Back in 2017, Gearbox's Randy Pitchford got on stage during an Unreal Engine 4 presentation to show what, hypothetically, a new game that happened to look a lot like Borderlands would look like running on that shiny new engine. A game like, say, Borderlands 3, which hasn't been announced but almost surely exists. It's been five years now since Gearbox made Borderlands 2, and three years since the Pre-Sequel mostly followed the same playbook, with more Handsome Jack and more playable Claptrap. That's long enough for us to reflect on what we want from Borderlands 3, and we're ready for another round of sarcastic looting and shooting.

Here's where we want to see Gearbox take Borderlands next.

Actually, less Claptrap period, please. Borderlands' little robot mascot was always a bit grating, intentionally so, but over the course of three games became a bit of an Urkel: that obnoxious minor character who somehow gets so popular they show up more and more and before you know it Reginald VelJohnson can't even find a moment's peace in his own house. Claptrap is like that, but for our ears while we're playing Borderlands.

Less is more. Borderlands 3 could do with some fresh characters, so let Claptrap run a shop somewhere we can talk to him once every 10 hours or so.

Okay, this is a big ask, cause just about nobody does guns like Bungie does guns. But Borderlands has always been a shooter where the feeling of pulling the trigger and killing an enemy was fine, but not amazing. The fun comes from the wild variety of weapons and their outlandish effects, like an SMG that fires 43 lightning bullets a second, or a grenade launcher that fires grenades that explode into yet more grenades and blanket an entire area. The effects of the weapons were fun, and so were combining them with abilities that upped your crit damage or sent you into a melee-killing god rage.

But how much better would Borderlands' procedurally generated arsenal of wacky guns be if the feedback and punch of each gun was as satisfying as it is in Bungie's Destiny 2? Or in 2016's Doom? Or Tripwire's Killing Floor 2? Those are lofty goals to aspire to, especially with procedurally generated weapons, but Gearbox has a big opportunity to buff up the fundamentals of its trigger-pulling, bullet-firing animations and physics. Make each weapon archetype feel incredibly good to shoot, and then figure out how the random modifiers would tweak those sensations. Make Borderlands 3 a shooter we'd want to play even without all the lootin'.

The best payoff in loot-dumping RPGs is to find loot that actually matters. In Borderlands 2, it was possible to make some ridiculous builds (remember when literally every shotgun pellet was counted in damage multipliers?) that took down endgame bosses in seconds. We’re not asking for a buggy, easily exploitable stat system—we just want loot stacks that actually get better the more you play. Don’t scale the challenge and suck out the expressive traits of classes and weapons like Destiny 2.

Channel those wack-ass late-late game witch doctor Diablo 2 builds where molten frogs and jars of spiders cloud the screen, pulling loot from corpses like water from a loaded sponge. Hell, how about a gun that shoots loot?

Borderlands’ sturdiest leg was its co-op play. Without a buddy or two to lean on, the massive empty worlds felt far more massive and empty, and the more challenging combat encounters felt too onenote without other players to synergize with. But even with friends, the only time close cooperation was required was during the endgame boss encounters and those synergies played out similarly every single time—you just had to play your damn class. With full-blown raids, the rest of Borderlands’ mechanics could get put to the test in areas designed for a specific amount of players.

Imagine big dungeons that match (or surpass) the sophistication of Destiny 2’s first-person platforming ballets and phantom-realm symbol memorization, but with Borderlands much more diverse classes, skill trees, and weapon types. I can’t wait to hate my friends all over again. 

Look, Pandora's great. It shows that the Sanford And Son aesthetic works well in almost any environment—be it deserts crawling with skags or decrepit hamlets ripped out of Dungeons & Dragons. But after three games, piles of DLC, and Tales From the Borderlands, it's time to move on. A new Borderlands would do well to set its unique brand of shoot-and-loot on another planet entirely, or for that matter, on multiple planets. It's a big galaxy out there, and letting us explore it would not only give us a welcome change of scenery, but also let Gearbox experiment with different physics and elemental loot.

Planet hopping could be an especially cool twist, making your ship home base along the lines of a 3D Starbound. However Gearbox chooses to handle a new setting, it should feel free to detach itself from the history it's built up on Pandora. We're ready for entirely new adventures.

Since Borderlands, similar shooter/RPGs like Destiny and Warframe have placed a huge emphasis on character customization, because they know RPG players love to look fashionable. Borderlands 2 had some light customization options, but didn't go nearly far enough. Borderlands is best enjoyed in its cooperative mode, and extensive customization would allow players to distinguish themselves from their party.

