Former League of Legends developer Aaron "Riot Sanjuro" Rutledge has parted company with Riot Games in the wake of an unfortunate outburst on the official League of Legends Discord server in which he predicted that streamer Tyler1 will "die from a coke overdose or testicular cancer."
Tyler1, as noted by Eurogamer, is a notoriously toxic streamer who was handed an indefinite ban from LoL in 2016 because of "verbal abuse, intentional feeding, as well as account sharing/purchasing, evasion of sportsmanship systems, and player harassment." He now claims he's reformed, but Rutledge apparently isn't buying it.
The trouble began in what looks like a reply to a request to reinstate Tyler1. "Free tyler one to make 100k+ a year on being a dick in a game he didn't make," Rutledge wrote. Things really went off the rails, though, when he appeared to suggest that his bad experiences with the streamer were behind him.
"He looks like a damn humunculous [sic] ... honestly.. it's fine he'll die from a coke overdose or testicular cancer from all the steroids.. then we'll be gucci," he continued. "u know how much bullshit he's caused me? personally? i've spent many many hours of my work day dealing with his bullshit. if games had terrorists..."
"I mean I get it.. i get the comedy of his streams and his 'brand'. but its at the expense of a LOT of other innocent people and that's not cool."
Rutledge also claimed that Tyler1 has had more than 20 accounts permabanned, and his comments were met with a not-inconsiderable degree of sympathy: "They ain't wrong about Tyler1, I'd be sick of dealing with his shit too," one player wrote on the Riot forums. Despite that, it's obviously not the sort of thing you can say as a representative of your company and just walk away from. Images of the comments quickly made the rounds—the whole conversation can be seen on Imgur—and Rutledge apologized on the LoL subreddit.
"Reddit, League Players, Tyler - I displayed a gross error in judgement last night and whole-heartedly apologize for my comments," he wrote. "They were out of line, and not what any of you deserve to hear, especially from a Rioter. I’ll be taking time away from Reddit, discord and in game chat to reflect on how I communicate with players. Sorry again for the insults and the language."
Riot, as you'd expect, issued a statement of its own: "To be very clear here: what was said is NOT okay, and we take it extremely seriously. I’d like to apologize on behalf of Riot to both Tyler1 and the community for this. We will be taking action internally to address this (although it would not be appropriate to go into specifics here)."
The ultimate outcome appears to be that Rutledge is no longer with Riot. It's not known whether the split was his decision or Riot's, but he said on Twitter earlier this week that he was no longer with the studio (the account has since been deleted, but @RLewisReports captured an image) and his LinkedIn account indicates that his Riot employment ended this month.
As for Tyler1, the subject of his ire, he said on Twitter that "it really sucks that some people still hold a massive grudge vs old T1 and refuse to acknowledge I've changed." But he added, presumably without irony, that he has no hard feelings.
In 2013 French electronic musician Kavinsky released a 13-track album of squelchy synths and triumphant lead lines called OutRun. It reveled in the forgotten sounds of 1980s movie scores, and the Ferrari Testarossa and palm trees on its cover referenced the 1986 arcade game the album took its title from. It’s an impeccably composed image so stylized it doesn't really resemble the game it's named after.
That’s the synthwave ethos: taking elements of a period of '80s excess millennials find irresistibly evocative, and modernizing them so they're just barely recognizable. As Robert Parker (a Swedish producer responsible for albums like Drive Sweat Play) told Time Out, "Synthwave is nostalgia with selective memory loss... [Synthwave artists] don’t really try to imitate the sounds 100 per cent, but rather take out some of the essential parts and put it in a modern context."
Kavinsky's OutRun proved so popular in the synthwave scene that it spawned its own subgenre. Quite how the music relates back to Sega’s 31-year-old racer isn’t clear, and perhaps isn’t important. What’s important is that the music inspired by a racing game went on to inspire a new wave of indie racing games.
Games like Fraoula’s Neon Drive, Denver Productions’ OutDrive, and the ill-fated Power Drive 2000 (Kickstarted in 2015 but without a developer update since February of this year) all seem to agree on the tenets of the genre: angular concept cars screeching along retrofuturist highways through a miasma of purple and pink. Tron's neon lines often appear, as do Blade Runner's cityscapes. It's an unquestionably '80s vision, but the specifics of the decade often aren't in sharp enough focus to be recognizable—least of all the games they’re homaging.
Perhaps synthwave fans couldn’t find satisfaction in revisiting the actual games of the ‘80s, so instead they created a new and imaginary vision of what games like OutRun were. Neon Drive achieves a heightened sense of 'eightiesness' by making the music an essential part of the drive. Rather than pulsing away at the periphery of the experience, the beats in Neon Drive propel the whole world forward, creating a rhythm-action racer in which you’re not so much driving the car as dancing with it—perfect synergy between sound and visuals.
