Mar 30, 2018

Far Cry 5's biggest mystery is why it won't let me play baseball

Far Cry® 5

Meet George. He's a resident of Far Cry 5's Hope County and a former minor league baseball player. With his hometown in the grip of a murderous death cult, George is naturally deeply concerned about his missing baseball card collection, and asks you—the one person capable of defeating the thousands of lunatics engaging in bloodshed, kidnapping, and torture—to find it for him.

And I will, George, I will. In a minute. But first, how about we play a little ball? After all, you're standing in the batter's box at home plate on a baseball diamond, holding a baseball bat. You point out to left field from time to time, calling your shot like Babe Ruth (or Tom Berenger imitating Babe Ruth). You even put the bat on your shoulder and take some cuts while you're standing there.

And what's this? Sitting on the pitcher's mound is a baseball glove with a ball in it. Surely, Far Cry 5, which has not only given me my own baseball bat but the ability to throw everything from rocks to cans to grenades to shovels to hunks of meat, wants me to throw you a few pitches. Let's do that right now!

Only, I can't. I can't pick up the glove or the ball. I walk over them repeatedly, which is the time-honored way of picking things up in games. I punch and kick them, but unlike most objects in the game, they don't budge an inch. I know it won't work, but I set a remote explosive under them and attempt to blow them free of the earth. Nothing happens.

George is still standing in the batter's box, looking for all the world like he wants me to pitch one in. I can throw rocks—you can do that to distract guards—so I try that, zipping them in over the plate. George gets distracted and stops swinging to look around at what the noise might have been. It's becoming clear why he never went pro.

I try to time my rock-throwing with his swing, thinking maybe if he's already swinging and his bat connects with the rock it'll, I don't know, unlock the actual ball? Give me a hidden achievement? Clearly, I'm desperate here, because Ubisoft isn't exactly shy about telling you with prompts and icons exactly what you need to do in the game to accomplish whatever it is you want to do.

Well, I want to play baseball, so I try it anyway. Repeatedly. I don't think George's bat ever connects with the ball, but it's at least some dim facsimile of pitching.

Okay, then. I'll complete George's mission by collecting his nine baseball cards, and see if that changes anything. I visit a shop, buy a map they have that for some reason shows the location of each of the nine missing cards (kind of a weird retail item), and spend a night fast-traveling and helicoptering around the mountains, until I've got all of George's cards.

George is happy to have his precious collectibles back, and after a couple attacks by angry skunks, he returns to home plate and I once again wander around on the mound, trying to pick up the glove and ball. I still can't.

What else might work? I return to the shop and buy an aluminum baseball bat, along with hundreds of in-game dollars worth of skins, including a prestige skin, for both it and the wooden bat I already own. I try standing at the plate and swinging my bats, thinking maybe George will go out to the mound and pepper some pitches in. But he just remains at the plate, apart from when I accidentally hit him with one of my swings, at which point he attacks me. I punch him to the ground, revive him, and we're back where we started.

Desperate, I drive a truck onto the mound and fling cans through the broken windshield over the plate. Nothin'. I search the park for some kind of baseball sign-up sheet I can activate to alert the game to the fact that I want to play ball. I pitch hunks of meat, attracting bears and wolves which I then save George from. I angrily set a sign reading 'Welcome Baseball Fans" on fire with a molotov cocktail. I run the bases. I bash the glove and ball with my various bats. Apart from breaking a lot of wooden bats, nothing is accomplished. I even throw some of my bats over the plate.

Okay, I give up. If someone out there knows if and how you can play baseball in Far Cry 5, please let me know, because I feel like Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, tearfully asking his ghost-daddy to play a game of catch, except in this version his dad is is like "Nah."

Mar 30, 2018

Sea of Thieves, Destiny 2, and the problem with games that always need 'more content'

No Man's Sky

One of the most common critiques leveled against games is that they 'need more content.' Sea of Thieves is the latest to take that flak, joining other big, open-ended games such as No Man's Sky and Destiny 2, which have also been accused of 'not having enough.' But what do they not have enough of? 'Content' can literally be anything, as can 'things to do,' so we've gathered some of our open-world aficionados to discuss what we're really saying when we talk about 'content' and our insatiable need for more of it.

Tyler (who reviewed Sea of Thieves), Chris (who just finished reviewing Far Cry 5), our MMO and EVE Online expert, Steven, and our resident Destiny 2 apologist, Tim, discuss below.