We'd like to see more options besides swappable heads and color variations for outfits—instead, let's have entirely different costumes for each character. Just imagine, for instance, how much better Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep would have been if you were allowed to put on a robe and a wizard hat.

You know the drill: You encounter an enemy in either Borderlands, and then they go nuts, either rushing you with makeshift axes or pelting you with bullets while they saunter from right to left. In time, the only thing that makes non-boss fights different from one another is how many bullets to takes before the baddies fall over. That's not going to cut it for the next game.

Enemies need to be more responsive and less bullet spongy, and more varied in their behavior. We're not asking for tactical geniuses, here, but the occasional flanking maneuver wouldn't hurt. Make playspaces arenas that enemies will intelligently navigate, rather than rushing at us like maniacs over and over again. Just because the enemies are psychos doesn't mean they have to be idiots.

The Borderlands games are definitely built for co-op, and they're a blast that way, but that ends up meaning some sections are almost trivial with a full group, and maddeningly tough solo, depending on your class. Better scaling for number of players could help smooth things over. Going further, we'd love to see more nuanced difficulty in Borderlands for New Game+, which is a crucial part of the Borderlands experience. Most of the time, that New Game+ difficulty just means enemies have much larger health pools. Give them new attacks, bring out surprise new enemy types, shake things up. 

Smoothing out the difficulty curve for various player numbers is important, but so is keeping that difficulty interesting for the entire run.

Customizing premade characters would be cool, but we wouldn't mind seeing Borderlands lean into its RPG side even more and let us completely design our own characters from scratch. Let's be honest—we're not playing Borderlands for the story, even though Borderlands 2 did have some fun twists and turns. But the point is, we don't need to play predefined characters. Let us create our own and fully customize their looks and playstyles.

A broader, more open-ended skill tree for a range of character classes would be a huge task to balance, but would make us more attached to our characters and make Borderlands even more replayable than it already is.

What's the most heartbreaking moment in Borderlands? You'd think it's the death of a major character, but it's not. It's tossing aside your legendary Fashionable Volcano with a 44.5 percent chance to ignite because you had to make room in your 27-slot backpack for some new specimen of badassery. Borderlands 2 remedied that problem a bit when it released a patch for new slots (among other things) back in April of 2013, but even then it seemed like a sin to toss aside legendaries that couldn't fit.

While we're at it: Gearbox, give us a place to display some of that cool loot that we may have outgrown but we're still proud of. It works for Skyrim, and there's no reason why it can't work on Pandora.

The Red Solstice is a sci-fi, squad-based survival game in which a squad of four space marines cleans house in a Martian colony installation that's been overrun by alien horrors from the fifth dimension. (Or someplace like it, anyway.) It has a beefy single-player campaign and a co-op mode for up to eight players, with randomized missions and events set across six large maps. It is also free on the Humble Store, as part of the Humble Winter Sale, for the next two days. 

Head to the Red Solstice listing on the Humble Store, click the "add to cart" button, and then proceed to the checkout. If all has gone well, you will see a blue "Get it for free!" button on the checkout page, so what you want to do next is click on that. An email will be sent your way containing the remaining instructions, or if you're in a hurry you can just hit the "preview your email" button. Either way, you'll end up with a Steam key that can be redeemed directly through the Humble site, or manually copied-and-pasted into Steam if that's your thing. 

Released in 2015, The Red Solstice is the predecessor to last year's Solstice Chronicles: MIA, a more action-oriented twin-stick tactical shooter that came out last year. There aren't a lot of players so putting together an eight-man squad might be tough, but it did pretty well for itself critically and has "mostly positive" user reviews on Steam. It's also free, which is a pretty solid selling feature. You've got until 10 am PT/1 pm ET on January 17 to grab it. 

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The train drops me off in Tynewich. It's raining, like always. As the train leaves I cross the tracks immediately rather than exploring on this side, a superstitious act I repeat every mission because it worked one time. 

It works again and I find my target quickly. He wears the distinctive red of a drug supplier carrying a new substance called HYPE. There's a police officer walking in the same direction, so I casually trail both. We pass ugly council houses and the visibility circle around me pulses in and out like a heartbeat, growing larger every time I step from a pool of shadow into the light of a streetlamp.

