It turns out the Battle Royale genre isn’t the bottomless goldmine that Fortnite and PUBG would suggest. First Radical Heights failed to save Cliff Blezinski’s Boss Key Productions from shuttering. Now The Culling 2 has performed badly enough that the developer is doing some soul searching.
The Culling 2 released on Tuesday, with Xaviant having halted development of the original Culling to produce the sequel. This decision hasn’t gone down well with its player base. The Culling 2 currently sports a rarely glimpsed “Very Negative rating on Steam, having received a slew of scathing reviews (13% positive at time of writing). “This is NOT the Culling”, says user Kaffe “It is more a bad rip-off of PUBG and H1Z1”. Steam user Fairlight was even less complimentary, stating “I stubbed my toe on the way to install this game. It was the most enjoyable part of the experience.”
Specifically, players lament the allegedly ropey state of the game at launch, along with some fundamental changes in the sequel’s mechanics, which places less emphasis on melee combat and use of traps and focusses on gunplay much like Fortnite and PUBG. General community anger is contributing to the wave of negativity too. The original game is also seeing its Steam rating drop, with recent reviews categorised as mostly negative.
The Culling 2’s user base has fallen off a cliff, too. Not that it was a very high cliff to begin with. According to Steam Charts, while the first game peaked at 12,622 concurrent users, The Culling 2’s all-time peak was just 249 players. At the time of writing, one person was playing the game about an hour ago.
I can’t help but be fascinated by this individual. Who is this dogged lone wolf, playing a Battle Royale game all by themselves? What drives them forward? Curiosity? Determination? Madness? Moreover, what happens to the game in this scenario? Do you automatically win and escape the area? Or are you simply forced to wait until whatever play-area shrinking gimmick crushes you into oblivion?
Joking aside, The Culling 2’s struggles have prompted a response from Xaviant. Yesterday, the developer tweeted “It’s time for us here at Xaviant to come together for some much-needed soul searching and to have some admittedly difficult discussions about the future of our studio.” It ended simply with “We’ll talk soon.”
Winter has come to the Commonwealth in the form of Northern Springs, a vast new content mod for Fallout 4 that claims to be larger than both its official expansions – Far Harbor and Nuka World.
Developed by a team known as Modular Illusion, Northern Springs is a snowbound landmass located to the North West of Fallout 4’s Commonwealth. The mod’s main designer, Jshrapnelc, states that it adds over fifty new locations to explore. This includes three buildable settlements, two player homes, a whole raft of new weapons and equipment, and, er, one ghost.
Created over two years, Northern Springs adds twenty-five hand-built quests to follow, which includes a main quest line that can be activated by speaking to an NPC named Quinton Grant at Thicket Excavations. In addition, the mod lets you assume four new jobs, which range from book collector to bounty hunter and even Deathclaw hunter, just in-case hunting down the heavily armed bandits of the wasteland isn’t challenging enough for you.
Speaking of which, Northern Springs is designed to be a difficult area for higher-level players, featuring lots of intense and pretty darned impressive combat scenarios. A sixteen-minute video showing off the mod begins with a Brotherhood of Steel gunship exploding in the sky, followed by an intense outdoor battle, then culminating in a lengthy underground mutant-bashing expedition.
It’s worth noting that some of the mod’s content may not be entirely tasteful. A few of the available images caused me to furrow my brow—particularly this woman’s sciatica-inducing pose— as did the bug-report “The Dead Prostitute quest can sometimes be faulty”. Franky, I’d argue that dead prostitute quests are always faulty.
Nonetheless, Northern Springs a substantial chunk of work for mostly one person. The mod even comes with its own musical score. There are a bunch of images below along with a top-down view of the new area, while the mod itself can be downloaded over at Nexus Mods.
It's a familiar experience: you spend a bunch of money on a dazzling PC, then four years later it's somehow just hovering above minimum specs for that new FPS you've had your eye on. You check your bank account. An upgrade is just about within reach, sort of. You put your holiday plans on hold, because this game can't wait damn it.
This weekend, we ask: which game made you upgrade your PC? Here are our answers, but more importantly, we'd like to read your comments below.
Philippa Warr: Dota 2
I put off buying a desktop PC for as long as possible, making use of a bootcamped Macbook to play games including Dota 2. It was a well-documented disaster. I had to run Skype through my phone to use voice chat with friends, which meant I couldn't have sound on from my laptop, so I spent months of Dota not playing with any of the sound cues which are essential. I was also often playing while sitting on a bed, using a Where The Wild Things Are gift box to rest my mouse on. Oh, and the button you use to ping the map in Dota is right next to the button which, on my bootcamped setup, crashed the game.
When I finally got a desktop PC the first game I installed was Dota 2, and gosh was it an eye-opening experience! I didn't exactly buy the PC to play Dota, it was more that the Dota problems exemplified the limitations of the setup when trying to do anything related to this hobby, and the non-bootcamped side of things was struggling to keep up anyway. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I definitely definitely didn't drop cash on a whole new PC to throw tiny casks at people as a wizard.
