Demetrious Johnson, widely considered to be the best pound-for-pound UFC fighter in the world, reckons he could beat MMA icon Conor McGregor at PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. When he stars in Uproar's competitive PUBG tournament 'The Golden Chicken' next week, Johnson thinks he'll come out on top there too.
Alongside a host of popular YouTube talent, Johnson hopes to head home with a "10k Solid Gold Chicken" in tow, in what will be the athlete's second professional tourney.
"Oh, I'm very excited," Johnson tells me. "This is my second competition and this is one of my favourite games. I'm looking forward to it and I'm looking forward to go out there and kill everybody in the woods. Nobody can beat the shadow, the Warrior in the Woods."
This type of bravado is synonymous with the professional fighting world. But while Johnson has more than proven himself in The Octagon, he's relatively green when it comes to pro gaming. As the number one pound-for-pound UFC fighter in the world at present, I ask him if he reckons he's got what it takes to become the top chicken dinner winner of all time.
"Oh I don't know, that's a long shot. You've got some really great, really talented guys out there at the moment," he says. "You've got guys who're playing these games professionally, eight hours a day. Videogames for me are a release, I wish I could put that amount of time into it but I don't know if I could ever be better than them.
"What I will say is this: There's not another athlete out there that puts as many hours into the gym, and as many hours into videogames that's as good as me."
Among fans of orthodox roguelike design, the platonic ideal of the genre is not just a world that is randomly generated, but one where each iteration and death teaches the player a little more about the rules governing it. Each experience should teach you how to leverage that knowledge into surviving just a little bit longer.
Depending what circles you move in, you could be forgiven for thinking the term 'roguelike' has lost almost all meaning. It’s become a catch-all term to describe anything procedurally generated, from platformers to turn-based tactics games.
You only have to look at some of the most popular 'roguelite' games out there, such as Rogue Legacy, to see a move towards tangible rewards for repeat play and player power-creep. While I’ve no particular preference either way, there's something to be said for conquering impossible odds armed with only raw intuition.
Today, we’re looking at three games sure to please even the most stalwart of roguelike traditionalists despite radically divergent designs: Unexplored, Caves of Qud, and Cogmind.
Unexplored
Genre diehards might be forgiven for watching the gameplay trailer for Unexplored and overlooking it. An unusual art-style, real-time gameplay, and a physics-driven combat engine do not add up to a traditional roguelike. It’s best then that we don’t judge a dungeon crawl by its cover, as Unexplored is only two steps removed from the genre progenitor itself: Rogue.
Unexplored is effectively a real-time adaptation of Brogue, which was in turn a modernized reimagining of the original Rogue. Brogue and Unexplored posit a theory that statistical bloat is holding the genre back. By paring things down to just two core stats—strength and life, increased solely through potions found in the dungeon—and doing away with experience and levels altogether, you get a far more intuitive and free-flowing dungeon crawl.
A room full of locked treasure chests but no lockpick? Drag the chests into a pile, brew up a Potion of Explosion, lob it at them and marvel as the World's Loudest Lockpick actually works.
It’s hard to argue, given the beautifully complex and entertaining dungeons that Unexplored generates. Environments repeat far less than you'd expect, with enemy placement subtle enough it feels like there’s an unseen Dungeon Master nudging things along. Procedural puzzle-based quests can span multiple floors, and whole dungeons are defined by game-altering themes. One dungeon might be a trap-laden wizard's lair with little in the way of combat, while another might be a full-blooded crawl through an orc warlord's barracks.
Unexplored's overall feel is similar to immersive sims like Deus Ex or System Shock, providing problems that can often be solved through creative means. A room full of locked treasure chests but no lockpick? Drag the chests into a pile, brew up a Potion of Explosion, lob it at them and marvel as the World's Loudest Lockpick actually works. Probably not the intended solution, but it’s my solution, and feels damn good.
Enemy AI is also nuanced, with most living foes having basic self-preservation instincts. Animals in particular won't attack unless pressured, or shown an opportunity to pounce.
