want to sacrifice that magic moment that happens when you manage to get a turret up on the roof and hack it to your alliance, and then somebody you weren't expecting comes around the corner and your turret opens up on them, but you happen to be in the line of fire. A whole sequence of crazy improv events happen that you have to react to. 

Some of the stuff is not just accreted baggage. It's where the actual synergistic gameplay comes from. Where it lives. And so it's thinking about how much do you need, and which do you need, that's not just painting by numbers. You know, 'oh it's an immersive sim, let's make the first code 0451 and add a crafting system or whatever.' The future is bright for deeply interactive games with a sense of presence.

Tom: The other thing I'm excited for for the future of immersive sims: I hope we come up with a better name. [laughs]

PC Gamer: I was actually going to ask, I don't know if it's common knowledge where the term came from. Was it a Kieron Gillen-coined term, or if it predated his writing on the genre.

Warren: I think Doug Church was the one who came up with that, isn't he? He's the first person I ever heard use it.

Harvey: I don't know, I remember a conversation with Rob Fermier, I think on Twitter, where we were trying to figure out where that term had come from. I think Rob's conclusion was that he first heard it from Doug, as well. 

Warren: Yeah, and we all hated it! It fell out of favor for awhile and recently it seems like it's come back. It's really odd.

PC Gamer: Has anyone come up with a description they like better?

Warren: No.

Ricardo: I don't know if it's better, but when we're talking generally with the press or gamers we avoid the term, because it sounds very inside baseball. We say first-person games with depth, instead, and then elaborate from there. But it is a bit technical.

Harvey: I like FPS-RPG hybrid.

Ricardo: Yeah, that works too.

Warren: Genre mash-up, yeah!

PC Gamer: So maybe by 2020 we'll have decided on a new name for the immersive sim. Well, I wish we could keep doing this. I could literally do this all day, makes my job easy. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for joining me! We should do it again. Maybe we can make it an annual immersive sim roundtable.

Warren: Sounds great. I'll have something to talk about next year.

During a talk at GDC, Dishonored 2 gameplay programmer Laurent Couvidou explained how the enemy guards are corralled by an artificial intelligence “mastermind” that influences their group behavior. Think of it like the director AI in Left 4 Dead, but one that puts together rough and tough gangs on the fly and orders them around rather than one that throws hordes of flesh pinatas at you because nothing’s happened for three minutes. 

It’s not the kind of AI implementation any old player will notice right away, if ever. I mean, the point is for players not to notice the AI—for the guards to react as we’d expect guards to. 

But the AI crew mastermind is the backbone driving Dishonored 2’s AI systems, deciding who will hang back and take potshots while melee fighters flank and corner, or whether certain paths of pursuit are safe or not based on how many dead friends are around. 

The design came about after the original Dishonored released, and the AI team left to work on Prey. The new programming team had to start from scratch, but starting over was apparently good for Arkane Studios Lyon, forcing them to revisit AI basics that eventually led to the current system. Rather than build complex AI from the bottom up, with individuals who inherently know how to work together, they designed an invisible AI god that whispered, ‘stand here’ and ‘you’re the captain now’ instead. 

In the most basic example, three guards, two with swords and one with a pistol, engage in combat with the player. The ensuing scene is a mess. The guard with the pistol takes fires wildly, hitting his own men in the process. Meanwhile, the two swordsmen act like they don’t know what they’re swinging and slash through one another on their beeline path to the player. The duke would be pissed if he saw the state of his civic officers.

With the crew AI turned on, the pistol-wielding guard is assigned as commander, and barks orders, taking careful shots while the two swordsmen spread out to corner the player, coordinating swings so as not to hit one another.

In another example that tests the crew AI’s attention to danger, the player set one trap on the stairs leading up to a balcony, then grabbed the four guards’ attention and returned to their perch. In the first instance, two guards went up to approach the player directly while two stayed down to guard the lower escape route. One of the encroaching guards stepped on the trap, which turned him into limbs and blood, but it wasn’t enough to deter the other guard from continuing his approach. Seeing that the way was safe and the player was engaged with the other guard, the two guards watching from below used it as an opportunity to head upstairs and engage the player directly too.

In the second take on the same scenario, the player set two traps, dissolving the two guards who tried the stairs the first time. Seeing this, the two guards below, with the guidance of the mastermind crew AI, figured those stairs were a bad place to be and instead barked at the player from below. I’d call them smart, but without a literal AI god influencing their actions, those guards would be toast.

But that doesn’t mean the guards are empty sock puppets incapable of their own reasoning. According to Couvidou and AI Programmer Xavier Sadoulet, each NPC is driven by their own AI systems as well, comprised of such an abundance of rules and reactions that for every frame the game is rendered the AI are making around 100,000 checks against the rules. With about 6,000 rules to run through for each AI, that’s pretty bonkers. It takes me at least two seconds to remember what 7x8 is.

56? 56.

Update: Bethesda says the second Dishonored 2 game update is now out of beta and in full release. A list of new features and PC-specific fixes is below, while the full (and much longer) bug-fix breakdown can be seen at bethesda.net.

