In his Pro Evolution Soccer 2018 review last month, Tom Hatfield said this: "There was a time when FIFA was noticeably the better-looking of the duelling football games, but that isn’t true any more, with only PES’s telltale licensing restrictions making the difference apparent."
Konami has now struck up an official partnership with Arsenal which sees the London team and its stadium more accurately recreated in-game.
And when the Fox Engine is used to recreate players with their real life likeness in mind, boy does it look pretty. Here's a still of Héctor Bellerín, Mesut Özil and Alexandre Lacazette as they now appear:
As is the case with Liverpool, Konami uses its "cutting edge 3D scanning systems" in order to capture facial animations and idiosyncratic movesets. In essence, the system is designed to portray the unique quirks and movements each player demonstrates in real life in-game. The partnership also of course means Arsenal gets its real name and not, say, London Red, as well as fully-licensed kits and the Emirates Stadium.
There's an argument to be made that this year's PES offering is finally a football sim worthy of the PC—can you imagine how it'd fare against its fiercest rival if every team was treated to this level of care and attention?
"We are determined to work with the very best clubs football has to offer and are delighted to partner with Arsenal,” says Konami's senior director of brand and business development Jonas Lygaard in a statement. "The relationship we formed last year has gone from strength to strength, most notably when Emirates Stadium played host to the PES LEAGUE World Final. As such, we were keen to work even closer with such a highly regarded club and the new agreement will allow us to perfectly recreate and feature Emirates Stadium, and the club’s many stars, within PES 2018."
PES 2018 is out now, read Tom Hatfield's review in full over here.
If you've wondered where legendary Counter-Strike map Dust2 has been since it left competitive matchmaking in February, here's the answer: Valve has been rejigging it. Following similar revamps, an "updated and refined version" of Dust2 will be available for testing in the next CS:GO beta depot.
Valve has yet to publish anything elaborating on the updates and refinements, though they did tweet out the picture you can see above.
...and that's about all we know at the moment, but if you want an idea of how significant Dust2 has been in the history of CS:GO, Evan spoke to some key CS:GO mapmakers in 2015 about its import. You can see the tweet embedded below.
To mark tomorrow's World Mental Health Day, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice developer Ninja Theory will be donating all proceeds from sales of the game to Rethink, a UK mental health charity.
The announcement came alongside a new video, above, that stitches together screenshots players have taken using Hellblade's photo mode (they look pretty stunning) and quotes sent in by fans, which offer messages of support for the game's attempt to tackle the topic of mental health.
Hellblade's main character, Senua, suffers from psychosis, and its symptoms are central to the game's story and mechanics.
Honestly, it's pretty touching to see the messages players have left the developers, and shows that the game has helped some people deal with issues around mental health.
This year's World Mental Health Day is focused on mental health in the work place: head over to the World Health Organisation's website for more information.
I met the developer's founder Swen Vincke at this year's Gamescom and, with just two weeks to go before launch, he seemed calm. I caught up with him again last week, three weeks following Divinity: Original Sin 2's launch, to see how he feels the game is doing, what he wants from its flourishing mod scene, and what it's got planned into the future.
PC Gamer: How are things at Larian Studios at the moment?
Swen Vincke: Quiet. Most people are on their holidays and [patch 3] is a big one. We're start working on patch four next and slowly people will start returning from their holidays and we're gearing up for our next things.
I presume these were well-deserved holidays.
Absolutely. They gave their everything to make the game as good as they could.
When we met at Gamescom you seemed pretty chilled out for someone who was on the cusp of releasing a game. Were you as calm inside as you appeared outside?
[Laughs] Not really. I actually wasn't planning on being at Gamescom and then a couple of things happened that got me to be there. And then I was there for a day and a half. The madness was at its peak at this point and at that particular time we were focused on bug fixing. Given how large the game is we were trying to get as many players through it as possible.
According to SteamSpy, you sold somewhere in the region of 700,000 sales in less than three weeks.
I think we're over 700,000 now.
