Aug 29, 2017

PC Gamer

Just when you think life in XCOM is hard enough, the aliens send super-powered specialists to steal your money, take your soldiers and taunt you while they're doing it. War of the Chosen adds three characterful bosses that harass you in missions and on the campaign map until you manage to hunt them down and hit them at home. You have to deal with them in addition to your normal XCOM 2 duties—contacting new continents, researching the alien threat and beating back the Avatar project. This is a huge, rich expansion, albeit one for experienced commanders already comfortable with XCOM 2's vanilla campaign.

You have some help, fortunately, in the form of three new resistance groups. Earn their trust and they will help you to chase down the Chosen, and give you access to powerful specialist class options: skirmishers, templars, and reapers. These are the most powerful and exciting troops in the whole Firaxis XCOM series so far. Templars are roaming assassins that can dart out of cover, kill an enemy with their psionic blades, and dart back into cover again. Skirmishers can use their grappling hook and high movement speed to zip around the battlefield and drag enemies out of position. Reapers can remain in stealth for most of a battle, with a bit of luck. They can blow up scenery with a well-placed shot and throw claymores without breaking stealth.

The Chosen and the resistance factions are woven seamlessly into the familiar XCOM 2 campaign structure. The Chosen have their own introductory cutscenes and missions, and will turn up in key campaign missions to give you something extra to deal with. Each Chosen sets up in a particular continent on the campaign map, and they are much more likely to attack you in their area. Their primary aim is to daze and kidnap soldiers to increase their 'knowledge' bar. As this grows they gain extra battlefield strengths and new ways to sap your resources on the campaign map. If it maxes out they can attack your base directly.

The Chosen are a threat, but are by no means invincible. They have a randomised set of weaknesses that causes them to take extra damage from certain sources—eg. explosive damage, or massed attacks in a single turn. They also each take additional damage from one of the resistance factions. This encourages you to build squads that can match a Chosen's weaknesses if you are fighting in their domain, and makes the Avenger's positioning on the world map matter more.

War of the Chosen gives you plenty of soldiers and resources to develop this flexibility. The expansion broadens the game rather than extending it beyond XCOM 2's story arc. I found myself playing a lot more missions and levelling more soldiers than a typical playthrough. While it is tiresome to move through the same old plot points, the expansion does a good job of refreshing ordinary missions with new terrain and scenarios. The most striking mission change is the addition of lost cities, which are populated by hordes of humans turned feral and mindless by alien toxins (zombies, then). Every successful shot you take against these easily-hit targets generates an extra action. This encourages you to empty every soldier's clip into the hordes each turn as your squad rushes for extraction. These are especially novel when there is a Chosen on the map engaging in a two-way fight with the undead and your XCOM troops.

Most of the new mission types are great with the sole exception of stealth missions, which you use to break allies out of Chosen prison. XCOM 2 is still unclear about whether a patch of ground is visible to an enemy or not. You can move to a supposedly safe part of the grid, shown in blue, only for the fog of war to peel back and reveal a turret a couple of metres away. When you get used to XCOM you learn to play around these situations with very cautious moves, but the system doesn't quite behave sensibly.

Battles are generally more exciting for the extra toys, the resistance classes and dozens of small improvements. When you mouse over a position you can press a button to see if you will be in a flanking relationship to an enemy, which brings vital clarity to flanking moves. Units earn ability points for successful flank and high-ground attacks, and for defeating the Chosen. Resistance soldiers use these to level up on their special skill trees, but you also build a pool of points for your generic XCOM soldiers. You can build a new training room to spend these points on additional abilities to help bring a handful of your favourite soldiers closer to the power level of a resistance fighter. While the expansion is tailored to seasoned XCOM players, the ability point rewards teach good practice in combat. Flanking moves and high-ground attacks give you significant buffs to your hit percentages.

Soldiers also form affinities for squadmates, which can grow into a buddy link. Once per fight a buddy can give their buddy an extra action in a turn. This might not sound like much but it has a many tactical uses. It's useful to have a vital reload or extra shot if you need something dead, or you can use it to give your buddied soldier a move out of danger. You can 'train' friendships to deepen bonds and access new abilities. In a particularly nice touch, a soldier that loses a buddy in battle goes into a frenzy and starts shooting every alien they can see.

