"When you fail," Brett Scheinert says, "we want you to fail spectacularly." Scheinert is the lead raid and dungeon designer for the upcoming MMORPG WildStar, and from the way he and his team laughed as whole 40-player raid teams died on screen from single mistakes, I could tell he means it even enjoys it. He crams his raids with bosses that change abilities from week to week, along with scores of mini bosses and trash mobs that vary with the same frequency to keep the raids from devolving into monotony. Folks like Scheinert want to make hardcore 40-man raids sexy again, and the footage half made me ready to believe.

I'd come to California hoping to try out the raids myself. Forget WildStar's Rachet-and-Clank aesthetic and flashy 40v40 Warplots, it's raids that have kept me coming back to it in my hunt for a new MMO to replace Blizzard's aging beast. I admired Carbine's cheeky disregard for an industry that tries to appeal to everyone, right down to lead designer Mike Donatelli's dismissal of a casual player lamenting that he wants to get sweet gear without joining 20- or 40-man raiding guilds. "Then don't play," Donatelli had said. Ouch.

As it happens, I didn't play either. I got to frolic through the starting zones and the new (and highly anticipated) PvP Warplots, but my initiation to the two raids scheduled for launch was limited to watching week-old footage of guilds on the test server bumbling their way to death. Oh, how they bumbled. The presentation illustrated how WildStar's system of telegraphs which show the direction and area of an attack comes into its own in raids, where they splatter the ground like splotches on Jackson Pollock canvases and demand frenetic games of violent Dance Dance Revolution.



"We want to make sure that each player is doing something exciting for the entire encounter," Scheinert says. "We don't want a case where these five guys are doing something really exciting and these 35 guys stand in this circle and shoot at this thing." It shows. Based on the videos and my own experiences in WildStar's five-man dungeons, I could tell these weren't going to be the fights I could half fall asleep in as I often can with ranged classes.

Roused by new footage, the 30 or so of us in the tiny ballroom inched in to watch a hapless player sprinting from a raid boss called Experiment X-89. It resembled a giant purple bullfrog. Around the raider, a circular telegraph the size of Mercury's orbit contracted as it ticked down to the player's doom. Boom. And so ended the player's existence, along with that of approximately 75 percent of the floor the telegraph had covered at its fullest extent. The survivors struggled to complete the fight on the few remaining tiles, but in time, they fell as the bullfrog bounded to and from suspended titles they couldn't reach. It looked gloriously painful, and I wanted to feel that pain myself.

The pitiful truth is that we couldn't play the raids because we didn't have enough people. That's been the concern voiced on forums and tweets since Carbine announced its intentions to revive the old 40-man raid template: it's usually a hassle to get that many people together for one night, let alone several days a week. (But not impossible: I was a member of a guild with world firsts in early World of Warcraft for years and we seldom had trouble.) A 10-man raid we could have pulled off; we might have been able to pull off WildStar's 20-man Genetic Archives raid, too, if we were willing to excuse some slack from the raiding tenderfeet. But as it was, the best we could manage were God-mode flythroughs of both the archives and the 40-man Datascape raid.



Not that our ragtag group of journalists would have been able to do much anyway. Beta players have had access to the raids for around four weeks, Scheinert says, and for all that, no one's even close to clearing them. Considering that some of these guys are experienced raiders, it gives some idea of the timing we can expect once WildStar goes live. "Of the 13-15 guilds I've seen in there, two guilds have made a lot of process, a third guild that just reached Act II, and everyone else is not even halfway through the instance," Scheinert says. "For the most part, a lot of people have killed the first of the five bosses and 10 mini bosses; only three guilds have killed the second."

But the WildStar team isn't just interested in introducing new challenges and variety on classic raiding; they're resurrecting other trappings such as raid attunements as well (which bid you fulfill a set of requirements before you can even enter a raid). Mike Donatelli, WildStar's lead designer, assures me they'll be fun. He tells me of a long quest line focusing on the Eldan WildStar's lost genius race, a la Elder Scrolls' Dwemer that'll lead you into dungeons, fights with world bosses, and other activities before you can raid. "I'll even give you this secret bit of info: at one point you have to raid the enemy faction's ark ship," he says. Donatelli's referring to versions of the ships that bring players to WildStar's homeworld of Nexus in the first couple of levels, although the instances in the attunement line won't be the same ones newbie players are running through.