Finally the target and the police officer separate. I follow the red man until a particularly dark shadow shrinks the visibility circle around me to almost nothing, at which point I opportunistically whip out my pistol and shoot him. The police officer immediately rounds the corner, having not gone nearly as far as I hoped. I sprint back toward the train, hoping for one of those moments where it arrives just after I cross the tracks, cutting off my pursuers. It does not, and there are now three of them on my tail.

This is Walking Heavy, a top-down game of stealth and assassination set in grimy gangster Britain, in which you're a hitman brought out of retirement to clean up the streets (although you can also raise a bit of money on the side buying and selling drugs). It's the creation of solo developer Gregory Oldham, who released it on Steam last year to the kind of quiet response that greets so many indie games. I asked him about why he made Walking Heavy, and how he feels about it the two years he spent on it. 

PC Gamer: So many of the best stealth games have been first-person or had tight views that limit what you can see. What inspired you to make a stealth game with a godlike top-down perspective?

Gregory Oldham: I’m an architect by profession, so any kind of orthographic projection is my gig, I particularly appreciate the simplicity and beauty of isometric graphics in videogames as I grew up playing The Sims, Age of Empires 2, Command & Conquer, et cetera on PC, so isometric graphics are what I know and love.

As Walking Heavy started life as a real-time isometric crime strategy game (I was thinking Gangsters: Organised Crime 2, but based in a contemporary UK) I never thought of it as a stealth shooter until much further on in the development when I was forced to abandon a lot of the grander ideas I’d had for the game in favor of actually finishing the project.

That’s how I landed on this combination, and once I started to add the mechanics which allowed it to become a stealth game (shadows, the visibility circle, et cetera) I started to like what I was seeing. 

I appreciate the stealth circle, the way it pulses as you pass through streetlights and shadows. It seems more visually appealing than, say, giving vision cones to the cops. Where did you get that idea? Did you try alternatives?

I knew that visibility cones would be ugly with potentially so many police on screen at any one time, so I was looking for a ‘catch-all’ type solution. First I didn’t have any visual cue in place for how visible you were, the idea was that you would eventually get used to the visibility distances—but I soon realized this would be far from ideal. So I decided to try physically representing the variable which dictated visibility distances as a circle with variable radius as a debug feature, and I liked how it looked so it became a permanent feature.

It feels like a very focused game, all about recreating one experience. You walk up to someone, shoot them, leave. This one set of actions repeated with relatively little variation. Obviously most games can be boiled down to one repeated sequence, but Walking Heavy feels pre-boiled, like the summary of the core is almost the whole. What is it about this experience that appeals to you?

I originally had so much more planned for Walking Heavy. My original train of thought was an open-ended criminal sandbox based in the UK, however as just one guy developing the game after work and on free weekends I had to scale it back massively to stand a chance of finishing the project.

So after a while I started to envisage something which still embodied sandbox, open world and RPG elements—but would play out like a casual/arcade-style experience, where the player repeats one process over and over on increasingly different levels whilst earning more money to purchase better guns and equipment to adapt the way you play.

With the online leaderboards and purchasable weapons/gadgets the idea is that players will be incentivized to keep playing to unlock new items and dominate the top spot on the leaderboard (currently Level 103, held by one of my work colleagues!).

This said I haven’t abandoned everything I had in store for the game originally, I’ve simply got it to a point where it was ready for release—I’m still working on new content and plan on adding much more to the game—the next update will feature new building types and rooftop access.

It's focused but there are extra modes like Rampage. Is that one specifically inspired by the old-school GTA games?

The title of rampage mode is indeed a homage to GTA, and I guess the gameplay is too! I put rampage mode in as a departure from the stealth gameplay of the main career which punishes players for going loco, instead rewarding players for their ability to mow down hordes of pixelated police-men, and providing a chance to earn more cash to spend in career mode. The idea is that the two modes are polar-opposite in gameplay style, but are closely linked as you will need to play career mode to buy better weapons for rampage, and rampage can provide some extra financial support to afford the weapons. 

The dialogue reminds me of GTA London, but also of Guy Ritchie movies, of English gangster stories in general. What made you choose that setting?

I chose to set Walking Heavy in England quite simply because that’s where I’m from (Manchester) and I really wanted to make something which could capture the feel of grimy British council estates, bathed in orange argon street lighting and swept by torrential rain showers. I was also able to have fun with the level names, creating an English town name generator from a list of prefixes and suffixes (although this occasionally gives some interesting place names).

