Fallout 4 s decrepit amusement park DLC, Nuka-World, is out now packing new enemies, weird weapons and the chance to finally become a raider. Besides being a little frustrated with its convoluted opening, Chris seemed to mostly enjoy his time milling around in the game s sixth and final add-on, and the latest developer diary offers a sneak peek of what you can get up to.

Your first 10 hours in Nuka-World will be spent endlessly shooting and little else, as each threat must be 100 percent neutralized before the surprisingly cautious raiders will move in, says Chris in his review. Doing so while skooshing explosive Quantum Nuka Cola from a water gun, or melting Gatorclaws (alligator-like Deathclaws) with the Acid Soaker looks like particularly good fun.

Nuka-World s creators discuss the different raider factions you ll be up against/be able to side with, and the various locations the new theme park area offers. Still, the inventive weaponry at your disposal sounds the most appealing aspect of the DLC to me.

The Thirst Zapper, which is the weapon that you saw in the Nuka Girls pin-up posters, you get early on in the add-on, explains the expansion s lead artist Mark Teare up there. You can mod that as you discover the secrets of how they ve weaponised Nuka Cola, and turn that into a really devastating weapon. Which looks pretty awesome in motion.

Fallout 4 s Nuka-World DLC is out now and costs 14.99/$19.99. If you d like to see more, an hour-long dev stream can be viewed here, while James ideas on where the series should go next can be read in this direction.

When I look back on the last 10 years of Fallout I remember a collage of greys and browns. I remember dark industrial corridors and spiked shoulder pads. I remember lunchboxes and rusty tire irons and a song about setting the world on fire. Three games and a combined 200 hours later, I remember a name or two (can t forget Boone and Caesar), and a few distinct locations and vaults, but the rest of my memories bleed together.

Successful and popular as it is, Fallout could reinvent itself a little. Assassin's Creed also gets some flak for being samey, but its changes of scenery and period have done a lot to keep that series fresh. I think it s time for Bethesda to leave popular US cities behind and hit the dusty trail.

No city for old men (or super mutants) 

Bethesda typically withholds the cities in Fallout until you re several hours in, building them up as infamous hubs for the remnants of civilization, full of danger and allure. I remember seeing New Vegas on the horizon for the first time the way it lit up the pitch black Nevada desert drew me in right away. But when I finally got there, Vegas was only the bone dry skeleton of what I imagined it to be.

The casinos are massive, empty galleries for the same few textures, and the city itself is tiny, so small it feels less like a city and more like an elaborate theater troupe s stage. The characters and quests were great, but because it s based on a real location, it was impossible to ignore how poorly it imitated a real city.

New Vegas disappointing reveal highlights a conundrum for the series. Due to tech and design considerations, cities in Fallout will always be smaller and less impressive than their real life counterparts. And even if they were gorgeous recreations to scale, they d be boring and repetitive in terms of design and at risk of feeling empty, especially depending on how many NPCs the engine can handle.

The density and iconography of a city may have cultural appeal, and the implication that every building is its own post-apocalyptic dungeon is an enticing promise. And it can be fun until you actually spend 40 hours wandering one corporate skyscraper or casino after another only to realize that hundreds of years and a few nuclear bombs aren t enough to make a cubicle interesting or imbue a restroom with sacred meaning.

And besides location, Fallout s satirical 1950s take of post-apocalypse urban culture and popular American history has lost its sheen. There are only so many Super Mutants wearing old-timey war uniforms I can laugh at in a lifetime. Instead, show me one dressed as Meriwether Lewis and another as William Clark. Put me under their command and let s head west.

Pack your bags

Here s the pitch: if Fallout leaves the cities behind, it shouldn t isolate itself to one area or region. If we re still satirizing American history, there are plenty of angles to take: as above, taking industrial canoes up the Mississippi as Super Mutant Lewis and Clark, rebuilding the Transcontinental Railroad, making the trek across a dangerous radioactive Dust Bowl in a sloppy jalopy for the promise of riches in the New California Republic you can see where I m going here. And the world shouldn t be a single open environment, but a series of smaller connected ones.

