Matt Thorson, creator of tricky platformer Celeste, is giving away a late Christmas present to fans of the game: free levels. These "very hard" levels will be ready early next year, he announced on Twitter this week.
He also said he'll be revealing his next game around the same time the levels are ready—other than Celeste, he's best known for co-op platformer TowerFall Ascension.
It's no surprise it's sold as many as 500,000 copies this year. As Shaun wrote in his review, it's a vibrant, challenging platformer, and adds the kind of narrative that so many games in the genre lack. It's also one of the best indie games you can play right now.
This year has been a relatively quiet one for VR, but headset owners have still been treated to their fair share of great games. The likes of Beat Saber, In Death and Moss have become must-plays for anyone with an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, while we've also seen plenty of excellent VR ports of existing games, such as Skyrim VR.
If you missed out on any of them, or if you haven't been keeping track of all the new releases, then don't worry—we've brought them all together in this article. Here are the best 2018 VR games. For more great games, check out our longer list of the overall best VR games, which stretches back to 2016.
Note that some of the games here are in Early Access. We've only included them if we think they're polished enough to be considered one of the best things that you could've played this year.
Beat Saber
Developer: Beat Games | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Official site
Guitar Hero with lightsabers, basically—and the best thing you can play in VR right now. With a laser sword in each motion-controlled hand, you slash at boxes that are coming at you to a beat, ducking under low walls and dodging bombs as you go. It’s relentless, and awards points for style rather than pure timing—the flashier your follow throughs, the better, so unleash that inner Jedi.
It’s constantly getting new tracks for you to dice to pieces, but you can also import custom songs: Tutorials and a list of the best tracks are over at the unofficial BeastSaber site. It’s simply a brilliant idea, executed to perfection.
In Death
Developer: Sólfar Studios | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Official site
2018 has been kind to VR archery lovers: both Sacralith and QuiVr are worth checking out, but In Death is the best of the bunch. It’s a roguelite about battling through a procedural fantasy castle, and it has the most imaginative use of a bow-and-arrow we’ve seen in VR. It’s primarily a weapon, and you come across cool arrow types by exploring, but it’s also your means of getting around: you fire a teleporting arrow to move.
Nocking an arrow and letting it fly feels smooth, and after every run you’ll make progress on at least a handful of different achievements, which means you’ll always have a reason to dive back in for one more go. It’s tough for newcomers, but well worth sticking with.
Echo Combat
Developer: Ready at Dawn | Platforms: Oculus Rift | Link: Oculus
Echo Combat, a $10 add-on to futuresport Echo Arena, has the best movement of any FPS we’ve ever played: with pistol, laser rifle or shotgun in hand, you rocket boost your way around zero-gravity levels, grabbing onto the walls and pushing yourself off for extra speed.
It’s slick and polished, and traversing each map feels as big an achievement as popping a long-range headshot. It only has a few arenas but they’re cleverly designed, with lots of objects to take cover behind and plenty of routes to flank your enemies. If you have a Rift, it’s a must-own.
A charming third-person platformer in which you’re both controlling Moss the mouse and poking at bits of the level with your hands, pushing and pulling objects into place to create new routes. The jumping, puzzling and sword-swinging are nothing special, but VR makes its gorgeous levels come alive. They’re full of detail and an endearing innocence, and each tells its own story.
James loved it, saying it “recalls the sensation of being a kid and playing around in the dirt, spinning stories and characters out of sticks and grass.” You can read his full thoughts here.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice VR
Developer: Ninja Theory | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive | Link: Official site
Don’t let the lack of motion control support put you off: Hellblade is a thing of terrible beauty in VR. Just like the regular version, you’ll play it in third-person with a gamepad or mouse and keyboard, but being able to swivel your head around while Senua moves makes you appreciate just how stunning a world Ninja Theory has crafted.
It was already a moody game, but being surrounded by it makes it feel even more atmospheric—the voices that Senua hears in her head will torment you, and when they whisper in our ear, our hair stands on edge. It’s simply the best way to experience Hellblade if you’ve never played before, and even if you have, the VR version is free for owners of the original. Don’t miss out.