That's not bad going.
No, it's not. We could definitely do worse. I mean, we had the early access players before that too. Lifetime total units: 748,000 on Steam, and then you have to add the pre-release ones on there. Wow, that's higher than I thought, that's really good.
Ahead of launch you must have had forecasts. Where were you expecting to be at this stage, or before Christmas—I guess you've surpassed those numbers now?
Yeah, we have. I was hoping for 500k before Christmas, so we're way above that right now which is really good.
Did you have any forecasts in the first month?
No, not really. I figured that if we hit the 500k before Christmas then we were going to be okay. This has been a nice bonus.
Is there ever a point during the development and testing of such a big game where you realise: Hang on, this is really good, this might do better than we expect?
I think any developer will tell you that, first of all, you fall in love with your game. But then the relationship lasts so long that you start focussing on all the negatives. A very classic phenomena means that by the time you're ready to release, the only thing that you're aware of is everything that's still wrong with it.
Then somebody reminds you of how much good stuff is in there. We're busy focusing on: We need to fix this, we need to fix that, this is not good, man we need time to sort this, we need more resources to do that', and that basically dominated the conversation over the course of the last six months. But then there are moments where you're playing and you forget you're hunting for bugs and realise: Actually, this is a lot of fun.
With Divinity: Original Sin 2, this was particularly true. I don't know how many times we redid the beginning of this game. Every time we presented it it was different, and every single time I enjoyed myself. Luckily for us, this seems to have rubbed off on the general gaming audience.
But then there are moments where you're playing and you forget you're hunting for bugs and realise: Actually, this is a lot of fun.
If you had to pinpoint one specific thing over the course of development—what would you say the most challenging thing about making Divinity: Original Sin 2?
Making sure that everything we were doing with the Origin stories meant you could play as both an avatar and a companion, and you still had the main story that all made sense. We had to make sure everything worked together, where all the different permutations made sense to the player. That was very, very hard.
That was the biggest ambition of this one. The previous game was criticised on the story front, rightfully so I think. But part of that was because it was so bloody hard to tell the story in the way that we're doing it—giving the player the freedom that they have, and the ability to kill every single person that you encounter. It's a very hard game to make when you say: Okay, here's a protagonist, oops! You killed him. We still have to tell the story.
One of the game's greatest achievements is its vast amount of voiced dialogue. You said at Gamescom implementing this was a result of shifting its launch date—tell me more about that.
Yeah, it was because the launch date was pushed back and we saw the opportunity to do the voice recordings. It was very clear that people wanted us to voice everything, despite a number of people writing on the community forums that they didn't care about voiceovers. We looked for opportunities to do so, but there was so much voicing to be done that initially it was not going to possible had we stuck to our original release date.
But then when we pushed it back to the end of the summer we thought that it would be possible, providing we could find someone who could be creative enough to do it for us… We did and it was very late in the process, it took a whole lot of effort, but I'm really happy that we did it.
An interesting tidbit of information is that we actually redid the voices at one point. We started recording and eventually realised that the way that we were doing it was not going to work. We were well into recording at this stage and knew that we didn't have too much time. But we knew we had to redo it. The staff deserves every single mention that they get—they did a really awesome job.
Through your Kickstarter and Early Access phase you've had a pretty open development cycle—would be players got regular feedback throughout. With the first Divinity being received so well, did this make dealing with expectation easier or harder?
That's a really good question. Because it puts a lot of pressure on you, that's for sure. But you also can't make diamonds without pressure, right? I think that it's both. It is harder because the moment that the community figures out that they want it and you've said you're going to do it, it's very hard to change course—even if you later discover what you're doing won't work. We did actually change course a few times, but if you explain exactly why you're doing it, most people will listen. You're always going to have some people who don't, but that's just the way it is.
At the same time, things become easier because you instantly know what's wrong. You put it out there and you don't even have to wait a day, you know right away what's wrong. This type of feedback can be very hard to get, unless you have a large community playing. Another thing that's easier with a large community is that there's a large amount of them and can in turn let statistics speak for you.