Pack in less file-cabinet-searching filler and endless Minutemen questlines and focus on telling specific, unique stories while giving a gorgeous post-apocalyptic tour of the diverse American landscape. It s worked for some of the best new RPGs out there, so why not Fallout?The Witcher 3 (a game we like) is categorically an open world game, but instead of taking place on a contiguous map, it uses several open world modules to successfully create a sense of distance traveled and establish the world of The Witcher as a geographically and (somewhat) culturally diverse place. The citizens of the mountainous islands of Skellige live by simpler means, but are also subject to the dangerous weather and scarcity of mountainous living, which shapes their social and political landscape. Harsh living conditions means they generally treat one another as equals, but with fierce judgement. There s no room to waste time or resources. Meanwhile, the citizens of Toussaint live in relative luxury thanks to its lush, bountiful land. But the disparity between the upper and lower class colors it in extremes between the bourgeois wine-binging castle dwellers and the systematically abused working class. Someone has to pick the grapes, but no one wants to.

The areas themselves aren t massive and don t have something new to do every 50 meters, but they feel massive thanks to their unique geographical character and great art design. Coupled with questlines that convey the culture and history of each area, the things you do are specific to who and where you are.Point Lookout, a DLC expansion for Fallout 3, is one of Bethesda s best examples of similarly focused design and storytelling. It takes place in a part of Maryland untouched by bombs, but deeply affected by residual radiation, turning it into an eerie swamp dotted with rotting shacks and inbred axe-wielding hillbillies. The map isn t huge, but the stories are more personal and the locations more expressive. I remember it more vividly than most quests and locations from the main game because it wasn t beholden to representing a huge iconic city.Expansions like Point Lookout and the widely celebrated Old World Blues DLC for New Vegas prove that Bethesda can produce smaller, more focused open world modules on par with The Witcher 3 s geographical diversity without sacrificing intrigue.

Bethesda s next Fallout game could make use of this design scheme from the get-go, breaking down specific areas of America into their own small open world modules that may not represent the scale of an entire region, but distill their character into a smaller space. If we re following the Lewis and Clark pitch, the journey could start in a rural riverside shantytown in the deep south where you build a boat, recruit some help, and allocate resources for the long trip ahead. The area is lush and humid, a hub for the locals who help out with whatever post-apocalyptic southern hospitality looks like.

One loading screen later, we stop for supplies in a stretch of the Great Plains, a former farming mecca warped into a vast desert plain, where radioactive dust storms turn an otherwise featureless plain into an evolution of Fallout 4 s Glowing Sea. Short trips are made tense by the threat of dangerous weather that ll pump up the rads and obscure the twisted forms of freerange wildlife. Buffalo aren t as majestic as they used to be. An otherwise empty plain earns character from the impression of its sheer expanse and natural danger.

Later, we visit a small village in the Rockies and see what life is like furthest from radioactive influence. Does any semblance of normal life still exist in this world? I imagine the area as Fallout meets a pocket Skyrim, with a few weird trappers thrown into the mix and talking grizzly bear. Bethesda s writers all groan in unison. The terrain is treacherous, but dense, marked with old cabins and mineshafts.

Different locations would also give Bethesda room to experiment with their existing systems. Radiation storms of the Great Plains could work as progress gates, hiding away fancy treasures behind deadly waves of radiation only survivable by wearing the appropriate gear. Survival might not only be dependent on radiation management either. Weather conditions unique to each location could influence stats directly. If you re wandering the snowy mountains in the nude, you re definitely getting debuffed. Hunt some mutant elk and make a coat already. The crafting systems could roll in some regional character, rewarding thorough exploration and serving as scrapbook of sorts. Just look to the success of the Far Cry series as evidence that combat, crafting, and light survival systems can work in a natural setting without a city as the backbone.