Donatelli insists that there won't be any gating to the process, so players won't have to worry about running out of chances to complete the attunement during a week. "You're not jumping through hoops with me saying, 'Nope, you can't jump through the hoop today because I've turned the hoop off,'" he says, "but if you're hardcore, you're going to get to get in before everybody else does." Donatelli said the team was still hammering out how long the process could take, although he mentioned seven months as a timetable in some of the earliest conceptions. That'll likely change drastically by the time WildStar launches on June 3, though, particularly after meeting that Donatelli says will take place this week.



I left Carbine with the impression that all the pieces were sliding into place; now the WildStar team needs to convince an MMORPG populace that's grown used to smaller raids that 40-player ventures like the Datascape are worth running. If they pull that off, they could more than justify their subscription fee and reignite server communities that the genre hasn't seen in years. Brett Scheinert thinks they can. WildStar's focus on challenging encounters, massive raids, and fast-paced raid combat scratches an itch other studios have neglected for years, and he believes that mix delivers an experience that will keep players coming back even after the raiding content grows old.

"Even if you know what you're supposed to do," he says, "the hope is that it'll be really fun when you do it."

FRACT is so laser targeted to my tastes that I'm breaking all my natural instincts and respecting its desire for all-caps naming. It's a musical exploration game, which is a description that, had it been available to buy right now, would have me already entering my purchase details. I've been scuppered by the fact that it's not available to buy right now, but - as was recently announced by its developers - it will be soon, with the game planned for an April release. You can get a small slice of its moody abstract atmosphere through the game's new bass-heavy teaser.



Stirring stuff, but not really that informative of the game's... well, game. For that we can turn to the video's description.

"You arrive in a forgotten place and explore the vast and unfamiliar landscape to discover the secrets of a world built on sound. You rebuild its machinery by solving puzzles and bring the world back to life by shaping sound and creating music in the game."

It all sounds good, but, for a better understanding of what's involved, check out this earlier video of the game in action.



FRACT will be released on Steam, GOG, the Humble Store, and through the game's site.

Star Citizen the in-progress space sim and dream generator has surpassed $40 million in funding, according to the latest update from game lead Chris Roberts. While the new monies are set to boost the scale of its universe with the addition of two new star systems, the new update also reveals the level of fresh support Star Citizen has achieved in terms of its community population. Roberts writes that more than 10,000 people have joined its community since the end of February.

It's important to point out that Roberts doesn't specify if all of those 10,000 supporters have pledged money or if they have simply joined the community to reserve a player handle for when the game eventually releases. But it does point to the astonishing level of interest out there for what Star Citizen is promising. It's something Roberts hints at with a quip in his latest update: "some say that space sims are niche. I m not so sure!"

At a time when even historic, acclaimed game studios are reevaluating their priorities, to see the level support for a starship-focused space sim makes me ask myself what other game genre is waiting for a new lease on life. And with Cloud Imperium Games now employing more than 200 developers, according to Roberts, his appearance at PC Gamer's PAX East panel next month on the future of PC gaming looks especially well-timed.

 

Written by Rob Zacny

Grey Goo, which we're revealing exclusively today, is a self-conscious throwback to the early days of the RTS genre, from the studio whose veteran staff laid some of the genre's foundations. It's a base-building, resource-harvesting RTS that throws most unit micro-management aside and puts the focuses on the big-picture macro decisions that once powered games like Command and Conquer and Total Annihilation. Underneath its retro sensibilities, however, is a thoroughly modern take on a classic design, one that owes more to MOBAs than to the recent efforts of studios such as Relic or Blizzard. This isn't a game about learning build orders or memorizing piles of hotkeys. This is an RTS that wants to get out of your way as quickly as possible so you can focus on smashing armies together.

Petroglyph Games is a direct descendant of Westwood Studios, the developer that helped create the RTS genre with Dune II and then helped take it mainstream with Command & Conquer. Petroglyph emerged after Electronic Arts acquired Westwood and tried to relocate the longtime Las Vegas developers to EA's Los Angeles facilities. The impending move (and the L.A. real-estate market) forced the remaining Westwood vets to choose between their lives in Vegas and an uncertain future at EA Los Angeles. Westwood's core team to make a hard choice about their future, and Petroglyph was founded by the team that stayed behind. Since then, Petroglpyh have been one of the few independent RTS studios.