Features:

• Added new mode: Custom Difficulties
• Added Mission restart/Mission Select: Mission restart available from pause menu and result screen

Fixes:

• Fixed a bug where Switching off the V-Sync for the second time set the FPS Limiter to 30 instead of 60 by default
• Fixed a bug where changing the settings from TXAA to FXAA and not applying the change made the TXAA Sharpness turn to 1 instead of its previous value
• Fixed a bug where turning off TXAA Anti-aliasing does not visually disable TXAA Sharpness slider
• Fixed a bug where the changes made to V-Sync were reverted to the previous setting when turning on then cancelling
• Fixed bug where the volumetric lightning is not turned on by default at launch if it was set to off on a previous version and it can't be turned on manually anymore
• Fixed a bug where the "Fog Quality" setting is set back to low after restarting the game
• Fixed a bug where Keyboard/mouse shortcut UI could show up during possession & keyhole peeking
• Fixed a bug where Emily’s feet can be seen floating during the throne room cutscene with high FOV settings
• Fixed a bug where the Low Chaos Sokolov epilogue slide will have black windows if Volumetric Lighting is off
• Fixed a bug where the screen post processing persists in Ansel mode

Original story: 

Bethesda has revealed details of the second free Dishonored 2 update, set to arrive on the PC in beta on January 18. The update will bring two major additions to the game: More custom difficulty settings, and a "Mission Restart/Select" option. 

More than 20 new difficulty sliders will be available following the update, covering aspects of the game ranging from the speed of sleep dart effectiveness to the number of enemies who will attack you at a single time, and even how effectively you can lean out from behind barriers to get a look at what's going on around you. It will also add a new Iron Man option for new games that not only exposes you to the cruel whims of permadeath, but also disables manual saving and loading, ensuring that you will live—and die—with the consequences of your actions. 

The Mission Restart/Select option will open up the ability to replay any unlocked mission, "giving you a better shot at nailing that Ghost or Clean Hands run." That seems like the sort of thing that should've been in place right from the start, but better late than never I suppose. Selected missions will begin with the state of your character (chaos level, runes, money, and that sort of thing) as it was at the start of the mission during your initial playthrough. 

Naturally, the update will also include various bug fixes and gameplay improvements. Bethesda said a detailed breakdown of the update will be announced soon. 

Our Game of the Year awards get more difficult to pick every year. With approximately 38% of all Steam games released this year alone, playing them all is impossible, but we do our best to review a cross-section of releases we think will both appeal to our audience and represent the majority of quickly multiplying corners throughout all genres in PC gaming. Last year, we cut off the list at scores above 80%, but because there were so many games that made the cut, we’ve upped our standards to 84%. These games were reviewed by many different people with varying perspectives, but all according to our reviews policy. As such, try not to sweat it when scores don’t correlate across the board. And if a favorite game is missing, swing by our reviews page to find it or let us know in the comments. 

Dishonored 2

Release date: Nov 11, 2016 ▪ Developer: Arkane ▪ Our review (93%)

Despite some technical troubles—which are steadily being patched out—Dishonored 2 is one of our favorite games of the year. It's no secret that we're big fans of systems-driven games at PC Gamer, and we've celebrated Metal Gear Solid 5 and the new Hitman thoroughly for that reason. Dishonored 2 is another for the list, even better than its predecessor and one of the best stealth/action games we've played.

Football Manager 2017

Release date: Nov 3, 2016 ▪ Developer: Sports Interactive ▪ Our review (85%)If you’ve ever played Football Manager, then you already know what to expect in the latest version. It’s a refinement that makes important information easier to access so you spend more time living the stories of your teams instead of processing dense screens of statistics, but it doesn’t entirely upend the formula. Why would it? Football Manager 2017 is the best entry in a well established series, so far unparalleled. If you want to manage some football, Football Manager 2017 is the way to go. 

Hitman: The Complete First Season

Release date: Many ▪ Developer: IO Interactive ▪ Our review (84%)

We were all a little surprised when we found out the new Hitman would be episodic, but as Phil says in his review of the full first season, pulling back on Absolution's story focus was a boon. While there's still a story, what's at the heart of new Hitman is "a standalone series of sandbox murder playgrounds," as Phil put it. Blood Money fans should be pleased.

Titanfall 2

Release date: Oct 28, 2016 ▪ Developer: Respawn ▪ Our review (91%) 

With the addition of a single-player campaign and no season pass to divide the community, Titanfall 2 sheds two common complaints about the original—and also does what it does fantastically. "If this were a game from the late nineties or early noughties, we'd likely look back at the mission 'Effect and Cause' as one of the greats of the genre," wrote Chris in his review. The multiplayer is better than before as well, but there's one worry—Titanfall 2's population could suffer from its proximity to Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Let's hope it doesn't.

Battlefield 1

Release date: Oct 21, 2016 ▪ Developer: DICE ▪ Our review (89%) 

The leap back in time to WWI had good results, as Battlefield 1's focus on infantry combat pairs well with more meaningful planes and tanks, and its finicky guns slow things down a little, giving us more time to move and more pride in our good shots. The campaign is enjoyable too, which hasn't quite been the case in a Battlefield game for some time.

Civilization 6

Release date: Oct 21, 2016 ▪ Developer: Firaxis ▪ Our review (93%)

There's of course room for improvement, but Civilization 6 is nevertheless the "ultimate digital board game," as we put it in our review. It's the most  transformative version of Civ so far, changing the rules of city-management and tweaking just about everything else. And Civ 6 will only get better with expansions and user-made additions—even though the mod tools aren't out yet, the modders are already at work.

Sunless Sea: Zubmariner

Release date: Oct 11, 2016 ▪ Developer: Failbetter Games ▪ Our review (90%)In any Lovecraftian narrative, the descent always gives way to more unspeakable madness and horror, which is exactly what Zubmariner accomplishes. As an expansion to the oceanic exploration text adventuring of Sunless Sea, it sends the player beneath the waves and on the path to unraveling the mysteries of the flooded world. As scary as it is, there’s nothing spooky about more of an already excellent thing.