I ll leave the actual design and writing to Bethesda, but the point is that American identity doesn t hinge on its cities, and open world design is actually compromised by trying to wrap them in. Truly, the US is best defined by its fringe folks, troublesome history, idiosyncratic interstate pit stops and its gorgeous, lonely landscapes. They re a perfect fit for Fallout, where the fun isn t the breadth of its open world, but the depth of its quirky characters, settings, and expansive systems all of which can work in a space of just about any size.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Game of the Year Edition is out tomorrow, and that means it's time for two things: A patch, and a trailer. They're both good.

You can tell right from the start that this is a legit Witcher trailer because it begins with sex. Then we flash to a monster of some sort, then back to some more, kind of creepy-sexy antics, and then Geralt intimidates a couple of thickies at the local watering hole. Eventually he does get around to killing some monsters, but we all knew that was coming. The Witcher 3 has been out for well over a year, after all.

Also coming tomorrow is the 1.3 patch, a full breakdown of which can be found here. Highlights include a fix for Roach's vanishing tail (Roach is Geralt's horse), another that ensure Hughes spawns correctly in the Goodness, Gracious, Great Balls of Granite quest, a fix for a bug that left some dye recipes inaccessible, and one that made two NPCs in the Without a Trace quest impossible to defeat. It seems clear, based on that list, that CD Projekt is digging deep to find things to fix, which is how we end up with lower-priority changes like, The Rabid Rock Trolls near the Dun Tynne crossroads are slightly less rabid on the 'Just the Story' difficulty level.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Game of the Year Edition is the complete package, including the Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions, and all the individual pieces of DLC that have been released since the game first came out. Full details are up at thewitcher.com.

Over the weekend, a Reddit post went up claiming that Steam was offering refunds for No Man s Sky regardless of playtime. It quickly gained popularity, becoming one of the most upvoted posts on the entire site, and while it s not a lie it is possible to get a refund for No Man s Sky whether you ve played one hour or 40 the headline is misleading players. Valve has not made an exception to its automatic refund policy for No Man s Sky, and because of the number of players looking for one, Valve dropped a PSA on the NMS store page to clear the air.

As their policy states, Valve will automatically refund any game for any reason only if the request is made within fourteen days of purchase, and the title has been played for less than two hours. Because of the Reddit thread, a growing contingent of players are under the impression that No Man s Sky is an exception to the two-hour rule, generally based on claims of false advertising and technical issues with the port. This is not the case. No Man s Sky is not eligible for automatic refunds beyond two hours in, but, like every Steam game, you can still appeal for a refund regardless of playtime.It seems because of the concerted effort in a thread with over 5,000 upvotes and how-to articles from multiple publications and YouTubers that some players have found success in their refund appeals but again, this is only because of their direct appeals to customer service, not a wider exemption. Right now, it's unclear how many refunds have been issued, and we may never know. But based on the massive success of NMS s launch, it s likely the percentage of players that refund the game won t make much of a dent in its long term performance. The confusion continues to poke at the flexibility of Steam s refund policy. In a game as expansive and as heavily marketed as No Man s Sky, how much playtime is needed to know a refund is necessary? Games are fluid, composed by teams of varying size, with varying budgets, and a wide variety of artistic intent. How much of the burden is on the development team for making a game that aligns with player expectations, and how much is on the player for keeping their expectations in check? If you ask me, the answer for players is simple. Don t pre-order games. You can t always trust marketing, but you also can t always trust your imagination.

Klei Interactive, the maker of Mark of the Ninja, Don't Starve, and Invisible Inc., is working on a new game, which also happens to be its first-ever 3D game, called Hot Lava. The idea behind it actually comes from a very old game that you may have played as a child: The floor is made of molten lava, and if you step on it, you die!

The floor is literally made of lava in hot lava, although it doesn't appear to melt the laundry basket or set fire to the teacher's desk. There's also a lot more Mirror's Edge to it than the couch-to-coffee-table clambering of childhood, and sliding on frictionless surfaces will allow you to to reach incredible speeds and perform impossible jumps. The adventure will unfold across distinct worlds, from school hallways to the memories of your darkest fears, and it will also, according to the Steam page, support some form of multiplayer.

The system requirements are listed too, but they're so low as to be almost irrelevant: Windows 7, 2GB RAM, DirectX 9.0, and 5GB of drive space. A launch date hasn't been announced, but Klei is now taking signups for a closed beta at playhotlava.com.

