Star Wars: Empire at War, one of the best space games on PC, has never looked this good before. The Empire at War Remake mod has been around for years but the latest incarnation is especially swish, as you can see from the fancy Star Destroyer battle above.
“This mod catapults Empire at War into 2018,” reads its ModDB summary. “It maintains the game's design philosophy, while adding new units, better graphics and deeper gameplay.”
It’s been updated a lot this year. The mod’s creator, Jeroenimo, has big plans. They want to turn the galaxy into a “varied and alive ecosystem”. The three main factions—Rebellion, Empire and Underworld—have been reworked, while new factions like the Mandalorians and Clone War Separatists have been thrown into the mix. The Vong are in the works, too.
A ‘Lite’ version of the mod is available at the moment. From now on, though, instead of incremental updates, Jeroenimo plans on waiting until the mod is fully functional and feature complete.
Tannenberg, the "realistic" First World War FPS that debuted on Steam Early Access a year ago, will go into full release on February 13, 2018, M2H and Blackmill Games announced today. The developers also teased a special winter offensive event and revealed plans to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that ended the war on November 11, 1918, with a two-minute in-game silence.
Tannenberg is a multiplayer WWI FPS that can support up to 64 players, and while that might inspire thoughts of Battlefield 1, it's a very different kind of game. EA claims "authenticity" in its shooters, while Tannenberg (and its predecessor, Verdun) are more about realism, which is to say that your gun sucks and you're going to die a lot at the hands of people you can't see. (But in a good way.)
As if to emphasize the point, the studio put out a brief "release date announcement" video teasing the arrival of the Bulgarians, who will be added to the game when it launches. In the world of Tannenberg, that's big stuff: M2H and Blackmill said when the game was announced that their goal was to turn a spotlight on the war's lesser-known Eastern Front, which was a far more mobile conflict that didn't get bogged down in the grind of trench warfare.
A major update to Tannenberg was also released today that overhauls the interface, with the goal of making it more immersive and intuitive for newcomers. M2H said that the update is a "good first pass," but promised to continue evolving the game "to capture the true Eastern Front warfare experience." Players are invited to offer input on future changes on Steam or via the Tannenberg Discord.
Tannenberg is currently on sale for half-price on Steam—$10/£8/€8—until November 11. A gameplay trailer featuring the updated interface is below.
K/DA is a pop group that doesn't actually exist: It's made up of League of Legends characters Ahri, Evelynn, Kai'Sa, and Akali. Despite that rather glaring handicap, it made a pseudo-real-life appearance last weekend at the LoL World Championships, on stage alongside real-life performers Madison Beer, Miyeon and Soyeon of K-pop girl group (G)I-DLE, and Jaira Burns—who also provide the voices behind the group—to perform the song Pop/Star.
I'm completely unhip to League of Legends, or K-Pop, or really anything that's happened musically since about 1993, but even so this was really cool to watch, and to listen to, too. The AR-based performance is impressive on its technical merits, but it's a fantastically catchy song in its own right—"bangin'" is how one person described it, which I assume means it's good.
It's also a legitimate hit, reaching number five on Apple Music's pop chart and number one on the K-Pop chart, and amassing nearly 30 million views on YouTube in just five days—and that's excluding the 5.5 million on the video of the live performance at the Worlds.
That puts Riot in the enviable, but kind of odd, position of having a song that's popular in the real world, performed by a group that doesn't even exist there. It's a bit like the California Raisins, except less hideously godawful, and for now at least it doesn't sound as though Riot is really prepared to capitalize on it.
"We went into this really wanting to make a dope ‘League’ moment for players—albeit one where the fantasy of the champs being in the real world played out in an authentic manner that could live alongside others in their verticals (i.e. song had to be able to stand up to other pop songs, performance had to stand up to other performances, etc.)," Viranda Tantula, Riot's creative lead on the Worlds Opening Ceremony and Music, told Variety.
"We really went into it wanting to make the singular moment as dope a possible and intentionally weren’t thinking much further into the future than that."
Update: The stream is now over and Warframe: Fortuna has been released. You can go download it now, and please look forward to our coverage and guides that we'll have coming over the weekend. If you want to watch the stream, you can do so here.