The dialogue became a side-effect of this decision. I had a laugh writing it and took the piss a bit. Anyone who knows their English street slang will see all sort of dialect from Cockney to Scouse thrown in, so where in the UK the fictional city is supposed to be, I’m not even sure myself.

Basing the game in the UK also influenced the decision to give the majority of police tasers as most of our police don’t carry guns. I feel like this works in favor of the game as it allowed me to introduce different types of enemy so there is a difference between the main police carrying tasers who deploy swarm tactics, and the rarer armed police who can take you out from a distance. 

I keep getting tased by cops around corners I didn't realize were there. Why do you hate me, Greg?

Two words: Infra-Red Goggles. If you can save up the ten grand price tag they’ll solve all of your problems.

The soundtrack's very atmospheric. How did you track down a composer, and what did you request?

I originally threw a load of tracks by Burial in as placeholders—I wanted a soundtrack which would capture the grit and brutality of the urban environments being created in the game. Eventually a friend put me in touch with a friend of his who makes his own electronic music, VHSX (check out his Soundcloud), we had a chat about what I wanted to achieve and he fired across a few tracks he’d already created and they were ideal. 

You've been making Walking Heavy for two years. Has it been anything like you expected?

Not at all, I decided to learn game making because I just wanted to learn computer coding as a bit of a side project, I didn’t intend at the time to create a finished game and release it on Steam. But I found the process of creating the game so rewarding and addictive that it ended up snowballing into what it is now.

The process wasn’t easy though, I came up against serious optimization issues and basically had to re-invent the way I was doing things, which meant restarting the project a total of five times before I got it right. Even now I reckon there’s plenty of code I could do with streamlining. If I hadn’t been enjoying making the game so much it would have been shelved after attempt two or three for sure.

How was the launch? Are you satisfied with Walking Heavy's reception?

My launch was at best mediocre, I was so busy trying to juggle my day job and finish the game that my marketing strategy was pretty lackluster. I created a website, set up all the social media accounts and posted a few bits but never managed to make a success of it. In the end I decided I’m not a marketing whizz, nor did I have a budget to pay a marketing whizz to do the job for me, so I just crossed my fingers and hit release.

As such the download figures have been pretty low, but of those who have played I’ve received positive feedback, so I can’t complain about that.

How much of the game is in the demo? Do you think it's been worth making one?

The demo lets you play the first five levels. The idea is to hopefully draw a player in enough to get them to spend £3.99 on the full version, or not if they decide they don’t like it. The demo was very little extra work on top of the finished game and I feel it’s only fair to let people try before they buy. 

What are you working on now?

More content for Walking Heavy. Whilst the game isn’t officially an alpha release I still feel like there is much more I can add. I hope to release a few more updates before moving onto another project. Currently I’m adding more building sprites to add some visual variety to each level—some of these buildings will also give you rooftop access, allowing you to snipe targets from afar and over the tops of other buildings. Hopefully this release will drop in the next couple of weeks.

The idea is to keep adding elements which enrich the gaming experience. I’m hoping to eventually add vehicles, more side tasks and better AI aimed at giving the different targets randomly generated routines to assist with their assassinations.

Do you have advice for new players?

I’d recommend putting a skill point or two into your connections stat early on, you don’t want to find yourself without ammo and searching for the one ammo supplier on the entire level.

Whilst all of the stats have benefits, speed and marksmanship are probably the most rewarding places to put a lot of your points—marksmanship in particular if you want to start dabbling with longer-range weaponry like the M4 and sniper rifle.

Finally I’d recommend investing in a silencer early on, it’ll save you a lot of grief from the police.

Walking Heavy is available on Steam.

Back in November, RimWorld mastermind Tynan Sylvester declared the colony sim as in its "final stretch" of development. Now, the creator has confirmed Ludeon Studios is working towards version 1.0, and is "furiously refining the hell out of this thing" along the way.

That's according to this Reddit post, wherein Sylvester explains at length why implementing every player-made suggestion is unfeasible. Here, he also explores some of what Ludeon is currently working on ahead of full release. 

The game's interface is in the process of being heavily redesigned, says Sylvester, as is balance measures for caravans. A new watermill power generator and accompanying underwater power cables allow rivers to be "meaningfully playable", while mod loading has been improved substantially. 

The economy for trading animals has also been redesigned, as have the animals themselves. "I reworked the doctor AI so they'll prioritize tending people differently," adds Sylvester, "and not go to get food while someone's bleeding to death."

Sylvester's thoughts can be read in full here, where he also considers how long he's likely to grow RimWorld in the face of an "endless treadmill of requests."  

