The absence of a release date didn't stop me from picking Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord in our PC Gamer 2019 Fantasy Draft, and my decision could soon be vindicated. TaleWorlds very casually slipped the mention of an upcoming closed beta into a recent developer blog update, like it was no big deal after seven years.
It is a pretty big deal, though. Mount & Blade is one of the best RPGs of all time, and the sequel is promising to be an even richer blend of roleplaying, strategy and simulation, but it's yet to be shown off outside the controlled confines of events and previews. What exactly the closed beta will entail has yet to be announced; all we know at the moment is that the "upcoming" closed beta will be detailed in a future blog update. Given TaleWorlds' hesitance about announcing a release date too early, I suspect that the closed beta won't be far off.
The update itself was concerned with multiplayer skirmishes, where players can beat each other up in 6v6 battles. You'll also be trying to capture and hold points, like in Captain mode, but there are no bots, just you and the other players. Because these battles will be asymmetrical, with powerful armoured knights charging into pitiful serfs who've just been tossed a sword, spawns are tied to the quality of your class. Every player gets a set amount of points to spend on a class to spawn as, but you'll run out of points faster if you keep going for the best warrior.
Sekiro is set in a dark fantasy reimagining of 16th century Sengoku Japan in a world of rogue warlords and embattled clans. As Sekiro—the ‘one-armed wolf’—you are on a quest to rescue your young lord from the clutches of the Ashina clan. One of its leading samurai cut off your shinobi’s arm, starting a long quest for revenge across a range of gorgeous environments.
Sekiro draws strong influence from Japanese history, and from Japan’s beautiful and varied landscapes. Your journey takes you to corrupted temples in lush forests as well as towns tucked away in snowy mountains. At night you fight by torchlight in streets swarming with guards, by day you vault across rooftops and use your grapple to hop between high branches. The world of Sekiro has been built with your shinobi’s grapple in mind. Expect environments with a lot of vertical intrigue, which you can exploit to get the jump on your enemies.
You aren’t alone on your journey. Beleaguered merchants, mysterious vagrants, wounded soldiers, and many more mysterious characters await on your path. Some offer advice, others offer warnings. Some can be tempted back to your home temple to advise you throughout the game. Given that Sekiro is developed by the creators of Dark Souls, you can expect a whole world of enigmatic lore. This will surely not be a straightforward revenge story.
Curt is a bastard. I know this because I watched him intentionally mow down three innocent bystanders in cold blood first-hand, before hopping out of his pickup truck, beating a woman to death with a baseball bat, and then chasing another down the street brandishing a knife and cackling as he went.
It's worth noting that while this is pretty standard behaviour in regular GTA Online, it’s a big no-no in the game’s player-built roleplay servers. The RP world is designed to reflect reality, to the point where even jaywalking, running a red light or speeding 5mph over the limit will land you a fine at best and, depending on the active officer—all controlled by real, fully-trained volunteers—jail time at worst, so harsh is the penal system in this city.
Before catching his fifth prospective victim, Curt was blindsided by a cop on-foot, nailed to the floor, cuffed, read his Miranda rights and rolled into the back of a squad car. He was duly whisked to the courthouse down the road, and, never one to shy away from opportunity, I decided to make my own mark on the unfolding drama.
This man, guilty as he clearly was, deserved a fair trial. I’d been dicked over by sentence-happy cops too many times in this town, so I made it my mission to represent him. We hold these truths to be self-evident.
The law is not my area of expertise. That’ll become pretty clear further down the page, but for this very reason, I feel obliged to make that admission right off the bat. In fact, I know so little about the law that halfway through my latest Grand Theft Auto 5 roleplay expedition, I Googled "Can anyone represent you in court?"
Given the fact you can legally represent yourself in judicial proceedings, I was of the vague understanding that so long as you agreed to accept counsel from another person, they too could vouch for you in front of a judge. It turns out I was really, really wrong about this.
So wrong, in fact, that here are the rules as per the Illinois Attorney Act: “Only lawyers can go to court for someone else. It’s the law.” Erm… duh! Television court dramas have taught me nothing.
The Act continues: “No person shall be permitted to practice as an attorney or counsellor at law within this State without having previously obtained a license for that purpose from the Supreme Court of this State.”
