Four months after the launch of the console, Microsoft still hasn't released a PC driver for the Xbox One controller. Someone else has finally done it for them. With a few caveats, YouTube user Lucas Assis has uploaded video instructions and a driver that will make your Xbox One controller work with your PC. The video is 11 minutes long, so it s not exactly a plug and play solution, but if you really like the Xbox One controller this will get it talking to your PC.
Assis solution uses a combination of a generic USB driver, controller emulating software vJoy, libusb (which allows applications to access USB devices), and his own application, which supports up to 16 (!) controllers. All of these are included in the download.
Basically, after downloading it you ll need to:


Open your device manager and plug in your Xbox One controller
Install the WinUSB device driver (a Windows driver)
Install vJoy
Open vJoy and use it to detect the controllers
Install libusb, launch its filter installer wizard and use it to install the two WinUSB devices that are your controllers.
Open Assis app.

Assis does a good job of walking you through these steps in the video. They're are little involved, but nothing you need a computer science degree for.

From there you ll probably want to install XPadder or x360ce (included in the download) to make it work with games as if it were an Xbox 360 controller. As you ll see in the video, x360ce is a little problematic, and Assis still has some issues with the d-pad, but until Microsoft offers something better, we ll have to make do with homemade solutions. And it took Assis all of a day to make his application. By the time Microsoft gets around to fully supporting the controller, this utility may have ironed out all the kinks.

The Natural Selection 2 World Championship tournament played out in Cologne, Germany a couple of weeks ago, and the whole event was broadcast live over Twitch complete with lights, commentators, and prize money. The spectacle will be familiar to anyone who follows eSports, but now developer Unknown Worlds has shared with PC Gamer a detailed breakdown of what that event cost to put on and how that cash was used.



The semi-final and final rounds of the world championship tournament took place in Germany after Natural Selection 2 fans donated $30,000 to a travel fund through GoFundMe. This money went directly to flying the competing teams to Germany, paying for their hotel rooms and team shirts, and the winners prize money.

Unknown Worlds broke the costs down further, revealing that the event cost a total of $67,443 to put on. Sponsors and donations paid for roughly half of that amount, and Unknown Worlds brought in the rest. For their trouble, the world championship became the first Natural Selection 2 event to generate direct revenue for the company. Over 80,000 people watched the stream online.


(Click here for a larger version.)

Events like this are why we make games: To bring people together, to create shared experiences, and make special moments that extend out of the game world and into the real, Unknown Worlds PR rep Hugh Jeremy told PC Gamer. We hope that by sharing this information, we can help other developers and player communities create their own events, and maybe throw us some feedback too!

Natural Selection 2 is an exceptional multiplayer shooter that you should check out if you haven t already. If you liked the tournament highlights, you can watch the full championship round, and other matches as well, on Twitch.

Illustration by Marsh Davies

All week long, we're peering ahead to what the future holds for the PC gaming industry. Not just the hardware and software in our rigs, but how and where we use them, and how they impact the games we play. Here's part three of our five-part series; stay tuned all week for more from the future of PC gaming.

Palmer Luckey has dedicated his career to virtual reality and bet millions of investment dollars on the idea, so it s expected that he would call it the most exciting technology of the last century. But it s still a bold statement from the young entrepreneur and founder of Oculus VR, and we told him as much during our chat at CES 2014.

I didn t say it s going to be the most successful, responded Luckey. But I think it is one of the most exciting, especially when you think of the potential.

Luckey has a lot of backup there; science fiction writers and scientists alike have been spinning tales of VR s potential for ages. All the way back in the 80s, Jaron Lanier the computer scientist credited with coining the term very accurately and excitedly predicted the virtual reality trends emerging in PC gaming today: massively multiplayer worlds, motion controls, and head-mounted displays (HMDs) through which we re immersed in stereoscopic visions of unreal places.

A US Navy hospital corpsman demonstrating a virtual reality parachute trainer.

And even before Lanier s predictions, there s been a persisting sense that virtual reality is both feasible and inevitable, which made growing up in the 80s and 90s terribly disappointing. The VR revolution just never came to pass. The technology never really worked in a consumer setting, and VR became a joke a list of novelty failures like the Virtual Boy.

Palmer Luckey and the Oculus Rift VR headset are putting that all behind us. It isn t a proven success yet, but it has proven that it s not a joke. By all indications, including the millions of dollars from enthusiastic Kickstarter backers and major technology investors, the virtual reality dream is finally becoming a reality.
Why VR works now
Consumer head-mounted displays existed before the Oculus Rift, but they weren t nearly the stuff of cyberpunk fiction. Shining stereoscopic images into the eyes is easy a plastic toy can do that but immersing the wearer s head in a world without making their stomach feel like an airborne water balloon is a lot harder.

Virtual reality that feels anything like reality requires an HMD with low-latency head tracking, high-resolution screens, minimal motion blur, and a field-of-view expansive enough to reach the peripheral vision. The first Rift prototype came near to solving these problems, but still made our managing editor, Cory Banks, quit Half-Life 2 with the contents of his stomach.