Samuel Roberts: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
Did it really look like that? In my head it was the most realistic thing I'd ever seen.
As an adult, I've upgraded a rubbish PC to play Alien: Isolation, because playing that at double the framerate of PS4 owners was incredibly important to me back in 2014 just after I joined PC Gamer. As a kid, though, hardware upgrades were infrequent, and basically came when my dad could afford to buy a secondhand PC off of one of his colleagues. After I told him all about trying Medal of Honor at my friend's house and how I'd never played anything that cinematic before, he managed to magic up a PC that could run it (albeit not brilliantly). World War 2 games were made for him.
This kicked off my second era of PC gaming as a kid. I picked up Mafia, Jedi Knight 2, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and more, games which all ended up having a pretty profound effect on my tastes to come. The lesson, for any kids reading whose parents are holding out on an upgrade, is to convince them that they're missing out on a game that was made specifically for their interests.
Wes Fenlon: C&C: Tiberian Sun
The first game I remember being heartbroken I couldn't play was Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. Our home PC had a 133 MHz Pentium; the game needed a 166 MHz. Eventually I got my very own PC, a much slower hand-me-down 486 that I'd use to play LucasArts adventure games and the like.
Fast forward to 2006 and I had an HP laptop in college, with an ATI GPU inside. The hardware wasn't upgradeable, but I remember having issues with outputting a video signal to my brand new, hot shit LCD TV, and I wanted the best possible performance, so I turned to some old voodoo: Omega drivers. Back then, there were actually custom graphics card drivers that promised to improve performance and give you more features. I vaguely remember them being a complete pain in the ass, and they probably never made my games run better. But the Omega drivers did support more resolutions and helped me output a signal to my TV, so at the end of the day it was a win. And I felt elite.
Jarred Walton: Wing Commander
I see how it is: let's trot out questions just to make Jarred feel incredibly old! Well, let me tell you about my first PC.
It was a 286 12MHz with 2MB RAM, 40MB hard drive, both 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch floppy drives, with an Adlib sound card and some generic VGA adapter. I saved up money all summer during 1990 to buy this PC, as before this I was switching between using my dad's PC when I was at his house, and playing games on an incredibly slow Commodore 128 at my mom's place. I knew the C-64/C-128 scene was dying, and I wanted to get a proper PC when I took the plunge. I had also learned all sorts of arcane rituals necessary to free up as much of the base 640K memory as possible (config.sys and autoexec.bat hacking were skills I acquired in my gaming pursuit). $2,200 later, I was the owner of this awesome PC, which was already quite outdated when I bought it, but I simply couldn't afford a 386. (Those were the Core i9 of the day, at something like $800 just for the chip.)
Everything went great for a couple of months, and then Wing Commander launched. The back of the box proclaimed "Every image on this box was taken from the game," which looked awesome, but my poor 286 could barely run the game and it looked nothing like the box art and was sluggish as hell. Commence me weeping and wailing and pining for a 386. Thankfully, my dad pulled some strings, managed to sell my 286 for more than I paid for it ($2,500), and I had earned some more money since the initial purchase. I took the $2,500, added $500 of my own, and upgraded to a 386 16MHz, with 4MB RAM, an 80MB hard drive, a Sound Blaster card, an SVGA card, and for added awesomeness I splurged on a Roland CM32-L (MT32 compatible) MIDI sound module ($550 just for the CM32-L).
And let me tell you, it was all worth it! The graphics still didn't look like the box art, but the game ran much better, and the full MIDI orchestral score was miles above any other games I had played. I still have fond memories listening to MP3 versionsof the Roland MIDI files. Anyway, don't complain to me about the cost of gaming PCs today. I spent $3,000 as a 16-year-old for what was still several steps down from a top-of-the-line system. And if you want to build a great gaming PC for a third of that, you can. PC gaming has never been more accessible, and the vagaries of himem.sys and emm386.sys are thankfully far in the past. You kids never had it so good. Now where's my cane?
Andy Chalk: Doom
I'd had a 286 for a few years when Doom came out, and by and large I was quite happy with it. So when I read that Doom required a 386, I headed up to the city, where there was a big computer store—and I tried to negotiate. "What's really the difference between a 286 and a 386?" I asked. "It's just a little faster, right? I can still run this game on it, right? It'll just be a little slower, right?" But no, it was not right (and the guy was kind of a dick about it, too), and so I was faced with a choice that was really no choice at all. I scrounged and saved and begged and borrowed and put off college for a few more years, and eventually I bought myself a Fujikama 386SX/25.
I don't remember much about it, but it ran Doom, and basically my life, for the next couple of years. Took me a year just to pay the damn thing off. It was totally worth it.