You can 'train' friendships to deepen bonds and access new abilities. In a particularly nice touch, a soldier that loses a buddy in battle goes into a frenzy and starts shooting every alien they can see.

There's more. So much more. You can create propaganda posters of your units to celebrate victories and memorialise losses. This is a fun way to immortalise your favourite characters using a surprisingly well-featured editor. They populate the Avenger and turn up as posters in battles. There are also lots of new resistance-themed cosmetics with a spiky, leathery Mad Max vibe, which contrast nicely with the sleek, high-tech templars and skirmishers.

Advent's roster has expanded. Red Advent soldiers torch zones of the battlefield with their flamethrowers. Psionic Advent troopers freeze your troops with stasis and put protective bubbles around alien units. They add some extra tactical variety to the early game in particular, when you would ordinarily be fighting boring basic troops. Befriending resistance groups also gives you specialised buffs that can help you on the strategy layer (by instantly letting you clear a room in the Avenger, for example) or in combat, where my troops currently run faster while stealthed during the opening turns of a fight.

War of the Chosen is a comprehensive expansion that touches every aspect of the game. In the battle layer it's a resounding success, but on the strategic layer where you build rooms and move the Avenger around the world to pick up resources the expansion introduces some bloat. A high volume of missions, new rooms to build, new tech to research and covert actions slow down the overall progression. A day in War of the Chosen involves a lot more work than a day in vanilla XCOM 2. This makes clearing rooms and researching technology a longer, more frustrating process.

Covert actions are a good feature, though. They are a vital tool that gives you a quick way to build relationships with resistance groups, hunt down the Chosen and gather extra supplies, scientists and engineers. You have a limited selection of covert actions available and you can only attempt one at a time. To complete one you devoting the requisite number of soldiers to the mission for a week or so of in-game time. These are important decisions and, crucially, they only pop up every now and then. Between covert action decisions expect to be bombarded relentlessly by mission opportunities, Chosen attacks, avatar project notifications and more.

XCOM 2 is all about pushing you onto the back foot and making you fight out of a tough corner, and mandatory missions and dark events are part of that. However War of the Chosen simply piles more on top of your old problems, to the point where the push to new technology, five and six-person squads, a built-up Avenger feels like admin rather than the desperate fight-to-fight survival experience of early XCOM 2 playthroughs. Matters improve as you move out of the early game and all the resistance heroes and Chosen warriors have been introduced—at this point you start chasing the cool new resistance abilities—but the pace of the game has been substantially altered.

This isn't entirely bad. The campaign drags at times, but the quality of the new resistance super-soldiers and obnoxiously chatty blue supervillains makes it a must-buy for avid XCOM 2 fans, and the increase in missions gives you more opportunities to play with the new gear. If the rhythms of XCOM 2 feel stale now, the expansion does enough to shake things up, just expect a slightly slower pace as you systematically pull apart those new alien champions.

Aug 29, 2017

Piloting the Dodo, the plane that was never meant to fly in Grand Theft Auto 3

Grand Theft Auto III

Today you can soar across Los Santos with ease in a variety of aircraft, but there was a time in the Grand Theft Auto series when flying was a luxury. The Dodo, appropriately named after the extinct, flightless bird, is the only way to take to the air in Grand Theft Auto III—a task made difficult by its clipped wings and stubborn flight controls. “We were making a driving and shooting game, and even that was radical at the time,” Rockstar said in a fan Q&A. “The Dodo was never meant to be flown much at all. It was just a fun thing that people went crazy with when they figured out various bugs that let them fly it.”

Keeping the Dodo in the air for more than a few seconds is tricky, but it can be done. You can find detailed instructions here, but the general idea is keeping the plane as level as possible. If you don’t you’ll lose control and plummet to your death. And remember, silent protagonist Claude can’t swim, so you can’t just ditch safely into the water either. As a result, mastering the Dodo is a risky venture. Having to drive back to the airport in Shoreside Vale every time you screw up will deter a lot of pilots in training, but there’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of staying aloft long enough to cross the whole map.