Tyler: Sea of Thieves is the sort of game I dreamed about back when Bolo was the height of networked multiplayer, and I'd have lost my shit back then if I'd somehow learned that A) such a game would exist in the future, and that B) people would be saying it 'sucks because there's not enough content.' But here we are, and I do intuitively understand the criticism, even though I think it's terribly vague.

Chris: I think 'content' can mean a few things. For one, a big variety of distinctly different things to do. I really like Sea of Thieves, but I can still recognize that beyond treasure hunts, fighting players, and killing skeletons, there's not much besides sailing around. I happen to really like sailing around, scrapping with other boats, and digging up treasure (not as big a fan of fighting skeleton waves), so that's kind of enough for me.

For No Man's Sky, I feel like procedural generation is counted on to always provide interesting discoveries, but it really didn't. Just because everything you see is slightly different doesn't mean it's exciting, and after a while you begin noticing that it's the same parts and pieces being used in different combinations. Flying around becomes less satisfying and you start wanting more to do.

You fly for the sake of flying or sail for the sake of sailing, and once the novelty of those activities wears off you're desperately wishing for something new

Tyler: It's completely contextual, though, right? Rocket League, which I've played over 350 hours of, has very little 'content' when you strip away all the cosmetic stuff. It's always whacking a ball (or puck) around, and that's far fewer 'things to do' than sailing, fighting players, and hunting for treasure. But no one complains because the 'content' of Rocket League is 'getting better at it.' I think what happens with Sea of Thieves and No Man's Sky-type games is that the framework is 'adventure' more than competition or improvement, so 'content' becomes 'I should be seeing and doing new things all the time.'

Steven: I also think the 'why' really matters here. People play EVE Online, which is a game where you can spend four hours doing absolutely nothing but sitting somewhere and waiting for something to happen, but they do that because those moments coalesce into a larger narrative that is, ultimately, meaningful to them. But games like Sea of Thieves and No Man's Sky don't really have a greater purpose. You fly for the sake of flying or sail for the sake of sailing, and once the novelty of those activities wears off you're desperately wishing for something new. It's a shame because, like EVE Online, Sea of Thieves is fundamentally a sandbox game, but there's just not a lot of sand in that box. If there were more conflict drivers inspiring you to interact with other players in exciting ways and more ways for players to build a compelling narrative out of those high-seas adventures, I could see the game being a smash hit.

Tyler: I'm pretty sure it's a hit anyway! But that's a good point.

Tim: Please can we disable the comments on this article because I'm about to talk Destiny.

Tyler: No, but I'll wait until you're out of the office to publish this.

Tim: I logged north of 2,000 hours in the first game (which itself drew criticism for content droughts of Saharan proportions), and am one of the few people still plugging away at the sequel on PC (where the problem is even worse). To my mind, Destiny 2's fundamental issue with lack of content isn't that there aren't enough missions, or destinations to visit, or even types of activity. It is that there is almost no reason to run any of it now. What unifies most of these games is that they're fundamentally about building some sort of collection—usually by acquiring and upgrading loot—and that system needs to have oceanic depth to keep players coming back. In Destiny 1 that meant giving guns random rolls so that each drop would potentially have a tiny chance of a god tier combination of perks. The sequel did away with that system in favour of fixed rolls—largely because a bunch of babies complained about grinding for the very best guns—which it turned out was no sort of replacement at all. I must have acquired and auto dismantled every weapon in D2 a dozen or more times over now, and it's robbed me of much desire to keep going. Bafflingly, Bungie knew this was going to be a huge issue and shipped the game without an answer. To bring the conversation back to Sea of Thieves, the fact you can't get a better cutlass or collect a sweet flotilla of increasingly flashy ships seems like a massive and obvious problem to me.

Tyler: It seems to me that 'content,' then, is the ability to set lots of short-term and long-term goals (the 'why'), and to be surprised (have intrinsic fun) in the process of achieving them. In Destiny 2, the big goal is collecting stuff, and when you run out of stuff to collect, the 'not enough content' complaints come in. And with that definition we can see why it isn't a problem in Rocket League, where winning each brief match is a short-term goal that's full of surprises—eg, the final score, weird bounces, moves I didn't think I was going to pull off—and getting better is the long-term goal, to which there's no end (players are still showing off skills I haven't seen before in the subreddit). And in EVE, you've got your eye on a new ship, so even boring-ass mining is working toward something, and then there are all the big goals you mentioned, Steven.