The latest hi-res prototype, however, strapped Cory and his stomach into a space battle with enough fidelity to keep his lunch secure. By overcoming its biggest critic the finicky human body virtual reality has proven that it s ready to arrive in our homes. It is no longer the stuff of failed Nintendo systems, theme park rides, and arcade installations of the 90s. It s real, and we ll be using it in the next year or two.

Mind you, modern VR technology is nowhere near the dreams of sci-fi writers we still need better motion control, haptic feedback, and face capture solutions but think of the Rift as the PC you would have played Doom on in 1993. We look back at those Pentium-powered antiques and laugh, but we bought them then because Doom was worth it. The VR tech of 2034 will make today s Oculus Rift look silly, but VR is just sophisticated enough now to be worth having, and that s why this is its watershed moment.
Game changer
The most important and exciting thing about this moment is that it isn t just about playing the same games with screens strapped to our faces. Virtual reality isn t a type of display it s a new gaming platform and it needs its own kind of games. In my ideal fantasy of the near future, we're still playing all the games we play now, but we have an expansive set of mutated genres made possible by VR.

As a first step, simulation makes sense. The closer technology gets to simulating reality, the better suited it is for simulations of reality. In the most basic VR scenario, you re sitting in a chair with a headset on, which makes it perfect for games about sitting in a cockpit or driver s seat. Expect VR support to be standard in driving, flight, and space sims Project Cars, for instance, already supports the Rift, and EVE Online developer CCP is making a dogfighting game designed specifically for the headset called EVE Valkyrie. Elite: Dangerous looks very promising as well see Andy talking about it below.



First-person shooters work in VR, too I played through part of Half-Life 2 with a Rift developer kit but slower is better. I doubt Titanfall would make a good VR shooter, for instance. Jetpacking up walls and being flung around by giant mechs might disorient even astronauts.

No matter how good you make a VR headset, it won t necessarily let you do everything you can do on a monitor without feeling disorienting," says Luckey. "And that s because a lot of things that you do in traditional games would make you sick if you did them in real life.

Call of Duty multiplayer, for instance, would probably not benefit from VR. Constant sprinting, 360-degree spinning, and bunny-hopping? No thanks and I doubt you'd get a competitive edge. That doesn't mean VR games will all be mundane strolls through static scenery, but even in a single-player shooter or on a psychedelic trip to Mars, I expect movement will need to be more natural. How often do you actually strafe across a room or walk backward around corners?

So, we ll move more like people move, and we ll also explore more with the Rift, just being in a place is instantly more interesting than it ever was on a flat monitor and more and more, we ll stop being asked to wield a gun at all times. In VR-land, pure shooters will further lose status as the dominant genre for first-person games. In their place, the survival-horror genre will continue its recent ascension Zombie Studios is already developing the Rift-compatible, properly terrifying Daylight and the less masochistic will find a greater number of first-person RPGs like Skyrim and exploration games like Dear Esther, The Stanley Parable, and Gone Home.

Many Oculus Rift demos are simply places to explore and experience, such as RedOfPaw's rendition of The Boiler Room from Spirited Away.

VR will be optimally used for simulation, exploration, and role-playing, and the games won t always fit into traditional definitions of games (as the last three I mentioned are either accused of or praised for, depending on who you ask). We ll visit foreign landmarks by exploring photorealistic 3D-scanned replicas. We ll bounce on the surface of the moon with friends. We ll dive into the Mariana trench in personal submarines.

These ideas call back to the multimedia CD-ROM experiences of the mid- 90s. The era s video encyclopedias and FMV games didn t earn the best reputation, but they ll come back in a much better way with VR. Consider Star Trek s reality-generating holodeck. The crew of the Enterprise didn t jump into the horrors of war as endlessly respawning soldiers. As much fun as that is (don't think I'm going to stop enjoying Rising Storm), I don't see it as the most exciting use of VR technology. No, Picard and crew experienced places, stories, and simulated people. They were role-playing, and even though the holodeck was just a plot device, I foresee real VR technology leading to the same thing. I also expect it to spur on advances in relatively un-advanced segments of game design and programming.
A new reality
For instance, role playing in virtual reality should lead to more convincing characters. Right now, short of hiring actors to populate my personal Sherlock episode in some kind of multiplayer murder theater, there s no way to have a natural interaction with a non-player character in a game. People don t fall in love via dialog wheel or blink idly when they have nothing to say, and as games start to feel more like reality, we ll expect their characters to act more like real people. AI and voice recognition will improve, and communication will become more important.

And when VR hardware is sophisticated enough, the goal of improving graphics and motion controls will be wholly replaced with the task of better simulating reality. That s the ultimate dream of VR from the perspective of many who have written about it a reality substitute, where people play, socialize, shop, and do business, as in Neal Stephenson s Snowcrash and other sci-fi fiction before and after it.

