"I will unite us… with fear!" cries Flann Sinna, the King of the Gaelic Kingdom (latterly the High King of Ireland) in the trailer below. He's the latest historical icon to be unveiled by Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia.
And I tell you what? He looks bloody scary.
I mean.
Seriously.
"There are multiple routes to a glorious victory in Thrones of Britannia," says publisher Sega in a statement. "For Flann Sinna, King of the Gaelic Kingdom of Mide (later High King of Ireland), there is one that is truly coveted—uniting the lands into a new, greater kingdom. To realise his ambition Flann plots a dangerous alliance with the nearby Viking factions, a gamble which may not pay off."
This roll of the dice is portrayed in the following eight-odd minutes of in-game footage, wherein the devs talk us through Thrones' Kingdom Victory Condition. Here, Sinna attempts to rule five vassals at once, while also controlling his home province Mide.
Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia is due April 19. More information on all of the above can be gleaned from the game's Steam page.
Hextech Chests contain items from LoL's store and can be both earned for free or purchased directly. Hextech rates appear on the support section of the game's official site, contained within a list that Riot suggests will be updated "whenever we make changes to Hextech chests" including "event-specific" chests or capsules.
Riot also lists the following "special rules" which are worth bearing in mind:
Equal Odds: Outside of Hextech exclusive skins, all skins in the system have the same odds of dropping. Any given ultimate skin is just as likely to drop as a cheaper skin.
Big Drops, Free Unlock: Ultimate and mythic skins drop as auto-redeeming permanents (no orange essence required to upgrade them). If you already own the skin, you'll be able to disenchant them for orange essence.
Bad Luck Protection: You can't open three chests in a row without dropping at least one skin shard. This raises the effective drop rate of skin shards to roughly 57 percent.
Bonus Gemstones: Gemstones have a 3.6 percent chance of dropping as a bonus alongside normal chest content. These also have light "bad luck protection," since you can't go more than 50 boxes without getting a gemstone. This brings the overall drop rate up to 4 percent.
Chests inside Chests: Bonus chests (with a key) have a 10 percent chance to drop whenever you open a Hextech chest. Each of these chests also have a 10 percent chance to drop with another bonus chest (and key).
Hextech Exclusives: Outside of redeeming Gemstones for these skins, they also have a 1 in 2,500 chance to drop alongside the normal Hextech chest content.
No Cheap Champs: Hextech chests only drop shards for champions worth 4800BE or more. Sorry, Nunu fans.
I finished the Dragon Age games on 'nightmare'. I just want you to know that.
I was advised not to waste words proving my 'gamer cred'. I was like, "Sure, I’ve been playing since the Exidy Sorcerer and reviewing games professionally for 10 years, but that’s totally not relevant. Whatever." But after four serpents killed me in Avernum 3’s tutorial area on 'casual' difficulty, my cred feels relevant.
Avernum 3: Ruined World is Spiderweb Software’s second remaster of what was originally Exile 3: Ruined World back in 1997. It’s a classic roleplaying game with turn-based combat, abundant loot, lots of story, and everything else you expect. Not only do NPCs react (and reveal their attitudes towards) the non-humans in my party, like the cold-blooded Slitherkai and cat-like Nephilim, I could specialize the first as a lockpicking missile expert and the second as a knowledgeable priest. There are so many points to buy so many things. So, what’s up with the serpents?
My error was not inexperience, it was hubris. I figured I could explore further than I should have, underestimating how much experience would be needed for early missions. I didn’t need to be handed bigger swords or squishier serpents, just a reminder to progress sensibly through an open world.
Avernum 3's hint book. SPOILERS.
In Avernum 3’s opening stages, what I needed to hear was "Go to B and collect all of the supplies there" and then "You should probably go to Upper Avernum to gain some experience. You can get missions from Commander Johnson at D." The kind of information that is friendly and specific, like you might find in a let’s play. I don’t have time for one of those, but fortunately Avernum 3 has an official hint book and it is my new favorite thing.
I was traversing the outside of Lord British s castle, hunting for secrets, and in a patch of forest (in the bottom right corner of the map), I found Joshua.
I ask designer Jeff Vogel if his games have always had hint books. "Yes, ever since Exile: Escape from the Pit came out in 1995," he says. "For a small game like ours, you can’t just google one. IGN doesn’t write big guides for our games and there are no wikis, like for Dark Souls or AAA games. Our first games were shareware, so our demos were distributed on CDs and over AOL. We mailed hint books on actual paper, using actual stamps."
