Tacoma is a marvellous piece of interactive fiction set onboard an abandoned space station. You play a mercenary on a mission to download important data from the vessel, but as the data slowly streams onto your neat futuristic hard drive you're free to wander the corridors and examine augmented reality recordings of the final days of the crew. We gave it a score of 84 in our Tacoma review, 

We recently caught up with Fullbright's Steve Gaynor to discuss launch, how the core AR recordings mechanic was developed, the changing state of the indie market, and the studio's future.

PC Gamer: Obviously Gone Home was massively successful for you, critically and commercially. There was always going to be a big element of expectation on you guys because you set the bar so high. It’s a different game, similar in the sense of non-combat, exploration and all that kind of stuff, but specifically compared to Gone Home, how has Tacoma been received critically and commercially? 

Steve Gaynor: Well I think it’s like you said, we only have one data point to compare it to. I think there were a lot of things about Gone Home’s launch that were kind of 'lightning in a bottle'. 2013 I think was a very different time for smaller indie games coming out that were kind of reaching into the triple-A fidelity space. Also I think that we were lucky to be responding to what I think was a real desire for more games that were less violent or more focused on story or whatever. And so yeah, Tacoma’s release I think has been a much more realistic version of what launching a game is usually like. 

It hasn’t been a massive runaway explosion in the way that Gone Home was. It was a successful game and got a lot of attention but on top of that it was just the four of us making a game in our basement, so now we’re actually a company as well so the stakes are different and everything. 

It’s been a very different experience between the two games, but I think that we're part of this landscape where there’s so much good stuff to play. Like, I am behind on my backlog of just stuff that's come out in 2017 and I guess I have an excuse because I was shipping a game for a lot of it, but everybody’s busy, right? I feel like I don’t know anybody who isn’t, "Oh yeah, that came out too and I still haven’t gotten around to this". I think that we’re part of a changing landscape where people play more stuff more slowly, like over time. [Tacoma's] had a really positive response from people who have gotten to play it so far, and hopefully that means it continues to do well on a different timescale than if we’d been in the landscape of three or four years ago.  

Isolation is a consistent theme across both games. Why do you think you and Fullbright are so drawn to isolation? Is it a design thing or is it a personal thing? What is it about creating isolation in games which can be so powerful?

Steve Gaynor: That’s a good question. I think that making being alone engaging, or having this isolated character being a compelling experience, is one thing that games can be uniquely good at, you know? When you try to think of other media especially, like film or television or something, there isn’t a lot of media that really focuses on someone being by themselves completely. I think that’s because it’s hard to express and make compelling in a lot of media, and games are really about the player’s individual experience. 

As at any small studio, but definitely with Fullbright, we need to do a lot with a little and being able to choose like “OK, our version of that is just you and the environment, and how can we explore every aspect of what you can do with that in a way that hopefully feels really full and complete and not kind of surface level but really making the most of the few elements that are there. It’s hopefully something that also plays to the strengths of, yeah a small studio to make an engaging experience without having to blow it out into a huge triple-A production.

How did the 3D AR recording system develop? 

When we first started working on the game, we had the AR character recordings, but they were much more isolated and they were much smaller scale and you could do less with them. They were really much more of visual audio diaries, and we’ve seen those in a lot of games where you sort of walk in and a hologram appears and it says some stuff and you watch it and then move on, and we got that into the game.

As we started looking at it, seeing what we were doing with it, it really pushed us to make it a lot bigger and more complex and have the player be more directly involved, and led to the version of how we use them that you saw in the game, which is like—okay, this isn’t just like you come in and you click and you stand there and watch this animation and this character telling you something, you have to kind of think more broadly about the space you’re in and the scene that you’re in and what the timeline means in comparison to where all the different characters are. 

That meant that we really did have to change our production approach and consider how we were building these things, because once we arrived at that idea of all the characters are moving around you in this one big scene that exists in one area of the game, we had to change how we were writing those scenes and record with that in mind, and then build the fast forward and rewind system. 