Original story: Though a release date was never specified, Warframe's next open-world expansion, Fortuna, will be available in just a few hours. Right now, developer Digital Extremes is racing to fix the last few bugs before shipping the update so that players can finally download it and dig in. You can watch this all happening live on Twitch, as game director Steve Sinclair is streaming live from his desk. Over 40,000 viewers are tuned in, eagerly awaiting the news that Fortuna is finally ready. In the meantime, Sinclair is giving viewers a precious insight into what's behind such a massive release.
Like the Plains of Eidolon update that released back in 2017, Fortuna adds a massive new open world to explore with up to three other friends. Instead of the brown pastures of Earth, though, players will be heading to the frozen wasteland of a terraformed Venus.
Tom checked out the update and the new blood-thirsty Garuda warframe last week and had a hoot using his K-drive hoverboard to pull off cool tricks while skating around the environment. That's just the tip of the terraformed iceberg too, as Fortuna also adds animal tracking and conservation, a new slot of weapons to build from scratch, and expanded fishing and mining. It looks beefy, so hopefully Fortuna lives up to expectations. Developer Digital Extremes has already said that they've learned a lot of lessons from the Plains of Eidolon and that Fortuna won't have the same super-intensive economy.
Warframe: Fortuna will be out in just a few minutes. We'll update this post when it is live.
One of the most prevalent stereotypes of Chinese parenting is the “tiger mom:”a high-intensity, authoritarian approach to parenting that, as I can attest, is a pretty common facet of growing up in a Chinese household. Academic excellence is a matter of dire importance. Leisure activities are regarded as frivolous affairs, often disapproved of in favor of loftier pursuits like supplementary classes. Gaming with Dad or Mum? Catching a movie together? Heading out for a family picnic? These hardly happen, really.
In Chinese Parents, you aren t the Pok mon trainer in control of your little critters; you are the Pok mon.
So I felt a tinge of bittersweet nostalgia when I played Chinese Parents, a game about the joys and perils of growing up as a Chinese kid. Since September 29, Chinese Parents, developed by Beijing indie developer Octopus Games, has racked up thousands of positive reviews and even spent a few weeks on Steam's most-played chart. It peaked at 32,593 concurrent players according to SteamDB, for a time putting it ahead of games like Fallout 4 and Civ 5. That's impressive for any game, but especially so for one that's only playable in Simplified Chinese, which millions of Steam users can't read.
Chinese Parents shows just how much Steam's audience has grown in China; today nearly a quarter of Steam players are using the platform in Simplified Chinese. But more importantly, it's a wildly enjoyable and relatable game that offers an achingly familiar experience for those who had to endure the stresses of steep parental expectations.
The stresses of childhood
Dealing with such anxiety isn’t just for adolescents only, of course—and that’s why Chinese Parents has you begin the game as a literal baby, much like the opening scene of Fallout 3 where you're born to a dingy hospital room. Popping out of your mother’s womb as a wee tot in much more sanitary surroundings, Chinese Parents is immediately heartwarming. The first thing you see is your family beaming at you, the morning sunlight streaming through the window as its brilliance slightly blurs your vision. Then you spot your dad looking back at you with pride, his eyes brimming with joyful tears.
But that sentimentality only lasts for a moment, quickly giving way to the first goal you’ll face as a Chinese toddler: being a healthy baby boy. This is the first of many, many parental expectations you’ll encounter all the way till adulthood. On a mechanical level, fulfilling these goals means raising your stats—such as intelligence, sensitivity, endurance, memory, creativity, and charisma. So as a fresh new baby, accomplishing that goal means having to meet a minimum endurance requirement. Stats are color-coded, and raising this figure is about collecting as many gems of that particular color as possible in a mini game.
The crux of Chinese Parents is about prioritizing which stat to increase. Complicating matters is how you’ll also need to pick up certain baby maneuvers, like mustering the motor skills and strength to lift your head, or learning how to flip over from your back to your tummy. These, too, are dependent on the strength of your stats. Sounds simple enough, right?