The primitive 3D engine used by GTA III was never designed for flight. As you fly over the Staunton Island district, skyscrapers pop into view and buildings have glitchy voids instead of roofs. But that only adds to the joy of keeping the Dodo in the air, seeing things you were never meant to see. You can even fly it to the fabled Ghost Town outside the boundaries of the map, which is in fact a chunk of city used in the game’s opening cinematic. “It’s from the bank heist at the very beginning of the game,” says Rockstar. “We built these few streets floating in space and assumed no one would ever find them.”

After the September 11 terror attacks in New York City, some content in Grand Theft Auto III was cut or changed. There are a lot of urban myths surrounding this, including the Dodo’s wings being cut off to stop people flying it into skyscrapers. But Rockstar has denied it, confirming that only about 1% of the game was actually altered as a result of this. “We removed one mission that referenced terrorists,” they explain. “And we changed a few cosmetic details, a couple of pedestrian comments, and some radio dialogue."

Of course, there are mods to give the Dodo its wings back and make flying it a lot more enjoyable. But the Dodo is memorable precisely because it’s such a pain in the arse to pilot. And, at the time, there was no other way to see Liberty City from above. You had to learn how to fly the thing, otherwise you’d be stuck on land forever. Or at least until helicopters were finally introduced in Vice City. And so you’d persevere, crashing endlessly into the murky waters around Francis International, gaining a few more seconds with every try.

The Dodo has since appeared in other GTA games including San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto V, which pokes fun at its idiosyncratic handling. “It’s not called a Dodo because it’s killed more passengers than any other plane in its size class,” reads the Elitás Travel website. “Although that’s a sad fact, and a regrettable legacy for this otherwise splendid aircraft. It can’t turn, it can barely fly, but it will be able to float if you land it just right.” But these other iterations of the Dodo fail to match the beguiling shitness of the GTA III version. Back then, flying used to mean something. Now anyone can do it.

My reverence for the objectively crap Dodo may be slightly over the top, granted. But just seeing that red-and-white fuselage brings back so many fond memories of playing Grand Theft Auto III for the first time and having my mind blown by the fact that I was driving, and briefly flying, around such an incredible 3D city. It’s laughably primitive compared to the dazzling, detailed metropolis of Los Santos, but it still has a certain charm. And having returned to Francis International for another round with the Dodo, I can confirm that it’s still an absolute bastard to fly. But I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Aug 29, 2017

The best strategy games on PC

Sid Meier’s Civilization® VI

When it comes to the best strategy games, we look for a variety of elements. We like a mix between explosive, large-scale action and more complex games of difficult decisions. In this list, you'll find everything from fast-paced and competitive FPS games to long burn 4X games. In the case of series with multiple entries, we've picked what we feel was the best game to play now. We might feature more than one entry from the same series if we think they're different enough that you might benefit from playing both.

These are the best strategy games on PC. For more on the greatest games you can buy on PC, check out our list of the best FPS games on PC, the best RPGs and the best puzzle games.

Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2

Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2's cosmic battles are spectacular. There's a trio of vaguely 4X-y campaigns following the three of the Warhammer 40K factions: The Imperium, Necron Empire and the nasty Tyranid Hives, but you can ignore them if you want and just dive into some messy skirmishes full of spiky space cathedrals colliding with giant, tentacle-covered leviathans.

The real-time tactical combat manages to be thrilling even when you're commanding the most sluggish of armadas. You need to manage a whole fleet while broadside attacks pound your hulls, enemies start boarding and your own crews turn mutinous. And with all the tabletop factions present, you can experiment with countless fleet configurations and play with all sorts of weird weapons.

Battletech

Like an adaptation of the tabletop game crossed with the XCOM design template, BattleTech is a deep and complex turn-based game with an impressive campaign system. You control a group of mercenaries, trying to keep the books balanced and upgrading your suite of mechwarriors and battlemechs in the game's strategy layer. In battle, you target specific parts of enemy mechs, taking into account armor, angle, speed and the surrounding environment, then make difficult choices when the fight isn't going your way. It can initially be overwhelming and it's undeniably a dense game, but if that's what you want from your strategy games or you love this universe, it's a great pick.