But for us, I think that if we’re going to expand our scope in a game that we’re making, we think of that “do as much as you can with as few elements as possible” thing; if we’re going to invest in something by expanding it or increasing its feature set then focusing on something like Z-Recordings that give you access to moments in these characters’ lives, that’s the kind of thing that makes sense to say “Let’s build on that”. Let’s make that have as much to it as possible. 

And again it’s probably not fair to compare Gone Home and Tacoma but given it was so successful and it was you guys’ breakout hit it’s inevitably going to happen. I’m a big fan of Gone Home myself, but Tacoma for me is a better game. What do you think, do you think it’s a better game or is it fair to compare the two? 

Well, that’s the thing that’s been really interesting, you were talking about reception earlier and I mean Gone Home definitely in aggregate reviewed better than Tacoma. On some level I feel like it kind of doesn’t matter if Tacoma or Gone Home is a better game, depending on how you conceptualise that. So I guess what I would say is I think Tacoma is more interesting and has more going on in the mechanical gameplay space. You’re managing more things and I’m proud of the job that we were able to do of making what I think is a relatively complex way of thinking about these AR scenes pretty intuitive. We never really tutorialise it, we just kind of put the fast forward/rewind UI on screen and people just kind of get it.

I think is really good but I think the flipside of it is that Gone Home I think connected with more people on a more visceral, emotional level of personal identification. I think that it really is this big open question of what makes something a better game, you know? Is it the construction of it, or how well designed, or how well considered different elements of it are, or is it just the feeling that people walk away from the game with? 

I think that Gone Home isn’t a worse game, I think maybe it’s a simpler game. I think it has much less to it in a lot of ways but maybe that’s a strength, honestly.

You mentioned the landscape that Gone Home entered into in 2013, how do you think Tacoma would have fared entering into that landscape if Gone Home wasn’t there and Tacoma was your first game? 

I would think and I would hope that it would have done well. I also think that it’s a very strange place to come from to be making a follow up to something that is well known and was well received and to some degree I think has developed some amount of a cache or status around it in the intervening years, because it just means that Tacoma in a lot of ways couldn’t be judged on its own, you know? 

There was no review that didn’t start with talking about Gone Home for a while, and then talking about Tacoma. It’s a sort of unknowable mental exercise to be able to be like 'I wonder if someone just totally encountered this thing blind, how their feeling would be' versus 'I remember when I played Gone Home, so let me have that be my starting point and then start thinking about this thing.' 

That’s something that I think is actually more true of some players compared to journalists. There’s probably more people who are just running into Tacoma either for its first time or they’ve heard of Gone Home but not played it, or they played it but it was a while ago. It’s a very strange place to be, kind of like you were saying, to say 'what would people have thought of this if it didn’t have a precedent before it?' Well that means if it theoretically came out in a different year or under different circumstances, and that’s impossible to really judge but it’s certainly... it’s very much a factor, you know?

The term “indie” has changed quite drastically since Gone Home came out, do you think that the indie market at the moment is saturated?

Well, that’s hard to say. I think that’s there’s definitely much more in the market now, I don’t know that saturation is necessarily how I would think about it. There’s a lot more out there which means a lot more people can have their interests served by different titles. But it also means that fewer indie titles are going to be 'the thing' that literally everyone’s buying.  At some point, that means that the tide shifts and more people that are trying to release games are doing poorly than well—though that’s always true! 

If you look at the total number of games released on Steam or whatever, it’s gone up an enormous amount but I think also the number of good games that you might actually want to play has gone up a lot as well! I think that “market saturation” is certainly a bit extreme, but I also feel like we are at that point where for any given person who’s paying very much attention, there’s too much to play, so how do you become one of the things that people actually might believe in and put their valuable time into? The equation is, I think, way different. 

You’ve commented on Robert Yang’s blog on the past on social media, and one of his blog entries praised Tacoma but also touched upon its failings and I don’t necessarily agree with this myself but one of the things he raised was the fact that Tacoma has faceless characters that identified to players with colour and voice and things like that. Do you think that’s a fair criticism, that some players find it  difficult to relate to Tacoma’s cast because they’re faceless?