Unexplored’s final trick is a trio of free DLC packs (the third in public beta at the time of writing) that leave the core mechanics unchanged, but alter the fundamentals of your quest and the environments generated. The Ripley Run DLC imitates Aliens, sending you on an extermination mission in an abandoned dwarven mining colony overrun by acid-blooded monsters, armed with an automatic repeater-crossbow and a Ring of Detect Life standing in for a motion tracker. The Mithril Run DLC is Lord of the Rings-inspired, with dark tunnels, goblins aplenty, and the Balrog waiting for you at the end.
The third and most interesting of the DLCs, Dark Ritual, is an eldritch murder mystery, where you race against the clock to gather clues, learn which cultist is living host to an elder god and the very specific method by which you can slay them without causing the apocalypse. It’s a little like Cluedo in reverse, and a fantastic showcase of how flexible Unexplored is.
Caves of Qud
Procedurally generated poetry, machine-written histories of post-human Pharaohs, and spray-on brains that turn regular doors into existentially dreadful animated creatures are the secret sauce that make Caves of Qud one of the most interesting roguelikes in development right now.
Of the three featured here Qud is the least complete, but recent updates have brought massive changes to its UI, accessibility, and systems—enough to make it worth a look for any genre fan.
Despite the familiar ASCII-with-tiles aesthetic, Qud is closer to a traditional RPG in structure, with a setting that resembles the weirdness of Torment: Tides of Numenera more than anything. Set in a future Earth so distant and strange as to be almost entirely alien, you play a stranger (and you can be very strange thanks to an absurdly powerful character generation system) who has wandered into the watervine-farming village of Joppa in search of food, work, and fresh water, which is the currency of Qud.
Greeted by a taciturn four-legged town guard, a glowing cat, and a village elder with eyeball-hands growing out of his back, you're nudged gently into a series of critter-slaying errands and fetch-quests for the village that grow into a long-form story with no shortage of memorable characters and strange prose, both hand-written or machine-generated. It would be impressive enough as a purely scripted RPG experience, but the world of Qud leverages procedural generation in the style of Dwarf Fortress to fill in the blanks in each adventure, both narratively and mechanically.
If Qud has one true failing at the moment, it’s that the character generator gives you too much rope with which to hang yourself. Is chitin plating overpowered? Will a slow metabolism punish you in the long run? How do you play a photosynthetic character, or one who is constantly harassed by your own evil self from a parallel dimension?
Yes, that’s a real option. I’ve never had a character with it survive more than a few minutes, but it’s hilarious. Finding the right combination of gear to keep you alive is almost as difficult until you’ve put a few characters through the wringer. The initial learning curve in Qud is fierce, but don’t be dissuaded.
It’s easy to burn out in the opening areas, and as such I do recommend disabling permadeath in the debug options menu until you’ve figured out how to manage the lethal opening hours, because the world beyond is strange, magical, and random in the best possible way. In what other RPG can you stumble across a devoutly religious gun turret, more likely to bore you to death with quoted scripture on the virtues of flexible programming than shoot you? Or where one of the best characters is a supergenius albino bear called Q Girl? Qud is a trip worth taking.
Cogmind ... might just be the closest thing we ll ever see to a Nier: Automata roguelike.
(Qud’s lead developer chipped in to recommend this beginner’s guide, and say that as far as starting characters go, a True Kin Praetorian with high strength and toughness is hard to go wrong with—not a subtle or complex character build, but survivable and easy to learn.)
Cogmind
Cogmind—years in development and just recently entering beta—might just be the closest thing we’ll ever see to a Nier: Automata roguelike. Set in a bleak post-human world, machine factions of varying sentience strive for resources and power in a massive underground megastructure. More than anything, it reminds me of this official Yoko Taro short story, right down to its depiction of multi-limbed mechanized combat, robotic evolution run rampant, and the end-goal of ascending to the surface, and to freedom.
In Cogmind you are your loot, a freakish improvised mechanical gestalt
Cogmind is a game of turn-based, tactical, and fundamentally inhuman combat. Starting out as little more than a floating brain, you bolt on limbs and components as you explore. Rather than traditional levels or experience, progression upwards through the cyber-dungeon increases the number of reactor, limb, weapon and internal component slots you have.