You may have a very vocal minority screaming how badly something is done, but then you have 95 percent actually enjoy what you've done, so you say: Well, we can certainly say that that feature is okay because so many players are having fun with it. If you didn't do that, and that vocal minority were represented by, say, a couple of developers inside your company, you may wind up going in the completely wrong direction. That's where and why I really like the early access model.
I spent hours in Fort Joy. Someone beat the entire game just under 38 minutes. How is that even possible?
Well, there's a bug [now removed via the game's latest patch]. Other than that we actually put a couple of shortcuts in there for speedrunners. But they can only do it once they've completed the game in the first place. As a side note, because you can kill everybody in the game, we always have to have fallback solutions. This is a spoiler, I guess…
[Warning: slight story spoilers ahead.]
… Okay, I'll tell you anyway and you can decide whether or not you use it. I'll put the responsibility in your hands. There's a city at the end of the game, and the guy there uses Death Fog, which you find at the beginning of the game. Skeletons are immune to Death Fog, which we were well aware of, and it's perfectly possible to kill everyone in that city. If you do so, you can still finish the game because you can talk to all their ghosts. It's one of those fallback solutions.
Having a creature in the game that can bypass the major blockers—such as Death Fog—automatically means that you have a whole bunch of shortcuts, and if you know the fallbacks, you just have to go from fallback to fallback—which is essentially what the [38-minute speedrunner] is doing. Our design approach is going to give you that kind of flexibility. Speedruns aren't good to look at, it spoils the game for you, but it's good to know that it's possible.
Do you do speedruns of your game?I do all the time.
And could you beat 40 minutes?No. Absolutely not. We do speedruns all the time when we want to test that all the critical paths are working in the game. But 40 minutes? I don't think anybody should want to do that. We're not that concerned about racing through the game, we're more interested in the classic narrative experience.
This level of engagement underscores community interest. I checked the game's Steam Workshop page ahead of this interview and found there to be 600+ mods out there already [there are now over 700]. Are you looking forward to seeing what people come up with?
We invited several modders into the office during development so that we could tweak the modding tool together with them. They are the guys that released the soccer mod, and they devised a number of more expansive mods which launched pretty much at release because they had the modding tools. It was really cool to see what they could make in one week. One of the things that we're doing now is to start a whole bunch of tutorial videos and we're expanding all of the tutorials. Hopefully we're going to see some cool shit coming out of that.
For sure you can do a lot of stuff with the engine and they have pretty much everything that we had in our hands when we were making the game. But it takes effort, it's an RPG system so you can't do it too quickly. I'm very curious to see what else they're going to come up with.
Is there anything that didn't make it into the base game that you secretly hope modders add?
What I really hope is that we're going to see adventures appear. Somebody made the noisy crypt, that was one of the guys that came here, he made a 40-minute adventure. I hope we're going to see more and more of those come up because I really want adventures that we can play in co-op where I actually don't know what the story is. That would please me tremendously. But again there's already loads of really cool stuff in there.
What have you enjoyed seeing players messing around with most? Fane's face-ripping is great fun, for example.
For sure, there's a streamer called CohhCarnage who's one of the bigger Twitchers, he played the entire game for 12 or 13 days or so, eight hours a day. And it was amazing to see—how they were figuring things out, things that they were trying to do, the things they were talking about in the chat, it was pretty much on everybody's screens over here.
That's very rewarding, which I think is the cool thing about Twitch whereby people watching can help contribute to how the streamer is playing.
You've mentioned the patch, however what does Larian have planned in the long run for Divinity: Original Sin 2?
We have a couple of things that are in the works but we'll only announce them when we're ready. There's stuff coming, for sure.
To that end: It's early days yet, but I assume the success of number two means we're in line for a Divinity: Original Sin 3, 4 and 5?
[Laughs] We have a couple of surprises planned. But we're going to work on the patch just now, then we're going to work in silence for a little bit so that we can get our shit together and then… yeah, I'm pretty sure there will be at least one big surprise in there.
