A couple of years ago at PAX Australia I had a chance to play a demo of Necrobarista, a visual novel about serving coffee, meeting ghosts, and playing with knives. The setting is a cafe called the Terminal, a magic coffee shop that serves both the living and the dead.
After five years of development, most of which I assume went into those slick animations as seen in the new trailer above, Necrobarista will finally be released this year, either on August 8 or August 9 depending which part of the world you're in (check your local version of its Steam page to find out for sure).
Necrobarista's cool art, bizarre story, and strong sense of place made it stand out back when I played that demo. Here's hoping the final thing lives up to it.
Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.
There were a lot of shareware games that didn't get played beyond the first, free episode in my neck of the woods. One that absolutely did was Wolfenstein 3D because word got out that at the end of the third episode you got to kill Hitler himself.
But first you we had to get to him. The final level contains new enemies who look like Hitler in a robe, shoot fireballs, and mock you with an echoing laugh after they die. These angry Hitler wizards are apparently just puppets with flamethrowers according to the internet, but I like the thought of the Führer keeping a bunch of magic clones in bathrobes around because it's no crazier than what happens next.
In the final room you confront Adolf Hitler, strapped into his own mechsuit, with chainguns for hands. The evolution of this design is something to see.
After you fill mecha Hitler with bullets he steps out of his armor and continues chasing you around the room with chainguns. That pixel Nazi face you've seen on hundreds of paintings all over Castle Wolfenstein is now staring at you from an oddly squat but hench body, zipping around at ludicrous speed. When he finally falls his body erupts into gore, which is exactly the reward for finishing a videogame teenagers in the 1990s wanted.
And then, the final Congratulations! text, exactly as overwritten and bizarre as you'd hope:
"The absolute incarnation of evil, Adolf Hitler, lies at your feet in a pool of his own blood. His wrinkled, crimson-splattered visage still strains, a jagged-toothed rictus trying to cry out. Insane even in death. Your lips pinched in bitter victory, you kick his head off his remains and spit on his corpse. Sieg heil. . . . huh. Sieg hell."
Today Ubisoft lifted the veil on Rainbow Six Siege Year 4 Season 2: Operation Phantom Sight. Last week I went hands-on with new operators Nøkk (pronounced “nook,” as in cranny) and Warden on the newly reworked Kafe Dostoyevsky map.
Like Operation Burnt Horizon, the new ops bring abilities to the table that until now were only seen on the opposite side—Nøkk is a stealthy attacker while Warden is a defending anchor immune to smoke and flash grenades. For that reason neither operator brings exciting newness to Siege, but they may shift the balance meaningfully this the season towards a new meta.
Nøkk
In a nutshell, Nøkk is a combination of both Vigil and Caveira, but on attack. Her wrist-mounted Hel Presence Reduction device automatically scrubs her image from cameras while also dampening her footsteps. By masking both her sound and image, she is by far the stealthiest operator to date. Though, the Hel’s dual functionality does come with some significant drawbacks. Her cloaking tech will “glitch” and give away her presence if she sprints, shoots, or walks into defender traps like Gu mines or barbed wire.
Nøkk's ability to slip past the cameras of Valkyrie, Echo, and Maestro (as well as bulletproof cams) will make her valuable on map positions where defender surveillance is hard to counter. It also gives her a protection against spawn peeks that rely on exterior cameras to pull off. When I played against Nøkk on defense, there was an extra layer of paranoia, as our team couldn't completely trust our eyes and ears.
Still, the gadget feels pretty specialized—most rounds of Siege are decided by direct confrontations, firefights where stealth takes a backseat. And in the guns department, Nøkk is an oddball: she's the first attacker without an option for a long range assault rifle or DMR.
Nøkk’s unconventional arsenal makes her the first attacker without an option for a long range assault rifle or DMR. Essentially, she has the kit of a defender, reducing her ability to operate at range and limiting her versatility.
What will likely be considered Nøkk’s main primary weapon is the FMG-9, an SMG previously exclusive to Smoke that is best known for being ignored in favor of the SMG-11. Alternatively, she can bring the SIX12 SD, a shotgun shunned by most Lesion players. It's silenced, which fits with her theme, but I can't imagine it will see much use in serious competitive play.
For sidearms, Nøkk gets the D-50 Desert Eagle or the 5.7 USG. Both are repurposed from past operators, but Phantom Sight introduces the suppressor for the D-50. This attachment isn't fooling anyone—it still makes an audible thunk when you shoot, but it's a fun, dumb novelty. The build I played did not include a suppressor attachment for Valkyrie's Deagle, surprisingly.
Warden
Warden is here to disrupt your coordinated push. Reporting for duty in a full suit and tie befitting of a Kingsman, Warden’s Smart Glance glasses (paired with his snazzy Secret Service watch) allow him to temporarily see through smoke and cancel out the effects of flash grenades—which makes him the perfect counter for Ying, Glaz, and Blitz.