Chris Livingston: Oblivion
I could tell myself I needed a new PC anyway, and would have bought one for reasons other than gaming, but I'm pretty sure The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion had a lot to do with it. I'd fallen head over heels for Oblivion back in 2006, and was perfectly happy playing it on whatever slow-ass PC I had at the time (sorry I can't recall the specifics of the actual hardware). It still nagged at me that it just didn't look like the screenshots I was seeing and naturally the first thing I did when I got my new PC (I can't remember the specs of it, either) was load up Oblivion. The difference was astounding to me, like night and day. "Oh, wow, I can see Imperial City even when I'm not standing with my nose pressed up against it. Oh, wow, there is actually detail on my weapons and armor. Oh, wow, trees look like trees instead of like they've been cut out of construction paper."
It's probably for the best that I can't find screenshots from that PC because they'd probably look laughably unimpressive today, but at the time it was like my new computer let me step into an entirely new world.
The third episode of neoclassical narrative adventure The Council will arrive on July 24, Focus Home Interactive has announced.
Titled “Ripples”, the third episode will continue the story of Louis de Richet, who belongs to an 18th Century secret society whose members include George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte. Its heavy emphasis on dialogue and player-choice is similar to DontNod’s Life is Strange, only with less teenage angst and more powdered wigs.
Alongside its heavily caricatured look, The Council aims to stand out through is “Social Influence” system, a complex network of skills and abilities more in-line with an open-world RPG than a tightly scripted adventure game. Using this system, Richet can attempt to manipulate other members of the society as he investigates the fate of his mother, who vanished somewhere inside the society’s island mansion at the game’s commencement.
PC Gamer contributor Phil Iwainuk compared The Council’s dialogue to most other games’ combat, stating the system resembles the “insult sword-fighting from the Monkey Island games, multi-stage affairs that require you select just the right response or line of questioning depending on the context of the dialogue.”
According to the publisher, the already tense atmosphere of the council will grow more unstable as “Plots are laid bare, characters reach their breaking point, and an unexpected, terrifying truth is uncovered.” Hopefully the third episode will also address the quality of the voice-acting.
Focus Home also released three new images showing off The Council’s third episode, which you can view below.
Aliens: Colonial Marines released on February 11, 2013. It wasn't very good. As Chris Thursten noted in our review, the AI of the aliens was especially bad. At the time, he said, "aliens pop out of vents and pop back in again, get stuck on the ceiling, fall off walls and run in circles." Well, it turns out the game's laughably stupid xenomorphs may have been caused by a typo—more specifically, a single letter mucking up the game's code.
As ModDB user jamesdickinson963 explained in a recent post, a line of code in one of the game's .INI files has a small but serious typo. This was spotted by poster JigglesBunny on Resetera, so we decided to investigate. Note the unneeded 'a' in 'tether' in the second line of this snippet:
In theory, fixing this typo could correct the erratic behavior of the xenomorphs. But to what degree? After confirming the code does indeed have a typo, I tried the fix for myself to find out.
Here's how the xenomorphs behave to begin with. As Chris said in his review, they're all over the place, they're sluggish, and all around they come across as kinda dopey.
Now look at how they behave after fixing the typo. In my experience, they're not only considerably more aggressive, they're also much better at tracking the player. As an experiment, I tried just running away from one, a maneuver which would normally confound a xenomorph, and it stayed right on my tail.
The change is less noticeable in some situations, and it's tough to say just from playing how much of the xenomorphs' clumsiness was caused by this typo, but they certainly seem to move more efficiently once it's corrected. They waste less time getting to the player, crawl and lunge more often, and generally move in more of a beeline rather than their usual drunken stroll. I mean, they're still plenty dopey, but hey, what did you expect?
This isn't the first time we've seen AI buggered by a small typo. Earlier this year, Civilization 6 developer Firaxis confirmed that a spelling error in one of the game's data files was messing with the way AI leaders allocate resources.
"After receiving a lead to a condemned apartment complex on the outskirts of West Roxbury, you are compelled to visit it." You probably wouldn't guess it, but that's the setup for a Fallout 4 mod (OK, sure, West Roxbury kinda gives it away, but play along). It's called Claustrophobia, and it's a little house of horrors inspired by Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil 1 built entirely within Fallout 4.
Claustrophobia creator Supernath97 describes the mod as "a fan homage to the cancelled Silent Hills game," and says it takes about 30 minutes to complete once you make your way to the condemned apartment, which is apparently filled with unkillable monsters and secret notes. There's also a custom Deathclaw (created by modder Hopper31), which makes it sound a bit like an extension of Devil's Due, a sidequest that sends you to a creepy mansion turned Deathclaw nest, one of my favorite quests.
"Unveil its long forgotten story and explore its tight halls filled with unnerving creaks and squeaks," Supernath97 says. "Mannequins taunt you every corner, walls turn inward and the layout seems impossible."