As a kid my dad convinced me that he had a "friend at work" he would ask for help "in a couple of days." He was actually consulting hidden hint books on a shelf. (It was a lesson in delayed gratification.) For RPGs, I always needed maps.
Avernum 3’s level design encourages exploration. Towns and cities aren’t just places to rest and re-stock, but also intriguing places to poke around in. They tell the story of an exiled, subterranean people who are striving to understand, and return to, the world’s surface and are full of secrets.
They reminded me of my favorite moment in Ultima IV. I was traversing the outside of Lord British’s castle, hunting for secrets, and in a patch of forest (in the bottom right corner of the map), I found Joshua. A hint-giver, oddly enough. It was completely unexpected because you literally can’t see him until you are standing on an adjacent tile.
If there was some hint leading to Joshua’s location in Ultima IV, I never found it. Avernum 3 is peppered with these kind of hidden encounters. Towns often have monsters and animals skulking around the edges as well, though most combat takes place in dungeons like the Slime Pit. It’s a highly intuitive dungeon. A central panel opens doors corresponding to their underground location and the boss is progressively weakened, shown by a visual cue that is easy to understand.
In the Slime Pit, I didn’t need help, but I enjoyed confirming my approach with the hint book after I’d cleared it. The hint book has instructions on how to navigate the area and weaken the boss, but more specific tips are absent. I also found an (undocumented) orb that can open just one of the magical doors I’ve seen everywhere. Can I appreciate the joy of that discovery, or did I want the guide to tell me it was there? I’m honestly not sure.
In that guide I also read that vampires had level-drained poor Anomen and that there was a star sapphire in a privy in De Arnise Keep.
In creating the hint books, one of Vogel’s aims is, "To think about what the player would want and might miss." He also says, "It’d be nice to have maps for every section, but that would be too awkward and too much work. I give a full walkthrough, answers to all the quests, guides to hidden dungeons, and lists of special collectibles." This is true, but I wonder whether I want Avernum 3’s hint book to be even more detailed. Don’t misunderstand me. It’s wonderful—and that is why I want more of it.
Firkraag was the first dragon I slew in Baldur’s Gate 2. But before I enjoyed that moment of triumph I read the comprehensive Prima guide, because I couldn’t figure out how to cause Firkraag any damage. In that guide I also read that vampires had level-drained poor Anomen and that there was a star sapphire in a privy in De’Arnise Keep. I was richer for knowing, literally.
So, what’s the point of all of this? That games should have hint books because some lady needs her hand held? Don’t be silly. I played Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2 — Martian Dreams hint-free. (Well, up to the frozen laboratory and plant-robots. I got that far. It was very far.) Hint books are an opportunity to welcome players, old and new. If indie iterations of 'hardcore' games can find a larger audience without sacrificing what makes them special, we can play more of them. That’s good for everyone, surely. "For a small developer, hint books make a significant bunch of extra money," Vogel says.
Official guides that are tailored to genre and play experience have been, at least to some extent, replaced by trying to navigate a let's play, which is a process fraught with spoilers and time wasting.
If it's super easy to get hints, then people will do that all the time. If it's super hard to get hints, people who are already frustrated enough to want a hint will get even more frustrated.
Jenn Sandercock
I enjoy watching let’s play videos for fun, but less so when it’s an adventure game and I just need a hint. Last year I reviewed Thimbleweed Park, a modern iteration of the early LucasArts adventures, like Monkey Island, made by some of the original designers. On the two occasions I was stuck a PR representative named Emily Morganti deftly alluded to a solution rather than spoiling me, as a video would have. I felt like I’d solved the puzzle myself.
Wanting the same experience for other players but figuring Emily wouldn’t have time to talk to literally everyone, I made an incremental hint guide in Twine, which has been used more than 15,000 times. Later, in one of Thimbleweed Park’s updates, it became the HintTron 3000, an in-game hintline you can call from any of the game’s phones. You can then access progressively more explicit hints, including a solution, for any puzzles that are currently relevant to your game state.
But why the phone? It’s reminiscent of the expensive hintlines you could call before the internet was a thing. (I never called one, thanks to living in Australia. My dad wouldn’t even call his "friend" who was "not in our area code".)
Programmer, designer, and producer Jenn Sandercock, in addition to implementing the system, reorganized my hints so they could be found at appropriate times. "I think we got the friction element spot on," she says. "If it's super easy to get hints, then people will do that all the time. If it's super hard to get hints, people who are already frustrated enough to want a hint will get even more frustrated. In Thimbleweed Park, you need to find a working phone, or switch to a character who has one, and dial a number. Then you need to listen to some preamble, work your way through a dialog tree and then you'll find your hint."