NES-inspired platformer Shovel Knight is getting a NES-inspired add-on: the three heroes from ultra-hard '90s beat 'em up series Battletoads are leaping into the game.
Rash, Zitz, and Pimple have been exclusive to Xbox One for the past two years but now you can stomp them on PC during three optional boss battles. The green amigos arrive in a free update, and players controlling Shovel Knight can find them in a secret room off the Hall of Champions (hint: go right).
Defeat them one by one in levels that are full of homages to the Battletoads series and you'll be rewarded with some new armour and the chance to befriend the trio.
The update also allows you to bind your mouse buttons to in-game actions (I can't really imagine playing it with a mouse, but there you go), fixes some bugs and improves controller support. The full change log is here.
Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove (the complete edition of the game) is £18.99/$24.99 on Steam, Humble Store, GOG and the Windows Store.
Demetrious Johnson is the UFC's reigning flyweight champion, and is the sport's highest-rated pound-for-pound fighter. Saturday's victory over Ray Borg suggests 31-year-old Johnson has plenty of fight left in him yet.
In his spare time, though, the fighter otherwise known as Mighty Mouse plays a lot of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. He livestreams on Twitch, often before and after fights, and is taking part in Uproar's The Golden Chicken pro tournament this weekend.
Ahead of that, we caught up with Johnson to talk about PUBG, bonding with his Twitch community, and his plans to livestream professionally when he eventually retires from mixed martial arts.
PC Gamer: You're quite a prolific PUBG Twitch streamer nowadays. On the face of it, livestreaming and MMA seem at odds with one another.
Demetrious Johnson: They're definitely different but what they both have in common is that you have to be persistent. You have to be persistent with what you're doing to be successful in anything.
What is it that you enjoy about streaming videogames so much? Honestly, it's interacting with the fans on a different platform. Obviously I've fought for many years, but interacting with fans in mixed martial arts is a little bit different because it's more of a competition. When we talk about videogames, we share the same passion.
When it came to streaming—I've been gaming for a long time, way before I ever started fighting. It's one of my biggest passions. And now I can share that passion with other fans via Twitch, it just makes sense.
Tell me about your relationship with videogames, then, what were your first games and your favourites?
The original Nintendo was the first games system I ever played. 3D World Runner, Snake Rattle 'n' Roll, The Legend of Zelda, The Legend of Zelda 2—those games were always really close to my heart. As I got older, I moved onto the Super Nintendo, and it's my favourite system of all time. A buddy of mine just picked me up a Super Nintendo classic.
And now you play a lot of PUBG.
I do, yes.
Would you say that it's your favourite game at the moment?
Yeah, hands-down, favourite game at the moment. There's so much you can do in the game. Sometimes I just jump around, I wanna run custom games, I want to jump in a car, honk the horn, and then run somebody over.
Maybe I'll battle someone one-on-one to grab an airdrop—I just have so many options and I truly enjoy that. I love having that level of freedom in games, instead of being penned in without choices.
Conor McGregor is a big deal in your field, and is really big here in the UK. Do you think if he played PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds you could beat him at that?
At PUBG? I fucking better be able to! I'd like to think I can, absolutely.
What other games do you most enjoy streaming?
PlayerUnknown's is my favourite one at the moment. But I also love Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite, that's another one I like to stream. Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn - that's a little bit low key, not a lot of my viewers like that game.
But I must say, PUBG is definitely my favourite game at the moment. The fans can interact with it, they enjoy it, and so do I.
In terms of preparation—are there any similarities between getting yourself ready for an MMA fight, and preparing for a livestream?
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. 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.
Dark Souls as a series is amazing. And it's an amazing game to stream. But I don't do any of that speed challenge bullshit, it's just too damn hard and takes too much time.
You're competing in Uproar's Golden Chicken tournament. How are you feeling about that?
Oh, I'm very excited. This is my second competition and obviously 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.