This brutal fantasy combat game only just launched in Early Access, but it already has some of the best melee battles you’ll see in VR. It gives you endless ways to fight: you can zap lightning spells, punch enemies in slow motion, pick them up and bash their heads together, hurl concrete blocks at them with telekinesis, or simply just stab them in the belly. The enjoyment comes in stringing these moves together in imaginative, stylish ways.
Battling human enemies sets it apart from the cartoony GORN (itself well worth a look), and the way the enemies crumple and scream when we skewer them makes us feel guilty for enjoying it so much.
Catch and Release
Developer: Metricminds GmbH & Co KG | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Official site
A chill fishing sim in which you row a boat to a likely spot on a lake, sling your hook, and enjoy the mountain scenery. It’s one of the most relaxing games you can play in VR and, as Chris wrote in the summer, it’s wonderfully interactive: to tune the radio to a song you want, you have to grab the tuning knob and twiddle, and to eat sandwiches you have to slam the bread into your face. You can even upload your own songs into a custom playlist to enjoy while you wait for a fish to bite.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim VR
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Steam
Strapping on a headset will make you see Skyrim’s world in a new light: dragons finally feel as imposing as they were meant to, and you’ll stop and stare at a sunset or waterfall that you previously wouldn’t have looked twice at.
The motion controls are robust, and controlling your weapons with your hands makes combat more involved than ever. We especially like how both bows and spells work, and being able to cast spells in two different directions, one with each hand, is a gamechanger for mages.
The menus are a pain, and interactions usually require a button press: you can’t, say, grab the lid of a chest and pull it open. But if you can look past that, it’s the perfect excuse to play Skyrim all over again (and it even supports some of your favourite mods, too).
The prettiest VR game we’ve played in 2018. It’s a puzzler in which you open the box-shaped heads of colourful monsters, twisting and turning different objects inside to make something fun happen before turning the box over and twiddling some more. It’s like a VR Botanicula, and every dial you twiddle, or butterfly you poke, is accompanied by a brilliant sound effect. We have no idea what we’re doing sometimes, and the solutions to puzzles can feel obscure, but when prodding at the environment feels this delightful, we don’t care.
Brass Tactics is an RTS developed by the creative mind behind Age of Empires 2—and that pedigree shows. It’s our favourite VR strategy game right now, and makes us feel like a real-life general, towering over a miniature battlefield and directing intricately animated troops with our hands.
Everything is done through touch controls: to place structures you flip your hand to bring up lots of tiny models, grab one with your other hand, and throw it on the board. It’s not the most complex strategy game, but trying to keep an eye on the entire battlefield at once is enough of a challenge to keep us hooked.
If you’re looking for something with a smaller scope, or you don’t have a Rift, we’d recommend Castle Must Be Mine, a cutesy tower defence game.
This mind-bending puzzler tails off towards the end, but it’s still worth playing because its central gimmick—you’re working with multiple past versions of yourself to complete challenges—feels unique. At the start of each level you don’t have any help but after you do something useful, like sliding a lever to move some platforms, you can create a new version of yourself.
When you do that, the old version will replay their actions, and this time, when they move the platform, you can jump onto it. You might pick up a cube on the other side and chuck it to a third platform—then create a new version of yourself to pre-emptively get to that third platform and catch your own throw. It’s never too taxing, but we just love watching four versions of ourselves work together.
Budget Cuts
Developer: Neat Corporation | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive | Link: Official site
This humorous VR stealth game is worth playing for its movement system alone: you fire a portal with one hand, which creates a handheld window into the new location. You can peer at it from different angles to check the coast is clear before fully committing. When on the other side, you’re murdering angry robots with scissors and knives, hiding under desks and solving simple puzzles, usually involving finding keycards. At three to four hours it feels a little light for the $30 asking price, but if you see it in a sale, grab it.
Rolling Line
Developer: Gaugepunk Games | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Official site
If you can’t afford to build a huge model railway in your garage, then Rolling Line is the next best thing. You can play around with its two default sets—inspired by Santa Fe and New Zealand—or create your own from scratch with its simple, powerful building tools, which even let you choose where to place individual trees, and pick how big they’ll be. Slowly crafting your set and idly flicking with the signals is a great way to blow off steam.