Forza Horizon 3

Release date: Sep 27, 2016 ▪ Developer:  Playground Games  ▪ Our review (92%)

One of the best racing games on PC, with a huge open world Australian playground (that's also full of irritating personalities) and over 350 gorgeous cars. As it's published by Microsoft Studios, Forza Horizon 3 is only available on the Windows Store—but at least Chris managed a smooth 60 fps, and didn't have many technical issues despite the Universal Windows Platform's rocky start.

World of Warcraft: Legion

Release date: Aug 30, 2016 ▪ Developer:  Blizzard  ▪ Our review (90%) 

Legion had a lot of work to do after the disappointing Warlords of Draenor, but even before all its pieces are in place, it succeeds. The quest writing, new order halls, and improved class identity are all high points. "For the first time, I don't just feel like I'm playing a druid—I am a druid," wrote Steven in his review.

N++

Release date: Aug 25, 2016 ▪ Developer: Metanet Software ▪ Our review (92%)

A refined action platformer with tricky, floaty jumps, 1,125 levels and a level editor—so there's no risk of being left wanting. Shaun has played over 300 hours of the original PS4 version, and put another 20 into this new PC release. "In some ways N++ feels like the end of the action platformer, like an exhaustive final document, a catalogue of its emotional highs and lows," he wrote in his review. It's safe to say he liked it a bit.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Release date: Aug 23, 2016 ▪ Developer: Eidos Montreal ▪ Our review (88%)

Andy wasn't super impressed by the story, but Mankind Divided's detailed vision of a future Prague, new augmentations, and level design earned it high marks. "Everywhere you look there are sentry turrets, security bots, criss-crossed laser tripwires, and patrolling guards," Andy wrote. "Getting inside, stealing the particular item you’re looking for, and escaping unseen was hugely satisfying."

F1 2016

Release date: Aug 18, 2016 ▪ Developer:  Codemasters ▪ Our review (87%) 

After last year's disappointment F1 2016 deserved some skepticism, but Codemasters came through—F1 2016 is "the most well-featured, authentic recreation of Formula One ever created, and it’s a genuinely good PC port," wrote reviewer Sam White. Better physics, better AI, and new details hoist it above the series' previous missteps.

Overcooked

Release date: Aug 3, 2016 ▪ Developer: Ghost Town Games ▪ Our review (86%)If you need to test your friendships, Overcooked is the game for you. A top down co-op cooking game, Overcooked places up to four players in crazy kitchens and throws an endless series of dishes their way. Getting a high score requires close, coordinated teamwork, but the moment communication breaks down, things can get messy. Tom calls it, “the perfect balance of chaos that can be conquered with skill,” and “hands down one of the best couch party games ever made.” Overcooked is a guaranteed recipe for fun. And disaster. And absolute despair. If you have the company, don’t miss it. 

Abzu

Release date: Aug 2, 2016 ▪ Developer: Giant Squid ▪ Our review (88%)James calls Abzu “an expertly directed psychedelic marine tour without a single UI or text prompt telling you where to go or what to do, purely driven by curiosity.” You control a diver and explore big, colorful underwater scenes, interacting with a wide assortment of sea life while unraveling a quiet story with an environmental message. Accompanied by an inspiring score from Austin Wintory, Abzu is an easy emotional journey to recommend.

Starbound

Release date: Jul 22, 2016 ▪ Developer: Chucklefish ▪ Our review (84%)According to Chris, Starbound is the charming and deep space exploration sandbox we were promised during its prolonged Early Access phase. It’s not perfect, lacking in combat systems and it’s still pretty cryptic, but “Starbound is otherwise a great pleasure, full of verve and laden with seemingly endless diversions and self-directed projects that you can lose yourself in for hours or days at a time.”

Lovely Planet Arcade

Release date: Jul 22, 2016 ▪ Developer: Quicktequila ▪ Our review (84%)

The follow-up to the great Lovely Planet, Lovely Planet Arcade strips the Y-axis from its precision, small-level shooting, meaning you can't look up and down. It's very different from its predecessor, but the essence of what makes it fun is still there: "the thrill of executing prescriptive shooting challenges with nearly zero room for error," as James put it in his review. 

Furi

Release date: Jul 5, 2016 ▪ Developer: The Game Bakers ▪ Our review (86%)

Furi has "a ludicrous premise, strenuous combat, loud neon synth jams, and saturated color palette"—but also restraint, says James. A series of bullet-hell hack n' slash boss fights train you in simple combat techniques:  slash, parry, shoot, and dash. Some bugs and difficulty spikes held it back a little, but Furi is still one of our favorite surprise hits of the year.

Hearts of Iron 4

Release date: June 6, 2016 ▪ Developer: Paradox ▪ Our review (88%)

You’ll find some cracks in the simulation, but how could there not be a few holes in such a sweeping, complicated scenario? Hearts of Iron 4 is “a beautiful, thrilling wargame” that presents the entire globe as it was at the outbreak of World War 2—and everything that happens from there is up to you and the AI.

“The AI may not always be sensible, and maybe combat doesn't always seem quite historically accurate,” wrote Rob in our review, “but then, you might be playing a version of World War 2 where Italy broke away from Germany to create a new Roman Empire with Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union was plunged into civil war and Stalin was deposed by 1942.” 