VR Cinema is a novel way to watch movies with extremely high resolution headsets, it could be a great way to share the theater experience with distant friends.

Virtual Reality starts out as a medium just like television or computers or written language, said Lanier in a 1988 interview with now-defunct magazine Whole Earth Review. But once it gets to be used to a certain degree, it ceases to be a medium and simply becomes another reality that we can inhabit.

Today, Luckey is saying much the same thing. When VR is going to be exciting is when it gets as good as real life at everything, he says. And you start to say, well, Why would I travel on a business meeting across the world just to go sit face-to-face with people, if we can just plug in Rifts and get all of the same nuance of communication we could have gotten otherwise?

But that s not to say that gamers aren t important, or that the goal of VR is to leave gaming behind. We re vital, according to Luckey and I agree because that grand cyberspace future will never get off the ground without us.

"Gamers are the ones that I think are most accepting of this kind of new technology," he says. "Gamers are willing to take time out of their day to go do something that s out of the ordinary and fantastical. And VR is one of the best ways we re going to have to do that."

Illustration by Marsh Davies

All week long, we're peering ahead to what the future holds for the PC gaming industry. Not just the hardware and software in our rigs, but how and where we use them, and how they impact the games we play. Here's part three of our five-part series; stay tuned all week for more from the future of PC gaming.

Palmer Luckey has dedicated his career to virtual reality and bet millions of investment dollars on the idea, so it s expected that he would call it the most exciting technology of the last century. It s still a bold statement from the young entrepreneur and founder of Oculus VR, and we told him as much during our chat at CES 2014.

I didn t say it s going to be the most successful, said Luckey. But I think it is one of the most exciting, especially when you think of the potential.

Luckey has a lot of support there; science fiction writers and scientists alike have been spinning tales of VR s potential for ages. All the way back in the 80s, Jaron Lanier the computer scientist credited with coining the term very accurately and excitedly predicted the virtual reality trends emerging in PC gaming today: massively multiplayer worlds, motion controls, and head-mounted displays (HMDs) through which we re immersed in stereoscopic visions of unreal places.

A US Navy hospital corpsman demonstrating a virtual reality parachute trainer.

And even before Lanier s predictions, there s been a persisting sense that virtual reality is both feasible and inevitable, but the VR revolution just never came to pass. The technology didn't work in a consumer setting, and VR became a joke a list of novelty failures like the Virtual Boy.

Palmer Luckey and the Oculus Rift VR headset are putting that behind us. The device isn t a proven success yet, but it has proven that it s not a joke. By all indications, including the millions of dollars from enthusiastic Kickstarter backers and major technology investors, the virtual reality dream is real.

Why VR works now
 
Consumer head-mounted displays existed before the Oculus Rift, but they weren t nearly the stuff of cyberpunk fiction. Shining stereoscopic images into the eyes is easy a plastic toy can do that but immersing the wearer s head in a world without making their stomach feel like an airborne water balloon is a lot harder.

Virtual reality that feels anything like reality requires an HMD with low-latency head tracking, high-resolution screens, minimal motion blur, and a field-of-view expansive enough to reach the peripheral vision. The first Oculus Rift prototype came near to solving these problems, but still made our managing editor, Cory Banks, quit Half-Life 2 with the contents of his stomach.



The latest hi-res prototype, however, strapped Cory and his stomach into a space battle with enough fidelity to keep his lunch secure. By overcoming its biggest critic the finicky human body virtual reality has proven that it s ready to arrive in our homes. It is no longer the stuff of failed Nintendo systems, theme park rides, and arcade installations of the 90s. It s real, and we ll be using it in the next year or two.

Mind you, modern VR technology is nowhere near the dreams of sci-fi writers we still need better motion control, haptic feedback, and face capture solutions but think of the Rift as the PC you would have played Doom on in 1993. We look back at those Pentium-powered antiques and laugh, but Doom was worth it. The VR tech of 2034 will make today s Oculus Rift look silly too, but VR is just sophisticated enough now to be worth having, and that s why this is its watershed moment.

Game changer
 
What this moment will do for games is the most exciting unknown. It isn t just about playing the same games with screens strapped to our faces. Virtual reality isn t a type of display it s a new gaming platform and it needs its own kind of games. In my ideal fantasy of the near future, we're still playing all the games we play now, but we have an expansive set of mutated genres made possible by VR.

As a first step, simulation makes sense. The closer technology gets to simulating reality, the better suited it is for simulations of reality. In the most basic VR scenario, you re sitting in a chair with a headset on, which makes it perfect for games about sitting in a cockpit or driver s seat. Expect VR support to be standard in driving, flight, and space sims Project Cars, for instance, already supports the Rift, and EVE Online developer CCP is making EVE Valkyrie, a dogfighting game designed specifically for the headset. Elite: Dangerous looks very promising as well see Andy talking about it below.



First-person shooters work in VR, too I played through part of Half-Life 2 with a Rift developer kit but slower is better. With a Rift on my head, I spent more time than ever before walking around looking at the details of Half-Life 2's floors and ceilings. I also noticed that, when I took my time observing, I was able to create a better mental map of the levels than I recall making during any previous playthrough.