Thanks, GamesRadar.

Unturned is a sandbox zombie survival sim. Looking at it scrolling through Steam, it seems like any other Minecraft clone. What makes Unturned interesting is its popularity. With over 219,000 reviews on Steam, 92% of which are positive, and a huge player base it s become an odd sensation.

What you can t help but notice first is the way it looks. A bit like Minecraft drawn on Microsoft Paint; it s not going to win any awards for graphical prowess. Every now and again I saw a moment and got a glimpse of an odd kind of beauty in its chunky primary colours. For the most part however, you have to ignore the strange cuboid potatoes and basic houses.

The controls are equally clumsy. I found myself pressing buttons multiple times to get the desired result, and fiddling with sliders and switches on the menus that seemed to do nothing. The UI and inventory system are not intuitive. You ll need great eyesight to make out the tiny writing informing you about equipment you collect. It felt unnecessarily cluttered which led to confusion as to where things were meant to go and how stuff was equipped. It s like the game is trying to make up for the simple graphics with a complex menu, which does not work.

The survival elements of the game are the same as a dozen of its predecessors. There s nothing truly original here, it has borrowed big parts from games like DayZ. However, although not original, it is all still serviceable. There are a number of things you need to keep an eye on health, stamina, hunger, thirst etc. You eat what you can salvage or grow, you drink what water you can find (preferably not dirty) and you try not to be mauled too severely by zombies. The maps are littered with settlements that hide the best loot, however, zombies tend to congregate there.

There are four main maps in single player with varying sizes and difficulties based on the environment. PEI, best for beginners; zombie-heavy Washington; the freezing Yukon best for experienced players; and the recently-added huge and varied Russia. Although the differences in environment are mainly found in the colouring, little touches such as a zombie in a restaurant dressed as a chef or a lumberjack zombie in Yukon made me smile. The ability to craft items and build shelter enable you to create a stable home-base, but you have to be prepared to defend your lowly homestead.

While many people unfamiliar with survival games may be put off with the pressure and hours of sneaking about before you get a weapon or dog food to eat, Unturned is far more accessible than the likes of DayZ. After an hour in single player you ll probably have a decent weapon, a backpack full of supplies and maybe even a vehicle to zoom about in. Unturned isn t as stressful as other survival games with loot being more readily available and zombies easy to sneak past. It is refreshing to head off into an unknown map safe in the knowledge that you have a rucksack filled to the brim with canned food and an axe. This isn t to say that Unturned is boringly easy. In large quantities the zombies quickly become a formidable force. The weather also plays a part in your survival as maps like the Yukon with their snowy terrain require you to shelter or build a fire so you don t freeze to death. None of this is revolutionary. The real popularity of the game doesn t lie in the survival mechanics, or the aesthetic. Unturned has amassed a following for two main reasons- the multiplayer and the price.

While single player is a decent way to while away a few hours most people seem to sink the most time into playing online. Unturned features both PvP and cooperative play. To new players PvP is baffling. I started in a house with a bunch of strangers, some of them were naked and I was also naked it was like a house party everyone wants to forget. After a bit you re warped to a small map and you will probably be mowed down pretty quickly. Although a large engaged community is a great boon, it also means to a newcomer entering this world on your own it s impenetrable. After being destroyed in PvP I decided to see if I would fare better in a more supportive environment. If you had a bunch of friends all playing together, this is where Unturned really shines.

The availability of Unturned is the crux of its popularity. It will run on most PCs and it s free to play, making it a great one that all your friends can pop in for a bit of co-op. The freedom that Unturned allows the online players means that a complex world has been created. Gangs are formed, intricate structures built and planned attacks take place. When I turned up none of this was available to me as a lone player wandering the map. I didn t even see another player let alone build a castle. However, this is hardly surprising, and more the fault of my lack of friends than the game itself.

Unturned is free to play, with an option to pay 3.99 for a permanent gold upgrade that gives you more customisation options, access to gold servers and an array of skins. I can imagine playing without ever spending a penny, which is impressive. But if you re hooked, the paid version of the game would be very tempting.