Only it isn’t. Knowing how to perform these parlor tricks isn’t enough. You need to be so damn good at them that your parents can brag about your talents. This will eventually culminate in a snappy, one-on-one showdown between your parents and your nosy and competitive relatives, in which you’ll have to pit your skills against your cousins’ acrobatic performances. Which one of you can flip their pint-sized body hard enough to perform somersaults at the tender age of five? And oh boy, there's whole library of skills and knowledge you’ll need to master as you grow older, from swimming like Poseidon to becoming the next Einstein.
In Chinese Parents, you aren’t the Pokémon trainer in control of your little critters; you are the Pokémon, speeding through rounds of rigorous training at the hands of your parents. The stakes are high, and the pressure of keeping up with these expectations is so intense that it does reach a boiling point. You can even suffer from a psychotic break. Factoring in time for leisure activities is a must, like taking a walk at the park with your grandparents, or learning how to clap along to traditional Chinese music.
But doing these too often will also earn the ire of your parents, who will tell you off for being a bum. Think of it as a more macabre version of the sanity meter prevalent in survival horror.
Pleasing your parents
At heart Chinese Parents is a brutal game of resource management, which does mirror the childhood anxiety I struggled with with to an extent.
Beneath these systems is a bigger cultural concept at play. It’s called "face," and in Chinese Parents, it’s the key ingredient to truly becoming the outstanding young man your parents want you to be. In broad terms, Chinese Parents is about making sure your parents don’t lose face—bolstering their self-image so that they can look better in front of peers and relatives. In real life, this means that children are often faced with pressure to become both well-adjusted and exceptional. Not only do they need to excel academically, they also have to be respectful, courteous, and demonstrate exceedingly good manners.
One distinct example in Chinese Parents is a short segment on accepting red packets, monetary gifts offered by elders during birthdays and special occasions. In this scenario, you need a marker to stay within a portion of a bar that appears at the bottom of the screen. This is primarily about performativity, because you can’t appear too eager to accept the gift. On the other hand, being forthright about rejecting the gift will cause your aunt—and by extension, your own parents—to lose face.
Face is its own stat, and allows your character to perform bigger, more impressive feats during showdowns with other relatives. The higher your face, the more skills you can invest in. Oh, and the parental expectations I mentioned earlier? They tie in with these battles too. Winning them is imperative to making it through the game, all the way till university.
Yet these mechanics are mere scratches on the surface of Chinese Parents, which demands more as the boy grows older and keeps repetition from growing stale. The gems mini-game is expanded. Each stage is densely packed with more stones you’ll have to excavate, but with the constraint of limited moves. As in life, graduating from elementary school to middle school means being exposed to a even wider range of subjects—including literature and classical studies. Yet you’ll still only have 24 hours in a day to cram all this knowledge into your noggin.
As you grow, Chinese Parents layers on even more meters to ramp up the anxiety. On top of one that depicts your parents’ fluctuating satisfaction with your grades, there’s another that charts your personality type, which is partly determined by your daily activities. Study too hard with no leisure hours, for example, and you may eventually become a psychopath. Then there’s managing your hard-earned pocket money, which you can use to give your stats a boost like buying a self-help book, or alleviate your stress by splurging on candies and toys.
At heart, Chinese Parents is a brutal game of resource management, which does mirror the childhood anxiety I struggled with with to an extent. Of course, as a child back then, I wasn’t imbued with the same degree of self-discipline and ruthless efficiency I was inflicting on this poor boy, but Chinese Parents does still manage to capture the fear of incurring my parents’ displeasure.
Despite how intense it all sounds, childhood in Chinese Parents isn’t just a boundless sea of angst and anxiety. Octopus Play manages to balance the emotional weight with lighthearted moments through bite-sized anecdotes about growing up as a starry-eyed child, fascinated by the happenings around us.
Remember the twisted feeling in your chest when you greeted your teacher in kindergarten, only to realize she wasn’t paying attention to you at all? Or the tiny crush you had on a classmate who was too cool and aloof to hang out with the other kids? Occasionally, there’s even a poll asking if you’ve been through the same scenarios before, and that’s where you can see how many players feel the same way. It’s a pleasant touch for a game that, if handled more thoughtlessly, could spiral into heavy-handed moralizing about childhood in Chinese families.