To fully see through smoke, however, the Glance glasses require Warden to stand still. Along with the Glaz rework, Warden's fancy goggles mean that, for the first time, defenders can exploit the smoke thrown by attackers, bringing balance to this powerful common gadget. In one round on Outback, I went face-to-face against Glaz through a murder hole I'd punched in the wall. He threw smoke, I toggled my goggles, and we squared off, looking for each other's pixels. He won the battle, but it felt like a thermal-sight quickdraw.
I'm excited about Warden's potential to disrupt smoke-plant pushes.
It was the first time that my reaction to a smoke grenade going off inside a doorway wasn't away running and repositioning. Warden will find use on bombsites like Wine Cellar on Chalet, where the meta for more than a year has seen the attackers breach garage, lob smoke around the snowmobiles, and plant with relative safety. Bakery bombsite on Kafe, and the basement of Bank are also good examples where seeing through smoke (in combination with a Mira Black Mirror) will allow defenders see through this popular tactic.
Warden’s a heavy 3-armor op, so he’s best played anchoring on the objective. Yet, his weapon choice seems a bit awkward for the job. He inherits Valkyrie’s MPX SMG, which is objectively one of the weakest in the game. Alternatively, he can bring the M590A1, a powerful pump shotgun enjoyed mostly by Smoke mains when paired with a secondary SMG.
Warden can take on a similar loadout to Smoke if you choose his SMG-12 secondary. His other secondary option, the P-10C pistol, seems like a serviceable choice if the SMG-12 is too unwieldy. It’s also the newest sidearm with a handy red dot sight attached by default. If you’re comfortable going for headshots, it could pick up the slack at long range.
Overall, I'm excited about Warden's potential to disrupt smoke-plant pushes and optimistic about the impact it'll have on the meta.
Kafe Dostoyevsky rework
Sadly we won’t be seeing more new maps through the rest of Year 4, but Ubi is putting those resources into substantial reworks for existing maps. With Kafe Dostoyevsky, Ubi has left much of the map intact while heavily targeting its most problematic areas. Namely, the terrible Bakery/Kitchen bomb site, second floor Train site, and the third floor.
These changes definitely address Kafe's glaring issues.
The bakery and kitchen have been completely rearranged to make the bakery itself less of a window-heavy killzone where no defender wanted to spend time in. The bakery is now divided into two rooms and the kitchen has been expanded with more areas to anchor. A new bombsite added to the second floor moves the bombs to Dining Room and the Reading Room across the hall. Defending this configuration was pure hell, as attackers have a ton of space on the second floor to roam through the train museum—if they can lock down the hallway that divides the bombsites, you're screwed.
The new Cigar Lounge cleans up one of the messiest and deadliest chokepoints in Siege: the skylight. Now, finally, there's an entirely new section in the corner near 'red stairs' where defenders can sit comfortably, outside the view of the skylight. The area now forms more of an L-shape between the third-floor bar and this new balcony, which also grants a line of sight on the second floor Reading Room entrance. Balancing this, though, is a new, second roof hatch above one of these extensions. It’s now less of a chokepoint for attackers, but dropping in is still like diving into a lion’s den.
Two new balcony extensions added beneath the skylight give defenders more room to breathe without crowding into Piano or the freezer, and should make Kafe less of a boring, pinned down fight between three attackers crowding the skylight and the defenders trying to avoid their gaze. Ubi took this a step further by hemming in the skylight itself, which provides a much smaller field of view when you're on the rooftop.
These changes definitely address Kafe's glaring issues, but it would've been nice to see it paired with a broader aesthetic refresh as well. The kitchen has some nice details, like sizzling meals and some beautiful cupcakes that no operator with a heart would let anything bad happen to, but it's otherwise the map we've played since the end of 2015.
New store & Ranked hub
In Phantom Sight, Ubisoft is finally deploying a proper redesign to the cosmetic store. Instead of a clunky list of categories, the new store resembles the flashy tile-based approach many other games use. I didn’t get to see it in action, so it’s not totally clear how things are organized now, but we know that the top two blocks are featured items from Ubi and the bundles below are recommendations based on your personal player history, which is neat. If you’ve recently been maining Maestro, it’ll serve up his Pro League skin, for example.
This is an insanely overdue change. Ubisoft made $721 million on digital items, DLC, and other 'extra' material in its last fiscal year, but I imagine they could've made a few million more if the Siege store had been more pleasant to use before this update. Hopefully the new store will feel more dynamic and visually interesting than what we've had.