There is nothing original about the mechanics of Unturned and the low production values can be off-putting. However, it is impossible to deny its appeal. At first the overwhelmingly positive responses can seem inexplicable, but the combination of a passable game with an open multiplayer that costs nothing was bound to equal a hit.

People who own RimWorld can now better learn how to play RimWorld with the aid of a "rich" new tutorial system. The tutorial "teaches the basics of setting up a game, building a small self-sustaining colony, and defeating the first raider", and that sounds like enough to get you started with the colony sim.

Alpha 15 of the early access sandbox story game also whacks in a drugs system, letting your colonists dose up in order to improve their performance or mood (there are of course downsides, including addiction and blood toxicity/death). It's a massive, enormo-update, and if you don't fancy reading the entire list, here's a handy video summing up the main additions:

This week on the Mod Roundup, a handful of mods for No Man's Sky to make alien planets a bit more imposing. By increasing the size of plants, trees, rocks, and creatures, exploration will feel a bit more daunting and wondrous. Plus, you'll also get a boost to your inventory size and be able to stack previously unstackable items.

Keep in mind that modding No Man's Sky is a relatively new development, and we can't say what might happen to your saved games should a mod or update mess with the functionality of the game. Mod with caution!

Here are the most promising mods we've seen this week.

Big Things

Download link

Wandering No Man's Sky's alien worlds can be a perfectly pleasant experience, but there's little to find that will make you feel particularly small and insignificant, which is where a lot of the wonder of space travel lies. Succinctly titled, Big Things makes things big. Clusters of trees will now feel more like forests, plants and rocks will loom, and even the resource crystals you gather will seem imposing. There are naturally some clipping issues, and your FPS may take a hit while the game generates these oversized elements.

Bigger Creatures

Download link

We were all looking forward to finding some truly massive alien beasts in No Man's Sky, and while there are definitely some large creatures roaming the surface of some planets, I daresay I haven't found anything truly daunting yet. This mod tweaks the size of alien critters in a few different ways. There's a version to make the chances of finding large creatures more common, and one that makes the size of creatures generally larger. There's also a version to make every creature huge, but I imagine that might get dull pretty quickly.

Item Stacking

Download link

There's one more thing that needs to get bigger in No Man's Sky: your inventory. It doesn't make much sense that you can hold tons of plutonium in one pocket yet only a single fascination bead on another. This mod allows you to stack specialty items like Gek charms and venom sacs, and also increases the size of resource stacks, letting you spend less time fiddling around in your backpack and more time exploring.

Looking for more? Check out our list of the best No Man's Sky mods so far.

Yet again, PC Gamer has organised 100 of our favourite PC games into a list. This week on the podcast we look through that list now available to read online and pick out some of the most notable, surprising and infuriating choices.

You can get Episode 22: The Top 100 here. You can also subscribe on iTunes or keep up with new releases using our RSS feed.

Discussed: The games of the PC Gamer Top 100, including Dragon Age II.

This week: Samuel Roberts, Tom Senior, Phil Savage, Andy Kelly

The PC Gamer UK Podcast is a weekly podcast about PC gaming. Thoughts? Feedback? Requests? Get in touch at pcgamer@futurenet.comand use the subject line Podcast , or tweet us with #pcgpodcast.

This week s music is from The Witcher 3.

The subtitle for Wargaming's new Master of Orion reboot is "Conquer the Stars," but "Hire the Stars" would have worked just as well. Michael Dorn, the Worf of old, intones the interplanetary histories of alien races as nebulae and starships fly past. Mark Hamill snags another entry for his gaming resume, Alan Tudyk (Wash from Firefly) voices a grey alien emperor, and John de Lancie (Star Trek's "Q") and Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger) give different spins on human emperors. And so forth. Any constellation these guys made together would probably look like a VHS cassette.