Head to Nexus Mods for download and installation instructions for Claustrophobia and its requisite mod manager. And have a gander at these spooky screenshots:
Riot Games connected with the Make-A-Wish Foundation last year to grant a wish to a teenager suffering from osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer, who wanted to visit Riot headquarters and create a skin for Cho'Gath, his favorite League of Legends character. From that collaboration, Dark Star Cho'Gath was born, and now Riot is selling skins, icons, emotes, and bundles featuring the champion, with 100 percent of proceeds going to charity.
The teen, Bryan, played LoL during his treatment and recovery, and his parents told Riot that they could tell how we was feeling by how much he played. On the worst days he wouldn't play at all, but as his condition improved he worked his way up to a Platinum V rank. Before his visit to the studio, he "brainstormed" with Riot over email and in video chats; while he was there he provided feedback on an early version of the Dark Star Cho'Gath skin, playtested new content, and played clarinet in a recording of an official Dark Star Cho'Gath theme song.
The original idea had been to create a "local" skin exclusive to Bryan's account, but after the visit was over and the design was complete, developers began to kick around the idea of making it available to everyone. "At the end of our work with Bryan, we knew the end result was too good to keep local to Bryan’s machine," Riot said.
"Each year, we select a few key projects to go big and bold," Riot Karma chief Jeff Burrell told GamesBeat. "This started as local, as Bryan wanted to design his own skin just for himself. It turns out he had a really good idea."
Dark Star Cho'Gath is available for 1350 RP, which translates to roughly $10, while the emote is 600 RP and the icon is 350 RP, and there are also a couple of bundles available if you want to pick up the whole works. All money raised will go to GlobalGiving, which will distribute grants on a proportional basis to more than 20 non-profit organizations around the world, each of which will receive a minimum $10,000.
The skin and accessories will be available for purchase through August 10. The skin will eventually be brought back as a Gemstone skin, but all other Dark Star Cho'gath content will only be offered during the fundraising period.
Note: This story contains a video and image that uses homophobic and racist slurs. Dropping hate speech in Rainbow Six Siege now comes with automatic consequences. Since yesterday, dozens of players have been saying that they received an automatic instant ban after using a racist or homophobic slur in text chat. Ubisoft has confirmed to PC Gamer via email that a new banning system is live in Siege.
These bans seem to last for 27 minutes on first instance, and prevent playing any aspect of Siege, including Terrorist Hunt or custom games. Upon second and third offense, the ban increases to 2 hours. After the third offense, an official investigation into the account is conducted that could lead to a permanent ban, per the Siege Code of Conduct.
Asked about the ban on Twitter, Ubisoft referred to a post in its dev blog from April that addressed toxicity. Back then, Ubi promised several features coming this year, like muting text chat and enhanced chat monitoring for abusive language. A chat filter was also promised with an estimated arrival for Season 3, but the feature set is a bit different than what is in place today.
“Our team is working on the creation of an automated system that will censor text chat in game based on a chat filter list. This will replace words that have been identified as offensive and provide players with a notification that their language was found to be unacceptable. We will also be tracking the number of times players trigger this filter and will take action as necessary for players that are intentionally having a negative impact on other player’s gaming experience,” Ubi wrote in the April post.
As seen in the video below by Redditor EMU4, the current system doesn’t appear to censor the slur used or hide it to players, but immediately after typing it the player receives a ban and is removed from the match.
Some have praised Ubi’s efforts to curb hate speech, while others expressed anger that their favorite words are now off-limits. “Just wanted to say I’ve watched a few people get banned right in front of my eyes! It’s beautiful!” Reddit user TheDeaves said in a post on the front page of the Siege subreddit.
Thirty-five years ago, Penguin published The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first in the enormously popular Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks. Penned by Games Workshop founders Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, Fighting Fantasy established the choose-your-own adventure genre, introducing readers and roleplayers alike to a whole new way of being hoisted upon their own petards.
Last year, Nomad games launched Fighting Fantasy Legends, a top-down, point-and-click PC adaptation of the first three Fighting Fantasy Books, created with the input of Livingstone and Jackson. Now, the cumbersomely named Fighting Fantasy Legends Portal brings together three more Fighting Fantasy adventures, centred around arguably the most famous gamebook ever written—Deathtrap Dungeon.
Alongside Deathtrap, the other two adventures are Trial of Champions, which is basically Deathtrap Dungeon nightmare-mode, and Armies of Death, which concludes the Deathtrap trilogy with a very different adventure. Unlike Legends, which weaved all three of its adventures together into a single game, Portal’s adventures are separate and played through in sequence, commencing with Baron Sukumvit’s challenge to best his infamous Labyrinth of Fang.
Each adventure begins with you creating a character from a trio of archetypes, namely Rogue, Paladin and Chaos Warrior, and imbuing them with a special trait, such as being immune to curses. You can also adjust how many skill and luck dice your character can roll in combat and ability checks (which are added at the cost of a lower overall health) and adjust the overall difficulty by selecting how many lives you’ll have for the adventure (3, 6, or 9).