The same could be said of the game that started it all: Hotline Miami. To players of a certain age it’s the kind of gratuitous and dark entity you imagined when your parents talked about violent videogames many years ago. But even at the height of that moral panic the reality was so much tamer than Hotline Miami. Doom’s blood-specked sprites have nothing on Hotline Miami’s eye-gougings or spurting arteries, or its utterly amoral characters.
By setting itself so firmly in the 16-bit era with its visuals, Hotline Miami managed to attach itself to those original gaming boogeymen without playing anything like them. The score multipliers have at least half an eye on arcade gaming admittedly, and the top-down violence owes plenty to the original Grand Theft Auto. Yet Hotline Miami feels completely disconnected from gaming in the '80s or '90s on a mechanical level. Its quick restarts turn it into a hazy, endless dream, something that feels completely modern.
Hotline Miami's soundtrack, however, seems to gel with the pace and attitude of the game perfectly. Those 22 songs from the likes of Perturbator, Jasper Byrne, and Scattle have persistent beats matching your stubborn restarts while their glassy synth pads seem to implicitly reinforce the nihilism of the setting and dialogue. In many ways Hotline Miami is a horrible place to find yourself in, one you only stay in because you’re enjoying the violence so much. And as its creators have frequently pointed out, that was always the point.
Despite the obvious craftsmanship of both game and soundtrack, Hotline Miami was lucky to find the success that it did. Released in 2012, it found an audience who’d seen Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive in theaters just a few months prior. With a hyper-stylized period setting, violence depicted with passivity, and a soundtrack full of Kavinsky, College, and Desire, Drive put synthwave in front of a mainstream cinema audience. Its poster, with a typeface inspired by 1983's Risky Business in hot pink contrasted against its dark blues, seems to have set out an indelible vision of that aesthetic.
If Hotline Miami represents the high point for synthwave-influenced games, the following year would see its low point. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon ticked all the boxes of the aesthetic: late '80s typography, that familiar colour palette, and an ironic repurposing of period elements (in this case the voice of Terminator and Aliens actor Michael Biehn). On paper it was primed to rewrite videogaming past like its synthwave-soundtracked brethren and offer the kind of heightened nostalgia hit you can’t get from genuinely old titles, never quite as stylish or ‘of their time’ as you remember.
The reality of Blood Dragon was a thoroughly modern open-world game with retrofuturist elements sellotaped onto it. If you were being unkind, you’d say it was Far Cry 3 with a palette swap squeezed out of Drive’s poster.
Instead of finding harmony between those elements, Blood Dragon pit them against each other. What made Far Cry 3 great was that it perfected a burgeoning frontier of open-world game design—it was an impossible task to ask a game so focused on the to new evoke something historical or nostalgic simply by changing its appearance and getting Hicks from Aliens in to record some gravelly quips.
Blood Dragon might be the first example of a game co-opting the synthwave ethos simply because it was in vogue, but it’s by no means the last. The danger with a genre of gaming and music as narrow and hard to define as this is that its output becomes reductive, simply hitting the recognizable trappings in order to give the 'come hither' finger to a hungry audience, without offering the chance to explore a remixed past that audience is really looking for.
Games under the ‘synthwave’ tag on Itch.io, for example, offer lots of stylish branding, but few seem to expand the retrofuturism concept further than that. 2D RPG Mistlurk is one exception to that rule: in Mistlurk you’re not just driving through the ubiquitous uncaring city, you’re actively trying to investigate and ultimately escape it. There’s an effort made to elaborate on the familiar tenets of the aesthetic, and give them deeper meaning. A meaning that’s underpinned, naturally, by gated snares and John Carpenter movie synths.
Five years after Hotline Miami and six years after Drive, synthwave and indie games still enjoy a symbiotic relationship, and are still responsible for the occasional gem. Last year’s Furi found a new kind of atmosphere and excitement by pairing the aesthetic with incredibly demanding boss battles in a less urban and more fantastical setting. A certain kind of listener will tell you that technically the soundtrack is 'darksynth', but the atmosphere’s very much a part of this broader movement. A steady evolution of it maybe, in which the rules are relaxed a bit.
Where that movement heads next is open to debate. It’s already had its breakthrough indie hit, and it’s already been absorbed into the mainstream. In music industry terms that means it's in trouble. To pick an example from a musical genre that's probably the antithesis of synthwave, we've had the moment where Limp Bizkit's chart success began the downfall of nu-metal. But right now at least, this little corner of gaming and music endures. As time drags us further away from the decade these games hark back to, game designers keep creating more ways to get back to it—or at least a hot pink version of it we can race through at top speed.