After listing the above and more, he continues: "That's just some random stuff off the top of my head. We made hundreds of other changes wrought by watching dozens of hours of play videos and reading thousand of suggestions. There are so many things to refine in a game like this; it's almost unbelievable! Still working on it. Oh yeah, the most critical change of them all: Sheriff backstory is no longer ridiculously awful."

Browse the rest of our RimWorld coverage in this direction.  

Sim Settlements is so good it should be an official part of the game, said Chris following the launch of kinggath's Fallout 4 settlers mod last year. It went on to win our Best Mod of 2017 and has since received an equally-impressive 'Rise of the Commonwealth' expansion. 

Now, IDEK's Logistics Station aims to "simplify [the] logistical concerns" of settlement maintenance, by creating an Industrial plot that automates supply lines and improves inter-settlement resource sharing. 

"Settlement networking sucks," says the mod's creator IDontEvenKnow. "Supply lines are annoying to set up, and even more annoying to redefine as you unlock more settlements. The standard system that shares food and water between settlements is just as happy to feed your settlers corn as it is your cache of Mirelurk Queen steaks. Collecting the surplus food, water and tax money that your settlements produce is tedious.

"To alleviate this, I created this mod. With Sim Settlements, your settlers are happy to build their own towns—why shouldn't they manage their own logistical needs as well?"

In practice, players assign settlers to each settlement's Logistics Station, who are in turn automatically assigned a caravan route to their nearest settlement. As your network grows, the mod lets your supply lines maintain efficient routes without additional input—and your supply lines will automatically arrange themselves to "produce a minimum spanning tree."That looks something like this:

Logistics Stations also redistributes resources in a more efficient manner against standard supply lines, which in turn is designed to maintain settler happiness. More information on that, as well how the mod handles storage and resource auto-collection, can be found via the mod's Nexus Mods page. 

For more on Fallout 4's Sim Settlements mod itself, check out Chris' words here. 

Let's face it, when it comes to collectible card games, most of us can only take so much ladder before generating enough salt to season every McMeal in America. Having some sort of PvE option helps, because losing to the computer is never quite as frustrating, and playing without the pressure of a turn timer, or some asshole emoting at you, makes for a refreshing break. Hearthstone's wildly popular Dungeon Run mode, and to a lesser degree the lethal puzzles in The Elder Scrolls: Legends, prove that PvE is increasingly core to what makes a good digital CCG.

That must be what the makers of The Lord of the Rings Living Card Game are banking on, because it dispenses with PvP entirely. Due in Early Access on Steam soon, it's based on an existing, and award-winning, physical card game from Fantasy Flight Games. The PC version, which is being published by Asmodee Digital, looks to replicate everything that fans liked about the physical experience, while leveraging the design space afforded by digital. Or in other words: It can do cool stuff with the cards that wouldn't be practical in real life. 

Here's how the game works: It's split into a series of narrative campaigns, each containing five or more quests across different locations, which you must lead your team of heroes through. The card game is officially licensed from the books, so the expected characters are all here, and operate much as expected. Arwen is fragile but can administer a heal during each upkeep phase, while Gimli is purely combat focused.

All decks contain 30 cards and three heroes. Interestingly, damage and buffs—heroes can have up to three 'attachments'—remains persistent on characters between Quests, as do the cards in your hand. That makes for an interesting risk/reward dynamic during encounters. Do you try to end the battle as fast as possible, or do you try to draw more cards and get your team in good shape for the next battle. To prevent you from completely farming the AI, over time the 'threat level' of your party will gradually increase, and if it reaches 50 Sauron automatically wins. So, sorry control players, you can't just noodle around forever.

You can absolutely play a control style, though, as well as midrange, aggro and other deck archetypes familiar from most CCGs. Cards are divided by colour—green, purple, red and blue—each of which has its own thematic personality. For instance, purple represents leadership, which I'm told equates to mostly midrange cards. During my demo I only got to see one deck, so can't comment on what the class diversity is going to be like, but I did like the sound of how they're planning to distribute additional cards and campaigns.

Whilst in Early Access there will be a founders pack to get your collection started, but once the game goes into full release it will be free-to-play and there will be monthly expansions with new quests and heroes. Playing the game will earn you valor points which can then be spent on valor cards. These can't be bought with money, and you also can't get dupes of valor cards once you own two copies (ie the maximum you can include in your deck). 