Story-wise, Portal’s adaptations are relatively faithful to the book. In Deathtrap, you brave the Dungeon alongside five other adventurers, all competing to be the first out the other side. Your objective is to face down two trials and collect several gemstones in order to safely exit the dungeon. Many of the core encounters are found in the same locations as the book, such as the Riddlemaster and the Barbarian Throm.
More important than these specifics however, is that Nomad embraces the spirit of the book, namely its speedy pace and litany of fearsome challenges. In your adventures, you’ll walk across burning lava-pools, navigate deceptive illusions that conceal deadly traps, choose whether to heed or ignore the advice of potentially treacherous spirits, and battle with monsters that include the Manticore and the fearsome Bloodbeast.
At the same time, Nomad uses the dynamism videogames offer to its advantage in multiple ways. Some encounters offer more choice than before, such as the Riddlemaster, who will challenge you with different conundrums each time you meet. Interspersed within the fixed challenges are randomised encounters. The game pulls a card from the top of a deck set in the lower-right corner of the screen. These could be useful items, such as potions that restore Stamina (health) or charms that help you avoid skill or luck checks. More commonly, however, deck will reveal a trap you’ll need to pass a luck-check to avoid or spawn a monster that wants to use your skull as a drinking vessel.
Combat is settled in the time-honoured tradition of rolling dice until someone dies. Each combatant has a maximum of twelve dice (though most monsters have between four and eight), and each die has one marked face on it. If that face lands upward, that represents a hit. It’s basic stuff, but well presented. I particularly like the way successful die will fly across the screen and strike the opponent’s card, as if they’ve been hurled from a sling.
As with any other RPG, you gain experience each time you emerge victorious from combat or succeed in a skill or luck check. When you level up, you get to add a face to one or your die, increasing the chances of a successful roll (up to a maximum of three marked faces per die). It’s up to you whether you upgrade your skill or luck die, depending on which you feel is more important in getting through the Dungeon unscathed. Should you lose a life, you’ll be catapulted back to the start of the dungeon, albeit with all your experience and equipment intact.
For the most part, Portal is a smart adaptation of Deathtrap and its sequels. But there are a few areas where the transition doesn’t work so well. In Deathtrap, if you reach the end of the dungeon without having found all the gems, then you’re sent right back to the start. And since you can only choose one route through the dungeon at any given time, this makes locating the last couple of gems an infuriating process, as you have to face down a whole bunch of random encounters again just to try a new path.
More broadly, it’s a shame that Portal isn’t woven neatly together in the way that Legends was, although I can see why doing so would have been difficult. Legend’s locations were evenly spread out and could be played in any order, while two of Portal’s adventures occur in the same place, and the third happens chronologically much later than the first two.
In addition, while Deathtrap focuses purely on the dungeon, Trial of Champions includes a lengthier prologue which offers the opportunity to solve a murder before returning to the Baron’s new, even deadlier labyrinth. Nonetheless, there are ways that some continuity could have been baked in, such as letting you carry over the same character, rather than being forced to create a new one for each adventure.
All told, though, this is a perfectly enjoyable interpretation of the Deathtrap gamebooks into a virtual format. It may not be quite as ambitious or as clever as Legends in terms of how it approaches that adaptation, but it nonetheless succeeds in finding a new and entertaining way to spin these decades-old adventures.
The Crew 2 is a bit of a lackluster experience, as we noted in our review. There's fun to be had, but the writing and story need help, as do the multiplayer aspects. That same feeling of "this could be better" applies to the game engine in general. It's 2018 and many games have proven (repeatedly) that it's possible and even beneficial to run at higher framerates. "No," says The Crew 2, "you will be content with 60fps max." It was a problem in the original as well, and it's particularly irksome considering how many other games Ubisoft publishes where the framerate is unlocked. It's also unintentionally ironic for a game that's all about speed to put in a hard speed limit.
Given that hard limit, performance testing for The Crew 2 is constrained. Rather than looking at what hardware runs the game best, it's more a question of what settings you should choose to hit the 60fps cap. After testing a collection of CPUs and GPUs, the good news is that most systems with a dedicated graphics card should be able to max out the framerate at 1080p, and higher spec PCs will be able to run 1440p at maximum quality, or 4k at high quality, and still hit the framerate cap. If you're looking to run at least 1080p medium quality, however, you'll need at least a GTX 970 or R9 380 or better graphics card. For the CPU, pretty much any Core i3 or Ryzen 3 or better processor will suffice. 60fps in that sense is the great equalizer.
The Crew 2 does fine in the graphics department, with 13 settings you can tweak along with good resolution and aspect ratio support. Controller support is also good—you can play comfortably with a keyboard and mouse or with any controller, including steering wheels (though I can't actually vouch for that as I don't have any). The Crew 2 loses points for the lack of mod support, the always connected requirement, the framerate cap, and the inability to adjust the field of view unless you use three monitors (though do note that the game auto-adjusts FoV based on your resolution and is generally fine).