Assassin's Creed: Origins is, as the title so subtly hints, a game about the origins of the Assassins. In case there was any doubt, the new trailer makes it very clear that this is in fact what's going on. Bayek, you see, was the last of the Medjay—an "elite police force" of ancient Egypt, as the Wiki explains—but that just wasn't enough to get the job done.
"There is a new creed now," Bayek intones as the trailer reaches its climax. "From darkness, we have come. And in darkness, we shall stay. We are Medjay no longer. We shall be known as Assassins."
I thought there might be a historical connection at play in the name, since Ubisoft has made a relatively big fuss about the historical underpinnings of the game, but that doesn't appear to be the case. The Online Etymology Dictionary says the term originates from the mid-13th century word hashishiyyin, meaning "hashish-users," although there is a certain murderous element to it too.
"A fanatical Ismaili Muslim sect of the mountains of Lebanon in the time of the Crusades, under leadership of the 'Old Man of the Mountains' (translates Arabic shaik-al-jibal, name applied to Hasan ibu-al-Sabbah), they had a reputation for murdering opposing leaders after intoxicating themselves by eating hashish," the site says. "The plural suffix -in was mistaken in Europe for part of the word (compare Bedouin). Middle English had the word as hassais (mid-14c.), from Old French hassasis, assasis, which is from the Arabic word."
It goes without saying that you probably won't see anything like that in Assassin's Creed: Origins. Ubisoft can't be having it slapped with an AO rating, after all.
Assassin's Creed: Origins comes out on October 27. Don't miss our recent hands-on impressions of the game, one looking at its RPG elements, and the other digging into its loot.
Retiring wasn’t easy. Eventually I had to put my swords in the display case. Folk expect an old man in Toussaint to care about wine, so that’s what I did. I asked the majordomo for help, and he handed me a ledger: Terroir. Well. I’ve been brewing potions and oils for this many years—making wine can’t be that hard. I just have to get on with it.
Year 1
The majordomo taught me the basics, but he was happy to leave me to learn on my own. The first harvest was a mess. Few grapes were worth using. According to the ledger, pretty much any grape can make wine. The resulting batch is… red. It’s wine. I’m pretty sure.
After I bottle it, a few local drunks give it "FIVE PLOUGHING STARS," which I cautiously take as a compliment. I plant more vines with the extra money. The truth is, it’s an easier way to earn coin than punching an angry cyclops. Maybe retirement is going to be OK after all.
Year 3
Grapes are fickle: they need a little rain to get going, then they grow best with warm sun and cloudy days. Too much rain and the vines grow leafy and and starve the grapes, blocking the sun even when the weather is good. Not enough rain, and the leafless vines sit exposed to sun, getting scorched and turning too sweet.
This summer was dry and the grapes ripened too early. I thought about praying for rain, but I’ve never been on good terms with the gods. Long ago, I saw a Skellige druid perform a rain summoning ritual, but the majordomo said that kind of thing would upset the neighbors.
Rain finally came, and the green leaves gave the grapes enough shade to calm down. Slowly, the last of the grapes finally ripened, but the first hints of frost were only days away when I called the workers in for harvest. We made it, but it was a close thing.
Maybe it was beginner’s luck, or maybe it’s just easy to impress dockside drunks, but the local judges haven’t liked my wines from the last few years. They keep coming back with the same problem: the acidity is too low.
Year 4
Constant, dreary rain. Like being back in Velen, hip-deep in mud and foglets. The workers in the fields trimmed leaves in a downpour, but new leaves came back as fast as they could cut them. I thought about reaching for a sword and helping cut back the foliage, but Yen thought someone would end up losing a hand. She’s usually right.
It doesn’t really matter, since the rain never stopped. We trimmed leaves from early spring to late autumn, then let the small, bitter grapes die on the vine without harvesting a single one.
Year 7
Making wine is a process. The first step is to stomp the grapes into juice, which pulls out tannins, the stuff that makes red wine bitter and caustic—like Vesemir always was before breakfast. After crushing, we ferment juice and grape pulp, which trades the sweetness for alcohol. Then, some of the fermented pulp gets pressed to add more acidic juice to the wine.
The workers taste the wine throughout, looking for acid, sweetness, and tannins. Getting a good balance between these qualities takes trial and error. The majordomo, for all his good qualities, isn’t interested in keeping track of the combinations we try out. I started keeping a notebook at my desk, writing down combinations. This year’s batch will be Acid: 5; Sweetness: 3; Tannins: 4. I scratch out 5/3/4 in my notebook to remember for next year. Last year we tried 4/3/4. It was good, but again the locals thought the acid was too low.
