Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord's title gives you a pretty good idea what it's about, but it's not all thundering hooves, flashing steel, and the crash of angry men in shouting, sobbing masses of broken bone and spilt blood. There is also, as developer Taleworlds explained today on Steam, the subtle art of persuasion.
The persuasion system is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: Where a blade or a bribe won't get the job done, some well-chosen words might. It will build out Bannerlord's personality and reputation system, which will influence the likelihood of success under different sets of circumstances—so if you have a reputation for being a stand-up guy, for instance, you'll have a better chance of convincing someone to do you a solid now for in exchange for a favor later than if you're known for jerking people around. Different skills come into play as well, like charm and charisma, and if you're lacking in those departments you can try leaning on "roguery" instead.
Persuasion attempts happens through dialog, which you'll have to steer in the direction you want. Once the sensitive subject comes up, the game will calculate your odds of persuasive success; if they're too low, the matter is dropped immediately, but if not you get into the hard negotiations phase.
"The NPC will then present you a number of issues where you will need to persuade him or her. During persuasion, you will see a progress bar, which shows how far you’ve gone toward convincing the other party," Taleworlds explained. "Every time you succeed in convincing the lord over a point, the persuasion bar will fill up a certain amount. If at the end you can fill up the entire bar, the NPC’s objections will be overcome."
"The persuasion system is often a gateway that leads you into the barter system. Some lords will do anything for honor, or for revenge, but most want some sort of token of your appreciation up front. Each successful persuasion attempt will help to reduce the monetary cost of the action you would like to perform when it comes to the bartering stage, whereas repeated failures might make a deal impossible to reach. And if you push your luck too much, then you run the risk of severely impacting your relations with NPCs in a negative way."
I hope it works out. Mounts and blades are great, but I really like the idea of being able to take a more Littlefinger-style approach to getting things done. Sadly, one thing the update does not mention is the one thing everyone really wants to know: When we'll get to see this system (and everything else) in action. Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord has been in development since 2012, but there's still no sign of a release date.
The Epic Games Store doesn’t have forums. When Epic announced the platform, it framed this as a positive thing. No forums, it said, would stop toxicity from flourishing, and with Discord, Twitter and developers’ own forums, there are other ways to get in touch. One of those alternatives is Epic’s competitor, Steam, and some players have turned to its forums to get support for the Epic Games Store version of Subnautica.
It’s hardly an epidemic, and looking at other Steam forums, they’ve yet to devolve into support forums for Epic users. The store gets mentioned here and there, but not in the context of asking for assistance. I also saw topics about console versions and Origin versions, so really this is just a matter of Steam still being this huge, ubiquitous thing that a lot of people use because they’re used to it.
Still, support on the Epic Games Store probably needs a rethink. Looking at store pages reveals no information about how to deal with issues with the game, beyond some social media links. If a game has bug reporting and a ticket system, that’s not clear either. It’s not just about offering support, then, but making it clear how you get it, too, and pointing in the direction of Twitter doesn’t cut it.
I was in a dollar store in Vancouver when a piece of music came on the store radio which I immediately recognised. Not in that usual way where a pop song starts up and you’re absent-mindedly humming along, but in the way where you hear a piece of music so deeply associated with a completely different context that reality feels a bit wobbly. It’s like your dad’s voice coming out of a cat, or something.
Anyway, ringing forth in the socks-and-earphones-and-facemasks-and-noodles aisle was some of the background music from Megaquarium. Megaquarium is a fish-centric theme park management game by Twice Circled, the tiny studio behind Big Pharma. I actually had to leave the shop in the end because I was so confused by the fact I wasn’t laying out theme park walkways and arranging fish in tanks that best suited their needs.
I have played dozens of hours of Megaquarium. Over the course of those hours, the music has become so deeply entwined with a particular set of activities—tinkering with aquatic plants, refining filtration systems, shifting my branded fish balloon inventory—that hearing it in another context immediately triggers the impulse to play.