In Cogmind you are your loot, a freakish improvised mechanical gestalt cobbled together from whatever you can salvage after each fight in order to replace whatever body parts the last fight cost you.
The majority of your enemies are inhuman in their behavior too, mechanical and exploitable. Utility robots—marked green—are non-hostile, ferrying resources around the various facilities and rushing to repair any damage caused by combat. Explosive weapons can reduce entire rooms to smoldering craters, and if you hang around long enough after a fight you’ll see them fully reconstructed. It feels almost like playing Dungeon Keeper from the interloping hero's perspective.
Combat is always a choice, too. Any engagement has a chance to escalate and summon more enemies, which in turn means more loot in the aftermath, but overheating or running out of ammo at a critical moment can bring even the best run to a halt. Patrolling enemies can often be detected before they're capable of starting a fight, so stealth becomes a viable play style, especially if you dedicate an internal component or two to scanners.
Combat itself is deeply satisfying, though. Primarily ranged (at least at first), you have an XCom-esque surplus of information detailing your exact chances to hit with each weapon and the exact state of your target. You are a robot after all: crunching numbers is your thing.
It makes for a mathematically satisfying experience, backed up by surprisingly great audio. Guns crack, energy weapons sizzle, and enemies spark and fizz as they collapse. Considering the nearly pure-ASCII graphics, there’s more atmosphere here than you'd expect.
Everything about Cogmind plays into the idea that you are a machine in a world of machines. Things are measured and predictable, to a point. Odds are provided and it's up to you to decide which risks to take, whether you want to push your reactor hard for one more turn and risk a thermal shutdown, or whether to try to get one more lore entry out of a terminal in the hopes that a security team won't be called to your location.
Rare for a roguelike, Cogmind puts overwhelming reams of usable information in your hands, and lets you decide what to do with it. You’ve just got to learn to think like a robot.
Three dungeon crawls, full of loot and risk and reward and intensely complex systems of procedural generation. More than anything, these are three games that haven’t lost sight of that core that makes the best in the genre work: randomness that empowers the player with meaningful choices, and worlds with learnable systems, making personal knowledge more valuable than any experience grind. For me at least that’s the essence of a good roguelike, and these three have it.
Divided We Fall is a Second World War RTS—"a strategic close-combat multiplayer game that emphasizes the importance of building an effective cohesive squad and executing well thought-out tactics on the battlefield," is how the developers describe it on Steam—that launched on Steam Early Access in September 2016. Today it went into full release, and to celebrate the big moment developer Kava Game Studio is making it free to play until Thursday.
It's a small-scale game, as you can see from the launch trailer, but it supports "massive conflicts" of up to 120 soldiers commanded up by to 15 players per side. "Working together is paramount! If you are the highest ranking officer, you will draw out your battle plan and distribute weapons to your subordinates through an in-game map board interface," the Steam listing states. "But as a lower ranking leader you still have the responsibility to lead your squad to achieve the objective set by your commander, and coordinate with friendly players to adapt the plan within the chaos of battle."
The Divided We Fall launch announcement also brings with it a "surprise coop mode reveal," which Kava said was "one of the community’s most highly demanded features." The new mode will enable players to team up against AI enemies, and will also allow solo play—not exactly a campaign, but at least a way to play on your own. For the future, Kava aims to incorporate more nations, theaters, and weapons, destructible terrain, a morale system, and "special character DLCs."
Steam user reviews are "mixed," but the biggest issue appears to be the fact that there are very few people actually playing it, which is a pretty big problem for a multiplayer-focused game. The free weekend may or may not help with that, but if nothing else it's a risk-free way to see if Divided We Fall stands up.
HTC earlier this summer dropped the price of its Vive VR headset to $600 to make it more competitive with the Oculus Rift's also recently-reduced pricing. Now HTC is upping the ante by bundling Fallout 4 VR, a $60 value, with new Vive purchases.
That's a pretty sweet value-add, and one that could entice more gamers to take the plunge into VR territory. While still a bit pricey, the Vive comes with motion controllers, a pair of base stations, and now a triple-A game to go along with a few other VR experiences, including Everest VR, Richie's Plank Experience, and Google's Tilt Brush.