I doubt, however, that Titanfall would make a good VR shooter. Jetpacking up walls and being flung around by giant mechs might disorient even astronauts.

No matter how good you make a VR headset, it won t necessarily let you do everything you can do on a monitor without feeling disorienting," says Luckey. "And that s because a lot of things that you do in traditional games would make you sick if you did them in real life.

Call of Duty multiplayer, for instance, would also probably not benefit from VR. Constant sprinting, 360-degree spinning, and bunny-hopping? No thanks and I doubt you'd get a competitive edge. That doesn't mean VR games will all be mundane strolls through static scenery, but even in a shooter or on a psychedelic trip to Mars, I expect movement will need to be more natural. How often do you actually strafe across a room or walk backward around corners?

We ll move more like people move, we ll explore more with the Rift, just being in a place is instantly more interesting than it ever was on a flat monitor and more and more, we ll stop being asked to wield a gun at all times. Shooters will exist in VR-land, but they'll further lose status as the dominant genre for first-person games. The survival-horror genre will continue its recent ascension Zombie Studios is already developing the Rift-compatible, properly terrifying Daylight and the less masochistic will find a greater number of first-person RPGs like Skyrim and exploration games like Dear Esther, The Stanley Parable, and Gone Home.

Many Oculus Rift demos are simply places to explore and experience, such as RedOfPaw's rendition of The Boiler Room from Spirited Away.

VR games won t always fit into traditional definitions of games (as the last three I mentioned are either accused of or praised for, depending on who you ask). We ll visit foreign landmarks by exploring photorealistic 3D-scanned replicas. We ll bounce on the surface of the moon with friends. We ll dive into the Mariana trench in personal submarines.

These ideas call back to the multimedia CD-ROM experiences of the mid- 90s. The era s video encyclopedias and FMV games didn t earn the best reputation, but they ll come back in a much better way with VR. Consider Star Trek s reality-generating holodeck. The crew of the Enterprise didn t jump into the horrors of war as endlessly respawning soldiers. As much fun as that is (don't think I'm going to stop enjoying Rising Storm), I don't see it as the most exciting use of VR technology. No, Picard and crew experienced places, stories, and simulated people. They were role-playing, and even though the holodeck was just a plot device, I foresee real VR technology encouraging the same kinds of experiences. And with those experiences, I expect VR will spur on advances in relatively un-advanced segments of game design and programming.

A new reality
 
As one example, virtual reality should lead to more convincing characters. Right now, short of hiring actors to populate my personal Sherlock episode in some kind of multiplayer murder theater, there s no way to have a natural interaction with a non-player character in a game. People don t fall in love via dialog wheel or blink idly when they have nothing to say, and as games start to feel more like reality, we ll expect their characters to act more like real people. AI and voice recognition will improve, and communication will become more important to gameplay.

And when VR hardware is sophisticated enough, the goal of improving graphics and motion controls will be wholly replaced with the task creating more and more complex simulations. That s the ultimate dream of VR from the perspective of many who have written about it a reality substitute, where people play, socialize, shop, and do business, as in Neal Stephenson s Snowcrash and other sci-fi fiction before and after it.

VR Cinema is a novel way to watch movies with extremely high resolution headsets, it could be a great way to share the theater experience with distant friends.

Virtual Reality starts out as a medium just like television or computers or written language, said Lanier in a 1988 interview with now-defunct magazine Whole Earth Review. But once it gets to be used to a certain degree, it ceases to be a medium and simply becomes another reality that we can inhabit.

Today, Luckey is saying much the same thing. When VR is going to be exciting is when it gets as good as real life at everything, he says. And you start to say, well, Why would I travel on a business meeting across the world just to go sit face-to-face with people, if we can just plug in Rifts and get all of the same nuance of communication we could have gotten otherwise?

But that s not to say that gamers aren t important, or that the goal of VR is to leave gaming behind. We re vital, according to Luckey (and I agree), because that grand cyberspace future will never get off the ground without us.

"Gamers are the ones that I think are most accepting of this kind of new technology," he says. "Gamers are willing to take time out of their day to go do something that s out of the ordinary and fantastical. And VR is one of the best ways we re going to have to do that."

The Elder Scrolls Online's three-way tiff over whose posterior claims the Imperial City's throne perfectly befits the franchise's massive lore background. To join in, though, players will need to pay a subscription fee on top of purchasing the disc or downloading the upcoming MMO. Producer Bethesda and developer ZeniMax have both come out in defense of that debatable decision. They argue they can provide heavier content thanks to a bigger budget, but it's still an interesting choice given the rise of free-to-play gaming. Speaking to GameSpot, Bethesda Vice President of PR Pete Hines claims a monthly fee exists to help bolster ESO with richer, "significant" content updates.