Overwatch

Release date: May 24, 2016 ▪ Developer: Blizzard ▪ Our review (88%)

A great team shooter that emphasizes positioning, teamwork and tactics over agility and marksmanship, but still leaves room for players to grow in the latter department. There are still character tweaks to be made to ensure they’re continuously viable and fun and all create interesting dynamics, but it’s the sort of game you could tweak forever. Overwatch can't replace Team Fortress 2 for us, but it’s certainly recaptured the experience of getting a bunch of friends together for night-long sessions of the current top shooter. Competitive mode is out now, and we’re keen to earn some golden guns.

The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine

Release date: May 31, 2016 ▪ Developer: CD Projekt RED ▪ Our review (94%)

With Geralt's journey into the sun-drenched vintner lands of Toussaint, CD Projekt RED capstones an RPG masterpiece, defining a standard for interactive storytelling. The Witcher 3's Blood and Wine expansion follows Hearts of Stone in adding new gear and combat abilities as well as stitching together small yet eventful scenarios into a greater web of intrigue. The wonderfully paced narrative of an ostensibly routine whodunit set in Toussaint's fairytale countryside reflects what makes The Witcher games so great: a politically divided world, superb dialogue, and distinctly memorable characters. 

Total War: Warhammer

Release date: May 24, 2016 ▪ Developer: Creative Assembly ▪ Our review (86%)

The Total War series and the Warhammer franchise share a love for massive armies crashing into each other on an epic battlefield, but the latter also includes wizards with fire for hair and smelly sentient fungus. That results in more distinctly characterized armies in Total War: Warhammer emphasized by the Warhammer universe’s magic spells and flying units—all added strategy layered on the Total War pedigree of positional and tactical superiority.

Duskers

Release date: May 18, 2016 ▪ Developer: Misfits Attic ▪ Our review (86%)

Piloting drones through abstract maps of derelict spaceships might not sound tense, but Duskers can be nightmarish. “Frantically typing commands into the console when things suddenly go sideways makes me feel like I’m really huddled in a darkened dropship, alone, desperately trying to save my drones and by extension myself,” said Chris Livingston in his review. Watch out for aliens.

Final Fantasy X/X-2 Remaster

Release date: May 12, 2016 ▪ Developer: Square Enix ▪ Our review (85%)In the last few years, Square Enix started plugging the gaps missing in the Final Fantasy series availability on PC, with varying degrees of commitment. Not every port has been stellar, but X and X-2 HD both function pretty well, albeit not particularly well with a mouse and keyboard. They’re among the more divisive entries in the series and haven’t aged perfectly, but looking back, Sam still thinks, “Spira is a wonderful world that’s well worth exploring, and X and X-2’s different approaches to combat systems are both deep and exciting.”

Doom

Release date: May 12, 2016 ▪ Developer: id Software ▪ Our review (88%)

Doom's reverence of a primordial aspect of FPS design—killing—borders on comical exaggeration with its fountains of demon blood and a main character who communicates by punching things. That fittingly fuels fast and fun combat indulging the nostalgia of id's run-and-gun lineage without smothering its metal brutality. Doom's first major update since launch adds a Photo mode for screenshots and ups the classic feel with an optional center-aligned weapon model. 

Offworld Trading Company

Release date: Apr 28, 2016 ▪ Developer: Mohawk Games ▪ Our review (88%)Imagine an intro to marketing class, streamlined and condensed into a sweet, chewy bubblegum format—and set on Mars. That’s Offworld Trading Company, a strategy and management sim where you take control of a business dedicated to supplying new human colonies. Matt praises the unknowable depth and feedback in his review, stating ‘There’s a simple, tactile joy of seeing every a nudge of the finger explode into a flourish of numbers, but a deep and lasting satisfaction from knowing every profit was carefully engineered.”

Duelyst

Release date: April 27, 2016 ▪ Developer: Counterplay ▪ Our review (84%)

Hearthstone blazed a path by making digital card games popular on PC, and many competitors have followed in the years since. But none of them have broken so far away from the pack as Duelyst. It’s a tactics game and a CCG mixed into one, wrapped up with some of the best pixel art animations and character design of any game all year. It’s easy to pick up, but the addition of movement to largely traditional card game mechanics give it an amazing amount of depth that has kept it as one of our favorite card games all year. 

The Banner Saga 2

Release date: April 19, 2016 ▪ Developer: Stoic ▪ Our review (86%)

We loved the original, and the sequel is even better. The Banner Saga 2 is a weighty tale of survival, and a brutal strategy challenge. Some interface issues carry over from the first game, but as our reviewer put it: “Yes, there’s still room for improvement, but this is a smart, worthy sequel: denser, richer, more complex and yet more intimate. Even if you’ll feel in dire need of a stiff drink once this second act draws to its devastating close.”

Dark Souls 3

Release date: April 11, 2016 ▪ Developer: FromSoftware ▪ Our review (94%)

James calls Dark Souls 3 “the most focused, potent game in the series” in his review. It has diverse and numerous enemies, masterful combat and world design, and a dense, mysterious story to every inch of stone. Most importantly, it’s not good simply because it’s hard. 