"Fallout 4 VR is the most anticipated title for VR this holiday, and the game development team at Bethesda Game Studios is delivering on the promise with a full-length AAA open-world game that takes advantage of Vive’s incredible room-scale immersion for a mind-blowing experience in the Wasteland," said Joel Breton, GM of Vive Studios. "The promise of a game with near endless content, including hundreds of locations, characters, and quests, fully playable in VR, is something that we have been focused on providing for the VR gaming community."
Fallout 4 VR will come in the form of a redemption code. The game launches on December 12, so there is a bit of a wait before you can cash in on the freebie. Buyers also have to be at least 18 years old to redeem the code.
If you already own a Vive headset, HTC has a lesser bargain available—it will gift a 3-month subscription to Viveport, its online app store for VR content, when you also purchase Fallout 4 VR.
I’ve played almost 80 hours of Metal Gear Solid 5, and much of it in a specific way. I’m almost entirely silent and non-lethal, with silencers on my various tranquiliser pistols and sniper rifles. I’ve even equipped Quiet with a non-lethal rifle, meaning most outposts are already dozing by the time I arrive. And when stealth does fail, I fall back on sleep grenades, smoke grenades, active decoys and—most effectively of all—running away. It’s a fun way to play, but, outside of boss encounters, I’ve rarely felt the need to switch up my tactics.
This isn’t a story about me actively seeking new ways to play. Instead, it’s MGS5 that forces my hand, offering special versions of previous missions with specific restrictions. The most interesting of these is the ‘Subsistence’ rule, in which all weapons and items must be procured on-site. I can’t choose what time of day I arrive, nor bring a companion along—not even the horse. I’m unequipped and unprepared, without even a cardboard box to my name.
As I exit the helicopter, the sun is high in the sky. That’s not great when you’re an unarmed man crouch-walking through a warzone. I approach a small outpost, hoping to find a few weapons before tackling the mission proper. A distant guard spots me immediately. In a panic, and with no other options, I repurpose an old tactic: I run. Not away, but directly towards the guard. He opens fire, and the screen turns red as the bullets connect. I keep running. I’m nearly dead, but I reach the guard in time. Snake slams him to the ground, knocking him unconscious.
That went badly, but I do at least have a weapon now—a basic SVG-76 assault rifle with a handful of bullets. My actual objective is to destroy some comms equipment in a nearby base. I decide to plot a path through the mountain, as the high ground should let me scout the area unseen, but my route leads straight into a wolf’s mouth. I quickly dispatch my canine attacker, but the gunfire draws the attention of the base’s guards.
Actually, this is good. The guards are leaving the base to explore the mountain. If I drop down off this cliff, I’ll be clear to complete my mission. Before I can even finish the thought I step on a mine. The explosion doesn’t kill me, but I’m wounded and now the base is on full alert. I dive into a nearby building. Outside, guards in riot gear shout instructions through radios. In the distance, I hear an enemy helicopter.
I prepare for a last stand, but then realise I’ve taken shelter in the outpost’s ad-hoc comms building. Finally, some luck. I shoot the comms station, completing the mission but alerting every nearby guard to my location. Maybe variety and improvisation are overrated. Maybe it’s okay to stick with what you know; what you enjoy. That’s what I tell myself as I dive out of the window and, once again, bravely run away.
Despite high profile forays into other disciplines, Conor McGregor is not the highest ranked pound-for-pound UFC fighter in the world. That accolade belongs to Demetrious Johnson—the sport's long-serving, record-holding Flyweight champion who hosts Twitch livestreams in his spare time.
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is his favourite game at the moment, Johnson tells me, and it's one he reckons he could outperform company counterpart Conor McGregor at.
"I fucking better be able to," says Johnson of his chances of beating The Notorious on Erangel. "I'd like to think I can, yeah, absolutely."
Later this month, Johnson will take part in Uproar's The Golden Chicken tournament against a host of YouTube personalities and PUBG pros. The flyweight's Twitch channel blurb notes that whenever he hangs up his gloves he'd love to pursue a career in professional streaming. With this in mind, I ask Johnson if there is any overlap between his MMA career and his latest hobby.