The aquarium theme immediately sets it apart from other tycoon-style games. I love fish and visiting aquariums so the chance to run one in a game was a rare and exciting treat. That theming also meant it didn’t have the pressure of needing to compete in a more crowded niche. You’d need to work hard to stand out in the world of rollercoasters, or to go toe-to-toe with hospital or city management projects, but Megaquarium is able to simply co-exist, throwing a new setting into the mix.
The main appeal for me, beyond the fact that aquariums make up a large part of my non-work life, is that Megaquarium succeeds in inducing that wonderful, relaxing cycle of play I associate with tycoon games at their best.
1. You set up a space.
2. You let the game run
3. You unlock new possibilities
4. You figure out what you want to improve
5. You set up the space anew
Tycoon games are really tinkering games. They’re projects which always have room for improvement. Manageable improvement. The kind of ongoing improvement which takes you from a single room with a single tank, to some kind of sprawling fish palace entirely by repeating the phrase “I’ll just do this and then I’ll log off” over the course of an evening.
I booted up the game to help me write this piece and I’m already accidentally re-housing my green moray eel to repurpose its tank for the newly unlocked red leg hermit crab. Y’see the eel is fully grown and will eat the crab if I put them in the same tank. But the crab needs to be in a tank with something as it’s a scavenger, meaning it can’t be fed directly. Instead, it nibbles the remains of another creature’s food. Perhaps if I add some spotted boxfish? But then is there enough going on in the eel’s new tank to keep visitors interested?
And this is how it continues. A wonderfully relaxing procession of “What if….?” and “Let me just try…” which expands to fill an evening.
February, 2013. Barack Obama is in the White House. ‘Thrift Shop’ by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis is topping the charts. The Harlem Shake is taking the internet by storm. And DayZ, a mod for Arma II, has become such a hit, Bohemia Interactive puts a plan in motion to turn it into a full game. Part survival sandbox, part social experiment, the mod throws 64 players into a bleak post-Soviet apocalypse, sits back, and lets them make their own fun.
Five years later and DayZ is a standalone game, having gone through an extended Early Access period. And, well, nothing much has changed. There’s something weirdly comforting about the fact that DayZ is still DayZ, with its clunky controls, buggy zombies, and commitment to making surviving as punishingly hard as possible. It’s kind of absurd that, in a 1.0 release, there are still problems that have been around since the alpha days. But honestly, I wasn’t expecting much else. For better or worse, it’s almost exactly the game I remember, warts and all.
You still have to run for miles to meet up with friends. The zombies still get stuck in walls or just completely fail to notice you at all. You can scour an entire town for supplies only to find one dirty jacket, a tin opener, and no tins. And the chances that you’ll be killed by some unseen sniper, usually seconds after you finally find something good, is always high. At least those damn ladders have finally been sorted out. Veteran players will remember the agony of climbing a ladder and ending up inexplicably dead at the bottom of it.
The map, Chernarus, is a former Soviet republic, and dripping in misery
If this all sounds a bit miserable, it is. Minute to minute, this is about as gruelling as survival games get. You have an ever-dwindling parade of meters to manage—thirst, hunger, temperature, and so on—and the general scarcity of items can make staying alive an ordeal. There’s nothing more disheartening in DayZ than trekking for miles to a town, only to see all the doors lying open: a surefire sign that someone has already been and no doubt thoroughly looted the place.
But this does complement the hopeless, melancholy atmosphere of the game. The map, Chernarus, is a former Soviet republic, and dripping in misery. You get the feeling that even before the zombies arrived, this would’ve been an unpleasant place to get lost in. But there’s a quiet beauty to be found out there too, particularly in the rolling farmland, dense forests, and sleepy rural towns. It’s a fantastic setting, and a welcome change from the more familiar Western post-apocalypses that usually feature in these games.
The largest concentration of players tends to be around around cities and military bases—where the best loot is often found—meaning you can travel in the wilds pretty much undisturbed. When I play DayZ, I’m constantly on the move, travelling between towns, landmarks, and other points of interest, grabbing whatever I can find, avoiding trouble if I can. But that means a lot of uneventful running. There are vehicles, but they’re often missing parts or fuel, and locating them can be a real chore for a solo player.