Chronos

Release date: Mar 28, 2016 ▪ Developer: Gunfire Games ▪ Our review (84%)VR is still lacking a deep, directed experience that begs to be played in the steadily growing medium, but Chronos might be the closest we’ll get for a while. It’s a full blown action adventure, taking cues from The Legend of Zelda and Dark Souls with punishing 3rd person sword-and-board combat and winding monolithic level design. It also makes clever use of VR in ways that can’t be replicated on a monitor, but they’re best experienced firsthand. Wes is dying for more, saying, “It’s a rare thing for me to be halfway through a game and already excited to play a sequel.” Let’s hope Oculus moves enough headsets to make it happen.

Samorost 3

Release date: March 24, 2016 ▪ Developer: Amanita Design ▪ Our review (87%)

The greatest work so far from Czech indie studio Amanita Design. It’s a point-and-click adventure, but puzzles aren’t as important here as imagery, metaphor, and surreal weirdness. “They're also so surreal that when I did something right, it was sometimes impossible to tell exactly what I did, or why it was right,” said Andy Chalk in our review. “I crept up behind a glowing, golden gazelle, leapt upon its back, and went for a wild ride along the side of a mountain.” 

Out of the Park Baseball 17

Release date: Mar 22, 2016 ▪ Developer: Out of the Park Developments ▪ Our review (89%)There’s no baseball management sim that comes close to the batting average of Out of the Park Baseball, and while it may not feel like a complete reinvention of the series, it’s still the best in the business. In our review, Ben says, “A wealth of up-to-date licences and attribute ratings make OOTP 17 an essential purchase for the devoted player, while newcomers will swiftly grasp, and love, its relentless brilliance.” 

Day of the Tentacle Remastered

Release date: March 21, 2016 ▪ Developer: Double Fine  ▪ Our review (87%)

Day of the Tentacle is great. Day of the Tentacle Remastered is that great game, remastered, and is also great. It holds up over 20 years later, and the modernization gives us an appealing opportunity to take another trip through time. “You can still play your old copy in DOSBox or ScummVM, of course,” noted Andy in our review, “but if you want a more streamlined, modern experience, with some fascinating insight into how the game was made, the remaster is worth investing in.” 

Superhot

Release date: Feb 25, 2016 ▪ Developer: Superhot Team ▪ Our review (84%)

Time moves when you move in Superhot, a shooter distilling its mechanics into a polygonal portrayal of bullet-time. It doesn't take long to complete, but clearing a level without dying in a single hit is a challenging demand of mental forethought echoing the zen-like state of FPS professionals. A VR version of Superhot for the Oculus Rift is in the works, so you can make those Matrix moves in your living room without looking too ridiculous (or maybe not).

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

Release date: Feb 18, 2016 ▪ Developer: Spike Chunsoft ▪ Our review (86%)

As a visual novel, Danganronpa's length is matched only by the ridiculousness of its premise. That 15 of Japan's most gifted students could get trapped into playing a murderous game of "Guess Who?" by a mechanical bear is certainly a very anime concept. But through that goofy setup, Danganronpa takes a dark turn and displays a real gift for taking absurd characters and making them endearing—which makes it all the more gut-wrenching when they inevitably die. There's a reason that in our review, Andy said, "the story is so compelling that I barely noticed that all I was doing was clicking through lines of dialogue." 

Firewatch

Release date: Feb 9, 2016 ▪ Developer: Campo Santo ▪ Our review (85%)

Great dialogue, excellent voice performances, a minimal soundtrack, and some beautiful visuals brought real life to this first-person adventure game. Set in Wyoming, you play the glum and haunted Henry who is spending a secluded summer as a firewatchman. While the conclusion of the story doesn’t live up to the compelling setup, the believable relationship between Henry and Delilah, another park ranger, more than make up for it.

XCOM 2

Release date: Feb 4, 2016 ▪ Developer: Firaxis ▪ Our review (94%)

Sid Meier once described a game as a "series of interesting decisions." And in our review, Tom said that "XCOM 2 is the purest expression of that ethos that Firaxis has yet produced." From the moment you first take up arms against your alien oppressors, XCOM 2 hits you with a relentless barrage of choices so jaw-clenchingly difficult you're going to need a cigarette after each one. The lives you sacrifice for the greater good will be etched in your mind, and the temptation to reload an old save will be overwhelming. If you can resist and embrace consequence, XCOM 2 will transform you into a grizzled commander through the fires of conflict.

The Witness

Release date: Jan 26, 2016 ▪ Developer: Thekla, Inc. ▪ Our review (89%)

The Witness is brilliant in its simplicity. It speaks in a language without words, but uses shape and form to impart philosophical ideas that will change the way you see its world. Repetition is a stern yet fair teacher, and engaging with that silent discourse as a student begins to unravel the relationship entirely. But The Witness can also feel frustratingly vague. As Edwin said in our review, "what it ultimately seeks to offer is a vantage point, a perspective on life's mysteries, rather than answers." But even if you don't like the answer, The Witness proves questions are worth asking.

Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak

Release date: Jan 20, 2016 ▪ Developer: Blackbird ▪ Our review (90%)

To take Homeworld and put it on the ground seems “almost sacrilegious,” wrote Rob Zacny in our review. But it works. “It's not only a terrific RTS that sets itself apart from the rest of the genre's recent games,” he said, “but it's also an excellent Homeworld game that reinvents the series while also recapturing its magic.” Deserts of Kharak is both approachable—less about production, more about tactics—and another example of all the life still flowing through the RTS genre.