I read a lot of positive feedback about the HintTron, as well as a few people saying it was difficult to exercise the self-control needed not to use it. (You can remove it by adding hintsEnabled:0 to the Prefs.json file.) I do understand this. A flatmate bought me The Longest Journey and she showed me the incremental Universal Hint System guide. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. Hints are basically Mentos.
I ask Sandercock where the line should be drawn between an essential instruction or clue that is baked into a game, and a hint. "It must be possible for players to complete the entire puzzle without any hints. You can't ask people to do something and then have nothing in the world, or people's common knowledge, that says how to go about solving the puzzle.
I remembered every puzzle I solved, because having help didn't detract from the potency of my own achievements.
"The hints should only be there to reinforce or remind people of things they already know, might have missed or to help them make a leap in logic. A character might say, 'I need Thimbleberry Pie'. There must be clues as to how to find or make pie embedded into the world, but players might see them before they've been given the task (and so could ignore them), skip over the text quickly or they might take a break from playing the game and forget the details."
When Avernum 3’s hint book told me to find Johnson, I remembered that a character had mentioned to do so. I had not been prevented from leaving Fort Emergence before I’d completed this 'tutorial step', as might happen in a modern RPG. It is a truly open world.
Thimbleweed Park also lets you discover things in your own sequence, potentially creating problems. "One unexpected thing about the HintTron was people being able to learn which puzzles they could solve or were meant to be solving now," says Sandercock. "It is a big game and there are times when there are things you think you can do, but you can't until you unlock a new area or character."
Oddly, I can’t recall where I needed subtle suggestions from Emily in Thimbleweed Park. What I remember is finding specks of dust, right when I needed a coin and thinking, "This game is teaching me how to pixel hunt." In making my Twine guide, I barely needed to refer back to the game. I remembered every puzzle I solved, because having help didn't detract from the potency of my own achievements.
So I’m proud to be both a user and creator of game guides. The first I ever contributed to (professionally) was for The Sims 2, shortly after its release. Guides for simulations can be different again, and Carl’s guide is a good example of one that inspires self-directed play by comprehensively outlining what is possible. I used it to make the ultimate gardener/fisherwoman/chef combo in The Sims 4.
As an 'old school' gamer, I do get sad when games change. Yet I speak to indie designers who want to recreate the experiences of their childhood without alienating enthusiastic newcomers who might enjoy their games. Making a guide should not indicate a failure of design or a lack of the player’s expertise. A guide should be like a helpful PR rep or the friend my dad invented—someone who doesn’t tell you what to do, but knows how to lead you there so you can discover it for yourself.
Like many multiplayer games, Ubisoft operates a test server for Rainbow Six Siege, where patches undergo some public trials before being rolled out officially. The incoming Operation Chimera update hit the Siege TTS this week, allowing some players to get an early look at Lion and Finka, the two operators about to be added, as well as Outbreak, the cooperative mode coming March 6.
Part of the fun of being a tester, though, is sifting through the smaller changes that lurk underneath the surface—recoil tweaks, gadget changes, and stuff that hasn't yet been outlined in patch notes. As testers hopped in, they found a massive one: Blitz, the attacker who wields a ballistic shield with an embedded flashbulb, was now moving like The Flash.
Blitz's movement speed was way, way faster—to the point of absurdity. In the gif above, a tester plows through all five defenders in a dozen seconds, meleeing them all without stopping and without any help from his teammates. Other players chimed in with their own superhuman killing sprees, and others on the receiving end, seen below, shared little horror clips of their encounters with Blitz.
A buff to Blitz's movement speed was expected, but not like this. Testers concluded that this probably wasn't the adjustment that the Siege dev team intended, and began voicing their concern in forum threads like "Blitz is actually op now," "This Blitz buff is pretty crazy," and "Well at least Blitz suits his name now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯."
Ubisoft was quick to respond. In a Reddit post yesterday, a Ubisoft rep acknowledged what players were seeing, and what would be done: "We have been investigating the reports about Blitz’s speed change, and we have found a data error that made him faster than initially intended. There is a mobility modifier for all shields that reduces the operator speed, and this was not active for Blitz at the launch of the Test Server. This will be fixed. His base speed will still be from a 2-speed operator, but his shield will bring a reduction to that speed. This reduction in speed will be live on the Test Servers as soon as we can confirm the fix; target is tomorrow."