I’m not going to argue against anyone’s personal take on something like that, I think yeah if any given player feels like 'yeah, I couldn’t connect' for this that or the other reason, I think that’s totally valid. It’s a balancing act, right? I think there are people who are going to find Gone Home not to be engaging because it’s just 'well, nothing happens' or 'I never see this character, I only ever hear about them from others in this game.' I think in Tacoma, it’s definitely a different equation in terms of there are characters there, but they’re abstracted and simplified. I hope that our ability to project how we imagine the characters to be, our interpretation of those moments onto the characters, is more powerful than what would we could have put on screen as a team, even as a large scale, high-budget team.  

I think that there is the ability that players have to hear a voice and see body language and put themselves in that space. We have those abilities to see how that would be in our own head, hopefully in a way that, like reading a book, that bridges that gap in a way that’s unique to each of us as we’re playing.

What is the future for Fullbright, what’s the next big project? I know you might not know exactly or be able to tell me, but has Tacoma’s reception altered your outlook or are you guys looking to the future once the dust has settled on Tacoma? 

Yeah, I think that as a studio you always have to take it one step at a time. We definitely are not a studio where we have already started pre-production on our next thing or anything like that, we’re a single project studio. There’s a lot of post-release support that you end up doing, as far as patches and all that kind of stuff. Also when you’ve been working on a game for three years, you need to take the time afterwards to get some distance and not necessarily just dive straight back into production. 

We’re working on some stuff internally and keeping people busy, but only as busy as we need to be. We’re kind of trying to take the time we need to consider what the next thing that we want to do really is as opposed to diving in. There is definitely some danger, or can be some danger, to making big decisions too quickly after you’ve done something like shipped a game that you’ve been working on for a long time.

I was reading about The Chinese Room recently, and they’re taking a step back from game development at the minute. Dan Pinchbeck spoke about Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, and he said that they stumbled upon the “Walking Simulator” for want of a less hackneyed term, and he insinuated he doesn’t necessarily want to be pigeon-holed into making games like that for the rest of his life. Are you worried about being typecast as the “walking sim developers” or do you think doing a “procedurally generated roguelike” or whatever is within your scope? 

I think and I hope  that we will continue making things that we feel excited about and that fit what we’re good at and what we’re interested in, and I don’t know if that will mean that it’s always a first person game or—like you’re saying—a game that’s about isolation or about discovering characters in an environment or whatever. Maybe yeah, maybe not.   

I think that what’s more important to us is what our team is invested in. I hope that if we make something that in and of itself is cool and exciting and that we believe in that there will be an audience for it. I don’t know how close to what we’ve done already that means we will do in the future. But I think that we do, that it is on us to surprise the audience and do stuff that, even if it feels close to or similar to or drawn from what we’ve done before, it also feels like its own new version of it.

Update: Before the Storm's second episode is out now, and it seems to no longer be shackled to Denuvo, the unpopular anti-tamper software. Square Enix uses Denuvo in a lot of the games it publishes, including Before the Storm. Until now. It only took a day for took a day for another Denuvo-protected game, Shadow of War, to be cracked, so it doesn't look like it's been doing much good. 

Original story: The second and penultimate episode in Deck Nine’s Life is Strange prequel, Before the Storm, is due out next week, the new trailer has revealed. Titled A Brave New World, it will launch on October 19. So you’ve got less than a week to emotionally prepare yourself. 

In the trailer, we see Chloe continuing to struggle with her family, especially her soon-to-be stepdad, David, and meet Frank, the deadbeat dealer who Max has run ins with in the first series. We already know that she’s hurtling down an unfortunate path, and Frank’s a big part of that.

Even from the brief bit of footage, we can see Chloe turning into the girl who Max reconnects with in the first episode of season one.  

“As Chloe and Rachel’s family life continues to crumble, their friendship blossoms and the two girls discuss running away together,” Square Enix summarises. “But before they can go, Chloe gets involved with an errand for Frank Bowers which puts her in a dangerous situation and exposes an uglier side to Arcadia Bay.”