Juggling the various responsibilities expected of a Chinese kid can be a tense experience in Chinese Parents. I soon found myself struggling to make him grow up as efficiently as possible so that he got as much out of every activity as he could. Unlike most games, this doesn’t get easier the more experience you gather; every year introduces brand new expectations and goals to fulfill. Yet Chinese Parents is ultimately a reminder to slow down amidst all that bustle. The weight of these expectations never goes away, but it’s up to us to decide when to start living for ourselves. It's a much-needed reminder that constantly striving to live up to anyone’s expectations, even your parents’, will only prove to be an endless struggle.
Hinterland Studio creative director Raphael van Lierop delivered some disappointing news yesterday when he announced that the third episode of The Long Dark, which had been set to go live in December, isn't going to make it. But that bad news actually arises from bigger-picture good news—although the good news in question is the result of even more serious bad news. It's all kind of complicated, so I'll let van Lierop explain.
"Some of you might be clued in to recent industry turmoil and a spate of closures, Telltale being the highest profile of these. A bit lesser known, but really big news for our local Vancouver game dev community, was the complete shutdown of Capcom’s Vancouver studio," he explained in a blog post. "About 200 people lost their jobs, and in the weeks following we scrambled to interview people to see if we could help them, and to see how we could build up our own development strength."
"Fortunately for us, we already had several ex-Capcom Vancouver people in the studio, so we were able to identify high performers who would fit in to our culture well. As a result of the Capcom situation, along with some other people we were interviewing at the time, we’ve hired six new team members in the last month. This is Hinterland’s most significant growth in the past five years."
Hinterland was able to "bulk up" its animation department in particular—limitations in its technical capabilities are why the first two episodes of The Long Dark shipped with voiceless dialog scenes—with two new animators and the purchase of Capcom Vancouver's "nearly new" motion capture equipment. It also added two new programmers, a new artist, and a new tester, and it's continuing to interview other people, including former Telltale employees.
It's enough that the studio is considering splitting itself into separate teams, one working on the Wintermute story and the other dedicated to the sandbox survival mode, and it's also completely changed the studio's outlook on The Long Dark development going forward. There's the rub.
"Suddenly having access to all this new development talent and the motion-capture gear makes a huge difference to what we can accomplish in Episode Three. I’ve decided that I’d like to be able to use these new resources—along with the new motion capture equipment—to add more content and polish to Episode Three," van Lierop wrote. "This means it won’t be ready for us to ship in December."
There's no word on when episode three will be out, but on the bright side, he confirmed that the Redux versions of episodes one and two will be ready in December. "Everything has been re-written, re-recorded, and re-animated. There are also new mission beats that didn’t exist before, things that flesh out the experience and story of Wintermute," he continued.
"In December, you’ll be able to play these Redux episodes and get a great sense of what to expect in Episode Three and beyond, as these now serve as the template for how we’ll approach all our mission and narrative content moving forward."
The darker side of the bright side (I told you it's complicated) is that existing saves won't be compatible with the Redux release, so Hinterland will be deleting them. If you haven't started playing Wintermute yet then you should probably wait until the Redux chapters are live, and if you're in the middle of a playthrough and want to finish it, get on it.
The Long Dark is currently on sale on Steam, by the way, for 75 percent off—that's $7.50/£6/€6.
Here I was, browsing through Steam when I saw something baffling: the Call of Duty Franchise Collection is currently listed as the number eight best-selling product in Canada at the bargain-bin price of $1,031.10 CDN ($865.40 USD). What's crazy, though, is that some crazy canucks bought this thing enough times to have the Franchise Collection beat out best sellers like Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Ark, and Black Desert Online. As a Canadian, I just don't know what to think.
It's this bloated price that makes the Franchise Collection the most expensive single thing you can put in your Steam shopping cart. Other bundles come close, like the $936.49 USD Paradox Interactive Collection and the $1020.46 Activision Collection. The difference here being that the both the Paradox and Acitivision bundle offers 50-plus different games while the Call of Duty Franchise Collection has about 14 actual games in it.
Of course, this doesn't come close to Train Simulator 2019's whopping $8,392.14 worth of DLC, but that chain of choo-choos isn't sold as an individual product.
Steam's best-sellers list ranks games by revenue, not by copies sold. The reason that it's even selling right now is likely due to a 19 percent discount (this megapack of CoD usually costs $1,069.60 USD), which shaves a few hundred off the price. But, really, what's a few hundred to a person who is even willing to drop a cool grand just to own every Call of Duty.