Steven: Yeah, to expand on that just a wee bit, in EVE you're also working towards communal goals. It's not just about you, but what you can do to help achieve success for your corporation. All of those are powerful motivators that keep people invested.

Tyler: As Chris hit on earlier with regard to Sea of Thieves, when you first start playing there are loads of sub-goals to work toward such as learning how to sail, sinking your first ship, exploring islands you've never seen. Those first five or so hours are great. But once you figure out the game, the rate of achievement falls off a cliff, and there are only a few short-term goals left: go get some treasure (with a few simple methods) and sell it, or fight another player ship (usually just because). The only long-term goals are to buy cosmetic stuff and reach a vaguely-defined 'endgame,' as 'getting better' isn't something I'm all that concerned with. I really enjoy the relaxed pace of Sea of Thieves, but that's when players start saying, 'Well, this game doesn't have enough content.' It comes from that drought of goals.

Chris: I also kind of feel like price has become this bar against which games are judged. NMS took a lot of extra flak for being priced at $60, which is seen as an 'AAA price.' Sea of Thieves is the same, and I see a lot of comments saying "This is a $40 game" or "This is a $30 game." We've come to expect full-priced games to be stacked with stuff even though games like NMS are built by a comparatively small team.

Tyler: That's definitely an issue. What you're buying with Sea of Thieves is a marvelous pool of physics—those waves are just brilliant, and co-op sailing is always pleasant to me—and a framework for PvP battles which I think are super fun. But $60 is a lot to spend, and people are thinking, 'Well, for that price I can get Far Cry 5, and it's full of all these mo-capped characters and bears are gonna attack me, and I can go fishing and fly a helicopter,' and so on. I love Sea of Thieves but I can't argue with bears and helicopters.

Tim: A big factor that runs through all these 'live' games is the core fantasy on which they're sold. Take a look at the first Destiny game's E3 reveal and the players are mindblown when this sweet-looking spaceship swoops in and drops off a tank to fight as part of a public event. And of course it is cool the first time you see it, but when you've seen the same event literally thousands of times and can in fact set your clock by it, the fantasy of being in this dynamic world dissolves.

Tyler: Yeah, our own imaginations totally outpace what's actually possible, because these games are open-ended prompts ('live in this world') rather than codified genre-games, where your expectations don't exceed other examples of the genre.

Tim: It's easy to pick similar comparisons with games like No Man's Sky and Sea of Thieves, where the core fantasies—Explore the infinite depths of space! Be a completely freeform pirate with your friends!—are so evocative, that whatever actual slate of content those games end up launching with inevitably feels anemic compared to what players imagined it might be like. The exception is something like EVE, which is able to keep surprising the audience because its vast scope and robust systems that enable the kind of weird, funny, scary emergent stories that Steven writes about on the regular.

Tyler: To play armchair designer a bit, if that's almost always going to happen when these sorts of games are pitched, how do they address it?

Sinking endless cost into keeping players as busy and engaged as possible seems to be something they deemed a diminishing return.

Tim: I mean, I question how much they care to a degree. Bungie took payment for Destiny 2 and its DLCs from most players up front. Sinking endless cost into keeping players as busy and engaged as possible seems to be something they deemed a diminishing return. But I think the short, patronising, answer is these games need to find ways of injecting new stuff on a close to weekly basis. For Destiny the best example of that was the Black Spindle mission, which was hidden at launch and only uncovered some time later when a time gate swung open to reveal this brilliant secret challenge which awarded an awesome weapon. I think balance can play a part too. D2 went something like six months with no nerfs of buffs, leading to an unbelievably stale meta. For all these games, I think the answer to to build an engine and workflow that its tuned towards regular, small updates, so the developer can keep delighting players. Procedurally driven content, as per The Division's Underground mode, and user-created stuff, like Halo's Forge World, also have the potential to take some pressure off the studio having to constantly create time-consuming new assets.