By now, speedy Blitz will have been removed from the test server, and will likely fade from memory as unnaturally quickly as he entered it. But for a couple days, Blitz became Siege's most fearsome operator, and players had fun terrorizing one another in the safe environment of the test server. One of the best memorials of this moment came from Redditor QuarterTurnComics, who shared this comic:
Call of Duty: WWII multiplayer action is free for everyone this weekend—in fact, the free weekend is live as we speak. To take part, just pop over to Steam, find the "multiplayer free weekend" link (it's a little hard to see, but you can find it sitting just above the topmost "Buy Call of Duty: WWII" link), and give it a little click.
Then be prepared for a wait, because it's about a 57GB download. But once that's done you can play your face off until 1 pm ET on February 25. Any progression, items, and unlockables earned during the free weekend will carry over if and when you spring for the full game.
It's hard to go wrong at the price, but Call of Duty: WWII's multiplayer is really quite good: We said in our review that the single-player campaign is largely "rote," but the multiplayer "recalls the glory days of Modern Warfare." That's quite a compliment, although doesn't seem to have done much good for the player count: CoD may be more of a console-focused pursuit but even so, today's peak concurrent player count on Steam of just 796 is not great for a game that's been out for less than four months.
Hunt: Showdown, the competitive supernatural bounty hunting game that we like very much (even though it suffers from a few issues) is now available to everyone on Steam Early Access. The game enables up to ten players, solo or in teams of two, to hunt monsters (and each other) for money across four missions set in "handcrafted sandbox" swamps of Louisiana.
Every mission follows the same basic path—find it, kill it, banish it, haul ass—but the game world promises to enable a great variety of play. The map features 16 unique locations "steeped in history and lore," with a day/night cycle, special sound cues, and "28 sandbox features to use strategically to distract or attract enemies." There are two boss targets to hunt in the Early Access release—the Spider and the Butcher—plus four AI enemies and randomly-generated "grunts," who you'll deal with using 33 unique pieces of equipment, with 17 variants.
Players will advance through three different types of progression: Hunter, which levels up individual character health and traits that are lost if that character dies; Bloodline, an account-wide progression line that unlocks gear, traits, higher-tier hunters, and in-game currency rewards; and Bloodline Prestige, which enables players to reset their Bloodline after reaching the maximum rank of 100. Stats will be tracked on leaderboards, and new stats, lore, and other features will be added as the Early Access period unfolds.
"Hunt: Showdown is an Early Access title, and players should note that they will experience crashes, as well as optimization, performance, and balancing issues," Crytek said. "We are dedicated to fixing major issues as quickly as possible, and to optimizing performance and balance. But some of these things will take time, and we ask for your patience as we continue to develop the game."
Hunt: Showdown is available on Steam for $30/£26/€30, and is expected to remain in Early Access for at least a year. Crytek warned that the price will "most likely" increase when it goes into full launch. System requirements for the Early Access release have also been updated.
Just had sex in Kingdom Come: Deliverance, no big deal. Got down to it in m'lady's chambers between a few buckskin blankets. I'm guessing it was very nice because I've been rewarded with this Alpha Male buff, a +2 to Charisma. All that barking paid off. It's only temporary though, so I'll have to re-up soon. It sure is nice having a medieval-era penis.
OK, so I have a confession to make: I did not mean to have sex with the digital woman. This is actually the second time I didn't mean to have sex in this game but ended up having sex anyway. In Kingdom Come: Deliverance, sex happens whether you want it to or not, a bizarre concession for a game steeped in player choice. But before I get too upset about all this sex I’ve been having, let's recount how it went down. Maybe I'm to blame.
Spoiler alert: We're about to get down and dirty and discuss some early game quests in detail.
In the opening hours of Kingdom Come, the player-protagonist Henry runs off to Talmberg in order to warn the local lord of an incoming Cuman army. They'd just laid waste to Ratzig, murdering Henry's parents and burning the place to the ground. Rough stuff. So when Lady Stephanie, the noblewoman married to Talmberg's Sir Davish, paid close attention and offered care to a grieving, injured Henry, I interpreted it as goodwill—and it was! She was kind to me in a time of need, stepping down from her highborn status to comfort a poor stinking peasant (still me). That's what all nobles should aspire to.
An early sidequest, 'At Your Service, My Lady', takes you to Talmberg to assist Lady Stephanie with preparations for a friend's wedding. Throughout the quest you learn about her husband's long imprisonment, who left a spritely middle-aged knight and returned years later as a weary, frail old man. Her elder by decades, Davish's return also marked the early departure of Lady Stephanie's youth.