You're ranked as the number one pound-for-pound UFC in the world. Have you got what it takes to become the number one chicken dinner winner in the world?
I don't know, that's a long shot. You've got some really great, really talented guys out there at the moment. You've got guys who're playing these games professionally, eight hours a day. Videogames for me are a release, I wish I could 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.
Image credit: MMA Weekly
Who's the biggest celebrity you've ever played at PUBG?I'd say Rampage Jackson.
And you won I take it?
I won a couple of his games, he won a couple and knocked me out a few times. I won more games overall. I'm too good.
On your Twitch bio you mention that upon retirement from MMA you'd like to pursue videogame livestreaming on a professional basis. Is this still something you're interested in?
Yeah, livestreaming is something I'd love to pick up when I retire. The thing about mixed martial arts is that you can only do it for so long before your body gives out.
If I'm streaming and entertaining, you can do that forever—so long as your mind is clear, your brain is switched on, and you want to entertain. I don't see why not, I can provide some on-air talent, play some games and we can take it from.
I take it you don't plan to retire from MMA any time soon, though.
No, I'm not going to retire soon. When the time comes, if I have teammates that I can help get to this level of professionalism, yeah, I'll stick around and help them. But once I'm done that'll be me.
Total War: Warhammer 2 developer Creative Assembly has opened the doors to the title's Steam Workshop, allowing players to easily mod the excellent strategy game.
Technically, players have been able to mod the game since it released late last month but the Steam Workshop remained closed post-launch because a lot of mods were crashing the game. Creative Assembly has been focusing on getting the game stable, and now it's satisfied that there won't be many performance hiccups.
There's already nearly 600 mods available through the Workshop, which you can browse here. The top rated one so far makes the camera more flexible, allowing you to zoom both closer to your units and further away from the battlefield than you can in the base game. It's got a 'cinematic' mode for screenshots too.
There's also a huge custom map pack that will grow with time alongside new animations, unit re-skins to add variety and graphical tweaks. The modding tools are called the Assembly Kit, and to install them you should search for 'Warhammer II Assembly Kit' in the Tools tab in your Steam library.
If you're a fan of the Total War series, or just strategy games in general, then Warhammer 2 is well worth a look. Click here for Jody's glowing review.
Every week, we ask our panel of PC Gamer writers a question about PC gaming. This week: what's your favourite game soundtrack? We also welcome your answers in the comments.
Evan Lahti: Cuphead
I'll go with the best soundtrack right now, and surely of the year: Cuphead. The ragtime, '30s jazz looks to Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway as big influences, but it's so much more than an attempt to put a period-authentic sound into a game inspired by the animation of that era. Cuphead's music is inseparable in its style and tempo, and the big band/jazz sound enhances the calamity of its boss fights and platforming, where you're meant to feel off-balance and improvise to stay alive.
This great Paste interview with composer Kris Maddigan (who'd never written game music or this style of music before), highlights one unique approach they took to recording, too: "... [I]n most of the big band tunes you'll have some ensemble piece which is written out and then you'll have a section where someone takes a solo and then you'll have another ensemble section, and what we did with all the solo stuff is we recorded all of that separately," Maddigan says in the interview. "Once we had completed all the big band sessions we brought in half a dozen soloists and we recorded them playing over top of a lot of the solo sections on the charts. So that's why you might have one tune but six different versions of it. So each tune, you can have the same tune but it's going to have different solos on it, just to keep things interesting in the game. So if you die at a boss, if you leave and you come back to that tune, it's going to be the same tune but it's going to have somebody else soloing over it. We were conscious of it that way, too, trying to maintain a certain amount of interest on repetition like that."
Obviously the correct answer is a Command & Conquer soundtrack. But which one? Clearly not Tiberian Sun. Its brand of dark, ambient electro is pleasantly late-'90s, but I played that game for tens of hours and I can't remember a single one of its tunes. Red Alert 2 is strong—Grinder is arguably the best bit of menu music in PC gaming. But HM2 is just a touch overproduced, and I'll be damned if I'm calling a soundtrack with the second best version of Hell March my favourite.