The sandbox nature of the game means that getting ‘geared up’ will be most players’ main goal: finding a gun, ammo, bandages, food, drink, and maybe a nice helmet or something. But the more you hoard, the more nerve-racking the game becomes, because you know that you’re just one trigger-happy survivor or mischievous troll away from losing it all. I actually love this, because it makes death mean something. When you die you’re unceremoniously dumped back to a random starting location with no gear, and knowing this makes every decision, especially with other players around, loaded with danger.
I've become wary of other survivors to the point of fearful paranoia
The real thrill of DayZ, and the reason I’ve played both the mod and the standalone version for hundreds of hours each, is in the feeling you get when you inevitably bump into another survivor. Even now my heart pounds when I’m exploring a town or wandering in the wilderness and I see another player ahead. Sometimes, but not that often these days, they might wave you down for a friendly chat and some beans. Or they might helpfully warn you about a group of bandits (DayZ slang for players who kill other players) in the next town down the road.
But they’ll probably just shoot you on sight. There are a lot of reasons for this. They might just enjoy killing people. They might want your loot. Or, and this happened to me, the game has turned them into a horrible person. See, I used to be friendly. I’d approach people, wave, say hello. I’d give them advice or ask if they needed a hand. But after several instances of people pretending to be friendly then stabbing me in the back (literally), or luring me into an ambush, I’ve become wary of other survivors to the point of fearful paranoia.
That’s brilliant, though. It’s what makes DayZ such a fascinating, compelling multiplayer game, and far more interesting to me than something like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. In games like that, your only interaction with people is, ultimately, shooting them. But in DayZ, every encounter with another player is an opportunity for a story. Even if you get robbed or handcuffed or humiliated, it’ll be something you remember. Incidentally, make sure you play with a mic. Not responding vocally when someone says hello, or orders you to do something at gunpoint, will likely just get you killed.
I haven’t really talked about the zombies yet, because they’re the least exciting thing in the game. Which is, perhaps, a little odd in a game about a zombie apocalypse. When they aren’t stuck in the scenery they run dumbly at you, and sometimes they phase in and out of existence like your internet connection can’t keep up with them. Then when it comes to actually shooting or smacking one with a melee weapon, there’s no sense of physicality at all.
Fighting a zombie feels like swatting at a hologram. The combat really is abysmal, and there’s no sense of challenge or satisfaction attached to it. They’re better than they were in the early days of the standalone, but only just. The result of this is that, rather than something to be feared, the undead are just annoying. There was a point in the mod when the zombies didn’t work at all, and I enjoyed that a more because there was nothing getting in the way of the real heart of the game: the interactions between players.
These were intelligent humans I was facing, not AI drones I could easily outsmart
DayZ is a difficult game to review, because a lot of the time it’s pretty boring. There are long stretches of nothing; of rambling across seemingly endless fields, not finding anything in towns, never encountering another soul. But what keeps you going is knowing that, around the next corner, something incredibly exciting might happen. A firefight with a rival group of survivors in a ruined city. A knife-edge stand-off with a gun-toting rival. Someone who hasn’t seen you, meaning you might be able to sneak up, stick an axe in their back, and steal that nice jacket they’re wearing. Hey, don't judge me. It's dog eat dog out there.
These snatches of drama are fleeting, but in the right moment there are few games as exciting as DayZ. And, similar to EVE Online, knowing that everything (except the zombies) is player-driven makes it feel extra special. If you get tricked and robbed by a group of bandits, it wasn’t some event scripted by a developer: it was dreamed up by a real, thinking human, and that really adds to the experience. In one combat encounter—my backpack stuffed with hard-earned supplies, my friend lying bleeding in the corner, two assailants hidden in the distance—the exhilaration was incredible. These were intelligent humans I was facing, not AI drones I could easily outsmart.