In FiveM, the open-source community mod for GTA 5 that I roleplay within, I had not previously obtained said license, and it turns out Los Santos is governed by the same in-game rules as their real-world counterparts. What I do have, though, is a silver-tongue—and as my previous RP ramblings have illustrated, I ain’t scared to use it.
I nipped round to the nearby Binco clothes store, strapped on the sharpest black suit I could find and cringed at the fact the server’s apparel editor bugged out and wouldn’t let me remove my black beanie. Ah well, it’s what I say that matters, not how I look, I told myself despite looking like a total twat.
By the time I made it to the courthouse, the rather suspect-looking judge, dressed in full police uniform, had handed down a life sentence to our Curt as he cursed and screamed from the dock, his greasy mullet haircut a match for his haggard face and awful denim waistcoat. FiveM incorporates NewTheft's Open All Interiors mod in its framework, which means a number of otherwise inaccessible in-game areas can be entered, the courthouse included.
“I’m this man’s lawyer,” I cried as I barged through the swing doors like that scene at the end of Miracle on 34th Street when the men storm in carrying sack-loads of letters for Santa Claus over their shoulders. It’d take a miracle to get this prick off the hook, but I’ve never been one to shy away from a challenge.
“You’re late!” harked the judge. I was very late, but pointed out that a crime and punishment of this magnitude surely must be held in front of a jury of the accused’s peers, not a copper guising as a judge and two other policeman who were clearly his pals.
In essence, the judge told me to piss off and take the matter up with his colleagues at the holding cells at the station, where Curt would ultimately be processed. I’d understood this to be the order of things during my own umpteen run-ins with the law in Los Santos, so knew there was still hope of getting my inadvertent client off the hook.
Back at the station, I challenged the ruling and suggested Curt’s abysmally-handled trial was a miscarriage of justice and that he must, HE MUST, be released immediately. I screamed and shouted and embodied all of those hours lost to binge-watching Making a Murderer while eating crisps in my pants in the dark at home. HE’S INNOCENT, I cried at one point, momentarily forgetting that I’d already admitted my client’s guilt, but that it was a default in the case that should set him free.
I made It’s Always Sunny’s Charlie Kelly look like Johnnie Cochran as I babbled on about rights and the constitution and tipping the scales of justice, and after a while I overheard one officer mutter to the other: “Should we just let him go?” If boring these guys into submission was how this was going to go down, I’d absolutely take it! Nobody cares how you get them out of trouble, so long as they walk free, right?
“Yeah, fuck it,” replied the boss.
…
…
“In fact, wait, check his credentials first, will you?” It was all downhill from here. First this:
And then a simple, but decidedly killer blow.
“Let me see your ID.”
I frantically hit Google. CAN ANYONE REPRESENT YOU IN COURT? Top answer: Illinois Legal Aid Online.
“Only lawyers can go to court for someone else. It’s the law.”
In that moment, I vaguely remembered something about lawyers and licenses on the RP server’s homepage—that IRL training was offered to roleplayers in the same way it was for the server’s emergency services. Shit. I’m rumbled, it’s game over, screw Curt, I need to get my arse out of here, pronto.
“Sir, stop walking away from us,” said cop number two. “We need to see your ID.”
Okay, quickly, get up the stairs, get to the exit, and get the hell out of there, I thought to myself. Before walking straight into the administration room like a total fucking idiot. After all this, I’d be undone by a dead end. Urgh:
At least Curt appeared to have my back until the last:
I don’t know if Curt ever did catch up with that police officer in the end, once he got out of jail. I don’t even know what sentence the LSPD wound up giving him. I was sent to Bolingbroke Penitentiary for 24 months, where I took on odd jobs such as welding and planting trees. I kept a low profile. What a fall from grace from the high-stakes courtroom. I didn’t see Curt once throughout that time.
Maybe they uncovered some more dirt on him that warranted a harsher punishment. Maybe they sentenced him to death. They probably did, he’s off his nut. And to be perfectly honest, this city might be better off if they extended me the same sanction. I’m no better than him.
Warparty is an real-time strategy romp with some pretty radical theories about the Stone Age. A trio of tribes are vying for control of the era and its limited resources, and they're not doing this just by going around clubbing each other. Each tribe has special abilities, like handy dinosaur taming skills or the power to summon the undead. This is a lot more exciting than learning about the Agricultural Revolution.