Guns'n'Stories: Bulletproof VR
Developer: Mirowin | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Official site
At its heart it’s a simple wave-based shooter—but we love its Wild West charm. Guns'n'Stories is told from the perspective of an old-timer recalling the glory days to his grandson, and he the narrates the levels as you go on, exaggerating for effect. It’s fun to act out the stories in real time, and although you can never move from one spot, we weren't ever bored: Its short stages are packed with more than enough enemies to keep us occupied.
The cartoony shooting is satisfying, particularly when you’re dual wielding, and you can smack bullets out of the air with the butt of your gun. Nothing complex, here: Just some rootin' tootin' cowboy shooting.
Distance
Developer: Refract | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive | Link: Official site
After more than six years in development, the best arcade VR racing game has finally left Early Access. You drive around trippy, sci-fi tracks at impossible speeds, trying to react to the way its randomly generated tracks rotate and morph shape. You’ll sometimes take flight, too, jumping between sections of track and rotating your car to drive on the ceiling and up walls.
It has a campaign, an arcade mode, online multiplayer and a track creation tool, and it’s all set to a wonderfully thumping soundtrack that will help keep you focused on the twisting road ahead.
If you’ve ever dreamed of becoming a cyber ninja, then you need Sairento in your life. It’s a ridiculous, cinematic combat playground in which you can, in no particular order, triple jump off of a wall, backflip, slow down time, blast dual Uzis, block bullets with your dual blades and slice up an enemy with a katana, sending blood spraying all over the level—and your screen.
It has a campaign, an endless mode and PvP multiplayer, so there’s lots to get stuck into. It takes a while to learn how to pull of its fanciest moves, but when you finally nail the killer combo you’ve been practising for so long, you’ll never want to take your headset off.
Accounting+
Developer: Crows Crows Crows, Squanch Games| Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive | Link: Official site
The original Accounting made it onto our list of the best ever VR games—now, two years after its initial release, it’s back as an expanded version with twice as many jokes, most of which are genuinely funny. It plays a little bit like an interactive, surreal comedy TV show, with lots of quirky characters to meet and plenty of mischief to get up to. It’s all based around the “noble profession” of accounting: one minute, you’re cleaning up your desk after work, the next minute you’re playing a xylophone made of bones and summoning thousands of demons. Oops.
Vox Machinae
Developer: Space Bullet Dynamics Corporation | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Official site
It’s only been in Early Access for three months, but Vox Machinae is already our favourite VR mech game. It’s remarkably polished, even at this early stage, and when you’re at the control sticks you really feel like you’re in the cockpit of a giant hunk of metal. When you turn your head, you’re faced with all manner of dials displaying your health, your location, and your heat status, many of which you can interact with, and you can hear your mech creak and groan as you leap in the air.
Your weapons boom when you unleash them, and both bullet trails and explosions look like something out of an action film. You can choose between five mech chassis, and then deck them out with your favourite weapons before heading into its multiplayer battles. It’s only going to get better with time, too.
Red Matter
Developer: Vertical Robot | Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality | Link: Official site
This puzzler, set on a Russian base on one of Saturn’s moons, won’t leave you scratching your head too often, but it’s full of otherworldly atmosphere. Every room is packed with objects to interact with, even if they’re not part of the main puzzle: you’ll yank open lockers to discover letters from faraway families, play with moving platforms, and throw gas canisters around.
The story is decent, and there’s plenty of incidental details that enrich it. Your handheld scanner fills in the blanks by revealing information about whatever you’re looking at—it will translate notes you find from Russian, for example. It’s worth taking the time to explore every hidey hole.
Anyone that has logged into Fallout 76 in 2018 will get the original Fallout, Fallout 2 and the combat-focused Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel for free next month, Bethesda has announced.
Players will get the games as part of the Fallout Classic Collection, and should be able to claim them in early January. The collection was initially available as a pre-order bonus for Fallout 76.
Bethesda didn't specify where you'll be able to play the games but I presume it'll be through the developer's own launcher, rather than via Steam.
The games have been available for free before, and they only cost pocket change each but, hey, we're not going to say no. If you're a fan of RPGs then they're still worth playing, even 15-20 years after they were first released. You can read a couple of retrospectves on them here and here.
He's known as The Revolutionary, and he's hell-bent on creating a new world order, starting with Colombia. You'll visit Hitman 2's Colombian level to try and lay waste to his plans, and you have until December 30 to make him disappear quietly. Or not so quietly, if you prefer.