On second thought, I get wanting to own every Call of Duty game. What I don't get is why anyone would spend $417.25 just to own every map pack, season pass, and other dumb DLC from each of these games that no one is likely playing any way. Roughly half of this package is just multiplayer-focused DLC. Do you really need Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's "Stimulus Package"? I doubt it.
I shouldn't judge, though. None of us here at PC Gamer are particularly savvy consumers, but still. This is obviously not a good deal—especially because this bundle still has games as old as Black Ops at just under full price, and it doesn't even include the newly released Black Ops 4.
Anyway, if you're from Canada and you have a thousand dollars to burn I guess this would be one way to do it. You can find the Call of Duty Franchise Collection here.
No offence to the sub-genre, but I feel like I burned out on 2D platformers with either a novel art style or emotional angle shortly after indie games exploded on PC a few years ago. Gris, though, is arriving at a point when I'm absolutely in the mood for a game like this, sandwiched between time-eaters like Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Fallout 76. It's relatively familiar light puzzle fare, but it has an outstanding hard pencil/watercolour art style, and its world feels enormous thanks to the clever ways it plays with scale.
In Gris, you're playing as a young woman who's dealing with some unnamed sorrow. You're left to figure out the particulars of the story based on the imagery in the world (more on that later), but in-game your time is mostly spent using her dress to solve puzzles in different ways. You unlock more functions for the dress as you get deeper into the game. Turning it into a cube shape, for example, transforms Gris into a heavy object that can break through fragile parts of the environment, or make items fall from trees. You can also use the dress to float as a kind of double jump, and later swim quickly through underwater environments. It's a very handy piece of clothing, all said.
Gris is a gently paced trek through a lovely-looking world, with predictably nice music and frequently gorgeous animation, even if it feels like an amalgamation of about four or five games I've played before. That's not a bad thing for me, though—I expected a certain variance in atmosphere from this game, alternating between desolate, cutesy and hopeful, and so far I'm getting it.
Later in the preview build, I encounter a bird that screams at Gris, knocking her off the environment unless I turn her into a cube to resist its force. The bird really does look like a drawing come to life—a shutter-y animation effect enhances the visual impact of the creatures you encounter in the game, and the larger animals are spectacular. The camera will sometimes pull out to illustrate how tiny Gris looks next to the rest of the environment, which gives the impression that its 2D world is bigger than it is.
None of the puzzles are hard enough that I got stuck in the early part of this game, but they're taxing enough that Gris is more than just walking sideways while nice music and environments happen around you. In an icy area of the world, every few seconds the cold will intensify, and an ice structure will be formed in the image of Gris at that exact moment, before shattering a few seconds later. There's a clever puzzle involving this part of the level that I won't spoil, but it makes you think about how to use her different abilities in a smart way.
This is the level of complexity I'm comfortable with given the game's overall dreamy tone. There are also optional puzzles in the game that are a little trickier, a couple of which I'm pretty sure I accidentally solved before learning they weren't mandatory.
The developers hint that there's some wider meaning to the symbolism in the game's world. Honestly, I could list some English Literature course-style nonsense here interpreting all the broken statues of sad women, or why there's a giant angry bird squawking at me, or why there's a nice little cube man who'll do things for me when I feed him an apple. Really, though, I'd be meeting the game more than halfway on what it's willing to tell me. If there's some greater meaning to Gris beyond some abstract exploration of sorrow or grief, I've personally not found it easy to pick up on.
That's okay with me, though—poking through the colourful world of Gris is rewarding enough for me. It shows me pretty environments and beautifully animated creatures frequently enough that I want to see the rest of its world. I thought this was the sort of game I no longer had an urge to play, but Gris doesn't have a million quest markers, so it's found me at exactly the right time.
Cylostra Direfin is a banshee on a mission. On a boat journey to sing to the Phoenix King of the High Elves, a storm sank her boat and killed her crew, but this can't stop her. Her determination to perform keeps her furious spirit in the Old World, and she's going to sing to the Phoenix King one day no matter how many mortals puny she has to go through first.