You will be able to buy hero packs with real money, but the contents of these are guaranteed—each includes a hero card and others that synergise with it. Taking the RNG out of spending feels like something that could interest quite a lot of CCG fans. All of that will only matter, though, if the base game is entertaining. From what I saw, The Lord of the Rings is a fairly standard mix of minion trading and resource management. You're always up against Sauron, and the sly bastard often begins with stuff in play.

Some of the keywords on cards did stand out as noteworthy: Creatures with 'Pursuit' will follow you into the next encounter unless killed, so need to be prioritised before you move on. In addition to attack and defence stats, friendly characters also have a willpower number, which is used to complete quests. These are represented by cards on the board which need to be defeated (but using your willpower stat, rather than the attack one) in order to activate a certain condition. This could result in ending the battle and moving to one of multiple new areas, or returning resources (ie cards) which Sauron has seized.

It's also worth talking about how you play cards in the first place. Each turn you receive three resources to spend (more if you're on the easier difficulty setting), and if you don't use them these carry over to the next turn. Again, that adds scope for planning out your moves across multiple turns. Maybe you take a little extra damage now in exchange for being able to play Gandalf, who comes with a predictably powerful effect, a turn earlier.

It'll require proper playtesting to determine how much depth this ultimately equates to, but apparently the physical game is notoriously hard and so you shouldn't expect to simply blitz the AI. I actually think the most fun way to play is going to be in co-op. Here the second player's forces appear above Sauron, and both of you get your own deck and set of heroes to manage. The opposing forces scale up accordingly to counter being double-teamed.

Lookswise, The Lord of the Rings is surprisingly pretty given the studio making it is just five months old. I imagine it helps that they already have all the art from the physical game to draw on. You can't expect the florid animations of Hearthstone at its best, but at first glance this looks to be a polished experience. I'll definitely be diving in to spend more time with Aragorn and chums once Early Access goes live. Right now I would say the biggest question mark will be over how compulsive building a collection feels without the threat of real players to overcome. Still, a little less sodium in my bloodstream has to be good news.

The last we heard from Chucklefish regarding Stardew Valley's forthcoming multiplayer mode was that they were "pushing that beta back to Q1 2018 in order to make room for polish and QA." Today, the game's creator 'ConcernedApe' tweeted out a single screenshot, showing a four-player LAN game in progress.

There are a couple of interesting things about that screenshot. The first is the two houses side by side, one of which is made of stone unlike the regular wooden cabins. Looks like we'll be able to be neighbors with our friends. The other new thing is the flamingo right there in the middle of the crops, which is presumably a new kind of scarecrow. That's not much in the way of new additions to go on but we'll take anything we can get.

In a subsequent tweet ConcernedApe confirmed that work on the new single-player content he's adding to the game (including the long-awaited profession-respec) has been completed, and he's now "shifted all my attention to getting multiplayer ready!"

In the meantime, if you can't wait to get farming with your friends, here's our guide to using the unofficial 'Makeshift Multiplayer' mod.

The patch note is an underappreciated art form. Among the dry details of damage buffs and bug fixes are occasionally brilliant puns or revelatory details about the absurd complexity of videogames. Dwarf Fortress is the undisputed king of unintentionally hilarious updates ("Cleaned up the bear situation"), but we've also written about some of the all-time greats from Ark: Survival Evolved, Rust, and World of Warcraft.

Absurdity is always with us, though, and the good gods know we've needed every laugh we could find in 2017. To find the very best ones, I dove through the 2017 community updates and patch notes from all kinds of games. Deep, open-world survival games are always good for a laugh. After all, they model systems like pooping and sleeping, and a mention of "shitting the bed" is already 90 percent of a joke.

H1Z1

12/13

• Blood effects have been changed back to the classic mist effect. 

12/7

• Toxic Cargo Pants have been updated to be more consistent 

11/15 

• Shooting from a passenger seat should no longer result in hitting a teammate in the backseat. 

8/29 

• Old rocks have been removed and replaced with new, varied rock formations.
• Players should no longer fall out of their parachute. 