But then it was back to running around the fields, scavenging for supplies, failing to find any, then dying and restarting—again and again. DayZ comes into its own when you get a foothold, managing to locate enough supplies and weapons to defend yourself and stay alive. But getting to that point is absolutely gruelling sometimes, and that’s where a lot of people will bounce off it. It’s a game where you have to work hard to achieve anything, and even then it can be immediately snatched away from you if you make one stupid mistake, or a player decides they want to shoot you for no particular reason.
Occasionally, in small doses, DayZ is one of the best multiplayer games on PC. But a lot of the time it’s a slow, dull, frustrating, and meandering mess of bugs, broken zombie AI, and weightless combat. So I don’t know what to think, really. Some of the stories this game has created will stick with me forever, and that’s something to be celebrated. But it’s also unforgiving, messy, and doesn’t have much respect for your time. If you want a social survival experience that doesn’t pull any punches, set in an evocative and atmospheric world, then DayZ might be worth investigating. But if you’re after a solid, polished game that always does what it’s supposed to, you’re going to be disappointed.
If you’re trying to cram in some frantic, last minute shopping before the holidays, maybe check out the Fanatical Winter Sale. It’s live now, with big discounts and flash sales. To shave off a bit extra, you can use the FANATICAL10 coupon code. On top of that, PC Gamer readers get an exclusive Hitman 2 discount.
There are lots of deals to trawl through, but look below and you’ll find some of the best ones, all of them with bigger discounts than on Steam. These are all including the 10 percent off coupon, so make sure you use that at checkout.
If Hitman 2’s been on your radar—it should be, as it’s great—then good news! Use the code PCGAMER41 and you’ll get a whopping 41 percent off the regular price of each edition. This includes the regular version of Hitman 2, Hitman 2 Silver Edition and Hitman 2 Gold Edition.
That should give you plenty to do over the holidays.
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Early Access Survival game Scum's winter update has landed and it's full of holiday cheer, complete with a snow-covered map, snowball fights, snowman-making, and even sleds you can find (or craft) to slip and slide down frosty hills. 'Tis the season! Even on an island filled with violent murderous criminals.
There are some other exciting goodies, too, like the first iteration of fortifications. Find a house you like and now you can make it yours by locking doors and barricading windows. You can purchase up to three locks per door using fame points, and there are three different levels of window barricade that take different amounts of damage to destroy. Naturally, with door locks comes a new lockpicking feature, though other players on your team can come and go as they please.
The winter update also comes with some bug fixes and balance changes, a new emote (heart hands), and if you happen to be a Scum supporter (meaning you not only own the game but also purchased the supporter pack) you'll get an additional gift in the form of a few different outfits you can put on your naked dick. How cute! I'm sure these banana warmers will look just spiffy combined with your human skin mask.
And with all that fresh snow, it's best to bundle up. Here's a few more pictures from the update, and the complete patch notes are here:
Valve’s changed its tune when it comes to tweaking cards in Artifact. Today’s update brings with it some significant changes to cards like Axe, Artifact’s most expensive card, as well as new features, including account levels and skill ratings.
While Valve previously subscribed to the idea that cards should never be altered aside from a few exceptions, its philosophy has shifted considerably.
“Our conclusion was that embracing ongoing card balance for a digital game has a lot more upsides for the game as a whole,” reads the update post. “Once we shifted over to this new mindset, it became obvious to us that it was a more natural fit with how we tend to develop games. Starting with today's update, we will be taking an incremental approach to balancing, with the primary goal being to improve the gameplay quality over time.”
Eight cards have been changed with this update, including several prominent ones like Drow Ranger, Cheating Death and the aforementioned Axe. One of Artifact’s most powerful cards, Axe could be found selling for over $30 at its peak. That’s more expensive than Artifact. It’s now selling for around $7.
Artifact’s steep decline in players is likely responsible for the drop, and it’s been going down all month, but the nerf certainly isn’t going to add value to it. The base stats of Axe have gone from 7/2/11 to 6/2/10. It’s still got two armour and his fancy Berserker’s Call ability, but it now does less damage and has less health.
I wonder if we’ll start to see even fewer people throwing big bucks around in the marketplace now that there won’t be this expectation that a card will be as powerful today as the day you bought it.