So I brushed off her light flirtations. I assumed she was just happy to have a hot guy do her chores and talk to her. It must be a lonely life as a noble in a small village and Henry represented something unexpected and vital. I thought we were just friends. And friends buy each other gifts, right? For finishing friendship quests? Normal, yeah? But when she gifted me an expensive shirt, things started to get weird. She told me to put it on in front of her. Listen, I'm not a Christian man, but my Henry wouldn't risk it. He wants to keep his head attached to his body.
Even so, I was intrigued by the potential of a relationship questline based around hiding an affair from the neighboring lord that saved my ass. Given the option to change in her room (while she looked away, of course) I said OK, expecting nothing more than some bad flirting and a thank you or four. I figured it was one step in a series of clandestine quests in which we tested each other's boundaries and eventually did the deed (or I ended up dead). I didn't want to piss her off, so I figured listening was the best way to avoid a spell in the stocks.
Lady Stephanie and Henry went from chatting about how nice the shirt was to suddenly crying and hugging and kissing and falling over onto the bed. This was unanticipated. Though not present for the sex itself, I'm pretty sure they didn't just leave things at some over-the-corset fumbling after the cutscene faded to black.
'Sex-haver' is not an interesting character trait.
My Henry had sex with a woman he didn’t mean to—a significant character choice made for me off the back of some mild flirtation and poor signposting. Why even have an option and achievement for completing the game as a virgin if it's going to be wrestled away from us pure, chaste Henrys? It played out as a weird and stilted sequence that assumes a lot about the player behind the wheel. Maybe I'm not the horny boy Warhorse Studios envisioned at the receiving end of Lady Stephanie's steamy shirt gift. 'Sex-haver' is not an interesting character trait. I'm sure every highwayman and beggar got some back when—I'm just disappointed the quest wasn't used as an interesting storytelling opportunity. An affair with the wife of the lord that saved me? Dangerous. That's some pulpy romance novel shit.
Instead, the quest, and the relationship with Lady Stephanie, just fizzles out. There's no further insight into her character, like how she's dealt with being alone for so long, what it means to be a noblewoman in a chaste Christian society, or even what sexual foibles the elite dabbled in at the time. Butt stuff, armor fetishes—who knows?
For me, it harmed the process of curating my own Henry. Here’s a character defined by his doofy naivete and what you choose to imprint on him during his rapid transition from serf to knight. Now that I know Kingdom Come is going to make significant choices on behalf of character—and being a newly-made page in medieval Bohemia who just banged a blue blood feels like a big deal—then it feels like maybe my own choices won’t matter so much in the long run. I was willing to chalk it off as an oversight.
Find the phallus.
Then I met Father Godwin, a traveling knight turned preacher who doesn't really practice according to the good book. You're given the opportunity to go drinking with the guy, a night that spins out of control through a series of cutscenes and short interactive vignettes. After getting kicked out of the bar and climbing the church bell tower, a scene plays out in a barn in which Godwin has sex with a local, unnamed woman. Another woman approaches Henry, saying, "The priest has mounted up. What do you say, Henry—shall we take a little ride of our own?" I expected a short dialogue interlude where I could say yes or no, but the scene carries on and Henry bumps uglies again.
I'm not mad Henry can have sex, I'm just mad the decision was made for me when I said I'd have a beer with a priest.
Damn, my Henry literally can’t stop getting laid. And again, what if I wasn’t into it? These sequences muddy how much control you have over his characterization in service of what the designers assume the player wants. I'm not mad Henry can have sex, I'm just mad the decision was made for me when I said I'd have a beer with a priest.
If I can play as a conniving thief or honorable knight or choose to save a friend in danger or leave them behind, then why can't I have a meaningful degree of control over roleplaying my character's principles? Without setting up clear expectations for how much we can steer our Henrys, the more often characterization is wrestled away for flourishes constructed to titillate the player, the more I'm going to dread every dialogue choice. A promise to deliver some apples might end with Henry waking up in a field with his ass in the air. A chat with a merchant could very well end with Henry renouncing his religion and sprinting into the woods to build a house. I'm having fun with Kingdom Come, but I don't trust it with my boy anymore.
Astroneer got a big, free update today—its "biggest update to date," developer System Era Softworks reckons—that makes significant additions to its base building and power systems.
New base platforms are the high point of the update. These "freestanding, movable" platforms can be placed and rotated individually and then connected to power sources. New fabricators—think little portable printers—were also added. You can use a small fabricator to print medium platforms straight from your backpack, or print a medium fabricator and plop it down if you need larger objects.
Base modules and platforms are also now modular. When you print them, they'll start as prepackaged crates, which you can easily place wherever you'd like before deploying them. System Era says existing bases will automatically be updated to fit these new systems, but advises that you "use old saves at your own risk."