Tyler: New, surprise events could obviously help Sea of Thieves, but I think there's a structural problem with it. The only difference between you and anyone else in Sea of Thieves is how 'good' you are at it, how long you've played, and how you show off your success with cosmetics. I like the boldness of that decision, but opportunities to test your skill (fighting other ships) are fairly rare, whereas Rocket League and CS:GO—which operate on the same principle of skill and cosmetics—are always all about showing off skill and learning new moves and practicing cooperative tactics. A couple probably-bad potential solutions: increase the complexity of ship battles ('moves' to learn) and include a combat-only arena mode, or scrap the idea that pirates are all the same and let players work toward functional upgrades like you suggested, Tim. I have no idea how you'd successfully do either of those things, but as it is, I feel like I'm in stasis: neither working toward the long term goal of 'getting better' at ship battles (and I'm not sure how much better I can get as it is now) nor working toward earning some fun new toy, like a new gun in Destiny 2.

Chris: No Man's Sky has added a lot in the last year to give players more to do: base building, terrain editing, new mission types, additional story elements, new vehicles, and the ability to explore with other people, sorta (other players are represented by floating orbs). The changes are good ones, and most of them come from direct player feedback about stuff they really wanted. But the structure hasn't changed, and neither has the somewhat disappointing core of the experience. Some new planet types briefly made exploration exciting again, but once I'd seen them I was left with the same opinion about the game as I originally had: the procedural generation just doesn't create enough mystery and wonder to keep me going. It's great there's a lot of new stuff for players to do, but simply adding gobs of 'content' doesn't fix what's broken.

Tyler: Yeah, exactly. That's why we need to be specific when we talk about 'content.' Rare could add ten new events like the kraken to Sea of Thieves, and that would create ten new goals—see each new thing. And then what? They just brute-force add new goals as fast as players can achieve them? That does constitute 'adding more content', but even though it would be welcome (fishing minigame please) it doesn't truly solve what players are complaining about and isn't sustainable. What we're looking for are short-term goals to achieve on the way to exciting long-term goals, and that's as much 'content' as it is 'the design of the game.'

Mar 30, 2018

Mafia 2 and Mafia 3 join GOG with limited-time 50 percent discounts

Mafia III: Definitive Edition

"We've known each other for many years, but this is first time you've come to me for help," says Vito Corleone to Amerigo Bonasera in the opening scene of The Godfather. Swap out the word 'help' for 'the chance to discuss selling Mafia on our digital storefront', and I imagine that's how GOG secured Illusion Softworks' 2002 open world crime sim last year.

I suspect a similar strategy was behind bringing Mafia 2 and Mafia 3 to the online distributor too, which means the organised crime series is now available to play DRM-free in its entirety. To mark the occasion, each game is subject to a limited-time 50 percent discount—66 percent if pick them up together. Is that an offer you can't refuse? You tell me.

PC Gamer UK's 91-scored review of the first game doesn't exist online, sadly, but let me pull excerpts from Rich McCormick and Andy Kelly's respective Mafia 2 and Mafia 3 analyses.

First, Rich's words on the second's setting:

It was the city that drew me in. An amalgamation of New York's streets and Hollywood's hills, Empire Bay is as interactively sterile as all other 'open-world' game-cities, but it's been coated in a veneer of dreamy credibility. Each street and hallway has a feature—a man shouting at an open window; a woman pressing her ear to a door; the sound of an argument. It's easy to see these details written down in a design document, but it gives Empire Bay a genuine rhythm, a pulse that Liberty City lacks.

Plus, it helps that it is—on hefty machines—stunning. Turn up in the city in winter, and the streets are caked in snow, with layered bands of crystalline white on the untrodden paths contrasting with slush on the roads. And the lights! Even as the game transitions out of the 1940s and into the '50s, Mafia II's waxy lighting remains consistently arresting, casting pools of gold and yellow on windscreens.

Second, Andy's frustration with the design and performance issues of the third:

The repetitive mission structure might not have bothered me as much if the game was more fun to play, or if there were any interesting systems to experiment with. The melee combat has a satisfying crunch to it, but the firefights are about as generic as cover-based shooters get. Vehicle handling, even with the vaguely more responsive ‘simulation’ mode activated, is frustratingly weightless and slippery. And the AI is astonishingly dumb, with enemies behaving more like confused robots than people.

The PC port is pretty bad too. The textures are muddy and the image is curiously blurry, even when set to your monitor’s native resolution. The fact that I couldn't hit 60 frames per second with a GTX 970, even on medium settings, suggests poor optimisation. And the aggressive colour grading—an attempt to create a vintage ‘60s aesthetic—is way too overpowering. The city can look spectacular at night, especially when it rains, but overall the image quality and the fidelity of the world are incredibly disappointing.