Northgard

Viking-themed RTS Northgard pays dues to Settlers and Age of Empires, but challenged us with its smart expansion systems that force you to plan your growth into new territories carefully. Weather is important too. You need to prepare for winter carefully, but if you tech up using 'lore' you might have better warm weather gear than your enemies, giving you a strategic advantage. Skip through the dull story, enjoy the well-designed campaign missions and then start the real fight in skirmish.

Into the Breach

A beautifully designed, near-perfect slice of tactical mech action from the creators of FTL. Into the Breach challenges you to fend off waves of Vek monsters on eight-by-eight grids populated by tower blocks and a variety of sub objectives. Obviously you want to wipe out the Vek using mech-punches and artillery strikes, but much of the game is about using the impact of your blows to push enemies around the map and divert their attacks away from your precious buildings.

Civilian buildings provide power, which serves as a health bar for your campaign. Every time a civilian building takes a hit, you're a step closer to losing the war. Once your power is depleted your team travels back through time to try and save the world again. It's challenging, bite-sized, and dynamic. As you unlock new types of mechs and mech upgrades you gain inventive new ways to toy with your enemies.

Total War: Warhammer 2

The first Total War: Warhammer showed that Games Workshop's fantasy universe was a perfect match for Creative Assembly's massive battles and impressively detailed units. The second game makes a whole host of improvements, in interface, tweaks to heroes, rogue armies that mix factions together and more. The game's four factions, Skaven, High Elves, Dark Elves and Lizardmen are all meaningfully different from one another, delving deeper into the odd corners of old Warhammer fantasy lore. If you're looking for a starting point with CA's Warhammer games, this is now the game to get—and if you already own the excellent original, too, the mortal empires campaign will unite both games into one giant map.

XCOM 2/War of the Chosen

The game cleverly uses scarcity of opportunity to force you into difficult dilemmas. At any one time you might have only six possible scan sites, while combat encounters are largely meted out by the game, but what you choose to do with this narrow range of options matters enormously. You need to recruit new rookies; you need an engineer to build a comms facility that will let you contact more territories; you need alien alloys to upgrade your weapons. You can’t have all of these. You can probably only have one. In 1989 Sid Meier described games as "a series of interesting decisions." XCOM 2 is the purest expression of that ethos that Firaxis has yet produced.

The War of the Chosen expansion brings even more welcome if frantic changes, like the endlessly chatty titular enemies, memorable nemeses who pop up at different intervals during the campaign with random strengths and weaknesses. There are also new Advent troopers to contend with, tons more cosmetic options, zombie-like enemies who populate lost human cities, the ability to create propaganda posters and lots more. War of the Chosen does make each campaign a little bloated, but the changes are so meaningful and extensive that XCOM 2 players need to check it out regardless.

Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak

Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak sounded almost sacrilegious at first. Over a decade since the last Homeworld game, it was going to take a game remembered for its spaceships and 3D movement and turn it into a ground-based RTS with tanks? And it was a prequel? Yet in spite of all the ways this could have gone horribly wrong, Deserts of Kharak succeeds on almost every count. It's not only a terrific RTS that sets itself apart from the rest of the genre's recent games, but it's also an excellent Homeworld game that reinvents the series while also recapturing its magic.

Civilization 6

The Civ game of choice right now for us, and it's packed with enough features that it feels like it's already been through a few expansions. Its Districts system lets you build sprawling cities, and challenge you to think several turns ahead more than ever. The game is gorgeously presented—while the more cartoon-y style takes some time to get used to, it's lovely to look at in its own right.

We're really curious to see how the inevitable expansions will build on what's already here, but taken as it is, this is the best Civ to play right now.

Stellaris

"I hope upcoming patches and expansions can fill in the gaps," is what Phil's Stellaris review said at launch. There's still room to improve for Paradox's sci-fi game, but the updates have been coming fast. The Utopia expansion made major changes to the game's internal politics system, and various other changes could plausibly see you put another hundred hours into the game. Plus, it lets you build Dyson spheres around a sun, letting you drain all the energy from it and leave any nearby planets freezing, which is amazing in a cruel way.