In time, we’ll be able to afford better barrels that age wine to perfection and a big grinder that pulls more tannins out of the grapes. They seem like luxuries, but those things will help us hit recipes no matter what happens with the harvest. For now, we can only do what we can with the grapes the weather gives us. Sometimes it’s good wine, sometimes it’s bad, but booze will always sell.
I got a note from the mayor that he’d like to visit the estate. The weather was perfect this year, so I thought we’d have wine worth showing off. Sales are fine and the weather has been good enough, but another powerful local friend would be worth the trouble—even if it meant an evening wearing tights. After the harvest, we invited the mayor to share a bottle. He loved it, and offered a hefty sack of coin as a "government grant," wink wink.
Year 12
War looms, but for once I’m not marching off to join in the mess. A stressed-out Nilfgaardian quartermaster visited the estate, asking us to donate wine to the army. Local wine distributors in Toussaint are picky—we have to be careful to send them really good wine and sell bad batches to the peasants—but the quartermaster insisted that any purple alcohol will do.
The quartermaster’s timing is good. Instead of letting this year’s overripe, sunburned grapes go to waste, we turn them into the most disgusting toilet water ever to be bottled in Toussaint. I send 3,000 bottles of the Corvo Bianco Moehoen Special 1287—named for the Nilfgaardians’ prick of a Field Marshal—to the Black Ones with my insincerest compliments.
For years, our wines were bottled and sold year by year, with a few special cases set aside for a few years down the line. The workers just finished rolling in the new aging barrels—made of “white oak” from a far-off land, “America”—and now wine becomes a long game. Planning ahead and aging wines to be bottled five, ten, or thirty years in the future is strange for an old man who expected to die young by the sword. Most times, I made my choice and never looked back. Now, I worry. It’s a new thing.
I’ve spent all this time expanding the vineyard and perfecting one type of wine, but some nearby soil might be good for different types of grapes: merlot, chardonnay, pinot noir. I’ve only just started to fill in the bestiary for my new world.
Micromanaging the vineyard workers is still a pain in the ass, and the majordomo still isn’t interested in keeping track of important details, so my notebook has grown thick and dog-eared. Still, watching the years roll by over these lovely hills with a glass of wine in-hand—well, life could be worse. It pretty much always was.
Year 20
We won an award today. Finally nailed down the perfect recipe, and last year’s batch got happy reviews from the royal court. I set aside some for this year’s local wine awards, and the Corvo Bianco Red 1295 was named the best in all of Toussaint. People are offering absurd prices for the remaining bottles, so I’m releasing them a dozen at a time to help the 1295 grow into legend. Dandelion isn't the only one who can build a myth when he wants to.
Corvio Bianco now has its own tavern where I can sell wine directly, and a few years of good harvests have filled my pockets and spread our reputation. Not bad for an abandoned boy raised on the stone floor of Kaer Morhen. Not bad at all.
Two hours spent with Assassin’s Creed: Origins left me with two strong impressions. Firstly, it’s definitely a more RPG-centric affair than earlier games in the series, as Tom explained in his preview, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still, at heart, an Assassin’s Creed game made by Ubisoft. Secondly, it’s great that you can actually headshot snakes in this game. Did you know you can headshot snakes in this game? You can.
Actually, PETA will likely be on Ubisoft’s case big time, because the vast majority of my time spent in Origins was murdering animals. I murdered hippos, crocodiles, weird flying vulture-like things, and I landed headshots on snakes (thus murdering them). I didn’t do this gleefully: it just so happens that, in ancient Egypt, virtually everything wants to kill you. And if you kill them back, you get XP for it, and some loot if you’re lucky. Just hope the NPCs don't have the same lust for XP that you do.
The region I explored was Kanopos Nome, a sleepy town on the edge of the Nile, and a relatively pleasant expanse of Origins’ sprawling map. I wasn’t allowed to explore beyond this due to the return of Assassin’s Creed’s fuzzy black invisible walls, which gates off areas of the map not yet unlocked by the story. As the gif below demonstrates, it’s a small fraction of the whole map, but it felt pretty big while I was exploring.
I didn’t really do any story missions. Or at least, I tried, but because I was a few levels below the level requirement I needed to complete some side missions first. Entering a level 20 mission as a level 17 build is not wise: I got utterly rinsed by the mobs, not to mention the mini-boss character I needed to slaughter. So I spent most of my time sprinting around the map, trying to get a read on just how different this game feels on a moment-to-moment level.
