Four Commander Keens. Three Descents. More than a dozen Zorks. Nine Tomb Raiders with another coming down the pipe. PC gaming was built on franchises, and it thrives today on the popularity of series’ from Diablo (which sold 3.5 million copies within 24 hours of the launch of Diablo III) to Nancy Drew (which has moved nine million copies of the staggering 26 games in the series so far).

With every new release, however, developers struggle to deliver new game mechanics and fresh stories while hewing closely enough to the original spirit of the game—if not the execution—to avoid alienating the fans that made it popular in the first place. The results have been, of course, all over the place. And where one fan may see an innovative extension of a favorite series, another might see a hideous and unforgivable betrayal of everything the game had stood for.

We want to know how our readers’ feelings on some of PC gaming’s longest-standing series have changed, so we’re putting 20 franchises across a number of different PC gaming genres to your vote: Which ones are getting better? And which are headed downhill?
View Survey

Graham, Tom Francis, Rich and Chris discuss Steam sales, the state of Kickstarter, Valve's Greenlight project, Dota 2 and more - including your questions from Twitter. Also featuring Graham's Steam press account hubris, Rich's need to be brilliant at everything, Tom's on again, off again relationship with Defence Grid and how Dota 2 made Chris realise that he's a bad person. On the subject of Dota, Tom Francis would like it known that he disagrees with the imaginary Tom Francis whose opinions Rich quoted in the last podcast.

"I said something along the lines of: it seems like if you get behind early on, you can never catch up because the enemies are too high level to kill, but it still takes you 45 minutes to lose. Which, if true, is bad design. There are lots of other reasons Dota 2 isn't my kind of thing, but the others are just a difference in taste."

Apologies to anyone offended by the views of imaginary Tom Francis. Blame Rich. He's brilliant at taking the blame.

We're aware of a few interference issues with the sound. Sorry about that, everyone - Graham was waving his phone around. We've managed to cut his yells of "woo, look at me, I've got a phone" out of the mix but unfortunately the interference itself is harder to isolate. We've all learned a very important lesson about phones.

Download the MP3, subscribe, or find our older podcasts here.

Show notes:

High Tea - the historical trading game that Tom mentions.
Gravity Bone, the predecessor to Thirty Flights of Loving, is available on the Blendo Games website.
Tom's write-up of the Steam Greenlight announcement.
Our Tribes: Ascend showmatch. No, we are never going to stop linking to this.

 

If you've never played the free to play MMO Allods Online before, you may not know that Allods are huge islands that drift through astral space, tempting adventurers ashore with promises of loot and monster slaying. At high levels, players can build their own huge astral galleons and explore the misty purple realm between worlds.

Upcoming update, New Horizons will give you the chance to sail out into the astral plane and build an island of your own. You can choose between a jungle, arctic and desert setting and erect a tower to warn off would-be looters, and then farm the resources that your allod generates to boost your gear and earn a bit of gold along the way.

New Horizons will also add mercenaries, NPC warriors for hire that you can purchase to fill out empty party slots. There are a few to choose from, each with their own way of breaking enemies. There's the Protector (tank), the Fighter (melee DPS), Warlock (healer), Shooter (ranged DPS/support) and the Witch (debuff support denizen). The Smuggler's War zone is another addition that'll give players the chance to conquer new allods in the 4th layer of astral space. Find out more on the New Horizons page.

Allods is free to play. If you're interested in checking it out, head over to the Allods Online site and sign up for an account. Here's a trailer for the update, which made me glad that hermit crabs can't actually talk in real life.

Crysis 3's busy environments aim to strike a balance between the blazing beaches and steaming jungles of the first game, and the crisp tower blocks of the second. The results should hopefully provide an exotic middle ground between both titles, but the set dressing is less important than the size and inventiveness of the areas themselves. Crysis 2 funnelled your super suit's spectacular abilities down narrow channels signposted by giant gawking bits of UI lettering. Hopefully the third game will let us experiment a little more with the neat new toys, like the nano-bow, and the gun that fires 500 rounds a second.