Endless Legend

A sleeper hit of recent years, Endless Legend is a 4X fantasy follow-up to Amplitude’s Endless Space—a pretty good game, but apparently not the full measure of the studio’s potential. Shadowed at the time of its release by the higher-profile launch of Civilization: Beyond Earth, Legend is easily the best game in the genre since Civ 4. It’s deep and diverse, with fascinating asymmetrical factions, sub-races, hero units, quests to discover, and more. It looks gorgeous, too.

Neptune's Pride

As much a social experiment as a strategy game, Neptune’s Pride pits friends against one another in a battle for control of a star system. The rules are simple: upgrade your stars and get them to build ships, then deploy them to poach more stars. The war unfolds slowly in realtime over the course of a week or so, and may slightly ruin your life during that period. The simple but elegant ruleset leaves lots of room to make and break alliances, and before you know it your friend’s getting up at 3am to launch sneak attacks while you sleep. A simple game that orchestrates amazing drama.

C&C: Red Alert 2

I still love the first two Red Alerts, and most of Westwood's C&C entries are fantastic—but this one has the best campaigns, most interesting units, great maps and of course, superb FMV sequences. The different factions are so distinct, and have more personality than they did in the original game—hence Soviet squids and Allied dolphins. They found the right tonal balance between self-awareness and sincerity in the cutscenes, as well—they're played for laughs, but still entertain and engage.

Nothing's as OTT as this beautiful disaster from EA's Red Alert 3, basically.

Galactic Civilizations 2

If you’ve ever wanted to conquer space with an army of customisable doom-ships, this is the strategy game for you. It has smart, creative AI, and a full-size game can take weeks to complete. You have to balance economic, technological, diplomatic, cultural and military power to forge alliances, fight wars and dominate the galaxy. Reminiscent of the Civilization games, but on a much grander scale, and with a lot more depth in places.

Homeworld

Mechanically, Homeworld is a phenomenal three-dimensional strategy game, among the first to successfully detach the RTS from a single plane. It’s more than that, though: it’s a major victory for atmosphere and sound design, whether that’s Adagio for Strings playing over the haunting opening missions or the beat of drums as ships engage in a multiplayer battle. If you liked the Battlestar Galactica reboot, you should play this.

Supreme Commander

Only Total War can compete with the scale of Supreme Commander's real-time battles. It’s still exhilarating to flick the mousewheel and fly from an individual engineer to a map of the entire battlefield, then flick it again to dive down to give orders to another unit kilometres away. When armies do clash—in sprawling hundred-strong columns of robots—you’re rewarded with the most glorious firefights a CPU can render. It’s one of the few real-time strategy games to combine air, ground and naval combat into single encounters, but SupCom goes even further, with artillery, long-range nuclear ordnance and megalithic experimental bots.

StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty

In addition to being the preeminent competitive strategy game of the last decade, StarCraft II deserves credit for rethinking how a traditional RTS campaign is structured. Heart of the Swarm is a good example of this, but the human-centric Wings of Liberty instalment is the place to start: an inventive adventure that mixes up the familiar formula at every stage. From zombie defence scenarios to planets that flood with lava every few minutes, you’re forced to learn and relearn StarCraft’s basic elements as you go.

Warcraft 3

Most notable today for being the point of origin for the entire MOBA genre, Warcraft III is also an inventive, ambitious strategy game in its own right, which took the genre beyond anonymous little sprites and into the realm of cinematic fantasy. The pioneering inclusion of RPG elements in the form of heroes and neutral monsters adds a degree of unitspecific depth not present in its sci-fi stablemate, and the sprawling campaign delivers a fantasy story that—if not quite novel—is thorough and exciting in its execution. It also has the best ‘repeated unit click’ jokes in the business.

Rome: Total War

Total War’s transition to full 3D marks a point before the gradual escalation in complexity that would lead to Empire’s initial instability and the longstanding AI problems that have dogged the latter games in the series. The original Rome presents a simple, compelling image of ancient warfare and delivers on it phenomenally. It’s a great introduction to one of the most interesting eras in military history, and holds up to this day.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II

It was tempting to put the excellent first Dawn of War on the list, but the box-select, right-click to kill formula is well represented. Instead let’s appreciate the experimental sequel, which replaced huge units with a handful of rock-hard space bastards, each with a cluster of killer abilities. In combat you micromanage these empowered special forces, timing the flying attack of your Assault Marines and the sniping power of your Scouts with efficient heavy machine gun cover to undo the Ork hordes. The co-operative Last Stand mode is also immense.