On that note, with ranked mode finally coming out of beta, Ubi is putting in the work to make it a centerpiece for Siege. The popular Pick & Ban phase is now the standard of ranked. To further mirror the established competitive rules of Pro League, Bomb is now the only mode in rotation. Outside of matches, Ubi has built an in-game guide for Ranked that acts as a hub for your personal stats. The guide shows the season’s upcoming reward charm and a graph of rank distribution across all players. This is extremely welcome—the page visualizes your Siege career in a way that until now was only accessible on third-party sites like R6Tab.
Speaking of ranks, there’s been a slight color changeup to be aware of. Platinum is now represented by Diamond’s former blue, while Diamond is now a royal purple. Eventually, Ubi plans to build similar guides for every other mode.
House Flipper's first paid DLC is all about cleaning up and redesigning gardens, and it's now available on Steam.
In the DLC, called Garden Flipper, you'll first clear away trash, mow the grass and tug out weeds. You'll then be able to lay down paths or patios, place flowerbeds and arrange furniture in whatever configuration you like—the trailer above shows all manner of chairs, hot tubs, sheds and play houses. When it's all finished, you sell it for a profit, and move onto the next one.
In total, the DLC has 500 items plus variants, including more than 250 plants. Just like the main game, which Chris described as "like Viscera Cleanup Detail only for super gross houses", everything happens manually in first-person, so you should get the sense that the garden is coming to life around you. I like the idea of continually tinkering until everything is exactly the way I want it.
It won't be for everybody, and Chris concluded that House Flipper wasn't fun enough to sustain long hours of play, but if you're a fan of the base game then it looks like the same formula, taken outdoors.
The Steam reviews are mostly positive, although some people are experiencing bugs and glitches. If you want to give it a go, it's $13.50/£10.25, which includes a 10% launch discount. Grab it here.
Conglomerate 451 looks a bit like a futuristic Legend of Grimrock: its turn-based combat and grid-based movement is classic dungeon crawling RPG fare, but it's set in a cyberpunk world full of evil corporations and state-sanctioned killing. Developer RuneHeads this week announced that it's coming to Early Access in just four days—on May 23.
As the CEO of a government-backed Special Agency, it's your job to clean up Sector 451, which is riddled with crime and corruption. To do that, you create an army of clones, customise them to your liking with weapons, armor and cybernetic implants, and then go and murder everything in site. When they die, they're gone for good, a la XCOM.
Dungeons are procedurally-generated, and the Early Access version will have one of the four planned districts. RuneHeads says it'll be in Early Access for between six and eight months, and during that time it'll get up to six times bigger. That's a lot of growth in a short space of time, but let's see how they get on—we'll know early how quickly it's improving because the devs plan to release two updates a month.
Away from combat, you'll be managing a base and researching new tech to upgrade your super soldiers. When the game releases, the plan is to have 10 character classes, more than 100 skills and more than 30 cyber implants that can help your clones fill a particular role. Perks, mutations, and diplomacy will be in the final game, but aren't in the Early Access version.
I'm interested to see how RuneHeads handle the story and themes: the devs say it's pulpy, but the thought of sending government-backed clones to wipe out areas of a city certainly sounds pretty heavy (Andy has more to say about that here).
If you want to check it out, the Steam page is here. It doesn't yet have a price listed, but RuneHeads says whatever it costs will likely increase as it nears full release. You can check out the combat in the trailer at the top of this post.
Hitman launched with DirectX 12 support, so it was strange that Hitman 2 didn't. IO Interactive finally added support March, which has boosted frame rates on higher-end systems, and the studio is working to make it better on low-end rigs, it said this week.
In a Microsoft blog post, the dev team said that users were reporting improved performance since DX12 support was added, and internal testing had showed an 43% improvement in frame rates. However, that data was gathered on a six-core Haswell CPU and AMD Fury X GPU—with lower-end systems, DX11 still offers better performance, and IO wants to change that.
"DirectX 12 requires additional work on the part of the game, so in some cases the overhead of this may result in poorer performance compared to the DirectX 11 version," it said. "We are still optimizing our DirectX 12 implementation and we expect to see improved performance on additional configurations, but currently DirectX 11 may be the best option for players with less capable systems."
It didn't say when we can expect better performance on lower-end machines, but I'd expect that it'll come as the team receive more feedback from players. You can read the full blog post, which contains details as to why exactly DX12 improves performance, here.
Games Workshop used to publish plenty of games beyond their Warhammer brands back in the day, including board games like Talisman and Fury of Dracula. Dark Future was another, a game of car combat set in an alternate timeline where much of the USA becomes a desert called the Big Empty and road warriors in "gangcults" roam the highways. Auroch Digital have adapted it into Dark Future: Blood Red States, an unusual meld of racing game, strategy, and Carmaggedon.