Cylostra is one of four heroes added in the Curse of the Vampire Coast expansion for Total War: Warhammer 2. Their strong personalities are reflected in their traits and abilities. Cylostra starts the campaign with the ghost of a Bretonnian hero at her side, and she can summon a ghostly unit of knights in battle as she resurrects members of the crew died with her. The Vampire Lord Luthor Harkon has had his mind splintered by a Lizardman hex, so a series of rotating traits affect his battlefield capabilities as he cycles through different aspects of his personality.
The heroes have their personal objectives, but they are all united by the expansion's broader mission: to kill a legendary ocean creature and resurrect it to fight for them using a necromantic sea shanty. The Le Chuck-like Count Noctilus raids the Old World from a maelstrom in the deep seas, and the human pirate captain Aranessa Saltspire wants riches, and they're all about to fight one another for the prize. The result is a decent campaign-within-a-campaign with its own rules and special features.
Knights to see you.
Ghost with the most
There are treasure maps, which you can find raiding ruins and taking out pirates. They give you a general map indicator and a small riddle. If you move a hero or general to the right spot and click the dig command they search for the loot, earning gold and acclaim when you hit the right spot. You can also hunt down pieces of eight to unlock regiments of renown. The pirate theme is strong.
There's no ship combat in Total War: Warhammer 2 (which is probably for the best). Instead when ships clash you now have the option to fight a land battle on a nearby island or, if you're attacking a Dark Elf Black Ark, on the Ark itself. You fight with all of the combat units you've stuffed into the ship, and the expansion adds some new island maps. It's a fudge, but it's better than autoresolving all sea conflicts in a campaign that requires you to voyage out to the maelstrom and surrounding islands.
The Creative Assembly has reached into the fringes of Warhammer lore to create some excellent new units. Your basic deck zombies look good and sound the part (they say "yarr!" a lot), but they're a bit pathetic. You need to upgrade your hero's galleon and your settlements to access the best nonsense. That includes giant zombies with crab arms, giant crabs, and shipwrecks animated in giant humanoid forms.
In the foreground, a renimated shipwreck, in the background a massive cannon called 'Big Bess'.
Fangs a lot
I don't remember boats with guns in the tabletop game. A lot of these feel like they've been pulled from off-the-cuff references in an old rulebook or Dreadfleet tale. None of it feels out of place, however, which shows the close understanding CA has developed for the old Warhammer world. These factions feel right for DLC as well; you wouldn't reasonably expect vampire pirates to be a core faction in the main three games.
I'm enjoying Curse of the Vampire Coast for similar reasons as the Tomb Kings expansion. It sets up a dark little world of warring bandits along the coast of Lustria. You know that somewhere across the ocean Nagash is doing some nonsense with the black pyramid, and to the north the High Elves are still trying to look after the vortex as the Dark Elves, Skaven and Lizardmen undermine them.
I slightly prefer the item-hunting and crafting systems that came with the Tomb Kings because it let me play it like a Heroes of Might and Magic game. The Tomb Kings' ability to raise entire armies so quickly minimised economy and public order wrangling. It feels increasingly redundant to buy and slowly build structures to generate a bit of resource here, and a bit of public happiness there, especially when there's more going on on Total War: Warhammer 2's strategy map.
Fortunately the Vampire Coast heroes can infiltrate ports to install a 'pirate cove' that siphons funds away from the unsuspecting population. That's a cool way to let someone else deal with that admin for you, and thematically it's perfect. A vampire pirate doesn't necessarily want a dozen castles, much better to leech plunder from humans little by little. By the time you've learned the magic sea shanty and raised the ocean monster, it will be too late for all of them. I have a feeling it will be Cylostra's finest performance.
Hitman 2 is due out on November 13, or tomorrow if you’ve slapped down some cash for the Gold Edition. Today, though, is for launch trailers, which you can direct your eyes towards right now.
It’s also review day, so you why not give our Hitman 2 review some of your attention? Phil reckons it’s great, though it hews pretty closely to its predecessor, which isn't a bad thing in this case.
It’s always a bit odd, watching trailers or other people play Hitman. There are guns! Who uses guns in Hitman? Madness! Thankfully, there’s also a lot of people falling, or boats falling on people. I’m all about that ‘accidental’ death. Comedy, that’s what I’m after, as well as getting rid of fedoras.