At half-price, Mafia costs £3.99/$5.24, Mafia 2 Director's Cut (which comes with its DLC) costs £15.00/$19.74, and Mafia 3 costs £17.49/$23.04 on GOG till April 5 at 9am PST/5pm BST.

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.

Mar 29, 2018

Here's what modders are planning for Vermintide 2

Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide

I played Vermintide for a couple of years without mods and liked it plenty, but when I finally installed a few (via this modpack) they immediately became essential. With better bots and the ability to drop the HUD at the press of a button, I can turn it Vermintide into a game about photographing the Old World. A squad of competent AIs protects me while I wander around setting up perfect angles on Tudor houses and twin moons, something no human players would ever put up with.

At the other end of the spectrum are mods like the Stormvermin Mutation, which upgrades enemies so that what would have been slaverats become clanrats, clanrats become armored stormvermin, and every special is replaced by a rat ogre. The first time I tried that I wound up facing two ogres and a pack of stormvermin simultaneously on a narrow bridge. It didn't last long.

And there are plenty of other mods available for the original game, many in the same collection. There's another difficulty increase called Onslaught, sound replacers, UI tweaks, cosmetic changes, and even a separate mod that adds a playable chess set. Because why not?

Image via mod creator IamLupo on Steam.

Official mod support was planned for the original Vermintide but is yet to appear—it's still there, grayed-out and "Coming Soon!" on the launcher's menu. Fatshark's technical director Robin Hagblom tells me it's still coming, "but Vermintide 2 is top priority at the moment. Hopefully we'll open both workshops simultaneously, but no promises."

It ended with John Cena's theme music playing when an ogre showed up
Aussiemon

The initial lack of official support didn't dissuade modders, of course. According to Grimalackt, who maintains the Quality of Life modpack, it began with cheats. "Modding in vermintide 1 started as a DLL injection," he says. "Its first uses were very clear-cut cheats. 'Win game' buttons. Adding all the items to your inventory, god mode, etc."

As he explains, they were designed to mess with the code in the middle of a game. "The possibilities given by that are obviously beyond game-breaking, especially since a lot of the game was at first coded with the assumption that the other clients were running exactly the same code as you were." He gives examples of potential malicious uses like kicking hosts out of their own games, impersonating other players in chat, or crashing someone else's game without even being in the same lobby as them.

The mods that became popular weren't the ones that let you cheat or troll other players, however. "I think the biggest reception was to the various sound replacers I made," says modder Aussiemon. "This was one of the types of mods made possible with Fatshark's assistance, as nothing like it had ever been done before. I wrote a script to play the 'headshot' sound from Unreal Tournament 2k whenever a special skaven was shot in the head." People started sending him requests for things like the MLG airhorn playing when gutter runners attack and soon he became the go-to guy for all your audio mod requests. "It ended with John Cena's theme music playing when an ogre showed up, and that silly balloon hammer mod."

Nowadays the most popular mod is Grimalackt's Quality of Life collection, with its toggleable options like third-person camera, the Stormvermin Mutation, and those bot improvements I l like so much. Some of these things were made possible by Fatshark giving modders access to their SDK tools, creating a Steam community for them, and answering questions directly. "We'd post about an issue we were having, or access to an uncompiled file for reference, and Robin would reply within the day with a suggestion or reference file. These discussions led to the first custom models, textures, and sounds in Vermintide 1, and we definitely would never have gotten that far without Fatshark's insight.

The first priority will obviously be to transfer everything from Vermintide 1 that is still usable in Vermintide 2's context
Grimalackt

"It wasn't just their advice though," Aussiemon continues. "Fatshark gathered our suggestions and thoughts on mod support to form a plan for Vermintide 2. I think a not-so-insignificant part of the official mod design will be the result of a collaborative effort between Fatshark and the modding community."

What's next?

Fatshark is aiming to add Steam Workshop support to Vermintide 2 in late April. "Though even past this it will still be an ongoing project," Hagblom says, "improving the tools, adding more functionality and adding access to more parts of the game so it won't be a fire-and-forget release."

They've made a Discord channel to connect modders and share information, working with them to map out how to best implement it. "It's really paid off for us too even without the actual mods," says Hagblom, "because they've in turn helped us finding repro cases for bugs and reported when they've found things that haven't exactly been working as intended."