There are a few ways to earn Mirian fast in Shadow of War. Check out the handy video guide above, created by our friends at GamesRadar. It explains the five easiest ways to earn Mirian in the game, none of which are too tricky to do, plus it offers tips on timings to get the most out of your orc army.

The pointers here include selling loot, tracking down orcs who are guaranteed to drop decent amounts of Mirian, sending your orcs to do battle and more. As you get deeper into the campaign, this guide should help you gather all the resources you need to progress. 

If you're right at the start of the game, though, be sure to check out our separate beginner's tips to Shadow of War. 

Now that The Evil Within 2 has launched, you may have already started your journey to save Sebastian’s daughter and fight lots of horrible things that give you life-long nightmares. If you’ve yet to begin your nightmarish adventure, however, then Tango Gameworks' explanation of the game’s difficulty levels might help start you off on the right foot. 

The Evil Within has four difficulty levels: casual, survival, nightmare and classic. You’ll be able to change your mind and pick a lower difficulty while playing, but you won’t be able to pick a higher one if that ends up being too easy, so it pays to know exactly what the differences are. 

Casual difficulty is for people who mostly just want to experience the story. Items are plentiful, enemies can be killed easily, there’s aim assist if you want it and the Bottle Break ability is unlocked straight away, ensuring that you can escape grabs if you’ve got a bottle in your inventory. 

On survival difficulty, enemies are more numerous, and resources are fewer so you probably won’t always have enough ammo, for instance, to take them all out. A slow and steady approach is what Tango Gameworks recommends, and you’ll need to keep an eye on your inventory to make sure you don’t run out of important resources. Aim assist is available in this mode as well. 

In the first game, nightmare difficulty was for more experienced players who had already fought their way through the game. In The Evil Within 2, it’s unlocked right from the start and, in terms of challenge, sits somewhere between the last game’s survival and nightmare modes. It’s meant to be tricky, then, but still viable for your first playthrough. Ammunition is very rare, crafting is absolutely necessary, items in general are scarce and enemies are tougher. Aim assist is also not available. “It’ll be rough, but it’ll be tense,” says the developer. 

Finally, there’s classic mode. You’ll need to finish the game to unlock this mode, and while it’s similar to nightmare, it does come with some additional obstacles. There are no autosaves, for instance, and only a limited number of saves. You’ll get 7 chances to save throughout the game, and that’s your lot. Also, you won’t be able to upgrade Sebastian or your weapons at any point. Sounds awful! 

At least you’ll get some extra assistance based on the difficulty level you picked the first time around. Finishing the game nets you new weapons and more crafting supplies for your New Game + run. 

The Evil Within 2 is out now on Steam and the Humble Store for £39.99/$59.99. 

Over the course of a decade, Riot Games has grown into a huge studio with 20 offices around the world and over 2,500 employees, all built around a single game: League of Legends. But that could be set to change, with Riot co-founders Brandon “Ryze” Beck and Marc “Tryndamere” Merrill stepping away from the management side of things, and back to making games.

“This growth has lots of benefits: our capabilities improved, our reach broadened, and we could deliver League of Legends and esports to more players than ever before,” the announcement post reads. “But this growth also meant that the majority of our time is allocated to “managing” the company rather than focusing on creating incredible experiences for players, which is what we really love to do.”

So to get back to that, the pair are leaving company operations to Dylan Jadeja, Scott Gelb and Nicolo Laurent, while they return to designing games. They want to “finally put the ‘s’ in Riot Games”. 

While Riot’s focused on League of Legends for 11 years, that’s given the studio years of experience at making something that’s part strategy, part RPG, competitive and co-operative. It’s not hard to imagine lots of other types of games that could benefit from that experience. 

Last year, Riot also acquired Radiant Entertainment. At the time, the studio was working on Stonehearth, which continues, and a fighting game, Rising Thunder. That was Capcom alumnus Seth Killian’s baby, and unfortunately development ceased after the acquisition. It’s not clear if Radiant will be involved in whatever Merrill and Beck are going to be working on next, but if it is, we might see another fighting game come out of it, and it would certainly be nice to see the tech developed for Rising Thunder be put to good use.