While Ubisoft has tweaked the UI so that there’s no “mini-map” full of icons, there’s still plenty of icons, and there’s still a main map. The main difference is the Skyrim-esque directional line at the top of the screen, though marked quests still appear by default as icons floating around the screen. The first thing I did was try to take out the Anthylia Outpost, a place full of guards with a war chariot acting as a sentry. The outpost has a series of objectives: kill the captain, kill the commander, and plunder the treasure. There’s also a separate side quest requiring me to also take out the war chariot. Thought Origins would do away with tick-the-box type activities like this? Think again. The requirement to meet a certain level before you can tackle story missions will likely make some of them essential, too.
This is how my efforts to take Anthylia Outpost panned out, by the way.
Not that the side missions are bad, and it’s not Ubisoft’s fault alone: The Witcher 3 had us herding a lost lamb, remember? But it does mean that Origins definitely feels like an RPG version of an Assassin’s Creed game—it hasn’t lost its splurge of icons, they’re just displayed differently. One mission had me kill two of three different animals in order to collect stuff for some vendor who needed this stuff before he could do some other thing… you get the drift.
Am I angry about this? Not really. I like the RPG stuff and I feel like this world is already a lot more varied and fun to spend time in than any Assassin’s Creed game since Black Flag. Also, there’s a whole loot grind aspect to look forward to: loot is colour-coded of course, coming in the form of armor, garb and weapons, and in the short time that I played, finding something fresh (and better powered) can genuinely shift your chances against those damn hippos.
"Weaponised hippo corpses? Confirmed."
You can equip two ranged and two melee weapons at once. The ranged combat is fun enough, but the melee stuff shines: it feels like a less measured, more arcade-oriented version of For Honor’s system, and it’s acres ahead of the sticky Arkham-like combat seen in later Assassin’s Creed games. There are heavy weapons and light weapons, dual-wielded swords, huge maces and hopefully a huge range of others to look for. One thing's for sure: the maces are effective against hippos.
That loot though: it makes the open world feel worth it. It feels gross to boil one’s enjoyment down to carrot-on-stick RNG, but it nonetheless offers the incentive to actually look around. At one point, galloping towards some distant pyramids (which in the end I couldn’t reach due to the dreaded black walls), I stumbled upon the Hathor of Mefkat, a ruin half-submerged in sand. It was a small dungeon, complete with the aforementioned headshottable snakes and some very light puzzle elements. Inside, I got some loot as well as a collectible. In previous Assassin’s Creed games, you’d likely only get the collectible. And then you’d be prompted to collect 19 more of that collectible.
There are some nice strategic touches too. Those barrelling hippos that seemingly attack you constantly? You can release poison from their corpses in order to kill (or at least slow down) nearby enemies. Weaponised hippo corpses? Confirmed. Oh, and Origins’ Ubisoft drone equivalent is a nice eagle who can mark enemies from afar and also scope out quest objectives. Sure, it’s virtually the same as similar gadgets in Far Cry: Primal and Ghost Recon: Wildlands, but it’s a genuinely fun tool to use.
And stealing boats is fun. As we've been assured many times before, boats and other naval vehicles are back, and they come in all shapes and sizes. I especially liked overtaking the larger ones by stealth: swimming quietly, climbing quietly, and then macing all on board to death while watching the yellow critical hit numbers burst over the screen. Then I'd sail desperately away from reinforcements with the wind in my hair until... the black invisible wall of death preventing me from sailing further.
Is Assassin’s Creed: Origins a complete refresh for the series? In terms of the way its open world gameplay goes, it’s not a dramatic refresh, though things have changed for the better. I like the loot (I like loot in general, to be honest), and the XP grind appeals to a deep-seated impulse to watch meaningless numbers accrue. The frankly overwhelming array of iterative power-ups each new level can unlock will pour actual meaning into this number’s game, but I’m not sure yet whether they’ll result in any abilities or skills not before seen in an Assassin’s Creed game. Overall though, Origins’ RPG bent had me hooked like few recent installments have. I’ll climb towers and jump off them for a handful of XP. I’ll deviate from my course if it means I might get a blue-hued scythe. I’m keen.
UK-based studio Automaton Games is making a tactical shooter MMO that will feature up to 1000 players, with a world that will be shaped by their actions. This game has not been officially announced yet, nor does it have a name (it's been codenamed 'Project X', so I'll stick with that for this piece), but after speaking to Automaton's CEO and CTO James Thompson about the project at EGX, there's plenty to share on what they've got in the works. That includes a previously announced 400-person PvP arena mode, which sounds laser-targeted at the growing crowd around PUBG and other battle royale games. Last month, Automaton announced that it had raised $10 million of investment to make this game.
"You’re all on an island and it’s set in the near future," Thompson tells me when I ask about the premise. "There’s a reason you’re all there. There is a central capital which runs the area. You have four faction towns which have different agendas—they [either want] to live there and make the best of what they have, or they’re really trying to take over. And you’re part of this set of people who have come in and you are going to be here to overthrow the whole regime, effectively, and that will literally happen."