The intel you've got—outlined in the video above—is that Murillo is a paranoid man, a narcissist and a pathological liar. He also has...hint, hint...a drinking habit.
He seems to have several possible spawn points, giving you lots of options for taking him out. Just make sure you play the Colombia map in the regular game first to get a feel for its secrets—remember, you only get one shot at killing him.
Update 3: The Atlas servers are now online, so you should be able to dive in.
Update 2: Atlas is now for sale on Steam Early Access. It costs $30 but is discounted to $25 until January 2. Servers don't appear to be up at the moment, but this post on the official site states they expect them to available in the next hour or so (though you might want to take that with a grain of salt, all things considered).
Update 1: Atlas will launch into Early Access at 12pm PST/3pm ET/9pm GMT today, developer Grapeshot Games has confirmed.
It follows several delays to the release of the pirate MMO, which major Twitch streamers have already had their hands on for several hours.
Original story:
A series of delays to the release of pirate MMO Atlas meant that tens of thousands of Twitch viewers watched their favourite streamers waiting for the game to go live yesterday. Now the wait is over: the major streamers have their hands on it, and it's currently the most-watched game on Twitch, pulling in more than 220,000 viewers (for comparison, 147,000 people are watching Fortnite right now).
However, regular players are still waiting for the Early Access version to go live. Yesterday Grapeshot Games, a new name for ARK: Survival Evolve developer Studio Wildcard, said on Twitter that it'd Early Access build should go live by noon PST today (3pm ET/8pm GMT). Following the release of the streamer build, the devs tweeted that they're working on the build now.
If you fancy watching a stream of the game, you can pick one from here. I've watched a little bit and, predictably, it looks a lot like ARK, but with a pirate theme. That's clearly an oversimplification, and I'll be keeping an eye on a few streams today to get a better look at it. I'll also update this post when Atlas goes live.
Among what seems like a million Games Workshop licensed games, Fatshark's Vermintide series is an obvious standout. See our GOTY hub for the rest of the awards and personal picks.
Tom: There is some seriously excellent hitting in this game. When you whack a rat in the head with a hammer it blows up and the poor creature stumbles around a bit before falling over dead. Top hitting.
Vermintide 2 is also a great example of how sequels can realise the intentions of the original game. With a fan base and more resources, Fatshark added a more engaging loot system, new environments and loads more enemies to clonk with hammers. I’ve always thought that more games should copy Left 4 Dead, but Vermintide carves out its own niche with a strong melee focus and a surprisingly good realisation of the old world of Warhammer. I love it for that, but even if you’re not a fan, anyone can enjoy mashing up hordes with some mates.
Samuel: I found Vermintide 2 too hard at launch, and I still don't quite get the loot system, but it's a much better version of what the first game was going for. Like Tom says, the combat is such an improvement over the original, to the point where I switched characters just so I had the opportunity to batter things more frequently. The environments are lovely, too—with the first game I felt like I was wandering around the same village or cave over and over again. Here I feel like I get a grander look at the Warhammer fantasy universe.
Wes: I had fun with the first Vermintide, but it didn't have quite the variety to keep me coming back. Vermintide 2 does not have that problem. Sometimes I'm chopping giant rat men in half, and sometimes I'm decapitating raving Chaos lunatics. That's all the variety I need!
But really, there's way more variety than that. Vermintide 2's best addition by far is its leveling system with subclasses for each character. I mainly played as grumbly dwarf Bardin Goreksson, and early in the game (especially before some balance changes made everything mercifully easier) I was all about tankiness, walking around with an axe and a shield that could soak up the damage and send a dozen enemies flying backwards with a nice shield bash. At level 7 I unlocked the ironbreaker class and naturally gravitated to that, since it made me even tougher and gave me a taunt skill, which made my tanky, defensive play more useful for the team.
By the time I hit level 12 and unlocked the Slayer class, I was ready for a change. And playing Bardin as a Slayer is about as dramatic a change as you can get. He strips off his armor and goes full crazy dwarf, with a rad leap attack that sends him into a fast-swinging frenzy. He's all offense. Talent trees also give you a few skills to choose from all the way up to level 25, which is a satisfying progression arc for playing many hours of Vermintide 2, and also lets you further tailor each subclass to how you want to play. Vermintide 2 manages to be the rare game you can go into just to mindlessly smack around some bad guys with great melee combat, or get really into how you build your character and fit in with a highly functional team. That's a great co-op game.