7 Days to Die

via reddit user u/nettech09

10/26 

• Some general improvements to zombie jumping
• Fixed: Snakes are fireproof

8/31

• Fixed: Businessman Zombie when killed can have his head dislocated when he falls backwards 
• Fixed: Vultures can fly underwater
• Fixed: Bears and wolves walk on water 

8/04

• Fixed: Wrong open sound on eviscerated remains
• Fixed: Dysentery description does not mention that it is lethal 

6/06

• Added: Moldy Bread is a science crafting item
• Changed: Fat zombie cops are bigger
• Changed: Zombie soldiers are less generous with the rocket launchers
• Fixed: Breaking down a car on the sloped road will create a hole in the world 

Oxygen Not Included

10/5

• Stress vomiting Duplicants infected with Hypothermia should no longer vomit "Hypothermia germs" 

8/31

• Fixed a crash that could occur if a Duplicant died while using a wash basin 

3/02

• Algae distillery has a much longer conversion interval
• Duplicants no longer use the massage table during red alert 

Ylands

12/9

• Horse is no longer perceived as a threat when sleeping 

Medieval Engineers

via reddit user u/zacrynix

12/12

• Fixed a crash when you walk on the exact north pole. 

11/28

• The Janitor will now clean up any static grids in the center of the planet. 

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

via reddit user u/beerye 

12/27  

• Fixed the issue where the falling speed meter text was showing abnormally in Portuguese 

12/11

• Fixed the issue where player's footstep sound was silenced when player moved diagonally or wore particular shoes 

12/8

• Fixed the issue where while vaulting in FPP, player could look inside own body 

Lone Echo

8/30 

• Repeatedly punching the dummies will no longer result in a crash. Swing away. 

Prey

via reddit user u/everypostepic 

8/2

• Fixed crash when mimicking bass guitar in the Yellow Tulip.
• Player can no longer bypass ceiling collision by mantling GLOO. 
• If the player manages to fully GLOO the greater mimic while it is in mid-lunge toward the player's face, the facegrab animation will no longer play and trap the player. 

5/31

• Superfruit no longer appears shrunken and flat when fully grown.

As I slogged deeper and deeper into the year, dozens of tabs open across three monitors and a laptop, I started to get a little delirious. It was in this moment that I fell in love with the long-suffering community managers and blog writers who compile patch notes. These poor people cry out for help with little quips, "just to see if anyone is still reading this." My friends: I see you, and I love you. 

Astroneer

12/18

• Fixed a few other instances of Client players getting stuck in a wheelie while driving a Rover in Multiplayer games. 

10/12

• Fixed an issue where Rovers would fly into space when loading a save from a rover seat 

9/15

• Fixed a rare crash, that according to engineers was “super weird, and something that should never occur,” involving the game trying to access non-existent Rover wheels.
• Fixed an issue where items would go on a beautiful journey into space if not collected from an dead Astroneer before a second death occurs. 

Hitman

via reddit user u/newbzoors 

7/13

• We've fixed an issue that could cause the toilet in the Marrakesh school to behave erratically after 47 kicks it onto Zaydan. This could occasionally result in 47's death. Seriously. 

Total War: Warhammer

via reddit user u/flavahbeast 

10/25

• FIXED an issue with the AI proposing peace right after entering a war with the player
• FIXED a staircase in Lothern Siege battle map which would cause chariots to spontaneously combust
• FIXED CA Cinematics Team’s obsession with slaying High Elves. May require further testing…
• FIXED Spearmen unit in Tor Elithis Rogue army T-Posing
• Skavenslaves: more salt added to diet; now 25% more delicious 

8/9

• Under-Morking no longer automatically leads to over-Gorking, and vice-versa. The waxing or waning of Morrslieb may affect this. Or it may not. 

The Nemesis System first turned up in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor. Defeated Orc heroes could return in future missions to shout insults and seek revenge. They had strengths, weaknesses, and defined personalities. Some were cowardly and sneaky, some were huge, brawny brawlers. It's a great system that generates great stories, and more game series should steal it. But which games would benefit from the system most? The PC Gamer team has a few ideas...

Chris Livingston: Cities: Skylines

I'd love something like the Nemesis system in a game like Cities: Skylines, where an unhappy citizen (I always have many, many unhappy citizens) could stand out a bit. Since you already get citizen complaints on Chirper (Skylines' version of Twitter) it would be cool if one citizen would really step things up if he was unhappy with garbage collection problems or that fact that his home was waste-deep in sewage and corpses. They could stage protests, wave angry little signs, write petitions, refuse to pay taxes, maybe even attempt to oust you from office. Bulldoze his house and maybe he'll return after buying a skyscraper or taking over one of your town's biggest businesses. I tend to get obsessed with NPCs as it is, so it would be nice if one of them would get obsessed with me from time to time.