It looks like a pretty straightforward RTS, with everything being subservient to building big armies and hurling them at the opposition. You'll still need to build a base and harvest lots of resources, but it's all just fuel for the war machine. There are some wrinkles, though, like tricky PvE encounters and magic spells.
Dinosaurs wander around and guard important resources, including the indomitable T.rex. They can be hunted and harvested for the meat you need to recruit more units, but as one of the factions you'll also be able to tame them and send them into battle for you, while another can recruit triceratops cavalry. Whichever faction you play, dinosaurs are key to winning the Stone Age. I've been living in ignorance all this time.
Along with a campaign, skirmishes and multiplayer, there's a survival mode where you pick a faction and see how long you can last against increasingly nasty waves of enemies, fighting for your spot on the leaderboard.
After a stint in Early Access, Warparty is out now on Steam for £18/$22.49.
Anyone with a long-ish memory of the internet will remember how Gearbox changed the art style of the original Borderlands. It's been talked about a lot in the years since its original 2009 release, and it's widely considered a 'last minute' change that helped the co-op FPS series take off.
In its first public showings in 2008, Borderlands was a drab and mostly brown-looking shooter that looked a little like the original Halo via Mad Max. It was definitely a product of its time, emerging in an era dominated by Gears of War and other games with a muted colour palette, like the Resistance series on PlayStation, or Metal Gear Solid 4, or Resident Evil 5. The pieces of Borderlands were certainly there—the guns, the vehicles, the enemies. It just looked boring in any screen where someone wasn't firing a weapon.
Interestingly, the UK games media resource Games Press still has all of the original screens of Borderlands from before the change—a time capsule of the game as it once was. I've put most of them in the gallery below, if you've never seen them before, or it's just been a while. The first six were revealed at Leipzig 2008, while the latter three were dropped at E3 2008 a few months earlier.
As meticulously detailed by Gamespot back in 2010, Borderlands was conceived as 'Halo meets Diablo' in 2005. The swap of colour palette was attributed to a few factors, notably that testers thought it looked too similar to Fallout 3 and the then-upcoming Rage from id. The change came at about 75 percent through development, and what soon became the previous iteration was hence referred to as the game's "brown period".
The thing is, the decision to give Borderlands a wild, cel-shaded art style wasn't just a key moment for the game and Gearbox's collective fates. It was a turning point for sci-fi games generally—cel-shading was a bit of an early '00s gimmick previously seen in games like Cel Damage and Ubisoft's XIII, but here it made perfect sense when combined with the game's bizarre sense of humour. When I reviewed the original Borderlands for a now-defunct Xbox magazine back in 2009, it unexpectedly became a game I was calling colleagues over to check out—either because I found a ludicrous new gun that fired elemental bullets, or because the tone surprised me in some way (I gave it 9/10). I remember insisting to a friend in a pub that he buy it, so we could try it in co-op. It went from barely being on my radar at all to my personal GOTY.
Along with the second more colourful Borderlands game that arrived in 2012, I think the series' art style helped to steer us out of an era of muddy shooters and into one where Destiny, No Man's Sky and Fortnite could thrive. These games might not be directly inspired by Gearbox's work, even if Destiny's Cayde-6 would blend in perfectly on Pandora—but it helped kick off the trend to which they would eventually belong.
Tropico 6 is a great game for people watching. It's a satirical city builder in which every one of the citizens of your banana republic is simulated. You place a mine. You watch as a construction crew makes its way over to the building site. You watch as the newly constructed mine's employees start digging for gold or coal or uranium or whatever. And you watch as teamsters come to take the raw materials to a factory for processing.
When it's all going well, there's a calming rhythm to the bustle of your island. When it's not, you find yourself scouring around the map, trying to diagnose problems. Why hasn't the mine been built? Why are the workers off-site? Why haven't the goods been transported? Why is the processing plant out of raw materials? Why isn't the shipment at the docks? The next cargo ship won't arrive for six months, and if I don't complete this trading order soon the Axis forces are going to declare war on me because of the time I used them as a scapegoat to win an election.
The focused, individualised simulation means that small inefficiencies can balloon into big problems, and the behaviour of your citizens feeds back into wider systems in interesting ways. That's why—while there is a sandbox mode with plenty of different islands and options—often the Tropico series is at its best during the campaign missions, where specific requirements force you to adapt.