"On a global scale between what all the players do, the whole narrative will progress based on those player interactions, but there’s fully fleshed out characterisation and stories for all the different parts of the land. So there is quite a lot of narrative, that’s a big part of what ties together that side of the experience."
Project X is built using SpatialOS, a cloud-based technology that exists to help developers get around the traditional hardware restrictions of game development. That's as simply as I can put it without falling down a jargon hole of words I don't fully understand. Improbable, SpatialOS's creator, touts 'massive scale', 'meaningful persistence' and 'rich simulation' as three major advantages of what its technology offers. Sandbox MMO Worlds Adrift was also built using it. In that game, players can build an airship, crash it somewhere, then another player can come along later and see the wreckage, as a piece of living environmental storytelling—that's a small, neat way of demonstrating what they mean by 'meaningful persistence'.
Thompson describes this game as a "full MMORPG", with five progression tiers of weapon and armour, as well as customisation and perks. Players will pass parties in the world that could be two people strong, or up to 25, with a kind of risk/reward system to balance the game. On the unlikely event that someone's on a 1000-strong killstreak, other players will be alerted that this is going on, plus there will be a bounty system to keep people in check. It's players policing each other, in a sense, with ongoing balancing provided by the developers. Without seeing it in action, these are just bullet points to me—but it's an interesting-sounding premise, and so absurdly ambitious that I'm intrigued to see how it plays. This is all set in a world with wildlife, dynamic weather, tracks, wildfire, dynamic water and other telltale signs of change to the environment effected by the players.
Not enough going on in the game for you? "Currently you can literally nuke the whole world," Thompson tells me, in what sounds like a killstreak award. Tanks are mentioned as another, less drastic killstreak bonus.
The game also boasts a 'machine learning-driven quest and events system', backing up the idea of this "global narrative", which is hard to parse right now without having seen the game in action. You take on RPG-style quests, and based on which factions you ally with, how you choose to complete these quests and what your clan does, this will apparently inform how the story progresses on a macro level—Thompson talks up a "large global impact". He says they're making a game that's both authored and emergent, co-existing in the same space. You can ignore the MMO stuff if you want and play the game solo.
400-player battle royale?
A MMORPG with survival elements is what'll wrap the whole game together, then, but the promise of a 400-player competitive mode within that is Project X's biggest draw. PUBG's success means a lot of studios are looking at moving into the same space, and differentiating them will be important. "Obviously battle royale is having quite a lot of popularity right now, it’s come from a sort of different direction to what we’re from," Thompson says. "We’re thinking, let’s make awesome MMO worlds and experiences, and I think that the current battle royale games out there right now are almost like, 'let’s make a mod of an existing game but try and push the players up a bit and try and get a really fun last-man standing experience' and that’s obviously latched on a lot.
"We do have, within our game, the arena mode where you do play in that format, but I would say that it’s not really player numbers that is the big differentiator between what we’re doing and what these games have done. It’s the level of simulation, the level of fidelity and the amount of information you see and how that affects the tactics used in the game." As for player count, that changes depending on if you're doing solo or team play. "With parties of four we do it as 400, with solo we do it as 100 in the arena—this is more about time constraints, making sure that you’re playing a sensible round.
"We’re doing something that’s progressive I think from the battle royale games that are out there, but that’s not the scope of the game. It’s all about really pushing—in a specific way—MMORPGs forward and yet being a dip-in dip-out shooting experience." The overarching game is very different to a battle royale mode, Thompson says. Nonetheless, some of their proposed additions sound inventive and cool.
It's the detailed world simulation underpinning everything that I'm most curious about. "We think there are a few areas we can improve on a lot through the way our world works, even just if you look at the arena," Thompson says, discussing battle royale games as they currently are. "[Say] you’re walking through some land and you’re leaving trails, you’re displacing the foliage, there’s the wildlife there who react to what you do and that may inform someone else that there’s someone nearby."
I've got a lot of questions about how 'Project X' will work. Without seeing the game in action, it sounds very blue sky, and the most important thing will ultimately be how it feels to play as a tactical shooter. The level of ambition here is off the charts, particularly with the changes to the simulated environment as you play—I'm a little skeptical, but definitely curious. Look out for more news on Automaton's project later in the year.
Yesterday, it emerged one fast-fingered speedrunner had (somehow) bested Divinity: Original Sin 2 in less than 38 minutes. Me? I'm ten hours deep and am still floundering in the game's Fort Joy opening level.
As such, death has become a semi-constant feature of each of my sessions—which is something Hybrid's Paladin Class mod addresses head on.