James Davenport: Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag

Because I'm an idiot and chief of all Moby Dick fan-fiction, I'm thinking a whaling sim set in the Dick Universe that uses something like Black Flag's sailing tech would be a fin-tastic use case for the nemesis system. First, you spec out your mad captain, pinning down their particular fears and origins, from which Nemesis Whales™ will be generated to harass them during the workday. I have no idea what you'll do between whaling ventures, but in combat scenarios, I imagine something like Shadow of the Colossus encounters, but with a Mass Effect party system in which you can stop time and switch characters to queue up specific attacks. Queequeg might be in a smaller boat circling the big bugger with handheld harpoons, while the Ahab archetype stands behind the wheel and issues dodging or ramming commands for the Pequod. 

Whales will resemble the colossi in that they'll come in all species and sizes—everything from porpoise to those big blue ones I've come to fear—and they'll require unique tactics to take down. Also, the name generation system will combine short adjectives indicating size with simple nouns. Tremble in fear, for Great Forearm swimmeth.

Jarred Walton: Fallout

The Nemesis System is such a great tool, and it generates some awesome stories, so it's difficult to imagine a game where it wouldn't improve it in some fashion. Imagine dropping it into just about any true RPG world and the results would be glorious. Fallout with Nemesis could end up with battles against raiders that actually mean more than yet another generic shootout. You go into a city where the raiders have been happily picking off passersby for years, wipe them out, and discover one of them lived and now holds a grudge against you and your settlements. Or what if one of the thousands of ants, radscorpions, or bloatflies was to come back with his friends? Even better, a deathclaw nemesis that comes back stronger and uglier each time you defeat it would be terrifying! Please, Bethesda, make it happen.

Tom Senior: Metal Gear Solid 5

I would say XCOM, but War of the Chosen did a nice job of giving us bad guys to hate last year. The Nemesis system is great for giving faceless goons the illusion of agency, and in that sense I think that Metal Gear Solid 5 could actually benefit from of that. The series has very good supervillains—wouldn't it be great to see them emerge from the rank and file soldiery that you're evading and assassinating every mission? 

Imagine a captain who, having all his prisoners stolen by Snake, embarks on a journey to thwart him, turning up at inopportune moments in future missions to ruin Snake's day. And imagine that with each appearance the captain's dress and mannerisms become more erratic until they fit in right alongside The End, Vulcan Raven and Revolver Ocelot. They could also receive procedurally generated alter egos with randomised, Metal Gear Solid names like Hornet Dark, Mona Lisa, Bad Giraffe—plus suitably gimmicky weaponry to match.

Austin Wood: Dark Souls 

Someone had to say it, and lord knows I'm game for a tailor-made Dark Souls nemesis. Death is very much baked into the Souls recipe, which could be a good opportunity to play up the "You thought I was dead!" side of the Nemesis System and iterate on returning nemeses. I was ecstatic to see Shadow of War expand on that, and Dark Souls' black phantom system is the perfect MacGuffin.

I'm reminded of Patches the Hyena, the merchant who's been kicking hapless players into pits for, what, three games now, Demon's Souls included? Imagine if, instead of an annoying bastard chasing you through the series, you had a tenacious bastard chasing you through the world. They would get harder each time you defeated them, and you'd never know when their phantom would spawn in and throw a wrench in otherwise simple fights. Similar things have been done with NPC questlines already. My mouth waters at the thought of personalized bastards. 

Developer Artifact 5 has taken on a heavy challenge with Anamorphine, which the studio calls a "surreal first-person exploration game of rendered emotions." Protagonist Tyler falls into post-traumatic denial as his wife Elena sinks into depression after an accident "that robs her of her livelihood and emotional outlet." 

Elena is, or at least was, a cellist, which lies at the heart of Anamorphine's dialogue-free narrative and frequently comes up in its audio-visual motif, all hideously coiled strings and shattered bridges. Its Steam page boasts of "combat-free gameplay" which lacks any sort of action button, instead opting for environmental storytelling. 

As Anamorphine's most recent trailer explains above, in some instances the shattered pieces of Elena's cello reach out to Tyler, providing stepping stones on his journey through abstract dreamscapes and harsh depictions of his own decaying psyche. Tyler is as powerless before Elena's depression as he is his own guilt, and turns to "easy escapes" like substances as the story progresses. "Will you confront the past and try to find a way to move on, or will you let it consume you?" Artifact 5 asks.

Anamorphine was originally slated to release January 16, 2018, but to allow for "a few final weeks of polish," it has been delayed to late winter or early spring.