Hello, ye nobility of the Forgotten Realms. Did you notice that Lords of Waterdeep released on Steam in September? It's a great board game, and I'm happy to finally have it on PC with solo, hot seat, and online play—it's something we don't have a lot of: an abstracted, heavily-stylized and thematic game that we in the board game world call a European-style strategy game, or Eurogame.

In 2012, Lords of Waterdeep was the newest hotness in board gaming. It was also pretty unexpected. It’s a Eurogame from an American company in an iconically American brand—Dungeons & Dragons’ Forgotten Realms. It’s that weird contrast that makes Lords of Waterdeep good, actually. Where most Eurogames are about niche genres like farming or building medieval castles, Waterdeep has the broader appeal and engaging flavor of fantasy politics, dark elf skullduggery, and dungeon-delving adventure.

Fundamentally, Lords of Waterdeep is a worker placement game. As a lord of Waterdeep, you gather adventurers to send them on quests vital to the fate of your fantasy realm and/or to enrich yourself. You do this by selecting one of a set of limited actions each round. Once someone selects an action space nobody else can use it until the next round. Selecting spaces gets you resources like fighters or wizards or money, and you use those resources to complete quests. It’s a tactical-strategic blend that’s a lot of fun because it stretches your ability to plan ahead by forcing you to account for what other players have done before and after you. Some turns you’ll set up for the future, but others you’ll scramble to make the cleverest move available. Also, you have a secret objective. Try to fulfill that for the sweet bonus points.

On PC, once you understand how it plays, you can zoom through a game in half an hour by yourself while playing against the rather competent bots. That’s a pretty good improvement compared to an hour or two on tabletop.

It is simple and fast compared to most games like it. I use it as an introduction to worker placement games pretty often, but it’s also good enough that I’m happy to play it with a crew of experienced gamers. One of Lords of Waterdeep’s greatest strengths is that despite its strategy it’s a relatively relaxed game experience. You can happily hold a conversation with friends while playing the game because you don’t have to do much when it’s not your turn. Some disparage it as “multiplayer solitaire”—and there’s something to that critique—but it’s that space which lets it flourish as a fun social experience. 

The laconic space between your turns lets you chat, ask how someone’s day was, and creatively curse at them about the tavern full of Warriors they just stole out from underneath you. If you or your gaming buddies enjoyed Armello or Gremlins Inc, you might like to spend some time with Lords of Waterdeep and a Discord voice channel. It’s an experience where you can casually trash talk your friends, domesticate some owlbears, raid a wizard’s dungeon, and proclaim yourself the richest noble in the city of splendors.

The only real downside to the PC version is that it’s a slightly rejiggered port of the tablet version from a few years back. Blowing up a tablet interface has made the whole game look cluttered. It’s not ideal—especially when on a PC there’s enough screen real estate that one could have done away with some space-saving tablet restrictions like only seeing one opponent’s status at a time. The upside is that Lords of Waterdeep’s tablet version was really good, so the overall user experience feels average rather than subpar, like many tablet ports. In the end it’s something I was willing to overlook in exchange for having Waterdeep on PC, where I’m much more likely to spend hours and hours playing it than on the cramped real estate of a tablet.

Oh, and the Skullport expansion is way better than the Undermountain expansion, if you’re wondering. Glad I could clear that up for you.

Amid the divisive loot box trend, PC players have been finding their own way to deal, foremost in Middle-earth: Shadow of War. By using Cheat Engine scripts to give themselves unlimited Mirian, some players have found it's possible to buy a infinite supply of loot and war chests, drowning themselves in uruks and gear. In the NeoGAF thread that tipped us off, members are going back and forth on the ethics of the exploit, and sharing methods for pulling it off. 