" just seems like a lesser game, and we're not going to make a lesser game that might be more palatable," Hines says. "We want to do the version that we think is the best game and the coolest experience. And that means putting a lot of people and a lot of content creators towards having stuff that comes out regularly; every four weeks, five weeks, six weeks. Big new stuff that you want to do.

"We're also very confident in our ability to support it with content," he continues. "And not content of the magnitude of, 'It's a new month, here's a new sword or here's a funny hat,' but content that is real and significant and it feels like regular and consistent DLC releases."

Hines believes ESO's more focused appeal to certain kinds of players Elder Scrolls buffs and MMO fans, specifically justifies the lowered player count from a subscription fee.

"We're not trying to make a game that everybody who plays games will automatically buy," he says. "It's a certain kind of game. There's no shooter elements. There's no aliens. It's a massive, 'Go where you want, do what you want' game that we think offers the kind of experience that's worthy of a subscription."

The value of a subscription fee is often difficult to define in a genre as prone to changing expectations as MMOs. The challenge here is for ZeniMax and Bethesda to follow through on their pledge of quality from the extra money they take in. A set update schedule sounds fine on paper, but post-release studio rearrangements and sales performance are sometimes all it takes to widen the gap between content patches. That's something to keep an eye on after ESO's April 4 release, but for now, invites are currently underway for the beta's last weekend stress test event.

Much like Tortchlight, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing was an enjoyable and affordable action role-playing game, which found an audience with players looking for something similar to Diablo. That s how I found it (and loved it), so I m pretty excited that Neocore announced that The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II will hit Steam on April 17 for $15. If you just can t wait another minute, you can pre-purchase the game on Neocore's site to gain access to the closed beta, which, now that we re so close to release, must be pretty close to the final product.
Neocore released a list of figures to empirically prove that if The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II is not a better game than the original, it is at least more game than the original. It will have three character classes where the previous only had one, a complex story compared to a linear one, over 250 unique weapon models compared to 30, and a level 60 cap compared to 30. The original's tower defense mode is also getting much bigger in the sequel with seven more levels and twice as many trap types.
The game will have a lot of stuff, is what Neocore is trying to say, which of course appeals to me as a loot mongering RPG fan.
If you re unfamiliar with the first game, you can get a pretty good idea of what you ll be in for by watching this new trailer.

This is part one of a multi-part Rust diary from noted naked man Christopher Livingston come back next Wednesday for part two of his adventures.

By now, we're completely familiar with the basics of crafting games. You hit a tree until it becomes tree parts, then use the tree parts to build wooden things. You smash a rock until it becomes ore, then smelt the ore to build metal things. You meet a half-naked guy named Batman, and he follows you around for ten minutes eerily moaning, "Take me to your house. Show me your house. Show me your houuuuuse." Actually, that last part might not be common to crafting games. But Batman's weirdness is not that unusual in Rust, the early-access crafting survival game from Facepunch Studios.

My first day in Rust was not particularly unusual. I found some trees and hit them. I saw some rocks and smashed them. I encountered some animals and killed them, and encountered some monsters and ran away. I saw the creations of others and became determined to create things of my own. Standard stuff.

Use this thing to smash those things, right? Pff. Who needs a tutorial?
Then I built a campfire and tried to cook the animal meat I'd harvested, but not understanding how to properly use the campfire, I accidentally ate all of the meat raw, and then began vomiting onto my campfire. Then I died mid-vomit. That part wasn't quite so standard.


Campfires give you comfort, a place to cook, and a spot to die barfing.

My first night in Rust, I ran around with a lit torch, looking for somewhere safe to spend the night, finding only darkened cabins with locked doors. Some wolves attacked me, bit me, and chased me. I found an empty shelter, a simple wooden room with no door, and hid inside. I was hurt from wolf bites, I was trapped by the wolves themselves, I was hungry but had no food, I was cold but had no fire, and I was taking radiation damage from something nearby. Eventually my torch ran out and I died in that little hut, in complete darkness.

Where's the 'domesticate wolf' button?

The next day, I decided that if I was going to die alone in pain and misery, it should at least be in my own doorless hut. So, I crafted a stone axe and ran around I whacking trees all day. I also met some of the locals. Another player ran up behind me and screamed, ear-splittingly, into the mic, then ran away laughing. I met Batman, as described above, and tried to ignore his soft, hollow moans. Someone else passed by and, when I said hello, said something so profane in response that I'm not sure it can be reproduced in writing without adding a few new letters to my keyboard.

Don't give me those doe eyes. Though if you do, I'll probably wind up eating them.

Another half-naked man approached. "Frosh Man," he said. "Do you have a bandage?" I said my name was "Frohman," and that I didn't have a bandage (not realizing that new spawns actually have two by default) and he started walking away. A moment later a gunshot rang out nearby and the half-naked man started screaming. "Frosh Man has a gun! Frosh Man tried to shoot me! Oh my God. Oh my God. Frosh Man tried to shoot me!"

"It wasn't me," I told him. "I don't have a gun."