"I started a cleric playthrough and I thought there were not enough healing abilities/cleric type abilities in the Hydrosophist skill tree," says the mod's creator. "So I decided to make a few of my own, and as suggested by the community I have decided to make this more of a class set of skills.
Here's what Hybrid has come up with so far:
Holy Blaze: Sets Holy Fire to self, and Regeneration—costs 3 AP, and requires 1 in Hydrosophist, and 1 in Warfare.
Righteous Step: Teleport to an enemy and set Clear Minded to self—costs 3 AP, and requires 1 in Warfare, and 1 in Pyrokinetic.
Healing Touch: Heal a target for a large amount, melee range—can be self casted, costs 2 AP, and requires 1 in Hydrosophist.
Holy Leap: Jump to a nearby location, knocking down and setting enemies on fire—costs 2 AP, and requires 2 in Warfare.
Divine Cleansing: Cleanse yourself and enemies around you lighting everyone on fire—costs 2 AP, and requires 2 in Hydrosophist, and 2 in Warfare.
Divine Resusitation: Resurrect target ally at 50% Vitality—costs 6 AP and 2 SP, and requires 4 in Hydrosophist.
Hybrid adds that these skills are incorporated into the Hydrosophist Skills' Treasure List, which have also been added to Zaleskar outside of Fort Joy. Hybrid also hopes to add more skills over time—keep an eye on the mod's page for updates, which is where you'll find installation instructions too.
I always hoped that Assassin's Creed would top the silliness of the 'air assassinate an ocelot' quest at the start of AC4. Assassin's Creed: Origins delivers early when I unleash an adrenaline attack on a hippo's face. In a storm of slashes I bring to bear the martial expertise of a master assassin to take down a swamp animal that, minutes earlier, had been quietly getting on with its day.
It is a high level hippo, though, so the barrage of blade strikes only removes a portion of its health bar and I'm forced to dodge around its teeth to lay into its blubbery flank. At this point a crocodile gets involved so I retreat to use my warrior's bow to blast the animals at range. It fires a spread of arrows like a shotgun. A flashing indicator on the hippo's health bar lets me know that head shots do extra damage.
Game system contrivances have always sat uneasily inside Assassin's Creed's beautiful, authentic worlds. I'm used to futuristic UIs floating in front of dusty snapshots of ancient life, but there is a lot more game in Assassin's Creed: Origins, and more friction between the setting and your moment-to-moment behaviour. We left Assassin's Creed as an action series, now it emerges from its two-year hibernation as an RPG in The Witcher 3 mould, complete with levelling, skill trees, an extensive loot system, and crafting.
These elements have appeared in Assassin's Creed games before, but the way Origins gates your progress, using your level and the quality of your gear, is a fundamental change. Missions have level recommendations, and if you strive too far ahead of your level you will barely be able to damage basic enemies. To move between story missions you need to grind out side quests and kill wildlife to gain crafting components and upgrade your gear.
I spent four hours or so in a northeastern section of Origins' enormous world. Even this fraction of land featured swamps, deserts, villages and temples. The setting is strong enough to compensate for the frequently dreary side quests, and often quite miserable tone. I recovered dead bodies from a swamp, followed an NPC back to her sacked village and murdered the bandits, and killed half a dozen tax collectors for extorting locals. If you preferred the frivolity of Ezio or Kenway, you won't find it here. Life is brutal in Assassin's Creed: Origins. Expect to spend a lot of time helping Egypt's downtrodden citizens.
If you preferred the frivolity of Ezio or Kenway, you won't find it here. Life is brutal in Assassin's Creed: Origins.
There's a good variety of activities, however, and the combat and levelling changes re-energise some of Assassin's Creed's familiar mission formats. Massed enemies at the same level as you actually pose a threat. I infiltrated a bandit camp with much greater caution than I normally would in an AC game, and made more use of the area's aerial routes and environmental hazards—I shot a barrel of oil placed near a brazier and brought a couple of guards to a nasty end.
Your weapon loadout matters a lot in Origins. In previous games weapons represented a suite of autoplay animations that would reward you for correctly pressing the counter button. Origins has moved away from this Arkham-esque combat system to dodge-and-strike system that forces you to account for your chosen weapon's range and speed. You lock on, circle, dodge through attacks, follow up with a few strikes and occasionally break enemy guard with powered-up strong strikes. Strikes charge your adrenaline bar, which you can expend to perform your weapon's special attack. This varies depending on what you have equipped, but tends to take the form of a big powerful attack or a frenzy mode that lets you pummel enemies really quickly.