Bringing everyone together before mod support goes live means that when the Steam Workshop goes live there will be plenty ready to fill it. "The first priority will obviously be to transfer everything from Vermintide 1 that is still usable in Vermintide 2's context," says Grimalackt. "Since Vermintide 2 still shares a lot of code from the first game, the task is usually not too difficult, with some mods sometimes working after a simple copy/paste with little to no adjustments. Third-person for example falls in that bag. It was already made functional in Vermintide 2 within days of one of its betas, although obviously can't be shared yet until official support comes around."

Third-person mode. Not as helpful as you might think.

As well as third-person mode he says visible damage numbers and health bars, chat blocking, bot improvements and crosshair customizations mods will all make the leap to Vermintide 2. Aussiemon is already working to bring over Fashion Patrol, which turns stormvermin white, as well as his mods for skipping cutscenes, freeing up hat cosmetics so anyone can wear them, scaling the UI for 4k, and adding more mission stats.

Pub Brawl was a fan favorite though, so I bet we'll see it make a comeback. When it does, I'll have a mod.
Aussiemon

Following the transfer of old mods, Grimalackt predicts UI improvements will be the focus. "Any of the complaints about any of the UI screens that Fatshark doesn't fix themselves, and that are within modding powers are going to get fixed by mods."

Aussiemon agrees. "Some people want detailed weapon stats. Some people want faster endgame screens. Some people want us to port over the UI from Vermintide 1. Working with the UI code isn't easy, but this will probably be what people will focus on first anyway. UnShame is already working on a 'weapon stats' tab at the equipment screen, in fact. I'm sure Fatshark will eventually implement some of the common suggestions themselves, but there'll always be ideas for modders."

And then, of course, the stranger ideas will flow in. Aussiemon says that after texture, model, and sound replacers, "eventually the Vermintide 2 tools will let us make new items, animations, cutscenes, and even levels." In the first game he managed to turn the Pub Brawl, a limited-time event that let players biff each other up in the Red Moon Inn, into something players could enjoy whenever they wanted. Now he's working on a follow-up.

"I've written a mod that allows friendly fire in Taal's Horn Keep," he says, going on to explain that without access to bespoke animations like those the first game had for Pub Brawl, like fists and Lohner pouring flagons of Bugman's ale, it won't be exactly the same—unless Fatshark does something like Pub Brawl for Vermintide 2. "Pub Brawl was a fan favorite though, so I bet we'll see it make a comeback. When it does, I'll have a mod."

A barricade against cheats and trolls

Modding Vermintide 2 won't be a complete free-for-all, of course. Some players will want to hog-wild while others would rather stick with the vanilla game. "To cater to both these things we will be splitting the game into two realms," Hagblom says, "the official realm and the modded realm. So if a player is playing in the official realm, they will be able to know that everybody else playing are playing legitimately. Though, since we've had a lot of mods for Vermintide 1 with QoL improvements, more advanced UIs and the like we still want this to remain without forcing these players to play in the wild west of the modded realm. To solve this we will allow mod creators to apply to get their mods vetted for 'sanctioned' status. We will then go through the mod, make sure it doesn't contain any cheats or unfair advantages and if everything checks out, clear it to be played even in the official realm."

...no Lord of the Rings mods
Robin Hagblom

As Grimalackt says, "Those who want to create absolutely ridiculous mods will now also be able to share them more openly, since there will be an 'untrusted' realm with separate matchmaking where everything is permitted, at the cost of loot not carrying over to the trusted realm."

Something we probably won't see is rebalancing to make the game easier, much as I'd like it if mid-level bosses like Bile Trolls and Chaos Spawn had about half as many hit points on Recruit difficulty. Grimalack calls it "very unlikely" that custom difficulty rebalancing will make it through the new system. "The bot improvements will likely still make a comeback, however," he says. "The only complaint the devs ever really had about them was their sometimes ridiculously accurate aim, so that part might have to be left unimproved, but their handling of tomes and grimoires will almost assuredly be changed just like in the first game."

As for making the game harder, "Vermintide 2 is already significantly harder than the first game. Some of the heroic deeds are also heavily inspired by the first game's difficulty mods. The 'Vanguard' modifier, is effectively what Stormvermin Mutation was, as it directly turns clan rats into stormvermins, and slave rats into clan rats (and does the same to Chaos equivalents), just like the Stormvermin Mutation once did. It doesn't turn all specials into bosses, however, so I guess I still have something to do.