Darkest Dungeon

Release date: Jan 19, 2016 ▪ Developer: Red Hook Studios ▪ Our review (88%)

Darkest Dungeon is cruel, probably too cruel. It's a dungeon crawler that doesn't deal in stats and loot alone but also trades on the mental well-being of the heroes you send into its festering crypts. But these heroes don't return stronger for their troubles; they come back battered and broken, a liability you're much better off dismissing. Beneath all that doom and gloom is an innovative take on turn-based RPGs that weaves the positioning of party members with an unconventional class system, that inspires experimentation despite the constant dread of what will happen if you fail.

The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human

Release date: Jan 19, 2016 ▪ Developer: YCJY ▪ Our review (90%)

Our reviewer loved how Aquatic Adventure “fast-forwards through the Metroidvania template, stripping it down to its most essential parts: exploration, atmosphere, and player growth”. It’s an underwater take on the classic genre, where you putter around gorgeous pixel-art environments, collecting upgrades, taking out challenging bosses, and try to decipher how earth’s oceanic apocalypse came about. You also get to swim out of a giant sea worm’s ass, a necessary experience. 

Pony Island

Release date: Jan 4, 2016 ▪ Developer: Daniel Mullins ▪ Our review (91%)

Pony Island is so dependent on its little self-referential gimmicks that it’s hard to explain without giving it all away. In a sense, and because there’s a pun to be made, that makes it a one-trick pony, but it does a great trick. One of its pranks near the end of the game is so devious we won’t likely forget it soon. If you like Undertale or The Stanley Parable, you’ll probably enjoy Pony Island. 

The following article contains plot spoilers for Dishonored 2. 

The Dishonored series presents us with the continuous choice to do violence. We might sneak past every obstacle and neutralize each target with ironic nonlethality, or we can indiscriminately murder everyone who crosses our path. The choice, ultimately, is ours, but the one who asks us to make that choice is a character whose involvement in the games is both marginal and integral, and whose position has been badly misunderstood.

The Outsider is the sardonic god who offers us magical gifts at the beginning of both games. He is explicitly beyond our knowledge, yet continually draws us into intimate conversation throughout both games. His places are the hidden, marginal places of the world: the witches’ hideouts, the rat-filled sewers, the abandoned apartments inhabited by the mad or the wicked. His chthonic nature binds him to death and judgement. He is hated and feared by the powerful and worshipped by the destitute. Through this, he’s often seen by players as an archetypal Trickster figure, a kind of Loki or Satan meant to tempt us into an Lovecraftian nightmare of our own making. It’s easy to arrive at this interpretation, but it obscures the Outsider’s true role.

In Dishonored 2 we are shown a truth hidden in the deepest, oldest recesses of the Void. In this place, we witness the method behind the Outsider’s godhood: a ritual which merged a young, helpless boy with the vast, malevolent powers of the Void. Arbitrarily selected, anointed, and murdered, the Outsider is shown to be a sacrificial victim of an unknown, ancient cult which imbued him with tremendous power at the expense of his humanity.

This insight gives us a new way to understand the character and his involvement in both games’ thematic arcs. As a sacrificial victim pushed to the margins of society and reviled by the community that rejects him, he assumes the role of the 'pharmakos'.

'Pharmakon' is an Ancient Greek social ritual of catharsis, cleansing, and sacrifice. The victims, 'pharmakoi', were required whenever a threat, real or imagined, destabilized the borders and hierarchies of a community to the point of crisis. Disease, war, famine, or lack of resources could all disrupt the community to the point of escalating, all-encompassing violence. Quelling these becomes a psychic and social necessity to avoid irreversible damage. And so a pharmakos would be chosen from among the marginalised, and either ritually murdered or exiled. Typically bathed, adorned, and treated as sacred, this act of unifying violence through sacrifice would expel not just the victim, but also all the social ills that the victim would come to represent; all evil, violent, and immoral acts become associated with the pharmakos, regardless of his guilt.

The pharmakos is therefore granted enormous power by the community: he has the means to both destroy it and save it. It is no accident that the root word, 'pharma', means both ‘poison’ and ‘cure’. This paradoxical double meaning demonstrates the power of scapegoating, as curative violence ends poisonous violence.

It might seem strange to draw connections between a modern day video game and Ancient Greek social ritual, but the themes and patterns that come to us from antiquity still have power over our lives. The most revered act of ritual murder across the globe, an event which underpins the language and literature of Western culture, is Christ’s crucifixion. We are preoccupied with sites of abuse and victimhood because of their ability to transcend boundaries that divide mankind. We are all vulnerable to violence; we are all vulnerable to abuses of power. Suffering is a facet of our lives that can level us all. How power employs, perpetuates, and quells violence within a community are questions we have explored throughout our history. 

The Dishonored series is a complex exploration of these themes, and the Outsider is the thematic touchstone who both grants us the means to access the game’s content and provides the backdrop necessary to contextualise the choices we make. He gives his gifts to the oppressed, the downtrodden, and the blamed. He revisits his own powerlessness when he reaches out to give a choice to the abused. His position within the Empire, forcibly outside its walls, gives him the power to ask these questions.

The Abbey of the Everyman, the only religious institution within the world of Dishonored, seeks to unite the different cultures and social classes of the Empire through rejection of the Outsider and his magic. What we mainly encounter of the Abbey’s role in both games are the Overseers, who are the militant witch-hunters zealously seeking out and destroying what they perceive to be the works of the Outsider. (We also briefly encounter artefacts related to the Oracular Order, the women’s branch of the Abbey; within pharmakos myths, Oracles are used to divine when a sacrifice is necessary.) Sea monsters, witches, black magic, wayward girls, thieves, murderers, etc, are all blamed on the Outsider’s influence. Some rightfully, most arbitrarily.