Combat takes some getting used to. Enemies happily swarm you instead of standing stupidly around you in a circle. Switching lock-ons to target the enemy you want to hit is fussy in a big fight. Also, while dodges are nice and snappy, striking isn't hugely satisfying, especially when you're whittling down the health bar of a stronger enemy. Glancing over the skill tree, I also worry whether combat will be fun from the outset, without access to slick multi-kill moves and overcharged adrenaline techniques.
It may not be as responsive as comparable systems in other games, but combat was such a non-event in older Assassin's Creed games—a prettily animated power trip with no real challenge. I think I prefer this imperfect system that makes enemies and gear matter. After a few hours I developed as suite of favourite weapons and gadgets that meaningfully changed the way I approached missions. The quick-fire bow is a lot of fun, and I felt very pleased with a sword I found in a dungeon at the end of one of the demo's better treasure hunting quests.
Killing hippos and helping peasants offers glimmers of fun, but I love Assassin's Creed when it feels like a historical action movie romp.
My favourite mission in the demo was a traditional assassination staged in a temple complex. Assassin's Creed's parkour traversal seems unchanged, and is as fun as it always was. The addition of a magic eagle that can tag enemies a great way to showcase the sprawling open world from on high, and the UI has been massively refined and decluttered. The sneaking, hiding and hidden blade kills are the same, but the streamlining around it improves your flow through the world. Your horse can even automatically navigate to your custom waypoints now so you can admire the passing scenery without having to dodge villagers.
The assassination reminded me that Assassin's Creed can stage memorable missions with interesting targets. My main worry for Origins—aside from questionable long-term appeal of its combat system in a game that feels like it's going to be absolutely enormous—is that the levelling requirements for missions will dilute the good stuff with busywork. Killing hippos and helping peasants offers glimmers of fun, but I love Assassin's Creed when it feels like a historical action movie romp that guest stars the most famous figures of the era. Helping morose peasants is a great fit for the fatalistic world of The Witcher, but until now Assassin's Creed has been a different breed of fantasy, and I wonder if the tone shift will wrongfoot long term fans.
The story does show promise. Playing as one half of a husband and wife team opens up new storytelling opportunities, and you will get to meet Cleopatra, Caesar and others in your journey around the Nile. Egypt is just gorgeous to explore, and I'll put up with a lot of animal-skinning to see the pyramids and the more built-up areas on the world map. The only other big question concerns optimisation on PC. The game was demoed on Xbox consoles, which gave me a good sense of how Origins plays. We'll have to wait for PC code to find out how it runs.
Fallout: New Vegas could have been a very different game had it not been for console support, so reckons the open-world action RPG's lead world builder Scott Everts.
In conversation with PCGamesN, Everts says game engine restrictions levied by consoles resulted in some neat ideas and features being cut.
"[Fallout: New Vegas] would have been a lot different if it was PC only," Everts tells PCGN. "We had a lot of plans early on. Like, 'Here’s where the water is stored, here’s where the farms are, here’s where the government is centralised'. We had it all planned out—it wasn’t just a bunch of random stuff."
Everts continues, suggesting certain things that did make it into the final release had to be pared down, and that the Mojave Wasteland itself would've looked different in the end—with "more separate zones" and a "big wall around the whole thing."
Everts also reckons the game's oft-criticised performance issues would have been less glaring had the game been PC-only.
"We would have had fewer performance issues," Everts adds rather explicitly. "We did break it up a bit, but from my point of view it was a performance-related game and we had to fix things."
What could have been, I suppose. Ah well, I guess we can instead console ourselves with New Vegas' ever-impressive suite of neat player-made mods.
Abandon Ship held its first public demonstration at this year's PC Gamer Weekender, and has since teased its deadly weather systems and doomsday cults. Now, developer Fireblade Software has shown off how we'll explore its sprawling water world and the perils that lie within.
If you thought the ocean's multi-tendrilled Kraken were the worst of your worries, think again. As the following trailer outlines, the elements in each of Abandon Ship's sectors pose as much of a threat as its horrid sea monsters—with icy biomes and volcano-lined arenas looking particularly awful.
Look, see:
Hemmed in by impassible picture frames, each zone houses a "sea route" that allows players to venture into adjacent areas. These appear in-game as locked gates that can be accessed by ascertaining specific objectives.
My own favourite level shown there is the Foresaken Sea, as it looks as lovely as it does terrifying. Here's Fireblade on that: "If I fight within the proximity of an active volcano, then that is something else I need to contend with in battle. We want you to constantly make interesting and difficult decisions in Abandon Ship, so systems can combine to push you right to the edge. But nothing feels as sweet about snatching victory from the jaws of defeat from the choices you made as captain."
All of that sounds quite brutal, but Fireblade continues to say that ship destruction is not the end—so long as your captain lives, your game continues on.
Abandon Ship is without a hard release for now, however is due at some stage this year.