It's between the original Command & Conquer and Red Alert then. I have a lot of love for the former, mostly because of how weird and experimental it is. Act On Instinct is a legit good industrial pop song, soundtrack or not. And Just Do It Up is just amazing. Yes. But, if I'm honest with myself, there's something that feels slightly off kilter and embarrassing about it all, sort of like that time in Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine where Trent Reznor—for no particular reason—recited the nursery rhyme “rain, rain, go away” and it felt inherently silly but we all collectively agreed to pretend it didn't happen for 28 years. So: Red Alert, the Broken to Command & Conquer's Pretty Hate Machine. It's full of driving, churning aggression trapped inside a harrowing machine, which is probably a metaphor or something. Also, it's got Hell March, so obviously it's the best.
Jody Macgregor: Bastion
Darren Korb calls the soundtrack for Bastion "acoustic frontier trip-hop", because he's a musician and they say things like that. It's a mix of folksy guitar, sampled beats, and instruments from all over the world that sounds unique to its fantasy setting. It's excellent enough on its own, but even better in context.
You're exploring and rebuilding fragments of a broken city, and one of the vocal tracks, Zia's Song, has an entire level built around it. You walk across rusted train tracks, cross wooden beams connecting floating islands, and as you do the music gets louder. Vocalist Ashley Barrett's singing gets clearer too, cutting through the reverb. And then you realize why—this isn't just a soundtrack you the player are listening to. It's being sung by another survivor, a lament both sad and hopeful, and at the level's end you meet its singer.
Bastion's music isn't just good stuff to listen to while you smack monsters with a hammer or shoot them with a bombard cannon. It's a part of the game that matters to its characters the way great music matters to us, that allows them to remember their past and look forward to a better future even while their world's in ruins. The soundtrack is available at Bandcamp.
Wes Fenlon: Neotokyo
Here's a bit of an odd one: Ed Harrison's soundtrack for Neotokyo, a years-old multiplayer shooter mod for Half-Life 2. It's not that the music is odd—it's just a slightly strange pick for me, because I've never actually played Neotokyo. I once went hunting for moody electronic music that evoked cyberpunk, and I came across Neotokyo. It's the more menacing alternative to Deus Ex's peppier score, and for years one of my go-to soundtracks to write to. I could put it on, lean back into it, and enter a cyberpunk trance.
You can listen to it for free on Bandcamp, and I especially like disc one of the double album. It all blends together for me—I can't call out any particular tracks—but if cyberpunk to you is more ominous than Vangelis, you won't be disappointed.
Austin Wood: Nier: Automata
I love Nier: Automata's soundtrack for its quaking, operatic ancientness, but I'm highlighting it here because, like the game itself, it gets better with age. Automata's layered endings gain poignancy with each subsequent play through, and the music piles on verve in kind. Composer Keeichi Okabe did a fabulous job of not only keeping pace with Automata's replay value and preventing the music from getting repetitive, but also leveraging that design with a truly dynamic OST. On top of orchestral and vocal variants, there are low, medium and high intensity versions of most tracks—which add up to roughly six hours of music altogether. There are some real bangers tucked away in the song list, and the way versions build on each other is a tidy echo of Automata's central themes.
Andy Chalk: Machinarium
The one soundtrack I always seem to come back to is Machinarium, by Czech artist Tomáš Dvořák, also known as Floex. All of Amanita's games are beautifully musical, but this is the one that that's stuck with me. A lot of it is mechanically percussive, and some of the songs are really upbeat—the Robot Band Tune comes to mind—but what I particularly enjoy is the distant dreaminess of the ambient electronica in tracks like The Glass House With Butterfly or By the Wall. Wonderful game, wonderful music.