These four screenshots, spotted on Evil Avatar, don't have the answers, but they are quite pretty. Take a look.









And here's the introductory trailer, if you'd like to see some more mobile images.

Cheerful free to play MMO Dragonica has just received a big facelift courtesy of the Phoenix Update. The latest patch has sharpened up Draconica's visuals and dungeons have been beefed up with extra difficulty modes and harder bosses for returning players. An extended combo system spices up combat, reduced potion prices will please shoppers and, to celebrate, a "party buff event" is now available that rewards groups for co-operation with increased gold find, XP gain and attack speed, because everything's a little bit more frenzied with friends around.

You can check out the full feature list on the Phoenix update page on the official Dragonica site, and take a close look at those updated graphics in the trailer and screenshots below. It's free to play, so you can download the client and jump in for nothing on the Dragonica site.

There's more to look forward to soon for Dragonica players, "additional in-game events, with some very exciting new features, are also set to be made available with a further update due out in a few weeks" say Gala.

Skyrim is a much more stable game now than it was on launch. You'll still find the odd horse wedged halfway into a rock, but bar the occasional physics freak out, it all sort of works. That's the result of constant patches since launch, the latest one of which is live now in beta form through Steam. It's a straightforward update that delivers some "general memory and stability optimizations" and fixes some crashes, bringing Skyrim closer to perfect working order.

If you've just picked up Skyrim in the Steam sale, consider augmenting your copy with a few choice picks from our round-up of the 25 best Skyrim mods around, or use this one to go adventuring with Minecraft Steve, a slightly disturbing companion mod that adds Minecraft's block default bloke to Tamriel. If you're more excited about what's coming up next for Skyrim, check out our ten favourite things about the upcoming Dawnguard DLC.

Now for the patch notes. They're brief, so let's take an extra moment or two to remember the Skyrim that was, back when it was full of flying bears, and giants that could punt you into the stratosphere.

Update 1.7
Accessible through the beta participation section of the account tab of your Steam settings.

BUG FIXES

General memory and stability optimizations
Fixed crash related to new water shaders
Fixed rare crash related to dragon landings

 

Blizzard have hotfixed Diablo 3 to squash the invincible Wizard exploit that went public yesterday. "We will continue to carefully monitor this issue and welcome anyone with information about bugs or hacks to submit a detailed report to our Hacks Team by emailing hacks@blizzard.com, or by completing the Hacks Report web form," reads a Blizzard forum post on the issue.

The exploit allowed Wizards to become invulnerable by quickly triggering two skills in quick succession. Once anabled, players could blast through Inferno with no clothes on, slaying demons and hoarding loot with ease. The problem was fixed within a day of it emerging on the Blizzard forums but there's a question over how long the bug has existed secretly before then. If so, how many auction house items are the result of those nude raids? And will the discovery of the bug result in any bans or rollbacks?

We'll have to wait and see what Blizzard do next. Meanwhile, here's a video of the exploit in action.

I spent hundreds of hours with my guildmates last year, chatting online while downing dragons, super-villains, and other big bads. But every now and then, it’s good for a team’s morale to drop the daggers, get out of the house, and just hang out with each other.

More and more MMOs are hosting annual conventions to help their players do just that. But it’s not just the games that make each convention different -- the theme, style, and length all vary as well.

From Iceland to Austin, Texas, PC Gamer attended five of the biggest MMO player conventions last year to see what each has to offer gamers. The results are below. Don’t get too discouraged if you find you can’t make it in person to your favorite on this list -– almost all of them provide free livestreams of the main events online.