Further fleshing out these base changes are yet more additions to power grids, following up on last December's big power and research update. The gist is that you can now create shared power pools by joining generators together, and use new extenders to better allocate that power.
The official patch notes are a laundry list of details, bug fixes and smaller changes, if you want to read them for yourself.
System Era also outlined its development roadmap in the update. With research and base building in-progress, the studio hopes to release weather and terrain improvements, as well as dedicated servers, in early 2018.
If you're looking for games like XCOM on PC, you're in luck. XCOM is now its own genre, as creator Julian Gollop explained on this website late last year. This is a good thing. Turn-based strategy games have gotten surprisingly big, and it's not just happening on PC—it's evident in the XCOM-like Mario + Rabbids on the Switch, and in the Fire Emblem series.
On PC, we've got a lot of different games coming in the XCOM/X-Com vein, including one from Gollop himself. Below, we've rounded them up.
Phoenix Point
Julian Gollop’s modern take on the original X-Com idea, Phoenix Point goes for a much more granular, simulation-heavy combat system than Firaxis’ XCOM reboots. Bullets are modelled individually, location damage can cripple enemies or remove combat abilities mid-fight, you can alter movement mid-run if you spot an enemy, and enemies include monsters the size of buildings.
There’s a much grittier tone, too, and the devs have talked about working Lovecraftian horror influences into the design of the enemy crab creatures menacing humanity. The creatures evolve to counter your tactics, growing gun arms to counter aggressive close combat squads, or chitinous shields to repel squads lacking in armour penetration.
We played the first backer build a little while ago, and there's a second one available to backers now—you can get access with the game's luxury digital edition, but it's a steep $50, whereas a regular pre-order costs $30. It's got a long way to go, but its differences from XCOM are pretty exciting.
Phantom Doctrine
It's exciting to see the XCOM formula applied to different themes. Phantom Doctrine is set during an alternate history Cold War, with both KGB and CIA storylines to choose from. You run a counterintelligence agency, and you can brainwash, interrogate and chemically enhance your operatives in order to battle a global conspiracy that's basically actioning the Cold War.
You've got the option to play in a stealthy way with silenced weapons and quiet takedowns, or be noisy about how you operate. You also maintain a hideout where, among other things like pinning evidence to a conspiracy corkboard, you can change your agents' identities if they're at risk. There's a lot going on in Phantom Doctrine, then, and beating it will apparently take a massive 60 hours, but the mix here is compelling.
Jody played Phantom Doctrine in June, and loved the aforementioned corkboard. During the initial infiltration stage, Phantom Doctrine is closer to something like Klei's Invisible Inc, but when the action kicks off, that's when it reminded him more of XCOM. You won't have to wait long to play it—it's out in August.
Xenonauts 2
We praised the original Xenonauts for hewing closely to the old X-Com formula but also building its own layers on top of that, including more flexibility for unit customisation. Years later, Xenonauts 2 is a nicer-looking sequel that has a pre-alpha combat demo on GOG Galaxy. It passed its Kickstarter goal of £50,000 within half a day.
In Xenonauts 2, the Cold War never really ended, and you have to rebuild your organisation from scratch. It's not a story sequel to the original, rather "an updated portrayal of similar events", according to the Kickstarter. The Geoscape has been expanded from the original, and Goldhawk Interactive calls this a game "loosely inspired" by classic X-Com and not a direct remake like the first game was. Some backers will get access to a closed beta, estimated to arrive in September, and the game will launch in Early Access before a full release.
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden
Based on decades-old pen-and-paper RPG Mutant, and from ex-Hitman developers, Mutant Year Zero is an unusual mix of stealth game and turn-based RPG. You explore environments in real-time, but when a fight kicks off, it enters a more familiar-looking XCOM combat framework. Wes described it as "really fucking cool", which is the sort of assessment italics were created for.
Mutant Year Zero is set in a post-apocalypse where mutated humans and animals are vying for survival. This means one of your characters is Duck (called Dux), which is something none of the other turn-based games in this list can boast. Your party is limited to three, and around 30 mutations, granting different abilities, are spread out across the playable characters. These include moth wings, that let a character fly to get a better sniper spot.
It looks beautiful, and it should be out later this year.
Gears Tactics
Made by long-time Gears of War collaborators Splash Damage, this PC-exclusive spin-off was a big surprise from Microsoft's 2018 E3 conference. The Coalition's Rod Fegusson described it as their "take on the classic turn-based strategy genre, with a character-driven story, faster, more aggressive gameplay, a customizable squad and equipment". It'll also feature huge boss battles, in the style of Gears.
