Star Wars: The Old Republic is out today, our review is coming soon. How are you getting on?
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (Canada), Bioware announced that they were working on Star Wars: The Old Republic. It’s been years in the making. Millions of dollars have been spent on its production. Millions of hours have been played by beta testers. Today, it’s finally ready to launch.
Our review won’t be up today, but it will be here soon. We want to see as much as we can of the hundreds and hundreds of hours The Old Republic has to offer before delivering a verdict. In the meantime, check out our Old Republic hands on for some early thoughts. You can hear Tyler, Chris, Lucas, and Greg’s impressions on the latest PC Gamer US podcast. We’ll be putting up our TOR guide soon as well, with lots of useful advice for anyone logging for the first time.
Renegade Ops DLC adds Coldstrike campaign and new vehicles
Renegade Ops just received a new campaign map called Coldstrike, and another slice of DLC that adds two new charactes. Coldstrike adds three new story missions in which you drive into new snowy locations and explode them until there is nothing left to be exploded. Expect hordes of new enemies, including low flying attack drones and “monstrous Golems.” It’s available now on Steam for £2.99 / $4.99.
The Reinforcement Pack is a separate download that adds two new heroes, Blazemo and Crystal. Crystal’s special ability throws up a huge defensive bubble that can protect allies huddled beneath it. Blazemo prefers to use his special weapon, The Incinerator, to destroy everything in an all-consuming spiral of flame. That’s also on Steam for £1.79 / $2.99. The new characters will have to work hard to beat the antlion attacks off their silent co-worker, Gordon Freeman.
Get a peek at the new DLC packs in the screenshots below. The snowy ones are from Coldstrike, the rest show the two new vehicles.
New Champions Online archetype isn’t a Sith lord, honest
He’s not a Sith Lord, he’s a Cosmic Knight. Champions Online’s archetypes offer players who don’t play a subscription fee pre-defined builds to level with. This one is called The Unleashed, and is described as a “Militant Monk,” an “Eldritch Warrior” and a “Mysterious Visitor,” albeit one you’re not likely to let into your house. He specialises in close range chopping with his lightsa- swords.
Champions Online is free to play, you can download the client from Champions Online site and Steam. In other news, Star Wars: The Old Republic is nearly fully operational. Bioware are set to throw the giant “ON” switch today, launching the game worldwide. You can join us on the Nightmare Lands server in Europe, and on the Crucible Pits in the US.
Civilization 5 update aims to fix multiplayer, squashes bugs and exploits
It takes plenty of patience to make it to the end of a multiplayer game of Civilization 5, patience often stretched to breaking point by de-syncing games and ponderous AI turns. A new patch has arrived for Civilization 5 brings “significant improvements to general multiplayer stability” and does something fancy to the AI move caching, “improving turn-times significantly.”
Out-of-sync errors should be less frequent and the UI has been updated letting players see details of a game before jumping into lobbies. On the downside, Firaxis have plugged a few loopholes. In a move sure to be welcomed by the confused citizens, we’ll no longer be able to trade cities back and forth to heal them and “generate endless City Strikes.” Aw. Here are the full patch notes, from Steam.
Batman: Arkham City free challenge maps and DLC skin released
For a man solely dedicated to bringing vigilante justice to the criminals of the world, Batman spends a lot of his time coming up with new outfits. As a thank you to everyone who bought the game, Rocksteady are releasing the Batman Incorporated alternative skin for Batman: Arkham City, and have released a cheat code that will let everyone unlock another skin normally awarded for completing the story. Commenter Jexx points out that there’s a free challenge map on offer, too, containing Jokers Carnival, the Iceberg VIP Lounge and the Batcave. Here’s how you can get hold of them.
Gigantic Steam holiday sale stuffs stockings with games, coal
Hey, wait, didn’t we just get done shaking off the cruel shackles of poverty after the last one of these things? Oh well, unnecessary luxuries like roofs, walls, and food are largely inconsequential in the face of really great videogame deals. And man, if day one’s deals are any indication, this will be quite the hall-decking holiday haul. I mean, using my patented Raving Lunatic advocate scale, Portal 2 at $7.49 is a “BUY IT,” Just Cause 2 at $4.99 is a “Buyitbuyitbuyit,” and Orcs Must Die at $3.74 is a “[Violently collapses and begins foaming at the mouth]“.
The holiday sale’s also hosting a meta game that involves collecting coal. Basically, if you complete daily objectives, you’ll walk away with free games. But if you commit the naughtiest act of all – failure – you’ll receive a lump of coal. That coal, however, can be used to enter the Epic Holiday Giveaway. And if you win? Well, you’ll find every game on Steam waiting under your virtual tree. So then, make with the indiscriminate purchasing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to fish my beggar’s clothes out of the dumpster. And probably some days-old pizza. May as well get a head start.