The Abbey calls for us to reject the strange and the different for the good of the community. Across both games, we may witness civilians threatened and killed in the street for various crimes against the Abbey. Understandably, performing magic in front of an Overseer in the sequel will instantly make him hostile. The way they speak echoes Biblical exhortations against evil. “We must cull the flock,” one says after executing a man for committing one of the many sins under their religion.

While this mimics how the Christian church regards Satan, it would be a mistake to view the Outsider solely in this light. The Outsider is not a tempter, sowing discord and offering power to bring people away from a righteous or compassionate path. Neither are his machinations meant to trick us into committing acts of chaos for a bored, eldritch boy-god to watch with amused delight. Ultimately, he wants to see power used justly rather than vengefully. Your violence only cements his cynicism; the Void might be chaotic, but the Outsider is not.

Like the unnamed child whose abuse maintains the happiness of the city in Le Guin’s haunting short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, the Outsider’s origins in death and sacrifice is fundamental to the Empire itself. What would the Abbey of the Everyman be without the Outsider to constantly, ritually accuse of every social ill? Nothing. They would have no cohesion and no society. They would certainly have no power. Their religion relies on scapegoating in order to maintain their ordered society, and this tenuous foundation is one which is uniquely prone to outbursts of violence.

In both Dishonored games, violence is miasmatic. In the first game it is literally so: the plague proliferates more voraciously if the player is violent. Rats will strip the flesh from the rich and the poor alike. In the sequel this is represented again by bloodflies, which can infest parts of a level procedurally and make exploration more difficult even within the same map. The player’s violent impulses are destabilizing to the point of crisis in both Dunwall and Karnaca. As pharmakon demonstrates, it is in these moments, when order has utterly broken down and violence becomes as infectious as disease, that the only means of unifying a community is through scapegoating and sacrifice.

As a boy, the Outsider witnessed the cruelty and violence of a society maintained through sacrifice; as a god, he grants power to these victims of society and hopes, in the vestiges of his humanity, that it will not be abused.Both Emily and Corvo lose their names, faces, and honour when they are wrongfully blamed and then exiled for the stability of the Empire; they, too, become pharmakoi. In the first game, we see graffiti scrawled across Dunwall, reading ‘The Outsider walks among us’. We play as Corvo, a foreigner to Gristol. We can’t know that it doesn’t refer to us. The tagline for the second game, ‘Take Back What’s Yours’, could easily be Delilah’s mantra as she steals the throne which she had, like Emily, been promised as a girl. The more violently Emily or Corvo seek to reclaim what’s theirs or to take revenge, the more indistinguishable they become from their adversaries.

What intrigues the Outsider most is when Corvo or Emily refuse to blindly mimic the violence and anger shown to them, and refuse to perpetuate the cyclical violence that calls for a sacrifice to quell it. Delilah uses the Outsider’s power to climb up from the gutter, claim power, and even uncover the secrets of his own creation. She rejects her status as a pharmakos when she was blamed and exiled for Jessamine’s misdeed. But when she engineers the coup that exiles Emily or Corvo to the margins of the Empire, the Outsider offers his powers to Delilah’s adversary. His attention is to structures, not necessarily individuals. His view of the world is much longer than one single sacrifice.

In ancient Greek, the word for gift is ‘dosis’, from which we derive the word ‘dose’. But a dose of what, we don’t know. When the Outsider offers us his gifts, there are more than two choices at play. We may be the poison that infects the city with horrendous, unending violence, or we might be the cure to quelling it without requiring another sacrifice. As the public brays for blood and the apparatus of justice and order execute dissidents in the streets, Dishonored asks us if the Outsider is as frightening as the walls which keep him out. We are invited to view the violence that maintains the hierarchies of Dunwall and Karnaca, and either take part or walk away. And the Outsider, a victim of this violence which preys on the weak and the dispossessed, looks on in surprise when we choose the gentler path. 

The Dishonored 2 New Game Plus update that went into beta testing last week is now fully live for everyone. The new mode gives players who have completed the game the ability to start a new one with the combined powers of both Emily and Corvo, and also to keep (and reassign) Runes and Bonecharms earned in previous playthroughs. It also makes a significant number of bug fixes, and the game should now run properly on AMD's Phenom processors. 

Bethesda once again urged owners to ensure they're running the latest Nvidia or AMD drivers, noting in particular that Nvidia's 375.70 and 375.86 drivers suffer from issues that negatively impact performance. The full changelog is up on Steam, but you can catch the PC-specific changes below. 

And by the way, we've chosen Dishonored 2 as our Game of the Year for 2016. Find out why here. 

• Fixed a bug where Switching off the V-Sync for the second time sets the FPS Limiter to 30 instead of 60 by default
• Fixed a bug where changing the settings from TXAA to FXAA and not applying the change makes the TXAA Sharpness turn to 1 instead of its previous value
• Fixed various crashes to desktop
• Game now runs on Phenom processor
• Fixed physics step variation limitation
• PC Load screens - the mouse cursor is now hidden - can press any key to continue
• Fixed Triple Buffering description text to match the option
• Fixed various bugs releated to PC Visuals Options
• Improved input management when the game runs at 120fps, during bendtime or slowmo
• Fixed a bug where plugging and unplugging controller after game has launched locks controls until either the controller button or Alt Tab is used
• Improved Ansel integration
• Fixed a bug where the resolution of the timepiece's preview keeps changing when opening a menu while playing with the adaptive resolution and FXAA
• Fixed a bug where the cursor was misplaced during greater blood thirsEmpty

This is PC Gamer's overall 2016 Game of the Year, chosen by the staff through voting and debate, with commentary written by its biggest proponents. We'll be posting the rest of our awards and personal picks daily as we approach the end of the year.