Phil: It's been said already, but damn, Vermintide 2 is some good hitting. I exclusively play Kerillian, meaning the majority of my time each mission is spent manically clicking the mouse, watching her spinning daggers slice through an actual horde of rats. There's a weighty presence for your foes that makes slicing, dicing and bludgeoning them feel incredibly satisfying. It might offer some of the most enjoyable melee combat in PC gaming. That it's also a great way to spend time with friends just makes it all the better.
Darksiders 3 has added a new 'Classic' combat mode aimed at making fights feel similar to the first two games in the series. The biggest change is that you can now interrupt attacks with a dodge move—previously, when you committed to an attack you had to see it through until Fury stopped swinging her weapon.
Classic mode will also let you use items instantly, which means you'll be able to heal without worrying that Fury will die during the animation (something that happened to me quite a lot during my playthrough).
You'll be able to select between the new combat mode and the default settings when you load up any save game or when you start a new game.
The update also adds some checkpoints so you can save progress more often, boosts the damage that you do in Havoc form, fixes crashes, and introduces a new item that lets you refill your Nephilim’s Respite healing flask at the Vulgrim shops. You can read the patch notes for the full list of changes.
The changes all sound positive, although I'm still not sure Darksiders 3 is worth splashing out on until it gets a significant sale. As I wrote in my review, the combat is punchy and the setting very pretty, but the camera is wonky, its puzzles too simple, and the lack of proper loot means you can't customise Fury as much as I'd hoped.
The holidays are upon us, and so we have a matching weekend question to ask: what's the best game you ever received as a holiday gift? Below you'll find our answers, which shed some light on our experiences with games when we were younger. Regular readers of the PCG Q&A won't be entirely surprised to learn that the answers mainly mention games from the '90s, such is the general age bracket of our team.
We'd love to read about past gifts you received during the holidays. Let us know your answers in the comments below.
Tom Senior: Tomb Raider 2
A long time ago I got Tomb Raider 2 as a Christmas gift. It came in a great big brown box with Lara Croft on it, and I still remember how exciting it was to load it up for the first time. The underwater bits were scary, the speedboat bit in Venice was a surprising James Bond moment, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn't kill the butler. It's hard to go back and enjoy it now, but at the time it seemed like a Christmas miracle. Sometimes I get the menu music stuck in my head and remember the game all over again. Thanks for the memories, Eidos.
Wes Fenlon: Tomb Raider
I'm cheating here a bit because I don't think it was actually a holiday gift, but my dad once came back from a business trip with a copy of Tomb Raider for me, in that legendary trapezoid box. I can still see it hidden in his sock drawer where I found it as a snoopy kid. Maybe it was going to be a birthday present? I can't remember exactly, but I do remember the pounding in my heart when I found it, and the whoa moment I felt when I later played the game and pressed a key to swap between its graphics presets. The "high" graphics looked so real. What an experience that first eerie cave was. Footprints in the snow! Wolves! It was beyond what I imagined.
Off the topic of PC games, I'd give a special nod to an uncle for giving me Pikmin for Christmas 2001, after I'd spent all summer saving up for a GameCube. I was obsessed with Smash Bros. and Rogue Squadron 2, but Pikmin hadn't even been on my radar. I ended up loving it. I'd also like to mention that the worst game I've ever gotten as a holiday gift was Glover. I would've had more fun with a can full of rocks.
Samuel Roberts: Rogue Squadron
For Christmas 1998, I got all the Star Wars things. It was all I cared about. My family bought me the films on VHS, which is the first time I ever owned them—that was a huge deal. But they also bought me two games that I probably played more than anything else in the '90s: Rogue Squadron and Shadow of the Empire. The latter is considered something of a dud, but it has a great version of the Battle of Hoth, plus it lets you run around Echo Base fighting Wampas.
Rogue Squadron, though, despite being so difficult that it took me a while to rattle through its levels, was a top arcade-style shooter. I think it's best remembered as an N64 game these days, but I only ever played it on PC—you can get it on GOG now, and it works perfectly with an Xbox controller. Why didn't they ever release the sequels on PC, eh?