One other item regarding framerates that I do want to mention is that falling below 20fps can seriously degrade the driving experience, and sub-10 fps becomes an awful mess. So even though I have some benchmark results for systems in those categories, ideally you'll want to stay in the 30-60 fps range. There's also the problem of microstutter, especially with vsync enabled. The game doesn't always maintain a perfect 60 fps, and when it falls just a bit short, you end up with a few frames at 30fps, which feels jittery and annoying. This is why the framerate cap is so damn frustrating.
The engine can successfully deal with everything from 20 to 60 fps; why can't that same programming logic be applied to going beyond 60fps? This is a 'solved' probem by now, as numerous other games have demonstrated an ability to scale to arbitrarily high framerates. We have 144Hz and even 240Hz displays, and I'd love to see how The Crew 2 feels on such a setup. We've also had 120Hz and higher refresh rate LCD monitors for nearly a decade, and 120Hz CRTs before that. There's no good excuse for 60fps caps. But let's get to the settings and performance before I continue that rant.
The Crew 2 settings overview
The Crew 2 offers up 13 graphics settings, but as is often the case, what some of these do and how much they affect performance and visuals is harder to tell. There are four presets (low, medium, high, ultra), plus a custom mode where you can increase a few settings above the 'ultra' level or drop a few settings below the 'low' level. I've run the 4k, 1440p, and 1080p tests with all settings at maximum quality, plus 1080p at the medium preset.
The above gallery has 4k screenshots of each preset, along with maximum and minimum quality. There are also individual screenshots with every setting on max except for the setting in question, which is set to the minimum value. Finally, aspect ratio and automatic field of view scaling are shown for 16:9, 21:9, and 32:9. The auto-scaling works well for the most part, but it would be nice to have the option to tweak the setting.
For the following estimates, I ran benchmarks using a GTX 1070 at 4k and max quality—the main difference from the ultra preset is that Shadows is set to Contact Hardening Soft Shadows and Ambient Occlusion is set to SBAO+. Performance increases are relative to the maximum setting, in each case dropping the individual setting to the minimum value.
Maximum: 29.0 fps
Ultra: 31.2 fps (8% faster)
High: 35.3 fps (22% faster)
Normal: 39.0 fps (35% faster)
Low: 57.7 fps (99% faster - cap in effect)
Minimum: 60.0 fps (107% faster - cap in effect)
Note that the low setting starts bumping into the 60fps cap, and minimum quality is at the cap. The good news is that there are enough knobs to fiddle with that you can more than double your performance going from maximum quality to minimum quality—though image quality obviously suffers. Outside of Intel's integrated solutions like HD Graphics 630, it's usually possible to hit 60fps via a combination of resolution and settings. Here's a look at the individual settings.
Geometry: Adjusts the number of polygons uses for rendering objects. The effect can be seen most clearly on the trees in the above gallery—most other aspects of the rendering don't seem to change much. You can get a three percent increase in framerates using the low setting.
Shadows: This affects the quality of soft shadows, as well as the distance for detailed shadows. There's a substantial difference in appearance between Contact Hardening Soft Shadows and the ultra setting, but performance doesn't change much. Turning all shadows off can net you a seven percent increase in performance, but I recommend using at least the low setting (a five percent increase).
Textures: Sets the size (quality) of the textures used in the game, with a negligible impact on performance. Framerates improve by just one percent going from ultra to low, and even 2GB cards don't seem to have difficulties with maximum quality textures—resolution is a far bigger factor on VRAM use.
Environment Mapping: Normally this refers to a technique for making reflections look better, but I can't really see a difference in the screenshots I've gathered. You can boost performance by two percent by using the low setting, which might explain the lack of visual differences.
Depth of Field: An artistic blur effect that takes place mostly in cutscenes as far as I can tell. Turning this off has no noticeable effect on performance when you're actually playing The Crew 2.
Motion Blur: Sets the quality of motion blur, the smearing you see when objects are rapidly moving. I don't care for the effect, and you can improve performance by three percent if you turn this off. (The above screenshot fails to capture this effect, since the motorbike is stationary for image comparison purposes. Here's a better comparison: motion blur on, motion blur off.)
Grass: Adjusts the amount of procedurally generated grass, which has a minor effect on the look of the ground in forests but doesn't affect performance much. Dropping to low only yields a two percent increase in framerates.
Volumetric FX: Adjusts the quality of volumetric fog, including things like light shafts. This is one of the three major settings that impacts performance, and turning it off improves performance by 13 percent, and depending on the scene the visual difference is often minimal. This is a good one to turn down if you're looking to improve framerates.