If you've bought one of the cards changed by the update, you can sell it back to Valve, but only for the peak price 24 hours before the announcement. If you blew $30 on it, you’re out of luck, though you’ll still be able to claw back around $8. You can sell your cards back to Valve now. Here’s how.
Are these changes going to make any of you more hesitant about investing real cash in the game?
League of Legends’ fictional pop act K/DA continues to enjoy the sort of popularity normally exclusive to flesh and blood performers. Their hit song Pop/Stars reached the top of Apple Music’s pop and K-pop charts after it was performed during the World Championships, and now it’s spreading to other games. Today, you can play the track in Beat Saber, the neon VR rhythm game.
Ahri, Akali, Evelynn and Kai’Sa’s tune is available now, so you can slash away at some beats with your lightsabers. You’ll need a VR headset, of course, and Beat Saber supports the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality. It’s a good fit. K/DA is a virtual group whose first gig was an augmented reality extravaganza in front of a live crowd, so a VR game sounds like a logical leap.
Beat Saber is still in Early Access, but at launch it quickly became the highest rated game on Steam at the time with a 99 percent positive rating across nearly 2,000 reviews. It’s at 97 right now, so it remains pretty popular.
As well as the new track, the free update makes a couple of tweaks to practice mode. The settings screen now plays an audio preview when you change a song’s start time, while levels start with an intro before the start time you set, to avoid instantly failing the track.
Doom co-creator John Romero is set to release a new megawad this February, in the form of a fifth episode of the original game. Dubbed Sigil, it features nine levels and even has a fancy physical limited edition, though if you're keen on just playing the levels you can do so for free providing you own a copy of Doom.
But waiting until February is hard. Thankfully Romero has spent the last week streaming two levels from the megawad, culminating in around four hours of footage. That's a lot of hours for two levels, but Romero demonstrates small iterative changes made to the levels over the course of the week, and also talks through some of the design decisions. He also dies: these levels aren't going to be a walk in the park.
Here's the first video. I won't embed them all – if you want to watch the rest in the series, head over to Romero's Twitch channel.
An "accolades trailer" is one that features gameplay and cinematics overlaid with glowing review scores and kind words from outlets such as ours—this one from the brilliant What Remains of Edith Finch is a fine example. Today, Square Enix released an accolades trailer for The Quiet Man, the live-action adventure/brawler about—as I understand it—a deaf guy who kicks ass in memory of his mom.
At this point you may be wondering how a game that Tyler described as "spectacularly bad" before he gave up in disgust could possibly be worthy of such a thing. The short answer is that it's not. The trailer is in Japanese, and the auto-generated English subtitles aren't exactly precise in their syntax, but there's no mistaking the quotes from the reviews:
"Inexplicable"
"Catastrophic failure"
"Worst Joke of the Century"
"Trashhhhhhhhh"
And yes, our take on it is in there too:
If you're wondering why exactly Square Enix would embrace the awfulness to this extent, I can think of two possible explanations. One, there's no saving it, so capitalizing on the carnage Sharknado-style is the only thing left to do. Or two, and this is the apparent goal of the trailer, Square Enix intends to highlight how the game changed once the intentionally missing audio and subtitles were added. The final quarter of the trailer quotes user reviews apologizing for calling it trash and saying that they cried after the update. (Presumably because it was such a revelation, although I suppose watching 15 bucks swirl down the crapper could elicit a similar response.)
So in the end, I guess it's a legitimate accolades trailer, but it suffers from the same basic issue as the game itself: It comes out hard as a rip-roaring mess and by the time it gets to the part where it's time to tell everyone that it's actually good, we've all had our laughs and moved on to something else.
Beyond that, there's also the question of whether the aural addition actually improves the game in any meaningful way, a claim our Quiet Man man disputes. "It would've been bad even if there were a good story. The fighting is terrible," he said in response to this video. "I also refuse to believe the dialogue makes it good." He has not played it with the subtitles, to be fair. He refuses to.
If you want to roll the dice anyway, The Quiet Man is currently on sale for $11/£8/€11 in the Steam Winter Sale.