In sandbox, you can go slow, sensibly growing your island, diligently pursuing new financial ventures, effectively placating political factions and superpowers. You have the space and freedom to effectively manage your growth as you progress through the different eras. But the missions – presented as an anthology of past adventures, narrated by your trusty aide Penultimo – throw in entertaining curveballs to overcome.
Each focuses on a different aspect of the game, be it the spread of propaganda, the challenges of mass tourism, the balancing act of international relations, or the benefits of light piracy. The latter is one of the most entertaining. Starting on an island with virtually no natural resources, you're required to pillage raw materials to then manufacture into more profitable goods. The raid system is a powerful new tool, essentially gifting a regular trickle of goods, immigrants and, in later eras, beneficial propaganda and even falsified tourist reviews. Having to create supply chains that aren't supported by local crops is a meaningful twist on a standard campaign.
If there's a downside to raids, it's that there's no major downside. Foreign powers have traditionally taken a dim view to piracy, but in this, a game that specifically pokes fun at international relations, it just doesn't come up. You do at least get a negative reputation modifier for stealing famed national monuments like Saint Basil's Cathedral or The /actual White House/, but it's easy to mitigate and goes entirely unremarked upon when said nation next gets in touch to demand you complete some petty task.
The only thing that can placate them? Building a golf course.
Some missions aren't as successful. One, in which El Presidente launches a grand experiment to abolish housing, sounded promising, but in practice just meant working around the negative opinion modifier that poor housing confers. Citizens can protest and even rebel, but, just like superpowers, they're too easy to placate—even when they don't have a roof over their head.
Where the missions excel, however, it's in forcing you to take actions that can upset the delicate balance of economic growth. If political strife always feels manageable, financial ruin is a more immediate danger, especially when progressing through to a new era. A few times I've gone from comfortable profit to uncontrollable decline, as upkeep and wages outgrew my production thanks to some ridiculous request from a faction leader.
Tonally, Tropico is almost too broad and bawdy to be considered satire, but the over-the-top absurdity does lead to some fun mission requests that feed comedy into mechanics. In one, for instance, the communists instruct me to dismantle religion, banks and mansions. This leads to outrage from the Capitalists. The only thing that can placate them? Building a golf course.
Tropico 6 was developed by new series stewards Limbic Entertainment, but you'd be hard pressed to know by just playing the game. It takes Tropico 5's era system, reintroduces Tropico 4's political speeches and work modes, and adds in a few new features designed to complicate supply chains and diversify systems. It looks a bit nicer – the Tropico series has always been very pretty – and the archipelagoes, bridges and tunnels add a few neat wrinkles to construction. That's about it.
Ultimately, this is still a series about people watching. The builder. The miner. The teamster. The factory worker. I've been watching these people perform the same tasks since I first encountered the series with Tropico 3. I'll probably watch them for many, many hours to come.
Everyone's been talking about Sekiro, how hard it is, how it trains you to become better at its combat and systems, and more. But let me step back for a minute and point out something I love about the game. The entirety of Sekiro is only a 12.6GB download in Steam, 15.5GB after it's unpacked and installed.
From Software axes a lot of the bloat seen in other major games by avoiding long video cutscenes. There's still an intro video, but once that's over, as far as I can tell (I'm not very far in the game) everything is done via in-engine scenes. Considering how much space video can consume, I appreciate this.
It's not like Sekiro loses atmospheric points by dropping video either. There are still full voiceovers for everything important, in multiple languages. I'm a heathen and prefer hearing things in English, but the option to go with Japanese audio and English subtitles feels compelling. And there are still plenty of cutscenes, with depth of field used to good effect. They're just not videos.
The environments of Sekiro still look beautiful as well, even without a 50GB HD texture pack. (Final Fantasy 15, I'm looking at you.) Sure, things could look a bit better with higher resolution textures, but so far I haven't felt anything was missing. Except an easy mode.
Downloading the entire game on my 300Mbps connection only takes about six minutes. And then I can commence dying, a lot. But not before I'm greeted by an EULA (End User Licensing Agreement) that I have to scroll through, line by line, before I can accept it. I still didn't read the EULA.