Its last project was Trion's troubled End of Nations, an MMO-RTS that never quite seemed to find a good reason for the first half of the acronym. Petroglyph were eventually let go from the project as Trion took End of Nations internal (and subsequently put it "on hold"), and was left looking for new work.

Chose points like this are where artillery reigns supreme.

You will meet a mysterious stranger

Grey Box is the new and mysterious publisher behind Grey Goo. That's not an attempt at drama. Every time I tried to find out something about who Grey Box is, and where it comes from, Petroglyph and Grey Box's representatives ducked the question.

The entire company is private. It's privately funded. Though everyone is involved has been actively involved in developing the game, everyone wants to remain anonymous at this point. said Grey Box's Matt Ballesteros. We want to be in the wings, out of the spotlight at this point, and let the game speak for itself.

While Grey Box itself remains a mystery, its intentions with Grey Goo are clear. It is the inaugural game for the publisher, and one it hopes will establish a strong fictional universe for other projects currently in the pipeline. That's why it's working with WETA Workshop (the propmasters behind the Lord of the Rings series and District 9) to help establish an aesthetic for Grey Goo. But first and foremost, the company wants to make the kind of RTS that we haven't seen in years.

More management, less micro

The first thing I notice as I sit down to play Grey Goo is that the controls are all based off of the QWERTY row on your keyboard, like a MOBA.

While most RTS hotkeys can be extremely esoteric, Grey Goo uses a simple tiered menu system. So you have a choice of producing buildings, light units, heavies, air and once you key into that next submenu, you get a new set of options using the same keys. With practice, it becomes fast and effortless.

Beta buildings have a hub-and-spoke structure. Each addition affects what they build.

That whole synergy between base-building, economic control, and unit production is really important, lead designer Andrew Zoboki says. When you're focusing on combat, we don't want you to have to snap the screen back and forth for unit production.

I spend most of my time with Grey Goo's meat-and-potatoes faction, the Beta. They're an industrial alien race, with beefy builds and an extra set of small, nimble hands. Tactically speaking, they establish outposts across the map and fight with heavy armor and artillery.

Another, more futuristic race employs a different dynamic, connecting everything to a central hub. They have to play a Tetris-like expansion game of laying down conduit, planting new structures, and teleporting existing structures closer to the front line.

While there's a lot of faction asymmetry in Grey Goo, Zoboki says the team tried to avoid having too many hard counters in the game. Instead, the idea is to keep evolving your unit composition in response to what you're encountering on the battlefield. Advantage accrues to the player that keeps making the right adjustments to the mix of units and combat tactics.

Throwbacks

Grey Goo plays like a lavishly produced, fundamentally simple RTS. That's good in some ways. However, there are also moments it feels perhaps too much like a return to the good old days. The units were so versatile that army size, not composition, seemed like the deciding factor.

The maps are gloriously lavish, like playing at RTS set in the world of Avatar, but they are also predominantly decorative. The most interesting visual elements are used to demarcate unplayable space, and much of the warfare plays out in open clearings or narrow chokes. Given how the different factions use the map, that may not be such a problem, but the terrain feels almost tactically featureless.

The Betas super-unit is a floating fortress with a nuclear howitzer and slots for six robots.

On the other hand, we ve played games with ever more sophistication and complexity that appeal to a demanding competitive audience for years now. Different terrain types, modular unit design, special abilities... all of these things reward players whose minds work at a few hundred actions-per-minute.

But that's not most people. It never was. The RTS genre was built in part by games like Grey Goo: where players gathered resources, built an army, and then tried to blast through enemies to get at their base and harvesters. Grey Goo is remarkable not for what it has added to the RTS formula, but what it has stripped away.

A HD rendition of a classic game can introduce new audiences to missing links in gaming's evolutionary chain. Resident Evil 4 is one such link, a brave rethink of Resident Evil's original formula that retained the horror, the bosses, and Umbrella's carefully alphabetised viruses, but moved the series in a livelier, gorier direction. Resident Evil 4 HD finally has finally given us a worthy PC edition, as you'll discover in our review, but we wanted to talk a bit about why it's so good, and why it matters. Tim and Sam brought their thoughts to camera, as you'll see in the video below.

I haven't played Godus, but its early alpha reviews gave the impression of a title that was more carpal tunnel roulette than game. Today, the 22 Cans team are hoping to address those criticisms with a new "Beta V2.0" update that, they say, "substantially" changes the feel of the game. Peter Molyneux runs people through the update in a new video, explaining big added features like mouse-drag.