"Oh my God," he repeated, running around the map. "Everybody, stay away from Frosh Man. He has a gun. He tried to shoot me. Stay away from Frosh Man! Oh my God!" He continued loudly accusing me of violence until he disappeared over a hill and his voice faded.

Eventually, I collected enough wood, then built my shelter just as night fell. In the corner, I placed my campfire, and carefully carefully inserted some raw chicken breasts I'd gotten from a deer I killed (yes, dead deer give you chicken breasts at the moment). I cooked them and ate them, and I suddenly felt better about everything. I had a whacking tool and a shelter and warmth and enough food, and thus had cleared the first hurdles in every survival game. Maybe everything would be okay. Then, another half-naked man, this one pointing a shotgun at my face, suddenly slipped into my shelter. Maybe everything would not be okay after all.

I'm pretty sure I know how this particular campfire story goes.

"Hey," he said. "Is this your first time playing? You really shouldn't have a campfire going in the middle of the night, everyone can see it."

"I'm pretty new to this," I admitted. "I just needed to cook some food before I starved to death." I waited for a blast of gunfire, or failing that, a blast of profane derision.

"Here," he said. "Take this stuff." From his bare torso, bags began to fly, one by one, until they littered the ground in front of me. He gave me wood planks. He gave me ore. He gave me walls, pillars, a roof and a doorway. He gave me storage boxes and a smelting forge and a sleeping bag. He gave me a shotgun, and tons of ammo.

As we ran together through the night he answered my crafting questions ("Can you build a compass?") and game questions ("Is there an in-game map?") and my personal questions ("Am I naked?"). The answers: no, no, yes. He gave me some pants. When another player tried to kill me with an arrow, my guide fired his shotgun and chased the attacked away. As dawn came, he showed me a good spot to build my house, in a place called Resource Valley.

Campfire, forge, sleeping bag, crates, and half-naked protector. Cozy as can be.

It was amazing. By showing my complete ignorance to a stranger in this crafting game, I had somehow crafted the perfect item: a guardian angel, a tour guide, a mentor. A friend! Within the hour, I had a real house built, with walls and a roof and a door that only I could open. I had crates full of loot and a gun full of ammo, all due to the generosity of my tutor. Thanks to him, I had a home.

A house just isn't a home without a welcome mat.

Of course, once you have a home in Rust, you have something else as well: neighbors. But we'll get to that particular peril of homeownership next time.

Blizzard announced you can now purchase a level 90 character boost in World of Warcraft for $60, confirming the price that leaked out last month. It s the same boost you ll get with a purchase of the latest World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor, which Blizzard will sell for $50 (Standard Edition) or $70 (Digital Deluxe Edition).
You ll find the boost in the services tab in the game s shop menu. After you buy it, head to the character select menu, choose the character you want to apply it to, and click the Character Boost Token. You ll then be prompted to choose talent specializations. Characters level 60 and higher will also receive a level skill boost to their primary professions and level-appropriate gear.
World of Warcraft lead encounter designer Ion Hazzikostas said that the price isn t trying to maximize profits, but rather trying not to devalue leveling. "If our goal here was to sell as many boosts as possible, we could halve the price or more than that make it $10 or something, he said. And then hardly anyone would ever level a character again.
Blizzard expects to release Warlords of Draenor on or before December 20, 2014. The Digital Deluxe Edition comes with a mount, pet, Starcraft II portraits, and Diablo III Pennants.
To find out more about what's coming in World of Warcraft's fifth expansion, be sure to read our previous coverage and hands-on with the game.

Reinstall invites you to join us in revisiting classics of PC gaming days gone by. This week, editor Sam Roberts returns to the fury of Call of Duty 4's singleplayer campaign.

With Titanfall jettisoning the idea of a traditional single-player mode and Battlefield 4 s campaign inducing widespread sighs, this has become a disposable bolt on to most of today s big shooters. Titanfall is able to create much of the drama of a single-player game in the midst of its impressive systems, but it s worth remembering that the old Infinity Ward were really good at making campaigns, too.

But it might be that Titanfall s lack of a true single-player mode is a sign of the times: COD s rigid campaign formula has been exhausted. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was its peak.

The single-player is, in levels without a significant story beat, a slog to get through today. Perhaps this is because its ideas have been mercilessly recycled in the last seven years by both copycat action developers and Call Of Duty s own teams not really successfully expanding on that formula (full disclosure: I haven t played Ghosts doggy campaign, though I ve completed all of them prior to that).



How many times have we seen that moment when your character gets knocked to his feet by a blast and his vision blurred, before you re picked up by an NPC and finally handed back control of the game? It s in the first mission of COD4 as the tanker is bombarded by MiGs. Every variation of this and many other scripted set pieces borrowed from Modern Warfare, and it s not COD4 s fault that people ripped that off. It just turned out to be pervasively influential.