"I've never done a livestream of me fighting in the UFC or training or anything like that but I have livestreamed before going over to the arena to fight," he says. "But at UFC 197, I believe it was, I went to fight Henry Cejudo, and I was streaming Dark Souls 3. I said I'd be right back as I had to go fight, I fought, won, then came back and jumped right back on the stream. I've done that a few times before."
Image credit: Lowking.pl
Having successfully defended his Flyweight title on ten occasions, Johnson is widely considered the best pound-for-pound fighter in the business. Yet the thought of Dark Souls speedrunning is to him more challenging than TKOs and armbar submissions.
"Dark Souls is difficult but I don't do any of that speed challenge bullshit," he says, "it's just too damn hard and takes too much time."
Look out for our full interview with Demetrious Johnson later this week.
The post-battle results screen might say C-, but the feeling when you finally beat a stage in Cuphead is A+. Not so much a boss rush as a boss crawl, Studio MDHR’s outstanding debut pits you against some of the toughest enemies you’ll face in a videogame, and the process of beating them can be slow and sometimes painful. But when you eventually do, the surge of euphoria is undeniable. Its difficulty hasn’t been understated, then, but crucially, it’s hardly ever the game’s fault if you get hit. You’ll shout and swear plenty, but you’ll know it’s really yourself you’re annoyed with.Within seconds of a battle kicking off, you often find yourself fending off threats on multiple fronts, simultaneously tracking Cuphead’s position but also keeping an eye on something hovering ominously above, another threat incoming on ground level, and another projectile or five floating somewhere in between. With just three hit points, you’ve precious little margin for error; as such, once you’ve begun to acclimatise to a particular attack pattern, you’ll find yourself restarting if you take damage during that phase. That’s the first sign that Cuphead’s got its hooks into you. And then suddenly you’ll deliver the killing blow and the wave of relief and satisfaction is overwhelming. The clock will say it took you two or three minutes, but such is the relentless, exhausting intensity of these fights that each attempt feels five times as long. That feeling might not be worth persevering for if the controls weren’t immaculate. Equipped with a reliable jump and dash, Cuphead is nimble and responsive, his handling so expertly calibrated than an analogue stick—hardly ideal, you’d think, in a game designed for digital precision—never feels like a handicap. A parry move that lets you slap back any pink projectiles by hitting jump again in mid-air can occasionally seem a little fussy in its timing. Still, it’s used intelligently, letting you build your special meter—which can be spent in increments or saved for a huge blowout—and also doubling as a method of traversal.
These are simple ingredients, but Studio MDHR builds a series of thrillingly diverse encounters around them. Bosses don’t just limit themselves to a host of different attack patterns, but adopt several distinct forms. Some play out like pursuits, while others are confined to a single, claustrophobic space. In one stage you’ll use the parry to nudge a handcar forward or back as you race alongside a train; in another you’ll slap springboards to clear a tall enemy. Meanwhile, random elements keep things fresh, meaning you can’t simply learn patterns by rote and rely entirely on muscle memory.
A huge part of Cuphead s appeal is seeing what bizarre monstrosity awaits you next.
I’m skimping on specifics, but that’s because a huge part of Cuphead’s appeal is seeing what bizarre monstrosity awaits you next. Not that you’ll have much time to marvel at the astonishing hand-drawn animation, because you’ll be so laser-focused on surviving as soon as the announcer’s dispensed with the formalities. It’s only after the fact that you can really appreciate the ingenuity of the animation and design of these encounters. And it’s not just a pretty face either, with a big band soundtrack that comes close to matching the visuals, one highlight of which is an uptempo jazz number that briefly segues into Ride of the Valkyries.
Cuphead’s bosses can be tackled on two difficulty settings: Simple (which is a barefaced lie) and Regular (hard). Beat them on Simple and you’re allowed to progress, but doing so locks out the finale, meaning you’ll miss out on a not-insubstantial chunk of the game. It’s only so useful learning the ropes this way, since many bosses use different attack patterns on Regular, or adopt a new form you won’t see at all on Simple. In other words, to see everything, you’re going to have to do it the hard way.