Sins of a Solar Empire

Sins captures some of the scope of a 4X strategy game but makes it work within an RTS framework. This is a game about star-spanning empires that rise, stabilise and fall in the space of an afternoon: and, particularly, about the moment when the vast capital ships of those empires emerge from hyperspace above half-burning worlds. Diplomacy is an option too, of course, but also: giant spaceships. Play the Rebellion expansion to enlarge said spaceships to ridiculous proportions.

Crusader Kings II

Crusader Kings II is a political strategy game. It’s as much about who your imbecilic niece is marrying as it is about leading armies into battle. Every landed character is simulated, and each one has goals and desires. It’s complex—you can blame the feudal system for that—but offers clear and immediate drama on a personal level. Its simulation corners you into desperate situations and encourages you to do terrible things to retain power. One time I executed a newborn baby so that his older and smarter sister could reign instead. Feudal times were messed up.

DEFCON

DEFCON’s sinister blue world map is the perfect stage for this Cold War horror story about the outbreak of nuclear war. First, you manage stockpiles, and position missile sites, nuclear submarines and countermeasures in preparation for armageddon. This organisation phase is an interesting strategic challenge in itself, but DEFCON is at its most effective when the missiles fly. Blooming blast sites are matched with casualty numbers as city after city experiences obliteration. Once the dust has settled, victory is a mere technicality. It’s nightmarish, and quite brilliant in multiplayer.

Company of Heroes

Some games would try to step away from the emotional aspect of a war that happened in living memory. Not Company of Heroes. It’s torrid and difficult and brutal. Sure, its methods are pure Hollywood—the muddy artillery plumes could have come straight from Saving Private Ryan—but the result is the most intense RTS ever made, brilliantly capturing the tactical standoff between WWII’s asymmetrical forces.

Xenonauts

Its deep strategic systems and clean turnbased combat make Xenonauts a triumph of rebooted game design. If you’re an old fan of the X-COM series, forget about finding your old install disks or putting up with 20-year-old graphics: playing Xenonauts is the best way to relive those glory days with deeper systems. And if you’re new to X-COM, this game will let you explore the series’ classic roots with added depth and details.

Total War: Shogun 2

As Total War evolved after Rome it suffered bloat and other growing pains, but Shogun 2 was finally the one to get it right. A gorgeous setting and strong theme bolster the strategy side, where the honor of your clan leader and the struggle between Buddhism and Christianity play a key role. Battles offer distinct differences between clans (Chosokabe archers for life) and some especially fun special troops, like the bomb-throwing kisho ninja. Shogun 2 also introduced a 2-player co-op campaign to the series, which is an amazing (though slow) way to conquer the continent.

Unity of Command

Strategy expert Tim Stone described this, in our 2012 review, as a “fresh and friendly” wargame, praising the convincing, challenging AI. You’ll need to use genuinely clever battlefield tactics to beat these computerised generals. The simple interface removes the usual barrier to entry that most wargames have, but there are hidden depths to uncover as you learn the intricacies of its systems.

Rise of Nations

Age of Empires gave us the chance to encompass centuries of military progress in half-hour battles, but Rise of Nations does it better, and smartly introduces elements from turn-based strategy games like Civ. Instead of marshalling troops from a single base, you build cities all over the map to grow your nation’s borders. When borders collide civs race through the ages and try to out-tech each other in a hidden war for influence, all while trying to deliver a knockout military blow with javelins and jets. There aren’t enough games that let you crush longbowmen with amphibious tanks and stealth bombers.

Age of Empires II: HD Edition

We had to put this in here, too, even if Rise of Nations built upon this foundation in a bunch of ways. Age of Empires II is still a big draw on PC thanks to its HD edition, which is supported by new expansions like Rise of the Rajas, released in late 2016. That's not bad for a game released almost two decades ago.