He's almost avuncular, but then says things like, "it feels smooth and delicious to do."

In a post on Steam, 22 Cans explain why it's been so long since the Godus's last update. "It s taken a while because we made the decision to avoid trivial updates that would prolong the core problems. Instead we ve rebuilt the foundations of the game based on the strong feedback we ve received from players. For this we also thank you - your involvement has literally reshaped the experience."

It's fair enough, to an extent. But while it sounds like the game was in need of the major restructure, it's a bit strange that they were otherwise so quiet about it. Developers are still figuring out the rules and best practices for early access projects, but "keep your community informed" would seem like a pretty solid one.

In addition to featuring less clicking, the god game has been redesigned in many other areas. The GUI has had an overhaul, the card system has been redesigned, and new god powers have been added. Features have also been removed - with the team deciding that things like the Story Mode were in need of more refinements. You can see the full feature list here.

Good news from Nvidia for fans of warm thighs on long trips. From today the graphics card behemoth is planning a renewed assault on the gaming notebook market with its forthcoming range of GeForce GTX 800M GPUs, with extended battery life billed as a key feature alongside the (expected) annual performance improvements. PC Gamer recently attended a launch briefing for the 800M series, of which the most powerful variant is the 880M (pictured) which Nvidia claims is the world s fastest notebook GPU. You can expect the chips to begin appearing in notebooks immediately, and among those to include the 880M at launch are the Alienware 17, Asus G750JZ and MSI GT 70.

According to Nvidia, the 880M, and its slightly less powerful sister the 870M, will comfortably run the likes of Metro: Last Light, Assassin s Creed IV: Black Flag and Batman: Arkham Origins in 1080p on Ultra settings. Somewhat surprisingly, those two top end GPUs retain the Kepler architecture from the 600 and 700 series. However, further down the range the 860M and 850M models are based on the new, highly power efficient, Maxwell architecture, and consequently show the greatest year-on-year performance increases over their predecessors. Those two GPUs will run the same games listed in the previous paragraph 1080p on high settings. The range is completed by two Maxwell-based mid-level GPUs, in the shape of the 840M and 830M, and the Fermi-based entry-level 820

All the cards feature a suite of proprietary Nvidia whizzbangery, including ShadowPlay, which aside from referencing the brooding Joy Division track, enables players to record the last 20 minutes of gameplay at all times. (The exact amount of footage captured, and in what resolution, is configurable think of it like a PVR for your PC.) From there it s a simple matter of uploading your glorious triumphs/humiliating debacles to YouTube or Twitch. Owners of an Nvidia Shield handheld can also now use the GameStream functionality to stream from their 800M equipped notebooks. Magnanimously, Nvidia is also making ShadowPlay and GamesStream available to all owners of 700M cards, as well as the 680M, 675MX, 670MX and GTX 660M models it ll just be a case of updating your GeForce Experience software to unlock the features.

One piece of functionality which hasn t made the leap from desktop to portable yet is Nvidia s G-Sync, which is used to align the refresh rate of your desktop monitor with that of the GPU to minimise screen judder and tearing. From the sound of things I wouldn t rule it out appearing eventually, but there are clearly issues still to be solved in terms of the sheer diversity of notebook screens. However, the 800M series does boast its own bespoke feature in the form of Battery Boost, which it s claimed can double the playing time of your notebook. It does this by targeting a specific frame rate, which is configurable on a per game basis, and then running the CPU, GPU and memory in the most efficient manner to achieve the chosen FPS number. So, obviously that means a visual performance trade-off. But then that begs a bigger existential question about notebook GPUs: who actually wants to play Crysis 3 on the move anyway?

Which of course isn t to say there aren t scenarios where you d want a kickass gaming notebook. Perhaps as a second screen in a room in which your partner is using the main TV, or maybe you travel a lot and want to be able to take a stellar gaming experience wherever you go. But in both those examples, you re going to have a power outlet easily to hand. Or to put it another way: it s a bold gamer who busts out a notebook on the bus and tries to get a Titanfall session going. More feasible is the idea of playing slightly more considered gaming experiences, say The Banner Saga or Banished, while on a long haul flight and in that scenario the extra battery life would be welcome and the reduced frame rate hardly a problem. Put another way: having a better battery is hardly bad news.