Joanna Nelius: Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines
My parents didn't really buy me PC games as holiday gifts when I was a kid. I got a lot of educational games randomly throughout the year, and some of my dad's old games when he was tired of them, but as far as holiday gifts go, I got clothes, dolls, and the occasional Ninja Turtle action figure. The only two games I am positive I received as a holiday gift are Banjo Kazooie (which was for the N64, so that kind of doesn't count), and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. They never bought me a game after that one, so I guess by default VTM: Bloodlines is the best PC game I ever received as a holiday gift.
Phil Savage: Rave eJay
Rave eJay, and later HipHop eJay. Both were simple music creation programs—often found in the bargain bins of UK game stores—that let you position pre-made riffs and beats to create your own tunes. Playing with them as a '90s teen, I think I managed to convince myself I had a natural talent for assembling banging tunes. I even made a mixtape containing my greatest hits—the highlight of which featured a friend who I'd recorded rapping down the phone. (Rural Warwickshire is not traditionally known for its hip hop scene.) For whatever reason I never did break into the music business. Probably because all of the tracks made with it basically sound the same.
Fraser Brown: Civilization 2
It could have been a birthday present rather than a Christmas present, but since I can’t even remember what I got last Christmas, let alone all of them, let’s just pretend that a pre-teen Fraser was delighted when he unwrapped Civilization 2 on Christmas morning. I’d played some turn-based strategy games before, but the first Civ sequel is probably where I really started obsessing over maps and armies. I was already a burgeoning history nerd, so to have the history of civilisation laid out before me, even in this really abstract way, was incredible.
Last year, I got to chart the history of the whole series with the help of each lead developer. There’s no way that the 11-year-old locked in a war with his dreaded Aztec nemesis would have believed that he’d be chatting about the very same game with Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds over 20 years later. What a trip. I don’t know if I could pick my favourite Civ—it would probably be 4 or after—but the second game has a fixed place in my heart.
Jarred Walton: Baldur's Gate (kind of)
I was a huge fan of Dungeons and Dragons growing up—I can't believe I gave away all of my old manuals as a teenager. "First Edition Monster Manual, Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master Guide, Deities and Demigods? Those are old and couldn't possibly be worth keeping..." Anyway, the point is I loved playing D&D games of all forms, and in 1998 BioWare revitalized the RPG genre with Baldur's Gate. I'm fudging a little on this and calling it a gift, but it was one of the few games I preordered and it arrived at the perfect time: right as finals wrapped up and winter break started.
I binged hard, beating the game twice in a two week period. I remember my roommates knocking on my bedroom door probably the second morning after I got the game. "Hey, Jarred, you all right in there? We haven't seen you since yesterday." Me: "Go away, I'm busy." Sleep was a chore, and I played 30 hours straight after installing Buldur's Gate. After the decline of SSI's D&D games, Buldur's Gate was the perfect RPG at the time. In fact, I think its sequel and the Neverwinter Nights games were the last great D&D titles. Maybe it's time for someone new to pick up that torch.
James Davenport: Nothing
Pictured: Mario.
I've never recieved a game as a gift. They were banned from my household growing up. Tragic, I know. I've bought myself a ton of games though, including but not limited to Mario.
Atlas' Early Access launch is turning into a disaster as players are growing increasingly tired of the lack of communication.
Update: Some streamers have the game now, though it hasn't released wide yet.
If you looked at Twitch earlier today, you would've seen the same grouping of games that always sit at the top of its Browse section. But, sitting just beyond that top ten most-watched games was Atlas, the new pirate MMO from the makers of ARK: Survival Evolved. For several hours today, over 33,000 people were watching a variety of streamers in that category. But none of those streamers were actually playing Atlas. Instead, everyone was just sitting around and waiting for it to release—or they were until developer Studio Wildcard, who appear to be developing Atlas under the name Grapeshot Games, announced that Atlas would be delayed again. This is the third time Atlas' release date has been pushed back since it was originally announced at the Game Awards on December 6, and, understandably, Atlas' burgeoning community of eager would-be players is pretty upset about it.