We're curious to see how well this universe translates to turn-based games, but that's pretty much all we know at this point. The screenshots suggest something familiarly XCOM-like, though.
Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus
Warhammer 40K plugs so easily into the XCOM format that it’s puzzling there aren’t more. We’ve had Space Hulk, and a version of Mordheim based on the Warhammer Fantasy Battle skirmish game, but Warhammer 40,000 Mechanicus will hopefully be the first game to do the licence justice. It's early days, but as you can see above, you'll get to fight Necrons, which is an interesting choice of foe.
The Adeptus Mechanicus are transhuman builders and worshippers of the machine god. They work with the Space Marines, building their armour and running their massive Titan walkers, but they are an interesting fighting force in their own right. Their tendency to upgrade their limbs with experimental weapons could be very entertaining in an XCOM-style campaign. “DIFFICULT DECISIONS” are promised, as well as alternative endings and a story penned by Warhammer Black Library author Ben Counter.
Arc System Works just had its biggest success ever with Dragon Ball FighterZ on PC, a collaboration with Namco Bandai that set the record for the most concurrent fighting game players on PC ever. The upcoming BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, landing in June, will be Arc's next attempt to pull in new players who've always been intimidated by the complexity of fighting games, with a simplified control scheme and crossover characters from Persona 4 and Rooster Teeth's RWBY.
I managed to win a match against BlazBlue director Toshimichi Mori, so it's definitely beginner friendly. After a few rounds, I talked with Mori and Guilty Gear creator Daisuke Ishiwatari about where the depth will come from in a tag fighter with simplified inputs and combos, what it's like for Arc System Works to develop games on PC, and, most importantly, why none of the shirtless, beefcake anime dudes in BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle have nipples.
Wes: I was just starting playing Cross Tag Battle, but it's hard for me to know where the depth will be. I'm curious where the hardcore Arc System Works fans will find the competitive depth and longevity for this game, compared to previous BlazBlue games?
Mori: I think a lot of that will come down to the character combinations. There are a variety of toolkits the players will have access to, depending on which characters they combine with who. One thing we were very careful with is 'if I have this one character on my team I can win.' We didn't want any one character to stick out above the others.
A large concept for the game is to take people from the sidelines of fighting games who are interested in it but have always just spectated because they felt the barrier to entry was too high, or the execution barrier was too much for them, so that the moment you pick up the controller you're able to execute some pretty flashy moves. And the more you dig, the more you discover 'oh wow, this is cool, I can do this.' That's the feeling we wanted to entice in people.
Of course, we are aware that very cartoony, anime-looking visuals like this is considered a niche in the videogame world, but even then, if there's any point at which people might find interest in this game, the fighting, the characters, whatever it is, we want to make this a platform where they can come and play and enjoy it.
We're putting a lot of effort into the network and online modes as well, so we just want this to be, again, a platform where people can interact with each other and build a community around the idea of a fighting game.
That is, again, a large reason why we forced Arc System Works America, so we can start to communicate more directly with our fans and communities, help the communities grow, give them what they need, and listen to their feedback. From there it should trickle onward. Previously I think Japan and Asia had a huge advantage in competitiveness and just information. We want everyone to stand at the same starting line.
Wes: For making the game more approachable to new players, has that affected your training or tutorial modes at all?
Mori: There is of course a tutorial mode that will walk people through the basics of the systems in fighting games, but again going back to it, if you just mash some buttons you'll be able to do something. There's something for everyone here.
A lot of tutorial modes will walk you through all the systems, the complex mechanics, and I don't want any fans to feel like 'oh, I can't enjoy this game unless I master all of these.' I expect some people to not even go into the tutorial, to just dive right into brawling with each other, which is the intent.
Wes: I have kind of a weird question. Where are the guys' nipples? Even Mario has nipples now.
Mori: I heard that overseas it wouldn't be too well received, so we intentionally abstracted that [laughs]. I think in the US and Europe it's more acceptable, but in Asia it's not really… so we kind of fudged it, a little bit. I thought it was totally acceptable to have some form of expression of that. I guess that's cultural.
Wes: It just stuck out to me because last year there were all these jokes about Mario in Mario Odyssey having nipples. Everyone thought it was funny.
Mori: For the record, I am of the school of thought that it's acceptable as a form of expression, but I noticed whenever they'd take some of the artwork that I do with the nipples, in Asia it gets erased.
Ishiwatari: Capcom characters don't have it, either.