I think the lack of self-expression offered by its linear structure is a bit too cloying by today s standards. There is some extraordinary visual design in Modern Warfare s real-world environments, but wander too far out of the intended path and you always find dead spots in detail or convenient fences and barbed wire. I forgot you don t have the power to open doors in Call Of Duty you have to wait for the NPCs to do it for you. The lack of interactivity reduces the value of replaying a COD campaign, admittedly, which is probably part of the reason it s become a disposable aside in multiplayer-heavy FPSs generally.

COD4 s success hinges on the quality of replaying those scripted moments, and they are still pretty decent even when you know Infinity Ward s tricks. The storyline isn t particularly entertaining, but it s a lot sharper than the increasingly ludicrous sequels are, and benefits from not overdosing on silly. Individual moments still excel and highlight the developers narrative chops.



You know the ones I mean. When the pilot rescue goes awry during Shock and Awe and your player character is consumed by a surprise nuclear blast, you crawl through the rubble for a minute before your character dies alone in a horrific blast zone. Having played that twice before, I thought the impact would wear off. It doesn t. Yes, you re basically just crawling in a straight line out of a helicopter, but struggling through this blood red wasteland is a scripted moment of real design merit. The sound effects of your character s death are a bit more disturbing than I remember, too.

Then there s the level everyone talked about in 2007. Breathlessly sneaking through the irradiated landscape of Pripyat in All Ghillied Up demonstrates the real craft of a linear story-driven FPS; it remains Modern Warfare s strongest level, and has a nice arc that begins with stealth encounters before escalating into a brilliant last stand. The abandoned backdrop is strikingly beautiful.

Playing it today, I m reminded that DayZ has thrown up a number of equally dramatic scenarios as Ghillied through its systems at random, while also allowing scope for personality and freeform set pieces. Ghillied is just following a guy down a linear path, as impressively paced and scripted as it is. You can t repeat it and have a different experience that s a problem with replaying any Call Of Duty title. But even without the feeling of newness that it had in 2007, you can see why other developers tried to emulate Infinity Ward s storytelling sensibilities.



I realise I sound a bit down in revisiting Call Of Duty 4 s story mode there s a reason for that. Before replaying the game, I considered the idea that the single-player part of an FPS might be becoming a lost art, but I actually think it s just this very specific type of linear shooter that s becoming irrelevant. And that might not be a bad thing. COD4 s memorable tutorial of running through a fake cargo ship of pop-up wooden enemies isn t far off what playing a COD campaign actually feels like today. When you know the beats inside and out, there s not a great capacity for surprise.

It s part of the reason why Titanfall only has a story mode functioning as a multiplayer framework, in my opinion. After Call Of Duty 4, I m not sure this type of single-player experience ever really improved in pacing or storytelling. It had a finite lifespan that has perhaps reached its end with the failure of Medal Of Honor, the broad apathy towards Battlefield 4 s campaign and COD s dog-related sagas.

Modern Warfare s impact was all in the multiplayer, of course. After many yearly Call Of Duty sequels it s hard to recall or appreciate how refreshing Modern Warfare s progression-based multiplayer was Titanfall is getting a similar response now, in that it reworked a genre we maybe didn t realise needed a rethink in the first place.

Maybe COD4 s campaign is just a relic, then but it s still a fun one.

Welcome to the After Action Report, a weekly account from one of PC gaming's varied, exciting battlefields.

Two robots. Two planets. Can't the robots just have one planet each? NO. This is Planetary Annihilation, an RTS from some of the brains behind Supreme Commander's large-scale robotic RTS battles. The plot is simple: once upon a time someone set all the robots to "kill", and the robots have been killing everything ever since, pausing only to build smaller robots that can kill more effectively. Unlike Supreme Commander, Planetary Annihilation has robots fighting for orbital supremacy as well as on land, air and sea.

Planetary Annihilation has recently entered the ominous "gamma" phase of its pre-release program. What does that mean, exactly? Let's find out, by making huge robot armies fight each other to death.

It begins. I'm fighting a single "normal" AI enemy across two celestial bodies. My commander is a plodding bipedal tractor with a single mournful eye, and rather looks like he could do with a hug. There are no hugs on this rock, only extraction points and, somewhere, another commander that wants to absorb my sad robot's carcass for spare metal.

To begin, I build a couple of metal extractors. These vital machines suck metal out of the planet's crust, which I can use to build my commander a few friends. Next, energy plants. You need metal to build units, but without energy, that building process will slow to a crawl. As with SupCom, you can hold shift to queue up build orders and sketch out a ghostly base for your units to fill in. My facility quickly takes shape. I scatter around a few turrets and have my commander build an air factory. That produces a few flying engineers. I send them out to scout the globe and start stealing as many precious extraction points as possible. As long as they don't fly directly over the enemy base, or into the ground, they'll probably get most of the way around the planet.



I soon find the enemy base. They're some way South-West of my landfall position, but not too far away. If your enemy is on the opposite pole, they're equally capable of attacking from any direction. In my four-or-so hours with Planetary Annihilation, the lack of coherent battle lines has proved frustrating. Extractors can be killed from any angle at any time, and there are so many it's tough to keep an eye on your territory, even with the game's superb fast-zooming camera. In this scenario it's unlikely the enemy will send land vehicles the long way round the planet, I can confidently deploy stronger defenses to the South East.