Anti-Aliasing: Sets the AA mode to either off or FXAA (Fast approXimate Anti-Aliasing). FXAA is a post processing filter that attempts to remove jaggies, but it's only partially successful. Turning AA off AA gives a three percent improvement.
Ambient Occlusion: AO is a technique for rendering the way shadows/light appear on surfaces. It has a relatively subtle effect and turning it off (vs. SBAO+) gives a substantial 13 percent increase in performance.
Screen Space Reflection: This is the biggest factor in performance, and it makes reflections look better. Calculating reflections (from glossy vehicle surfaces, water on the ground, windows on buildings, etc.) can be very computationally expensive, with a relatively minor impact on the actual appearance of the game world. Disabling SSR can improve performance by 21 percent.
Weather: Adjusts the degree of weather effects, supposedly. This is hard to capture in a benchmark, but heavy rain/snow/fog can certainly reduce framerates. However, using the in-game photo tool (where you can apply weather effects), there doesn't appear to be a performance difference between the low and high settings—I measured a two percent difference, which is within the margin of error.
Terrain: Adjusts the level of terrain detail, with a very subtle effect on appearance (there appears to be a bit more water puddles in the screenshots, for example). Turning this to low gives a small three percent increase in performance.
Cumulatively, all the settings stack as expected, providing for up to double the framerate at minimum vs. maximum quality. Turning down Volumetric FX, AO, and SSR to minimum for example gives a 55 percent boost to performance.
The Crew 2 system requirements (PC)
The minimum official minimum requirements to run The Crew 2 at 1080p using the low preset at 30fps or more are pretty tame. It will run on Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 (64-bit versions only). For the CPU, you need an Intel Core i5-2400s (2.5GHz) or better, an AMD FX-6100 (3.3GHz) or better, or equivalent hardware. You also need 8GB of system memory. The biggest factor as usual is the graphics card, and Ubisoft lists an Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 or AMD HD 7870 as the minimum. Both of those have 2GB VRAM and with DirectX 11 Shader Model 5.0 support.
The recommended specs are for running The Crew 2 at 1080p using the high preset, with a 60fps framerate. You'll want an Intel Core i5-4690k (3.5GHz) or AMD Ryzen 5 1600 (3.2GHz) or equivalent better, along with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB) or GTX 970 (4GB), or AMD RX 470 (8GB) or better. As we'll see in a moment, you can probably go lower on the CPU if you have a faster GPU, and it's possible to hit 60fps even at 4k with the high preset if you have the right hardware.
Note that The Crew 2 also requires your CPU have SSE4 instructions (first seen in 2006), and AVX instructions (introduced in 2011) may also be used.
MSI provided all the hardware for this testing, consisting of primarily Gaming/Gaming X graphics cards and motherboards. The Gaming X cards are designed to be fast but quiet, though the RX Vega cards are Air Boost models and the RX 560 is an Aero model. I gave these a slight overclock to level the playing field, so all the cards represent factory OC models.
I’m using the latest Nvidia 398.36 and AMD 18.6.1 drivers. Nvidia lists its drivers as Game Ready for The Crew 2, which makes sense as it's a promotional title for Nvidia GPUs. AMD makes no mention of The Crew 2 in its release notes, but performance isn't a problem as we'll see shortly.
There's no built-in benchmark, and the 60fps cap obviously poses a limit. I've tested starting from 4k at max and moving down in resolution until the GPUs hit the framerate cap. While there may appear to be minor differences in performance (eg, in minimum framerates), the focus is more on the average fps here. GPUs that have clearly hit the framerate cap are shown in grey, with 60/60 for the average and minimum.
For the benchmark, I use the Portfoliage Rally Raid event, since it's in a more demanding forest location and sets the time and weather conditions to the same defaults every time—otherwise, weather and time of day could affect the consistency of benchmark results. The Crew 2 is at its most demanding in races where eight (or more) vehicles are present on the screen, but repeatability becomes an issue.
The Crew 2 graphics card benchmarks
I'm starting at the top this time, for reasons that will become obvious in a moment. Running 4k at maximum quality and 60fps proves to be too much for any current graphics card, though the upcoming GTX 1180 will likely change that. The 1080 Ti comes close, and in many areas of the game it will hit 60fps, but everything else falls well short of that mark.
Interestingly, despite being an Nvidia TWIMTBP game, AMD cards in general perform better than their Nvidia counterparts—the Vega 64 and Vega 56 beat the GTX 1080 and 1070, and the RX 580 8GB and 570 4GB beat the GTX 1060 6GB and 3GB, respectively.
What if you run 4k resolution at lower quality settings? The 1080 Ti hits 60fps using the high preset, while the Vega cards and the GTX 1080 need to run at the low preset to get a consistent 60fps (medium averages about 46-50 fps on those cards). The GTX 1070 meanwhile needs to drop to minimum quality to hit 60fps, at which point you're better off dropping the resolution.