5. The Old Republic Guild Summit




Where: Hotel in Austin, TX, USA
Who: 200 invited guild leaders
Main event: Presentations about upcoming features.
Food: Four free food trucks.
Best dev bonding moment: Playing Star Wars trivia in groups.
Overheard: “Man, sometimes you just have to admit how much cooler tech Star Trek has.”
Hours spent playing games: 0
Link: TOR official news
Party rating: 4/10

4. City of Heroes Player Summit




Where: Hotel in Palo Alto, CA, USA
Who: Approximately 100 players
Main event: Audience input on content design/tweaks.
Food: Free greasy finger food.
Best dev bonding moment: Playing board games and Dungeons & Dragons with CoH’s lead developer as your enthusiastic DM.
Overheard: “Oh, man. I LOVE the mission you designed. Big fan!”
Hours spent playing games: 4
Link: City of Heroes official news
Party rating: 5/10


3. SOE Live




Where: Hotel in Las Vegas, NV, USA
Who: Several thousand players
Main event: Tons of panels for each game.
Food: Fancy banquet feast, Las Vegas buffets.
Best dev bonding moment: Calling their bluff on the poker table.
Overheard: “Hey, wanna see my EverQuest tattoo? It’s pretty cool.”
Hours spent playing games: 10
Link: SOE Live
Party rating: 8/10

2. BlizzCon




Where: Convention center in Anaheim, CA, USA
When: October, usually, but Blizzard is skipping this year
Who: 26,000 players
Main event: Game-specific panels and pro tournaments.
Food: Convention food for purchase.
Best dev bonding moment: Watching Mike Morhaime rock his bass guitar on stage from the front row.
Overheard: “I just saw Gabe Newell playing Diablo III with regular people!”
Hours spent playing games: 10
Link: BlizzCon
Party rating: 8/10

1. EVE Online Fanfest




Where: Reykjavik, Iceland
Who: 1,000 players
Main event: Keynotes for each franchise.
Food: Meals/drinks for purchase.
Best dev bonding moment: Pounding drinks and lamb sandwiches during the massive dev-led pub crawl.
Overheard: “No! Don’t wait; wake him up and launch the counter-attack now.” – EVE player on the phone outside the hall talking to his fleet’s second in command back in the US.
Hours spent playing games: 10
Link: Fanfest 2013
Party rating: 10/10

This article originally appeared in issue 230 of PC Gamer US.

Ten years ago Nvidia released Dawn, a GeForce FX tech demo featuring a fairy gymnast as seen through the tunnel vision of someone who's been eating unidentified fungi. It was impressive, but in the past ten years extreme use of bloom and depth of field has become less novel. Today, Nvidia released "A New Dawn," an updated demo (announced last month) which shows off the power of Kepler-based GPUs.

Dawn has new hair (40,000 hairs, to be precise, as opposed to the original demo's 1,700 strands), a new skin shader, a fully modeled environment to live in, screen space ambient occlusion, and all of the other stuff we expect from Nvidia's fastest and most efficient GPU yet. Her hair is especially striking, in that it looks very impressive, but not quite like hair.

To deal with the challenge of anti-aliasing 40,000 strands, A New Dawn uses "a special hair smoothing shader that inspects each strand and blurs them in the combing direction." According to last month's post, "the final result looks soft and silky, as if she just jumped out of the shower after an extensive conditioner routine." That is seriously extensive conditioning.

The demonstration will run on a 2.5GHz dual-core processor with a GTX 670 or higher. The download link, a complete list of upgrades, and the full system specs can be found in Nvidia's post.

Warren Spector, Will Wright, Sid Meier, Tim Schafer, Peter Molyneux, John Carmack. These names and many, many more have been interviewed by the Critical Path team over the last two years as part of a project that aims to "give game designers their due as innovators and influencers of culture." More interviews are due to be added as time goes by, but there's already a fantastic list of participants. Ray Muzyka, Ken Levine, Todd Howard, Rhianna Pratchett, Clint Hocking, Greg Zeschuk, the list goes on. Take a look at the introductory trailer, and challenge yourself not to be infected by the speakers' enthusiasm for games as an art form.

Critical Path is described by its curators as a "transmedia project," and is set to kick off soon with a "dynamic interview archive." Feedback on the opening interviews will be used to shape future additions to create a set of films that explore "the art, philosophy, politics and psychology of video games." Neat. The company filming the interviews, Artifact, have previously worked with some of those designers on behind the scenes documentaries for Skyrim, Rage, Hunted and Brink, and have created TV spots for games like Just Dance, Toy Story 3 and Cars 2.