Anyway, I'm not saying every game needs to be like Sekiro. There's room in this world for all types. I'm just saying it's a nice change of pace to get a game that could theoretically fit in my system RAM. Of course, Sekiro does screw up elsewhere—seriously, stop building games with a 60fps cap and no FOV slider. I know that can be fixed with mods, but it never should have happened in the first place, not in 2019.
Heaven's Vault, the sci-fi archaeological exploration adventure coming from 80 Days and Sorcery! studio Inkle, will be out on April 16.
Heaven's Vault will tell an open-ended story about discovering artifacts, deciphering lost languages, and piecing together the history of a world. Players can progress through it in any order they like, while interacting with "a diverse cast of characters who remember everything you say, and who's attitude to you will change with how you act."
It looks quite a bit more elaborate than 80 Days (which, in case you'd forgotten, is fantastic), but based on a tweet from studio co-founder Jon Ingold, it's still very much in Inkle's style.
"Heaven’s Vault is fully dynamic, fully authored, self-assembling long-form interactive narrative," he wrote. "Every choice of make, explicit or implicit, feeds the story machine. Every story has an ending; and no two stories are quite the same."
Inkle also shared one of the musical tracks for the game, composed by Laurence Chapman, who also did the soundtracks for 80 Days and Sorcery! It's pretty damn fantastic. Find out more on Steam or at inklestudios.com.
Just a few days ago I was praising fantasy RPG Outward for constantly auto-saving your progress to make your choices meaningful. If there's no reloading a past save, it adds weight to the decisions you make and the situations you wind up in. There is a big downside, though, as I found yesterday when I got stuck somewhere. Not stuck on a quest or a puzzle—I mean my character got literally stuck in some world geometry. Being unable to reload a past save suddenly didn't seem so wonderful.
I was running around attempting to find a bandit hideout in the Marshlands—there are no quest markers in Outward, so often quest-givers will just tell you a general area to look and you have to go hunt around. After a lengthy trek across the map and a lot of exploring around some cliffs, I slid down the side of a small hill and got myself wedged behind a stone wall. And there I stayed. I was trapped in the sliding animation, which meant I couldn't run or roll myself out of the spot, and there's no jumping in Outward. I couldn't activate skills or spells or use items in my inventory. I was just wedged in place, only able to float a little to the right or left.
This uh... sucks. Big time. In a game with a traditional save system, at least you'd be able to reload if you wound up in a situation like this, but in Outward you can't. Quitting the game and relaunching just reloaded me in that exact same spot. I couldn't join a friend's game (Outward has co-op) and while he was able to join mine, he appeared right where I was, so we were both stuck there.
I decided to wait and just leave the game running until I died of thirst, hunger, or exhaustion, but as those meters gradually emptied (after about two real hours) I was still alive. Maybe it's because I was stuck in that sliding animation, but my health never dropped and I didn't collapse even with my hunger, thirst, and sleep all zeroed out. So don't even bother trying to just wait it out.
How to revert to an old save
Here's what you should do instead. There are separate saved games in Outward, and you can find them by navigating to the game's folder. On Steam, you'll find them here:
Steam > steamapps > common > Outward > Savegames
In that location, there should be a folder called... well, it's just a bunch of numbers. And in that numbered folder, you'll find a folder for each of your characters, unfortunately not listed by your character's name but instead by a bunch of letters and numbers.
This made it a bit tricky since I'd played both of my characters the same day I got stuck. But by noting the times the folders were created, you should be able to tell which folder belongs to which character.
In any case, make a copy of all of your saves somewhere (like on your desktop). Then delete (or remove) your most recent saved game from the save folder in the game files. That will make your last save before you got stuck your most recent one, and when continuing your game you'll be moved back to a time in your game before you got stuck.
Annoying! Deeply annoying—both getting stuck in the game world and having to dig around in files just to fix the issue. It's a lot of work you shouldn't have to bother with, and hopefully there will be some patch in the future to address the issue of players becoming stuck. I know from searching the forums I'm not the only one this has happened to.
The remake (and and partial reconstruction) of disturbing adventure game Pathologic now has a release date. Pathologic 2 is coming to Steam May 23, 2019. There's a new trailer above giving you a glimpse of the creepy world and its sad and sickly inhabitants who you're trying to save in your role as a medic.
In Pathologic 2 you've got only 12 days to save a town stricken by the plague, and just to add to your to-do list, it's a survival game so you'll need to find time to eat, drink, and sleep as well. You can find it on Steam.