To be clear, Miriam is not the premium currency that requires real money to purchase, and the silver tier of chests do not reward legendary uruks or gear—those are saved for crates you need to buy with Gold, the premium currency. But you can still accrue a formidable army and enough powerful gear to take on Shadow of War's greatest challenges with ease. 

[Update: We've been told that silver war and loot chests can reward legendary items and uruks. They're just not guaranteed like the higher tiers, which means with enough persistence, the silver tier exploit can entirely supplant any need for the higher tier, premium boxes.]

The cheat is made possible using third-party tools like Cheat Engine to manipulate the game files, a common practice until the advent of online-everythings and microtransations. It's an especially strange cheat since the ability to give yourself infinite uruk friends and gear makes the presence of premium loot boxes in a single-player game stand out as totally unnecessary. They're there to make money. That's no surprise, but the exploit diminishes the value proposition of the premium crates, which are already a questionable addition.

But is changing the value of a free in-game currency using cheats to earn unlimited digital items wrong if it shares the same market and item pool with the premium currency and loot? Is it theft, or is it up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A?

With microtransactions effectively tripling the value of the game industry in recent years, I wouldn't be surprised to see publishers take action against such exploits, even if cheat codes and digging through game files are an ages old hobbyist tradition. 

We don't condone altering game files without first considering the effects it could have on your save files and any possible legal repercussions. To get clarification on the latter point, we've reached out to WB and will update if we get a response.

I've been attending EVE Vegas for three years now, and I can't remember a time players were more optimistic about the changes CCP is making to the nearly 15-year-old MMO. Last year, the Citadels expansion introduced a major (and contentious) shakeup to how EVE's players build their kingdoms and wage war. The upcoming Lifeblood expansion is due out on October 24, but CCP also gave us a glimpse of what's to come in December and early 2018. The proposed changes we saw have made this starfaring community very excited again.

As CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson said during his presentation, "EVE is growing again." Despite years of declining numbers, EVE Online seems to be finding a new rhythm that works and its concurrent players are up 18 percent over last year. That growth can be largely attributed to EVE Online's new free-to-play option, which lets players explore space with a limited number of available ships and skills. As I already wrote, that program is likely going to be expanding dramatically come December as free-to-play players are given access to battleships and battlecruisers—the backbone of a lot of EVE's warfare.

But let's look at what's coming at the end of October when Lifeblood launches. For a detailed look at Lifeblood, you can check out EVE Updates, which also details smaller additions like new skins and ship remodels. But here are the biggest changes coming to EVE in October and beyond. 

He who controls the moon goo 

Perhaps the biggest feature in Lifeblood is a shakeup to the central industry that fuels EVE Online's massive player-driven alliances. Colloquially referred to as 'moon goo,' this bundle of different resource types is passively harvested from moons using deployable starbases which, with the release of Citadels last year, will become obsolete. The current system is one of the oldest in EVE Online, dating back to its early years. It's so hopelessly esoteric and complex that it's not worth explaining. Trust me.

The new system, however, turns passive moon mining into a scheduled group activity that entire corporations can work together on. Think of it like a World of Warcraft raid night, except everyone is getting drunk and shooting rocks (or each other). In Lifeblood, two new structures called refineries are being introduced. These operate in a similar manner to EVE's Citadels—the Death Star-esque space ports that players can now build and deploy to help defend their space. The big difference is that refineries are industrial facilities where resources can be processed into valuable materials and moons can be mined. 

Aside from generic mineral processing, refineries can be deployed near minable moons and fitted with a special module that will, periodically, blast a massive chunk out the moon's surface. That chunk is then extracted to the refinery and exploded to create a nearby asteroid belt that the refinery's owners can then harvest for moon goo.

What's excellent about this new system is that it becomes a conflict driver. Alliances will need to carefully coordinate when to detonate the moon chunk so that they have enough bodies to help with the mining operation. Likewise, combat pilots will need to be on alert in case a rival alliance decides to attack during the mining operation. It weaves mining, one of EVE's most boring activities, into a system that can lead to epic fights as others try to disrupt your corporation's industry. Players can also choose how often these operations happen and that dictates the size of the asteroid belt. If a bigger corporation only does it once a month, they'll need a lot of helping hands to mine every asteroid, but smaller corps can detonate the chunk weekly, making it more manageable for only a few players.