Difficulty is subjective, of course, but while there’s no doubt some idiots out there who will claim Cuphead is too easy, most will find it a tough nut to crack. Whether it’s fair is a more important consideration. And the answer is: mostly. On occasion it isn’t, and it’s often those variables that spoil things, with platforms and enemies positioned in such a way that you take an unavoidable hit through no real fault of your own. Such incidents are relatively rare, but in a game as demanding as this, it’s frustrating that you do sometimes need a hint of luck to get by. In a game that earns your trust by establishing its rules and staying true to them, there are a few moments where it doesn’t quite hold up its end of the bargain.
Still, 95 percent firm-but-fair to five percent bullshit is a more than acceptable ratio for what has clearly been a labour of love. There’s not a whiff of cynicism about Cuphead: from its aesthetic to its systems, it’s wilfully off-trend, and utterly its own thing. As tough as it gets, ultimately that’s what’s really worth shouting about.
Last week, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds broke 1.5 million concurrent users, announced its own subsidiary company (PUBG Corp), and revealed Squad FPP OCE servers will be confirmed "after mid-October". But the battle royale megahit rounded off the last seven days with a slew of negative Steam reviews. Why? In-game advertisement of a third-party gaming VPN in China.
Despite being fully-localised, Chinese players complain of lag-affected local servers and are often forced to join European or North American games. Conversely, native players in these forums report migrant players bring their own lag and can be at times unplayable.
Chinese players have now reported in-game advertising for an 'accelerator' VPN service said to boost connections to international servers. The problem for these players is twofold: they feel that in-game advertising for a game that isn't free-to-play is a problem in itself; and that Bluehole could do more to support their servers as opposed to promoting the advertisement of tools used to better access foreign ones.
The result of this unrest has seen almost 10,000 negative reviews posted to the PUBG Steam page in the last day—as outlined here:
We've reached out to Bluehole about the situation and will report back as and when they reply.
The Call of Duty: WWII PC multiplayer beta only launched three days ago but the hackers have already invaded. There's multiple videos doing the rounds of cheaters having their way with other players, the first of which I saw on this Reddit post, where user JarekBloodDragon shared a clip of an obvious aimbot.
"It's becoming more and more difficult to find a game in the WW2 open beta without there being an incredibly obvious hacker not trying to hide it," they said. "At one point I got 5 games in a row with these types of hackers, all different lobbies, all different hackers."
Users responded with their own tales of hackers they'd encountered, and there's also a Steam thread highlighting the same issue, accompanied by this clip of another aimbot cheat:
It's not clear how widespread the problem is, with one user on the Reddit thread claiming it's "completely rampant" while others haven't come across a single case of cheating. There's a fair few videos on YouTube documenting in-game hacking, though.
As Redditors on the thread point out, it's not particularly surprising that the beta has attracted hackers, nor is it cause for panic. But the response from developers Sledgehammer Games and Raven Software will be key, because this needs to be stamped out at the first opportunity.
If you've played the beta, have you come across hackers?
It's worth taking your time in Death of the Outsider, the recently-released expansion for Dishonored 2. Its world is dripping in atmosphere, full of detail and side stories that will take you the best part of 10 hours to fully explore.
But, naturally, that hasn't stopped an army of speedrunners using every exploit possible to zoom through the game. The best of the bunch is streamer Bjurnie, who has just achieved a new world record by zipping through the expansion in nine and a half minutes flat.
If you recognise the name it's probably because Bjurnie also holds the record for speedrunning Dishonored 2, which he completed in a lick under 23 minutes, and is third all-time in the list of runs for the original Dishonored. Something of an expert in the series, then.
There's a few techniques at play in the run, shown at the top of this article, but the most noticeable is known as the 'leap glitch'. Basically, you have to rebind jump to the mouse wheel, preferably on a free-scrolling mouse. Then you jump into a vault and cancel the animation, and if you get the timing right you'll fly miles. It's easier said than done.
Needless to say the run is incredibly impressive, especially considering Death of the Outsider has only been out a matter of weeks. Bjurnie barely puts a foot wrong.