MMO soundtracks are massive, messy beasts meant to accompany an entire world's worth of themes and flavors. But Final Fantasy XIV's soundtrack deftly explores new sounds and styles while still feeling true to Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu's original work. There's a stunning breadth of genres on display, but each becomes a piece of a mosaic that colours in the wider world of Eorzea. And like the best Final Fantasy scores, each composition becomes a part of the area it accompanies. I love the quiet, comforting piano that plays as I walk the streets of Ul'Dah at night.
One other aspect that deserves being recognized is how incredible the boss fight music is. It turns every raid fight into a WWE match, where the boss steps into the area accompanied by a theme that becomes inextricably linked with their persona. That music sets the tone and makes each raid fight feel climactic. Again, there's an amazing breadth of musical flavor on display, from the raging tempest of guitars that accompanies Garuda to the rousing and catchy Lakshmi theme.
Samuel Roberts: Silent Hill 2
If I had to pick a single entry from Konami's once-great series, it'd be Silent Hill 2. Akira Yamaoka's score is somehow extremely chilled out despite being the soundtrack for one of the best horror games ever made. The highlight is probably The Theme of Laura, as embedded above, but there are tons more great instrumental tracks that make for perfect working music. Heaven's Night, for example, or Restless Dreams.
The series has fantastic music across the board, particularly the title tracks. A special shoutout for the grunge-infused and deeply mid-'00s Cradle of Forest from Silent Hill 4: The Room, which is a personal favourite, and obviously You're Not Here from Silent Hill 3. I saw Yamaoka and his band play a bunch of these live two years ago, and it was an amazing experience.
My only gripe: Konami appears to have pulled Silent Hill 2's soundtrack from iTunes in the UK (you can still get it in the US), so even though I've bought Theme of Laura to listen to on my phone, I can no longer redownload it because they stopped listing the album, which is...shit. Ah, the digital future. The music's amazing, though.
What's your favourite game soundtrack? Let us know in the comments.
Football Manager 2018 is almost upon us, bringing with it a new graphics engine and a handful of new features. Perhaps the most interesting of the latter is 'Dynamics'—a system that lets you manage the inner workings of the dressing room, which can in turn affect your performance on the pitch.
As explained in the following video, Dynamics in-game applies to three main areas: Team Cohesion, Dressing Room Atmosphere, and Managerial Support. Within, you'll manage a hierarchy of players that are ordered by influence, and a number of social groupings that considers age, length of time at the club, nationality, and results on the pitch, among a host of other variables.
Most interestingly, failing to keep influential players onside could result in the team turning against you, while paying too much deference to top players could result in fringe players losing faith. On the face of it, the Dynamics system sounds really interesting and could act as a story generator beyond the standard FM formula.
Here's Sports Interactive with all the above and more in greater detail:
Football Manager 2018 is due November 10, 2017. More information can be found on the game's official site.
Studio founder Swen Vincke reckons D:OS 2 will grow further still in the coming months, with promise of "at least one big surprise" into the future.
"What I really hope is that we're going to see adventures appear," says Vincke when asked what he'd like to see from the game's thriving modding community. Pre-release, Larian invited a number of prevalent modders of the previous game into its office to craft new mods for its latest. They were given a week, so says Vincke, and came up with some pretty neat creations.
"Somebody made the Noisy Crypt, that was one of the guys that came here, he made a 40-minute adventure," Vincke continues. "I hope we're going to see more and more of those come up because I really want adventures that we can play in co-op where I actually don't know what the story is. That would please me tremendously. But again there's already loads of really cool stuff in there. We have a couple of things that are in the works but we'll only announce them when we're ready. There's stuff coming, for sure."
Given the success Divinity: Original Sin 2 has enjoyed so far, I ask Vincke what's next for the series. It's early days yet, but might we expect a Divinity: Original Sin 3, 4, or 5?
"[Laughs] We have a couple of surprises planned," replies Vincke. "But we're going to work on the patch just now, then we're going to work in silence for a little bit so that we can get our shit together and then… yeah, I'm pretty sure there will be at least one big surprise in there."
Check out Fraser's review of Divinity: Original Sin 2 in this direction.