It's an exciting change for many of EVE's corporations because moon mining is also being introduced to hi-sec and wormhole space as well, giving everyone access to a powerful form of industry. It's such a major change that the audience virtually exploded with glee when it was announced.

Resource Wars 

Aside from mining, another boring aspect of EVE's PvE content is missions. These highly repeatable quests are a grind to slog through and don't offer much in the way of challenging combat scenarios anywhere on par with the thrill of fighting a human pilot. For years CCP has been trying to change that by investing in smarter, more human-like AI, like the Bloodraider Shipyards it introduced earlier this year. Resource Wars is the next evolution of that AI, but delivered in a much more accessible way so even brand new players can participate.

In a sense, Resource Wars are like EVE's take on modern MMO dungeons. The NPC empires of EVE are opening up their top secret asteroid fields to player pilots in order to fend off invasions by NPC pirate factions. Players can form a fleet and enter these sites either as soldiers or as miners, and each will have specific objectives they have to complete.

Miners will have to mine ore and deliver it to nearby haulers to be shipped off. Meanwhile, combat pilots will have to protect them from invading bands of NPC pirates. CCP says Resource Wars are designed to be a short-session co-op experience, and it's aimed squarely at getting new players into a more dynamic form of PVE than mission running or normal mining (which is boring as hell to do alone and in the relative safety of high-security space).

Perhaps the best thing about it, however, is that it'll finally make mission running a more social experience—which is what makes EVE awesome and is always lacking in its PVE content. Hi-sec miners and soldiers will have good reasons to coordinate and work together to survive Resource Wars sites.

Pirate invasions 

A less structured form of PVE coming in Lifeblood is Forward Operating Bases, where two pirate factions will begin randomly invading high-security systems and setting up starbases and raiding the local populace. The bases themselves are hidden, but you'll know there is one nearby as roaming fleets of pirates will begin mining nearby asteroid belts or attacking players randomly—even if they're sitting in space AFK.

Players can thwart the invasion by using combat probes to scan down the Forward Operating Base and launching an offensive. The bases are designed to handle between 10-50 players, and, like the Bloodraider Shipyards, advanced enemy AI will field fleets designed to dynamically counter the ships you bring to the fight. For new players too intimidated to jump into one of the many null-sec player empires and experience full-scale fleet combat, this is a fantastic (and relatively safe) introduction to what EVE is all about.

This is an ongoing evolution of EVE Online's NPC pilots behaving more like actual players. CCP has warned that pirates will even shoot at vulnerable player-owned structures in high-security space, so pilots will need to be a lot more vigilant in defending their turf when pirates have set up a FOB.

A major overhaul to Citadels 

When the Citadels expansion was first announced, its slogan was "Build your dreams, wreck their dreams." But EVE players quickly realized the whole wrecking part of that equation was boring as hell. The Citadels are too easy to build and way to hard to destroy. It's resulted in a rather stagnant year for EVE as alliances have struggled to find the motivation to kick down their enemies' sandcastles. Right now, thousands of small Astrohaus Citadels are scattered across the systems of New Eden, many abandoned but still standing because everyone is too lazy to blow them up.

But CCP has listened. During the EVE Vegas presentation, they announced a series of sweeping changes that had the crowd cheering with excitement. These changes won't happen until early next year, but arguably represent the most important shift to happen in EVE Online since Citadels were introduced. Essentially, if a Citadel is not actively defended by players, it'll be much easier to destroy.

Looking closer, Citadels will soon be vulnerable to attack 24/7. When their shields are hit with enough damage, they'll enter a reinforced invulnerability mode. The owner of the Citadel selects a time when the shield comes out of its reinforced mode, typically when they'll have the most pilots online to help defend it. After the shield is reinforced, it becomes vulnerable again during that selected time period between 24 and 48 hours later. This is where the second phase of the battle begins to destroy the Citadel's armor and remaining shields.