As ever, we ll be putting these GPUs through their paces in the PC Gamer lab, and it s worth waiting for the verdict of our brainiacs before deciding how seriously to take Nvidia s yearly uptick in performance numbers though an initial look at Bioshock Infinite running in maxed out settings proved impressive. There s little doubt that notebook gaming remains a potentially ripe part of the PC gaming universe, and PC gamers on the move will surely want to check out the 880M s chops to see what the new benchmark in mobile gaming looks like.

We ve seen Microsoft teasing the GDC announcement of the latest installment in their popular DirectX series subtitled "A Storm of Low-Level Hardware Interaction" and now it seems the open source brigade are countering this new Microsoft offensive. Valve have freely released a software layer, ToGL, which will translate Direct3D calls to OpenGL.

In the interests of impartiality I feel I ought to mention AMD will also be talking up its Mantle API at GDC to battle alongside the DirectX and OpenGL announcements.

Valve releasing ToGL is interesting because it s a software layer taken directly from their own DOTA 2 code and has just been put up on the GitHub repository for anyone to use. Valve aren't going to charge for ToGL, so it s being provided as is , but they note it has been "hardcoded to match Source Engine behaviour".

That should mean anyone playing with Source Engine in DirectX ought to now have a relatively good shot at translating their titles into OpenGL for use outside the Windows ecosystem. Fingers-crossed this means we ll start to see more older Source Engine titles getting OpenGL updates for SteamOS increasing its native library. Maybe, one day, we'll even see Titanfall.

It is only rated with a limited subset of DirectX9 though and, because it s designed to intercept and Direct3D calls and replace them with OpenGL versions, ToGL does introduce a level of abstraction which could impact upon gaming performance of translated games.

I'm all for a little Linux love for Star Citizen...they've promised everything else...

Crytek, meanwhile, are going to show off a native version of CryEngine running under Linux. Obviously that means CryEngine-powered games have a pretty good chance of seeing native SteamOS support and, for me, having Star Citizen available on Valve s OS would make me a lot more interested in its use as a full-time operating system for my home rig.

Barbecues? Picnics? Eating your own body weight in ice cream? You may want to clear it all from your Summer schedule. If Wildstar turns out to be the next big MMO, the warmest months will instead be spent sitting in a dark room, illuminated by the colourful glow of its cartoon world. Developers Carbine Studios have today announced that the game will release all around the world on June 3rd. Well, it's not like anyone really needs vitamin D.

Naturally, the release date announcement was accompanied by the pre-order bonuses Carbine have planned. They're rounded up here in video form.



To summarise, pre-orderers will be eligible for all upcoming beta weekends, receive full access to the game three days before launch, and be given some extra digital goodies, like an exclusive Rocket House. They'll also get to experience the thrill of gambling their money on whether the game will be any good or not. Exciting!

Putting aside my reservations about the pre-order model in general, it seems a relatively descent spread of goodies that don't punish people who decide to wait. Interested buyers will be able to secure the game when pre-orders begin next week, March 19th.

You can read my impressions of Wildstar's Adventure mode here, and Chris's overall impressions here.

Update: According to EA, the Titanfall downtime is now resolved.

Original: Titanfall hasn't finished its worldwide roll-out yet - although there are ways to get around that issue. Even with a staggered launch in place, it's popularity is seemingly too much for the game's servers. EA have released a service update, stating that users may experience connection problems that would prevent them from playing the multiplayer mech shooter.

"Titanfall is currently experiencing connection problems," states the EA help page, "which means you may not be able to connect to online play, or even might get dropped from an online match you're currently playing.

"Rest assured that we're addressing this problem and will provide updates as soon as possible."

Possibly connected to this, RPS have spotted threads on Reddit and the EA Answers HQ claiming that users are experiencing a "503 error" when attempting to play. While this specific issue is reportedly fixed, EA's status update suggests that users could face rolling problems while they work on the issue.

Some server instability is to be expected in a game's launch week. Let's just hope that it's a brief blip in the life of Respawn's FPS, and not a sign of a Battlefield 4 style saga of woe. Expect any of the game's issues to be reflected in our final review. We've held off on giving Titanfall a score precisely because EA's review event is a poor reflection of a player's real-world experience with the game. Potential technical hurdles aside, you can read Chris's review-in-progress here.