Build immense armies, upgrade them, farm like hell and enjoy a suite of entertaining campaigns in this RTS. Plus, if you get bored of the game's numerous campaigns and easily downloadable custom campaigns, enjoy making your own daft mash-ups in the scenario editor. We can't wait for the fourth game.

Aug 28, 2017

The strangest patch notes in PC gaming

Uplink

Most patch notes are boring. Fixed a bug that stopped a menu from opening properly. D.Va's Defense Matrix doesn't last as long. Wukong's attack speed is 10 percent slower. That's the usual stuff, chronicling important but dull balance changes across years of a game's life. And then there are patch notes like this: "Added cat butchery." "Made all undead respectful of one another." "Tigerman does not have ears."

That's the good stuff.

Those are the kinds of wonderfully crazy patch notes Dwarf Fortress has given us over the years. Determined to top the absurdity of Dwarf Fortress's bizarre changelogs, I put on my deerstalker, grabbed my magnifying glass, and set out to find the strangest patch notes in the history of PC gaming. These absurdities are the result.

Rimworld

Alpha 12

Colonists will visit graves of dead colonists for a joy activity.

Alpha 16

New alert: Unhappy nudity

Alpha 17

Raiders will no longer compulsively attack doors.

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Conan Exiles

Patch 15.2.2017

Rhinos should no longer try to walk through players

Patch 15.2.2017

Emus now give less XP

Patch 23.02.2017

Players can no longer use chairs to travel great distances

Update 24

Imps, ostriches and other non-humanoids no longer go bonkers if you hit them with a truncheon

Update 25

Seeing dead people can now lead to great rewards

Update 28

Fixed a small issue where a player in some instances could walk underwater.

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Rust

Update 149

Bucket no longer hostile to peacekeepers

Update 152

Pumpkins only have 1 season (instead of 7)

August 28, 2014

Bald inmate digging grows hair bug fixed

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Terraria

1.2.0.2

The game will no longer look for the square root of zero.

1.2.1

Mice can no longer spawn in hell

1.2.3

Red Stucco no longer spreads corruption.

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The Sims 4

02/04/2016

Sims carving pumpkins or working at a woodworking table will no longer ignore Sims who die near them.

02/04/2016

Babies will no longer send text messages congratulating your Sims on their marriage, engagement, or pregnancy.

01/12/2017

Confident children will no longer get a whim to practice pick-up lines.

05/25/2017

Babies will no longer change skin tone when they are picked up.

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Don't Starve

January 29th 2013

Darts and poop won't magically accumulate at the world origin.

October 1st 2013

You can no longer trade with sleeping pigs.

November 19th 2013

You can properly deploy or murder captured butterflies

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Ark: Survival Evolved

254.9

Beers can no longer be eaten by Dinos

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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

1.2

Taking items from dead owned creatures is no longer a crime

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World of Warcraft

1.3.0

The quest NPC Khan Jehn no longer becomes confused and unresponsive

1.4.0

Roast Raptor now has an more appropriate inventory sound

2.1.0

Fixed an error where some characters appeared to be drinking while standing up

2.4.0

Zapetta will no longer become confused about whether the zeppelin in Orgrimmar is arriving or leaving

3.1.0

Yaaarrrr! now has a detailed tooltip

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Uplink

1.314

Fixed : Dead or jailed people don't answer their phones

1.35

Fixed : LAN Spoof progress graphic overflow
Fixed : Time freezing and unclickable buttons on computers running for several weeks

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Everquest

July 10, 2001

Reevaluated the values of the various fish fillets

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August 15, 2001

The Giant Tree Flayer is now Large instead of Tiny

December 6, 2001

Fixed a bug that was preventing characters from being bald

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Two Worlds 2

1.4

Horse behaviour - improved

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Battlefield 1942

1.2

Bots do not jump in and out of vehicles anymore

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Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

1.02

Dead party members will no longer show up later in the game. What with thembeing dead and all

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Black and White

1.1

The word "Death" no longer said when villagers die of old age
Creature doesn't become constipated if you punish him for pooing

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No One Lives Forever 2

1.3

Fixed problems with camera rotation after slipping on a banana

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Hitman: Codename 47

Patch 1

Dancer in "Gunrunner's Paradise" is no longer confused by dead bodies