Once the armor is destroyed, the Citadel again enters a reinforcement period that ends after a certain number of days depending on what zone of space it is in (seven days for hi-sec, three days for null and low-sec, and one day for wormhole space). However, one important change is that this second reinforcement period only kicks in if the Citadel has service modules equipped that use fuel (which means it's actively used by players). If not, the station is deemed abandoned and players can destroy it without the pain of waiting up to a week. Abandoned Citadels will also have less damage resistances too.

The fight to destroy these Citadels between two active forces is also getting a lot more exciting. Citadel void bombs that deplete enemy ships' capacitors (think of them like an EMP blast that disables electronics) are being removed entirely. This allows attacking fleets to fit a much greater variety of ships instead of focusing on ones that aren't reliant on capacitor energy. Replacing void bombs will be a whole host of new doomsday weapons, tech 2 variants of Citadel guns and new defensive modules. Put simply: Attacking and defending Citadels will be a lot more interesting.

For casual and non-EVE players, these changes might seem way too granular to really matter, but the implications are huge. Wars in EVE Online are about to get a lot more explosive. Naturally the players are extremely happy about this. Along with the changes to the free-to-play program coming in December, the next year of EVE Online looks promising for veterans, new players, and those who just like reading about it. 

Apart from stealth games that allow for non-lethal attacks, unconsciousness is a bit of a rarity in games. And in Fallout 4, NPCs basically have two states: alive or dead. But sometimes you just want to knock someone out, especially while using fists or a non-lethal weapon. Thankfully, the Knockout Framework mod is here to sing Fallout 4's NPCs a violent yet soothing lullaby.

With the mod installed, you'll be able to knock out just about any NPC or creature in the game using your fists or gun-bashing. It's not an instant KO: the mod just determines when an NPC is about to be killed by a non-lethal weapon, and instead it renders them unconscious.

An unconscious NPC will remain in that state for a while (you can customize how long in the mod menu's options), and when you interact with their body you'll have some new options. You can choose to wake the unconscious person up, useful since your companions can now be knocked out during combat. Best of all, not only can you completely loot a knocked-out NPC as if they were dead, but you can also kidnap them and take them somewhere else.

Enjoyably, kidnapping an unconscious NPC places an enormous duffel bag on your character's back:

"Nothing to see here. Just carrying a giant sack around like a normal person who doesn't pummel people unconscious and then kidnap them. There's not a body in there or anything. It's just... my extra socks."

You can, naturally, remove the kidnap victim from the bag using your Pip-Boy at whatever location you've taken them to. Wake them up, dump them off a bridge, leave them looted and confused somewhere... just use your imagination.

The mod's author, Seb263, also has a companion mod, Non-Lethal Armory, that changes the behavior of a number of weapons. It's not required to make Knockout Framework function, but it'll give you more options for beating NPCs unconscious. The mod makes weapons like the tire iron, rolling pin, pool cue, baseball bat, baton, and several others non-lethal, allowing you to knock NPCs out with them. (And by the way, you can now be knocked out too, though NPCs can't kidnap you.)

You'll find Knockout Framework on Nexus Mods.

Today, something a bit different is coming to Digital Extremes’ multiplayer action romp, Warframe. The Plains of Eidolon expansion is, for the first time, introducing an open-world area, the titular plains. It’s about nine square kilometers in size, and is full of secret caves, enemy camps and new missions. 

Along with this large new area, expect new gear, a new warframe, and a brand new mission type that will see you making some fancy weaponry. And you can’t have an open world without some relaxing diversions, so of course there’s fishing, and if you prefer to crack rocks instead of catching fish, there’s always mining. 

It would be a good idea to get all the mini-games finished before night falls, however. During the day there are threats, certainly, but night is when the massive Eidolon appears. It’s a huge beast that’s woken up to search for something “mysterious and dangerous” and you’ll probably need to put together a team if you have any hope of hunting it down. 

Here’s a 20 minute developer walkthrough to whet your appetite. 

The Plains of Eidolon launches today on Steam, and it’s free.