You control a car covered in guns from an exterior view, switching between it and a sidekick vehicle if you've hired one, either giving commands in real-time or dropping into a slow-motion command mode as much as you want. It turns white line fever into something thinky, so that when things get hectic you can take a moment—not forever, it's slow-mo rather than a pause button—to plan something clever.
You might drop a road spike to deal with the enemy behind you, lock your turret onto a new target ahead, then program in a lane change to get behind them before opening up with your front guns. Cars can be kitted out with everything from mines to grenade launchers to shotguns, and there's always the option to just hit boost and drive into someone.
Between missions there are upgrades to buy, balancing the weight of new armor and weapons with the effect on your top speed. Fuel's a concern too, and its price goes up the longer you play. Run out and it's game over. Getting blown up means permadeath too.
Dark Future is divided into runs (called seasons) in which you play a specific character with their own storyline to unlock. After completing goals like earning a set amount of money or doing enough missions against a specific gangcult, more plot unlocks via journals and emails. Some of it's pretty funny stuff, dropping hints about this very strange timeline in which Nixon became president at the beginning of the 1960s instead of the end and the US went down a disastrously different path. (Though the original tabletop game predates Fallout by years, it's got some similar ideas.)
The missions are procedurally generated and might involve running barricades, blowing up tankers, hacking vehicles by driving alongside them, or escort missions that are bound to be everyone's least favorite. Though mutators sometimes appear to add variety, perhaps increasing the strength of enemies or forcing you to play in real-time, they do begin to feel a bit samey after a while.
You have to play a lot of missions to complete certain goals, too. Right now I'm stuck on one that requires buying a level three upgrade from the shop, but haven't seen anything higher than level two available. I could just knuckle down and keep going until the shop finally sells me what I need, but I'm finding Dark Future isn't the kind of game I can play non-stop for an entire week. It's more of a snack game I've enjoyed alternating with others. Aptly, it's best enjoyed as a change of pace.
Dark Future: Blood Red States is available on Steam.
Green Man Gaming is celebrating its ninth birthday by releasing a batch of new deals every day—and right now you can grab games such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance and shop sim Moonlighter at their lowest-ever prices.
Yesterday's deals are still available until Sunday, and they include Kingdom Come Deliverance for $24/£19, indie shop sim Moonlighter for $11/£8.50 and co-op cooking game Overcooked 2 for $13.60/£11, which are all historic lows according to deal site IsThereAnyDeal.
The team behind co-op mod Skyrim Together has received "multiple direct death threats" from members of its community, it has revealed.
In the mod's May report one modder, Yamashi, apologized for saying last month that the team "[doesn't] owe the community anything". The team said Yamashi's comments were "poorly written and a result of a lot of pressure and frustration"—but that pressure came partly from fans "harassing" them, with some going as far as to send death threats, they said.
"Since March a part of the community has been harassing Yamashi, even going so far as to send multiple direct death threats (all of which have been properly reported to the appropriate authorities)," they said. "At the same time many are not asking—but demanding—that we do certain things such as weekly updates, that we open source the mod, etc.
"We know that you are most likely trying to help, but this isn’t helping...our work on this is very irregular, with people maybe not being able to work on the mod for weeks, and then suddenly having full weeks to dedicate to the project. Yamashi’s comment was targeted at the minority of people who were aggressive and toxic, if you are not harassing or making demands, this comment does not apply to you."
The mod was effectively rebooted this month after a series of setbacks, including having to apologise for using code from the Skyrim Script Extender. In the May report, the team revealed that they plan to release a new build of the mod every day from now on, based off the latest code. These builds "might not work, and will definitely be buggy", but it gives fans a way to see the progress being made.
"We do not suggest trying to seriously play the mod like so right now, as this is just for players who are eager and feel they can put up with minor up to plenty of bugs and crashes," the team said.
Ubisoft began teasing the new operators coming to Rainbow Six Siege in Year 4 season 2 earlier this week with an image showing two characters from behind, one of whom appearing to be sneaking up on the other. Today we've got a little more information on one of them: Collinn McKinley, aka Warden, a 30-year veteran of the US Secret Service who looks like a cross between James Bond and your dad.
Warden is a defender who comes equipped with Glance Smart Glasses, a prototype device that emerged from his experience leading the Secretary of State away from a deadly attack during his time on close-protection detail.
"They reflect the nature of his natural talent, to see what most cannot in order to gain the upper hand in any given situation," Ubisoft said. "He would be just as talented without them, but with them, there’s nothing he can’t tackle."
How exactly his swanky spectacles will work hasn't been revealed yet—that, his attacker counterpart Nökk, and everything else that's coming in Year 4 Season 2 will happen during the full reveal of Operation Phantom Sight, which will be livestreamed on Twitch on May 19. Ubisoft is also working to address some game-breaking exploits, a process that includes completely disabling the operator Clash until a patch can be rolled out next week—read all about that effort here.
