The Elder Strolls, Part 4: Nordrick the Envious
As the new guy in Windhelm, I’m doing my best to fit in with the local NPCs. I walk around the city, wearing regular clothing instead of armor. I hang around in the tavern, eating and drinking. I sleep in a rented bed every night. I make small-talk, or at least listen to the small-talk of others. Overall, I feel like I’m blending in well: if a real adventurer arrived in Windhelm, I’m confident he or she would be convinced I was just another local living a routine life. Nordrick the Bland, they’d call me.
And yet, a very un-NPC-like emotion has reared its ugly head inside Nordrick’s even uglier head. I may walk, sleep, eat, and drink like an NPC, but when it comes to my professional life, I’m definitely falling short. While spending time with the locals, and seeing what they do for a living, I’ve come to an unexpected conclusion: I’m insanely jealous.
Saturday Crapshoot: The Terminator
Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. And at the risk of annoying any idiots who think the end of the world is coming in 2012, here’s a slightly more grounded fictional apocalypse to sink your teeth into.
Before The Elder Scrolls hit the big leagues, Bethesda was best known as the company that made Terminator games – though not necessarily the best known Terminator games. The awful platform games, with the infuriating mechanic of having to shoot human enemies in the legs to maintain the second movie’s no-killing rule? Other guys. The for-the-time-impressive light-gun game? Nope.
Instead, with the exception of the deservedly beloved FPS Future Shock, one of the first to combine on-foot action and vehicles, certainly in a way that actually made it fun to jump behind the wheel, none of them were particularly remembered. Admittedly, in the case of the action RPG style Terminator 2029 and Wolfenstein-level teched FPS Terminator: Rampage, that’s probably for the best.
But their first attempt? It’s the only Terminator game that lets you risk destroying humanity by buying Kyle Reese a pack of condoms while protecting Sarah Connor. How did that get forgotten?
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – PC Gamer UK’s RPG of the year
The Elder Scrolls games have been brilliant for long time: huge open worlds that let you go wherever you fancy, get wrapped up in hundreds of different stories, and make a life for yourself. But until Skyrim, they weren’t particularly good at one of the most exciting things about other RPGs: levelling up.
The top 10 free PC games of 2011
With New Year celebrations just around the corner, it’s understandable that you might not have time to trawl through our weekly Best Free PC Games archive, analysing every write-up to construct your own top ten list. So, since we understand the importance of ranking free games in order of perceived quality, we’ve done it for you. Here are PC Gamer’s ten favourite freebies of 2011!
Deus Ex: Human Revolution – PC Gamer UK’s action game of the year
Deus Ex: a game so good it gave us actual neuroses about its sequels. Invisible War, a shonky but interesting and sometimes hilarious shooter, became reviled as a crime against gaming for declaring itself to be Deus Ex 2. And when Human Revolution started looking seriously, seriously good, none of us could quite believe it.
Free games for the New Year: Marathon Trilogy
Halo creators Bungie have given the official nod to Aleph One, fan-made updates and remakes of the originally Mac-only Marathon series. The project reached version 1.0 in early December, with all three games now available for free. It’s an impressive update, too: all three games include HD texture packs, network play, and work on modern operating systems.
They’re exploration-based FPS games that look a little like Doom but play rather differently. From the beginning, Bungie were more interested in narrative than combat, and it shows: weapons and enemies are fairly standard fare, but its doomed starships and alien worlds still retain a bit of their old atmosphere. There’s more writing than you’d expect, too, with world building-handled by AI-controlled computer terminals that feed out in-character plot and location info.
Star Wars: The Old Republic created “to make sure Bioware is not going to be left behind”
Star Wars: The Old Republic has been a huge undertaking for developers, Bioware. It’s taken massive investment and untold man hours to bring it to light. It’s also Bioware’s first MMO, which makes it a risky move into an unfamiliar genre. We asked Star Wars: The Old Republic game director, James Ohlen why Bioware decided to move online. He revealed that the decision was made by Bioiware’s founders, Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk, who thought the MMO genre could be the future of the RPG.