Dropping to 1440p max quality brings the framerate cap into full effect on the faster GPUs. The 1080 Ti and 1080, along with Vega 64 and 56, all basically reach a steady 60fps. There are still occasional dropped frames, which is why the minimums aren't quite at 60, but declaring a victor here is splitting hairs.
Moving down the charts, the 580 and 570 continue to lead the 1060 models, and older generation cards like the 970 and R9 390 continue to perform well. If you want to lower the quality settings, the 580, 570, both 1060 cards, the R9 390, and the GTX 980 and 970 can all reach 60fps, but it requires a mix of minimum to low/medium quality to get there.
At 1080p and maximum quality, nearly all the midrange and above GPUs reach the framerate cap—running at the ultra preset will get you there with the 1060 3GB and above, while the 970 requires moving to the high preset.
The lower part of the chart with the budget GPUs shows everything running at least 30fps, including the older GTX 770, which also means those cards can hit 60fps at 1080p and minimum to medium quality. The Ryzen 5 2400G's integrated Vega 11 graphics still struggles, however.
Last and least, at 1080p medium quality (and 720p min on IGP), nearly all the GPUs hit 60fps, and it's only budget cards like the 1050 Ti and RX 560 and below that come up just a bit short. AMD's R9 380 still does quite well, besting the GTX 770, and that means HD 7950 owners should also be able to reach similar framerates.
Looking at the integrated graphics solutions, the Vega 11 almost manages 30fps at 1080p medium, and it comes close to 60fps at 720p minimum, nearly triple the performance of Intel's HD Graphics 630. The reason the Vega 11 falls short is a bit perplexing, however.
If you watch the video that shows the real-time framerates (with some smoothing going on), you'll see large dips from 60fps down to the sub-30 range on the Vega 11. These occur on a regular basis, with no obvious reason for the drops, and the dips happen in other games as well. I had hoped newer drivers would remedy the situation over time, but AMD's Ryzen APUs are on a quarterly driver update schedule and don't seem to be getting as much TLC as they need. The dips are severe enough to impede gameplay when they occur, which is even more frustrating.
The Crew 2 CPU performance
For CPU testing, I used the GTX 1080 Ti on all the processors. This is to try and show the maximum difference in performance you're likely to see from the various CPUs—running with a slower GPU would further reduce the performance gap. It turns out that The Crew 2 is basically a non-event when it comes to CPU requirements, thanks once again to the framerate cap.
At 1440p, every CPU I tested, from a lowly 2-core/4-thread Core i3-7100 to the 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 7 2700X, averages 60fps. There are minor variances in the minimum fps, but they're not really a concern—just one or two dropped/delayed frames over the course of a 45 second benchmark run. At 1080p, the differences become even more meaningless, so I didn't bother with additional charts—everything continues to hit 60fps.
Moving to 4k maximum quality does show some separation, with the Ryzen 5 2400G coming in last (perhaps thanks to the x8 PCIe connection), but we're still talking about less than a five percent difference in performance. Unless you have a very old/slow CPU, chances are it will be sufficient to run The Crew 2.
The Crew 2 notebook performance
Notebook performance runs into similar limitations as CPU testing, since two of the notebooks have 1080p displays—and the laptop with a 4k display is the GS63VR, which has the weakest GPU. Yeah. Here's what it looks like, with the desktop 1080/1070/1060 included as reference points.
All the current notebooks hit 60fps at 1080p medium, so I won't waste time discussing that chart. At 1080p max, most of the systems continue to come close to the framerate cap, with the GS63VR being the only one that falls short. If you have a relatively recent gaming notebook, like anything with a GTX 970M or faster, you should be fine.
Please rethink framerate caps on PC
Thanks once again to MSI for providing the hardware for testing. These results were collected in early July 2018, using the initial version of the game with the latest graphics drivers available at the time (Nvidia 398.36 and AMD 18.6.1).
60fps ends up leveling the playing field, which might seem like a good thing. The problem is that many PCs have GPUs that could hit higher framerates if the cap were removed, and smoothing out the driving experience by allowing up to 144fps for example would be a great benefit to users with our favorite 1440p 144Hz G-Sync and FreeSync monitors.
I'd love to see a patch (either official or something from the community) remove the limit, but that never happened with the original game so I'm not counting on it here. Given the other complaints with the game, I suspect Ivory Tower has bigger fish to fry.
This isn't the first and it won't be the last game with a 60fps framerate cap, but I really wish developers, especially for PC games, would consider the target audience in greater detail. Variable refresh rate monitors are growing in popularity and coming down in price, and high refresh rate displays have been available for years, with more coming. Add in the potential for future technology and locking a game to a relatively low framerate is a shortsighted decision.
Please, take the time to architect for higher framerates. It's not an artistic choice, and it's not a required design element. By all means, give players the option to enable a 60fps cap if they prefer the way that feels, but for those of us with high-end PCs, let us run with unlocked framerates.