Metal pouring in, which is fortunate, because I've ordered the construction of four vehicle factories. Without a corner to dig into, I have to build hundreds of robots to cover my territory.

I set two of my factories to build anti-air tanks on an infinite loop while the other two churn out traditional tanks. Purple boomerang bombers are nagging at the edges of my base, targeting lone metal extractors and blowing up the odd turret. I get some of my engineers to buff the factories and speed up the build.

Four factories ought to do it, right?

Increasingly persistent air patrols target my distant metal extractors, so I dispatch a blob of tanks and anti-air vehicles to mill around on the frontier of my miniature empire. There they swat boomerangs, repel the occasional enemy bot and complain about 3G reception at the cold edge of the universe.

With my factories on autopilot, I can turn my attention to the fun stuff. SPACE. I'm currently fighting for control of a verdant planet, covered in sparse forests and stretches of desert and volcanic rock. The planet also has a small, rocky moon with dozens of unclaimed extractor points. I get my army of flying builder-bots to materialise an orbital factory, opening a new front in the outer atmosphere.

Soon I have a few orbital fighters and an orbital constructor bot sailing over my base and bumping into the camera every now and then. The orbital constructor builds a battle station a slow moving, unstoppable octagon with lots of mounted lasers. Back on the as-yet-unnamed planet that shall henceforth be known as Robotron, I've built a space bus to carry one lucky unit to the final frontier. One of my flying builders is chosen for the grand journey. Once the it's safely on board I right click on the moon and watch the bus take a spiraling route out of Robotron's atmosphere. The bus quickly reaches the planetoid and the builder disembarks in a slow, lingering spiral, like a sycamore bud falling from a metal leaf.

One giant leap for robot-kind.

The moon is MINE. I build a factory with my lone builder-bot, and get it to build more builder bots, then send them around the Moon, spiking the surface with metal extractors until it resembles a craggy grey pincushion. How is the metal making it back to the surface of the main planet? Only Optimus Prime can say, but the resource boost will let me build more cool orbital stuff, like space lasers.

While distracted by the wonders of interstellar transport, the AI has started putting up orbital defenses. My orbital octagon lashes a few fighters into zero-G debris and resumes falls back into brooding silence. On the ground, things are starting to get out of control. The constant raids on my empire's periphery has taken a dozen or so metal extractors out of commission. My self-perpetuating war-blob of tanks and anti-air trucks has grown to a frankly ridiculous size. It's raid-o'-clock.

First I move the orbiting octagon very slowly in the direction of the enemy base. It starts drifting over the cordon of purple turrets like a ship from Independence Day, flanked by a few fighters and an orbital builder. The builder starts assembling a space-laser, which I hope will end the war. There's trouble, though. From the darkness of the fog-of-war, huge bolts zap my octagon into a flaming wreck. Moments later, my fighters and my builder falls. The orbital laser hangs, half-finished above the base. Before the fleet is wiped out, I catch a glimpse of the enemy's building-sized anti-orbital ground artillery. Damn.

WAR BLOB, ADVANCE!

I order my factory to build more orbital fighters, but the enemy has a couple of their own floating right above my base with impunity. I have no way to challenge them; every fighter I fire into orbit is swarmed instantly. Plan B: charge the main enemy base with everything I have. If I can wipe out their anti-orbital guns and destroy the lingering orbital fighters I can finish my space laser and win the game. Hopefully.

Mistake. A terrible mistake. I should have migrated my entire population to the moon and lived happily ever after, but instead I sent my army into a devastating laser-turret crossfire, and didn't factor in the presence of enemy artillery emplacements. Their massive rockets pummel by tanks into fluffy clouds. A wave of enemy bombers is taken out by the spiraling homing rockets of my AA tanks, but soon they fall. I beat a hasty retreat, trying to preserve enough of a force to fight back if purple counter-attacks.

War blob, come in. War blob? Do you read? WAAAR BLOOB?

They counter-attack. My radar picks up their huge, lumbering army long before they reach my base, but there's little I can do. My bedraggled troops are destroyed.

In hindsight, I should have built twice the number of factories, thought about artillery and obsessed less about becoming king of the moon. The great purple tank collective wipe out my buildings one by one. The space base fires one final rocket into orbit. I like to think that a few robots were on board, trying to make a final escape, but I know there's an army of purple space-fiends above waiting shoot them on sight.

Commanders normally go nuclear in SupCom and Planetary Annihilation, but for some reason my commander doesn't. He died how he lived, silently and sadly. Once he's gone, the buildings on the moon start to self-destruct one by one, covering the grey rock with dozens of puffy orange explosions. Quite beautiful.

DEFEATED. Nevermind, eh. Now the fog of war's lifted, let's take a look at what the enemy really had.

HOLY MOLY.