“Back in 2004/2005 it was something we knew we needed to get into,” he said. “It seemed to be one of the possible future paths for role-playing games in general. One thing Ray and Greg are always doing is looking at ways to make sure Bioware is not going to be left behind. So they’re looking at all the futures going and then try to make sure we kind of diversify, and that was one of the areas we wanted to diversify in.”
League of Legends – PC Gamer UK’s free game of the year
Do you remember the tail end of 2010? We all wore rags and lived in dirt-floored shacks, dinosaurs ruled the Earth, and ‘free to play’ was still a dirty set of words. 2011 saw those words climb into the word shower and wash themselves clean, courtesy of League of Legends.
Free games for the New Year: Egress
It’s hard to get into the meat of why Egress: The Test of STS-417 is special without spoiling it, but at its core this is an adventure game that not only sets a puzzle in front of you but cares how you solve it. If you’re tired of games that ignore your failures and treat the time you spend flailing for a clickable hotspot as storyless limbo, then you should absolutely put aside time for it.
Battlefield 3 – PC Gamer UK’s online game of the year
Launch bugs and connection problems can’t dent Battlefield 3’s sense of ambition. Call of Duty might have bagged the ‘modern warfare’ label, but Battlefield 3 shows us what a modern online shooter can really be. Developers DICE have tapped into the potential of modern PCs to create online battles on a massive scale, and with technology that makes its competitors look years out of date.
Free games for the New Year: Nitronic Rush
Christmas is behind us, but the holidays continue. For the next couple of days, we’re going to be showcasing a number of great free games that you might have missed amid the smoke and spectacle of the last couple of months. Whether you want something to play while you queue for The Old Republic or are simply looking to save a couple of pennies as we head into the new year, we’ve got you sorted.
Nitronic Rush is an arcade racing game set in a Tron-style virtual reality. You control a sportscar-shaped streak of neon as it boosts, jumps and tumbles through a twisting obstacle course. Billed as a ‘survival driving game’, the aim is to reach the finish line while racking up points and trying not to hit any of the number of obstacles in your path. Built from scratch by students at DigiPen, it’s an impressive debut.
Portal 2 – PC Gamer UK’s co-op game of the year
In most co-operative games, players don’t work together so much as work beside one another. The closest you’ll get to real teamwork is pulling the trigger at the same time. Portal 2 doesn’t work that way. Its co-op problems are impossible without a friend, and each reality-twisting solution forces you to share a brain.
How Bioware wrote Star Wars: The Old Republic
The most ambitious aspect of Star Wars: The Old Republic is the staggering amount of writing involved. Every class has their own storyline that unfolds over dozens of hours. Every character you speak to has their own voiced dialogue. It has to be one of the biggest writing projects undertaken by a game studio. How on earth did Bioware do it? We spoke to lead writer Daniel Erickson to find out.
The actual dialogue that you hear when playing is decided much later than you might think, and is the result of long, vigorous writing process that sees ideas tossed back and forth between Bioware’s writers, world designers, artists and animators. It all starts simply, though, with a series of short stories.
The Humble Bundle guys – PC Gamer’s community heroes of the year
To give you some idea of how indie Wolfire games are, the rabbit-based kung fu game they’re making is not the first rabbit-based kung fu game they’ve made. It’s called Overgrowth, and it looks great, but it probably won’t change the indie scene forever. Their other project has already done that.
They launched the first Humble Indie Bundle last year, to enormous success: it’s just a bunch of great indie games, you pay what you want for them, and a cut of the money goes to charity. At first it doesn’t exactly sound like commercial genius – people generally pay about $5 for games worth at least $20 – but the good cause, slick presentation and friendly attitude created a perfect storm of goodwill.
Total War: Shogun 2 – PC Gamer UK’s strategy game of the year
We elevate the Total War games beyond simply being good strategy games because we believe they’re story-engines: that not only do they offer deep and difficult decisions about how to paint the map your colour, but they also entertain you with your own genius.