Since midnight, dozens of Twitch streamers like 'pairfect' have been sitting on Twitch wearing pirate costumes while countdown timers ticked away presumably heralding the official release of Atlas on Steam. Those countdown timers, though, were never accurate as developers Studio Wildcard had never specified the exact time that Atlas would release. All anybody knew was that it would arrive some time today on December 21. But, just over an hour ago, Atlas' official Twitter finally said the full release of the game would be, again, delayed until December 22 with some streamers getting early access later tonight. Almost immediately after, Atlas dropped to just a few thousand viewers on Twitch while its official Discord of over 23,000 people has boiled over into a seething rage. At this point, I wouldn't blame anyone for being suspicious of this new release date.
"This is a joke, right?" Wrote one Discord member before their comment was drowned in a sea of insults and criticism. If you take a minute to watch the channel, others aren't nearly as kind.
While insults and harassment are never tolerable, it's understandable why fans are upset. Atlas first debuted at The Game Awards on December 6 with a cool trailer that promised to take ARK's survival systems and mash them together with a single-server, player-driven world inspired by EVE Online. When I flew out to Studio Wildcard's Seattle offices to check it out last month, I really liked what I saw. Atlas looks so different to just about every MMO.
Atlas was supposed to launch on December 13, but only a few days after its reveal it was delayed to December 19. Given that buzz around the game was still building, I don't think people were all that concerned about a delay for an MMO they hadn't known existed a week ago. But what really upset players is when December 19 rolled around and the countdown timer on the official website slowly ticked down to zero. People were expecting to be able to buy Atlas, but nothing was happening. Then the official Twitter announced the launch date was pushed back to December 21 a half an hour after the countdown had ended.
That same thing has happened today, with dozens of streams and tens of thousands of viewers eager to see what would surely be Atlas' actual launch. But this third delay isn't exactly giving anyone reason to be optimistic.
Delays are a normal part of game development and it's always a good thing when developers take the extra time to work on a game—even if that leads to temporary frustration from players. But Atlas' day-to-day delays are concerning, because it implies that things are down to the wire. Atlas is now expected to release three days before Christmas, and MMOs are live products that need constant developer attention—especially during its first weeks when issues like server stability and major bugs can ruin players' experience. So why on earth would Studio Wildcard release an MMO days before Christmas when that presumably means employees responsible for uptime and fixes won't get a break?
I've reached out to Studio Wildcard to get some clarification on the delay and will update this article when I hear back. But it's clear to see that Atlas' Early Access launch is turning into a disaster as players are growing increasingly tired of the lack of communication.
I liked The Bard's Tale 4: Barrows Deep an awful lot when it came out earlier this year and it's improved considerably since then, with new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes. Today developer inXile Entertainment announced that the studio is working on a new dungeon, the Royal Necropolis of Haernhold, which will be free for everyone who owns the game.
The Royal Necropolis will be a combat-focused dungeon with "several new mini-boss fights and two very challenging boss fights." Players will have the opportunity to uncover the truth of Tarjan's treachery and reverse the destruction wrought upon the tomb of Gaerwyn, the greatest hero of the Dwarves.
"While the emphasis is very much on trying out and acquiring new, powerful gear and then using it on the most challenging fights we’ve ever made, we are also able to leverage all of our existing puzzle designs and components for a set of new, mind-bending puzzles that players will have to solve to find the secrets of Gaerwyn’s tomb," inXile said.
Not everyone will be thrilled with the promise of more puzzles: For all that I enjoyed the game, even I have to admit that it got to be a little much at times. The upcoming 2.0 patch will address the hassle with a new song called "Struggler's Lament" that will instantly open most doors that are locked by puzzles. It will only work on core quest content, so you'll still have to handle the optional sections on your own if you want to see what they've got hidden away, but it will make getting to the end of the tale a less trying proposition.
The 2.0 update will also add a new tier of high-level, "master-crafted" items and change up merchants to make them more useful (particularly in the late stages of the game), add new character portraits and nine new fast-travel locations, buff unique items and Elven puzzle weapons, and—finally—add inventory filtering and controller support. Work on the Mac and Linux versions of the game is also ongoing but is taking longer than expected because of the focus on post-releases updates.
A rollout date for the 2.0 update hasn't been set, but the Royal Necropolis of Haernhold DLC is expected to be ready to go in early 2019.