Chris Thursten: Arkane are creating a design legacy worthy of Looking Glass or Ion Storm—appropriate, given that they're doing more than any other studio to carry the legacy of Thief and System Shock into the modern era. Yet for all that Dishonored 2 owes to the PC's long history of superlative stealth sims, it's also a true original. Its fantastic movement systems and dynamic violence can trace their lineage back to Arkane's underrated Errol Flynn-em-up Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, while its artistic direction ignores games entirely and looks to traditional art and real history. I suspect that I'd love this game for its sense of place even if I didn't also love it for the freedom it gives me to approach encounters in my own way.

Andy Kelly: The sheer artistry on display in Dishonored 2 is astonishing. Arkane excels at making worlds that feel organic, storied with history and culture, and Karnaca is its greatest creation yet. It's both a convincing, beautifully realised setting and a detailed, intricate playground for Corvo and Emily's suite of imaginative supernatural powers. From Kirin Jindosh's magnificent Clockwork Mansion, whose opulent rooms shift and fold away at the pull of a lever, to the faded beauty of the storm-choked Dust District, it's an incredible artistic accomplishment. The game is, throughout, a perfect marriage of art and design, using its architecture to both evoke a rich sense of place and give you multiple ways to navigate and exploit its sprawling, complex levels.

Phil Savage: This is a better written game than its predecessor. Not all of the dialogue lands, but the buildings are filled with pages of text that expand your knowledge of the world and its characters. There are hundreds of these stories to be found, to the point where I've heard comparisons to Gone Home. That's not entirely accurate—Gone Home didn't have spring razor mines—but it is a way for Dishonored 2 to encourage and reward exploration.

James Davenport: I’m halfway through my second playthrough of Dishonored 2 and I’m still finding surprising ways to screw up. Emily’s Domino ability might be the best stealth ability ever, sharing the fate of one foe, however brutal, between two or three others in a supernatural chain. Imagine my surprise when I grabbed one Domino’d guard the moment before his friend took a shot at me. One died in my arms and the other slumped to the ground immediately after. If you’re a monster, summoning a doppleganger at the bottom of a big drop and drop-assassinating it is, um, a handy way to get around. As Corvo, I’m discovering the joy of Blink-kicking guards off of high places and freezing time to arrange a deadly Rube Goldberg machine of crossbow bolts and bodies that turn dangerous situations into horrific contraptions. And the depth of Dishonored 2’s simulation goes beyond guard behaviors and whalepunk stealth abilities. Even when you’re halfway across a level, it’s keeping track of the proliferation of bloodflies between corpses, and if you left a mine somewhere, you may come back to a swarm of deadly insects poking at a pile limbs signifying the former patrol. It’s simply one of the most complex, playful, gorgeous stealth simulations PC gaming has ever seen and likely will for some time. 

Phil Savage: A Crack In The Slab is one of the best levels of the year—and this is a year that gave us Titanfall 2's Effect and Cause, and Hitman's Sapienza. It also shows off Dishonored 2's dedication to providing consequences to your actions. James mentions the moment-to-moment depth of the simulation, but there's a narrative depth too. Dishonored 2 feels reactive, and that lets you enjoy the effect your actions have on the world. This is taken to the extreme in A Crack In The Slab, where the conceit of the level lets you experiment in an ecosystem of cause and effect. Whatever you try, Dishonored 2 has an answer—a way to tip the hat, and acknowledge what you've done. Never mind being the best game of the year, this is one of the cleverest of the decade.

For more Dishonored 2 coverage, check out our full Dishonored 2 review, and this collection of amusing assassinations.

If you've ever wanted to play mix-and-match with the supernatural powers of Corvo Attano and Emily Kaldwin, the first of two planned free updates to Dishonored 2 will make you very happy indeed. It includes a New Game Plus mode that will give you access to all of the abilities of both characters, as well as all Runes and Bonecharm traits you've collected from previous sessions, which can be reassigned to different powers. 

"Dishonored players have asked for it, so now New Game Plus is here for Dishonored 2,” creative director Harvey Smith said. “If you've ever wanted to make higher-powered characters, now's your chance. If you've wanted to play Emily Kaldwin with Possession or Devouring Swarm, or Corvo Attano with Domino, now you can. We've been having fun with it here at Arkane Studios, and we hope you will too.” 

The free update is the first of two that are planned for Dishonored, and will be released today in beta ahead of a full rollout scheduled for December 19. The second update is slated for January, and will add a new Mission Select option and additional custom difficulty settings. The full list of changes made by this update is below. 

New Features:

• New Game Plus mode!
• New Quick-Access Wheel option for hiding/unhiding items

Improved Features:

• Fixed Oraculum false-kill count in Royal Conservatory
• AI detection tweaks to clarify when players are detected or not
• AI locomotion improvement for running
• Fixed various Bonecharm effects (Strong Arm, Spiritual Pool, etc)
• Fixed a problem in slow-motion where some inputs were ignored
• Blood Thirst: various enhancement and fixes
• Killing an NPC with their own bullet is now more reliable
• Tweak for mana potion refill speed, depending on difficulty
• General performance and optimization improvements
• Fixed various game logic issues
• Fixed various User Interface issues