Mori: It's a very tedious process to either draw it or not draw it, depending on which region the assets are going to go to, so we just decided to keep it universal.
Wes: How much does Arc System Works share personnel between teams, and technology between BlazBlue and Guilty Gear and Dragon Ball FighterZ, and all your different games?
Ishiwatari: In terms of Dragon Ball FighterZ, that was more of an exception where the lead artist from Guilty Gear was kind of placed at the helm of overseeing many elements of that project. For more games that are developed internally at Arc System Works, exclusively, the game designers talk to each other, so they work really close to each other. Usually at the first stage of any game development, for example, the game designer of Guilty Gear will say 'hey on the next version we're going to try this, add these features and network modes, we got this kind of feedback from the audience, maybe you guys can apply something.' A lot of times at the game designer level they try to communicate, and each project will help the other one grow.
Mori: To summarize and add on to what Daisuke said, we're not a huge company, so I think communication is very key. Because we're not that large, the barrier to reach out to someone across the office is not as big as it might be for a huge, huge studio.
Wes: Is there a lot of shared technology between the different games? The engines that you used, the network infrastructure?
Mori: As far as the network infrastructure is concerned, there is a lot of overlap, but in terms of the engines, anything that has a BlazBlue look, versus a Guilty Gear look, are fundamentally different. Guilty Gear Xrd uses Unreal, where BlazBlue is a self-developed engine we've been modifying and improving upon since the Guilty Gear XX era.
Ishiwatari: Among the games developed inside Arc System Works, there are some universal themes and systems very familiar to people playing any Arc System Works game. So you have your Guilty Gears and BlazBlues and if one tries something new and gets a really good response, generally the other will try to improve upon that, integrate it, and then the barrier to cross between any of our games is generally very low. Of course, there are some exceptions, where one team might disagree with some kind of mechanic or element the other team is really gung-ho about. Those are always up for discussion.
Wes: On the PC, what has it been like for Arc System Works to start bringing their games to Steam? What has the fanbase been like? Has it grown a lot since you started bringing your games to the PC?
Mori: In terms of our PC releases, I think it's still very very young in its development stages. Yes, we have begun to bring games to the PC, but having said that, we haven't noticed any large movement in terms of shift in fanbase or anything of that nature. I think we'll find out in the coming years how that's going to affect that our company structure.
Dragon Ball FighterZ propels ASW to three big games at the EVO Championship this year.
Wes: Is developing for PC still a challenge for the team, or is it as easy now as developing for PS4, arcade?
Mori: In terms of the development on PC, creating a 1:1 clone of any game, it's been pretty standard inside of our team. It's no more or less difficult than developing for any other platform. The biggest challenge right now is making them talk to each other across platforms. That's been a big theme.
Ishiwatari: Each platform has its own quirks and its own fanbase, and we have many micro communities, where if you add everyone together we should have a pretty big community, but it's hard to get everyone matched with everyone else. I think a big bottleneck of fighting games is when you want to play but can't get matched with someone of a similar level. We have five different populations across five different platforms. Of course there's the technological barrier and difficulties of that, as well as the politics.
Wes: How does it feel to have, is it three Arc System Works games that are going to be on the main stage at EVO this year?
Mori: Of course we're very, very thankful. One of the titles being Dragon Ball, it's hard to say how much we really played a role in that, but it's a very heartwarming feeling.
Wes: There's never been another Dragon Ball game on the main stage of EVO, I don't think.
Mori: Our president is saying 10 years from now, I want only Arc games on EVO's main stage [laughs].
On a very personal level, it's a shame Central Fiction wasn't selected to be a main stage title. Going back to my previous point, if we did have Central Fiction, I think the Japanese players would have an advantage, which is not what I'm trying to do for this next era.
Wes: Within Arc System Works, which of your games are most popular in Japan, vs. the West?
Ishiwatari: As far as overseas is concerned, Double Dragon and the Kunio franchise really seem to have a lot of traction and popularity.
Mori: Of course, traditionally this has been a very niche kind of game, and the sort of branding that's been pushed, but with Anime Expo, Comic-Con, you see a lot more Japanese content, and even in US pop culture, what used to be subculture, comics, was always a more nerdy thing, is starting to take the main stage more and more. So I think if we can get people to see, hey, there's a really fun platform to engage upon, then that'll be really good.
Wes: If either of you could make an anime fighter from any series or property, what would you like to adapt?
Ishiwatari: The Simpsons [laughs].
Mori: Family Guy!
Ishiwatari: And Teen Titans is one of my personal favorites.