Lines will be drawn at mods that infringe on intellectual property. "So for instance no Lord of the Rings mods," Hagblom says. "When the Mod SDK is released it will have a EULA specifying the exact dos and don'ts."

Grimalackt is looking forward to the fact he won't need to maintain the equivalent of his Quality of Life modpack for Vermintide 2. "Every modder will be responsible for uploading and maintaining their own mods, and won't have to go through me to have me include their work in my package. I'll be able to dedicate more time to creating my own mods instead. Fear not though, the QoL modpack will eventually still live on as a Steam Workshop list of recommended good starter mods, sometime down the line."

He already has ideas for what he'll do with the free time he'll have. "One thing I also definitely have to do sometimes soon is turn everything into plague monks. You don't see enough of those guys around. I can already imagine the screeching from a horde of monks…"

Mar 29, 2018

Players are searching for Bigfoot in Far Cry 5

Far Cry® 5

I've finished Far Cry 5's story missions—you can read my review here—but naturally there's still plenty to do in the open world of Hope County, Montana. While checking out a prepper stash in the northern region today, I found a cabin with a locked door and a note on it. A note mentioning a Sasquatch.

It wouldn't be a stretch for Ubisoft to have hidden Bigfoot in Far Cry 5: there was DLC for Far Cry 4 called Valley of the Yetis. And while I haven't found Far Cry 5's Bigfoot yet, I'll detail below what I have found. If you want to discover it all for yourself, consider this a spoiler warning.

The cabin I found is located in the Whitetail Mountains, directly west of Clagett Bay. If you can find Stone Ridge Chalet, and move west from there across the road, you'll find the cabin. Pinned to the locked door is a note that mentions finding 'proof of that squatch' and kicks off a prepper mission called 'Gone Squatchin.'

You're directed to follow the trail to the north to find Dicky, the owner of the cabin, and along the way there's blood. Lots of blood. Pools of blood. There's also some grappling points to scale up to the peak Dicky is on—I could have just taken my chopper but I was in a climbing mood. At the top, you'll find Dicky, sadly dead, the key to the cabin just inches from his outstretched hand, a dead deer that may have been dragged up the trail, and a small cave containing a few human skeletons.

There are a couple things here telling me this isn't the squatch's cave. First, it's tiny. I could barely squeeze in while crouching, and I guess I sort of always imagined that if Bigfoot did live in a cave it would be one with more headroom. And also, more stuff. Sasquatch stuff.

The other thing is a dead wolf is lying at the entrance to the cave. Now, possibly Bigfoot killed a deer, dragged it to the cave, killed a wolf, and killed Dicky. But I'm more likely to think that a wolf killed the deer and then attacked Dicky, and Dicky and the wolf were both mortally wounded. If there is a 'squatch in Far Cry 5, I don't think this cave is his home.

Returning to Dicky's cabin with his key, I found both his stash and his research on Bigfoot sightings in Hope County in the form of a giant map.

There's also a plaster cast of a Sasquatch footprint on the table:

The map does line up with your personal Hope County map, and you can see Dicky's map has a lot of notes on it: locations of Bigfoot sightings, news clippings, photos with red string leading to spots on the map, marks that seem to track Bigfoot's movements, locations of activity, question marks, and lots of Xs.

There are a number of spots to investigate, so I got in my chopper and flew to one marked with an asterisk, which also has a red string leading to it from a photo and a newsclipping about a sighting. I got to the spot, and while Bigfoot didn't rush out and greet me, it was hard to not notice it's the site of a small crop circle:

I landed nearby, got out, walked over, and was immediately attacked by a wolverine. Of course. Unsure of how one summons a Bigfoot to a crop circle, I threw some bait into the center of it, but that only summoned a bear. I tried a few more times in various spots, but only attracted more bears and wolverines. At one point I heard an explosion, but it was just a couple of angry bison who had apparently rammed my parked helicopter. Ah, Far Cry 5.

I visited another spot on the map (with a fresh chopper) where some Bigfoot footprints were supposedly once found, but didn't find anything of interest there.

That's the extent of my investigation so far, but I plan to keep looking for Bigfoot, and we're sure some of you will too. Reddit is on the case, naturally, so we can assume it won't be long until he's found. We'll update this post with any further clues or progress we come across.