If you haven t heard of these folks, there's a good chance you haven't heard of Master of Orion itself. It's the first 4X game that really mattered, even to the point of granting the genre its name after journalist Alan Emrich wrote about its core emphasis on Exploring, Expanding, Exploiting, and Exterminating. It's as old as The X-Files now, and for the most part the Civs and GalCivs have pushed it off the throne once confidently held by Master of Orion 2. The new Master Of Orion, oddly, does nothing to improve on their legacies. Its planets turn heads almost as well as Elite: Dangerous, its diplomacy screens animate alien leaders beautifully, but nevertheless this is a release that's stubbornly dedicated to recreating the 4X experiences of yesteryear.

In singleplayer and multiplayer modes, these experiences usually involve founding a colonies, managing those colonies industrial and research output, all while sending scout ships out to nearby stars to find what may be hiding there. Sometimes you'll find untouched planets to colonize for yourself, but on other occasions you'll find aliens whom you can either befriend or crush.

There's a lot of extra stuff sandwiched in menus between all that, such as raising taxes, following a lengthy tech tree, designing custom ships, or figuring out how to juggle a planet's population for maximum production efficiency. But one good thing about the new Master of Orion is that it never really gets out of hand. In fact, if anything, it's far more accessible and streamlined than the games it's based on, and that needn't be a bad thing. Part of Wargaming's reason for reviving Master of Orion was to introduce a new generation for 4X gaming, and it succeeds admirably through the help of an optional adviser and a user interface that conveniently draws attention to different elements as the turns roll on.

In the process, though, it plays things a little too by-the-book. The design of Master of Orion 1 and 2 might have been revolutionary in the days when Britney Spears was still singing about Mickey Mouse, but the reboot is so devoted to old, first-generation ideas that a sad sense of sameyness sets in as the map expands and empires amass more planets. Most newer games shake it up a little. Back in May, for instance, Stellaris took the 4X model and overlaid the grand strategy of a game like Paradox's own Europa Universalis 4, scrapped the turn basis for real-time, and peppered its gameplay with complex diplomacy and fun quirks like inviting you to deal with races who still haven't reached the space age.

There's little of that here. Strangely, Master of Orion s main annoyances usually spring from the few additions to the original template, such as the tendency for planets to need cleaning after getting too polluted, which gets tiresome when multiple planets come into play. In theory, it's a cool idea that speaks to the concerns of our time, but in practice it merely introduces needless micromanagement. Elsewhere, "star lanes" keep ships on straight paths between star systems, occasionally shattering the image of a sprawling, open galaxy with effective traffic jams.

Mission to wars

The additions aren't always bad. I'm particularly fond of the shift from turn-based to real-time combat in the battles that pop up when you fight alien civilizations or pirates. This shift, to put it lightly, has been a point of contention in the community during the game s time in Early Access, but I've learned to admire the comparative speed of the approach and the way the right combination of timing and skill can let me use my smaller ships to outmaneuver the enemy's larger ones. (You can always auto-resolve them, too.)

Master of Orion s greatest triumphs, though, are those of personality. Generally all those bucks spent hiring Hamill and friends went to good use, as it's always fun to watch the animated leaders bicker and cheer in the diplomacy screen and the minions of your chosen race give you advice in the research screens. From the Geth to the Krogan, these were the races that largely inspired Mass Effect, and the team's awareness of that legacy shows. There's even a little news show that sometimes pops up with two robotic newscasters recounting the big events happening between turns, which serves as a form of comic relief. (Sadly, they do threaten to wear out their welcome late into a match. It s easily toggled off, though.)

It's a shame, then, that the civilizations' differences usually amount to mere imagery and voicework. This may be a galaxy packed with 11 advanced races including warrior lizards and sexy cats and cruel robots, but venture deep down their technology trees and you'll find they all effectively amount to the same in practice. And while I wouldn't call the AI a failure, it's prone to puzzling actions like twiddling its thumbs after diplomacy negotiations led allies to declare war on your enemies.

A master of the 4X universe this is not. But neither is it unenjoyable, as its lively presentation, personality, and occasional humor do much to shore up its weak points, and its comparative accessibility make it a decent option for anyone wading into the genre for the first time. But for depth? There are many worlds other than these.