PC Gamer US Podcast #299: A Galaxy Torn
Tyler, Chris A., Lucas, and Greg discuss the first days of The Old Republic, the last days of Star Wars: Galaxies, and wrap-up 2011 with fond gaming memories and a desperate need for USB coffee warmers and other junk people wrap in paper this time of year.
Everything you wanted to know about indie game development (but were afraid to ask)
Making an indie game, publishing it and then selling your soul to EA for £1 million is the new get-rich-quick scheme. But how exactly does one make an indie game? Our video-camera-faced-chums over at CVG have asked just that to Bristol-based developers Red Wasp Design, whose intriguing turn-based strategy RPG Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is due out early next year.
The first part of the interview, above, covers how the three of them work together as a team and how they stay motivated (clue: they stay motivated with money). Talking about their vision for the game, Tomas Rawlings, the game designer, says, “They talk about the Angry Birds, they say you just have to make an Angry Birds but with lizards and cats instead. It just doesn’t work like that, you have to have a vision for what you see as a great game. And you just hope that enough people agree with you that that’s a vision for a great game.”
Parts two and three follow after the break.
Did Bulldozer just get better?
Remember the lacklustre performance of AMD’s much vaunted new Bulldozer CPU architecture? Turns out the difficult launch and grilling the chip got in reviews may not have been entirely down to the limits of the hardware.
Launched as the AMD FX brand a month or so ago, Bulldozer performance was behind what most pundits were hoping for. Apparently, some of that is due to Windows not supporting new features that Bulldozer introduced. And now there’s a patch that should help.
And in other PC gaming news…
Could Battlefield 2143 be in the works? The hints DICE have left in Back to Karkand are small, but they’ve been known to use similarly cryptic methods before. Of course that means those little toy dinosaurs must be a hint too! We can only assume they’re actually planning to bring us the pictured DLC pack after all. The people have spoken. Dinosaurs must be added.
Check inside for a selection of dino-lovin’, PC gaming news.
Need for Speed: World introduces $100 car
“Free-to-play” used to mean just that, but now it seems that it’s becoming “Remortgage-to-play”. First, DarkOrbit releases a $1,000 item and sells 2,000 of them. Now EA’s Need for Speed World sells a $100 car, according to GameSpot.
The pricey car in question is a Koenigsegg CCX “Elite” Edition. It heads up Need for Speed World’s “Premium Elite” collection, which is targeted exclusively at people with more money than sense. The car is reduced to “just” $75 at the moment, but even for that price you could pick up Race On ($19) and GRID ($15) on Steam – both of which feature the Koenigsegg CCX – and still have $41 left over to buy a cheapo steering wheel.
On the whole the free-to-play model does seem to be working, but these costly items make it look like developers and publishers are taking advantage of an audience willing to pay exorbitant amounts for fairly rudimentary power-ups. A report in the Daily Mail is sure to follow shortly.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is UK Christmas number one
For the first time in years, the game topping the UK Christmas software charts hasn’t got anything to do with Call of Duty, The Sims or Fifa. Skyrim has take taken the top spot, relegating Just Dance 3 to second place. Modern Warfare 3, meanwhile, lingers in third place.
You can see the whole chart on the UKIE site. The figures won’t include steam sales, which Valve tend to keep secret, though they have confirmed that Skyrim is the “fastest selling title in Steam’s history.” Skyrim is still topping Steam’s top games chart.
Ultimate Christmas Giveaway: Win one of 150 copies of Rift
Welcome to the PC Gamer Ultimate Christmas Giveaway! This is the biggest competition we’ve ever done: packed with peripherals, games, and exclusive items signed by some very important people. Why are we doing this? Because it’s Christmas! And we love you.
The Ultimate Christmas giveaway will run until Christmas Eve. Every day we’ll be posting about a new prize that’s up for grabs, and you’ll have 24 hours after the time of publishing to enter. Sadly, we’re only able to open this competition to UK residents.
Our stockings are stuffed full of prizes today readers, because we have an astonishing 150 copies of Rift to give away. No, that is not a typo, one hundred and fifty lucky readers will win a boxed copy of Rift, complete with 30 days playtime. We gave Rift 86% back in PC Gamer UK 226, and you can read the US team’s Rift review online. If you’re planning to join in, why not check out the PC Gamer Rift Guild to find someone to play with?
Check inside for details of how to enter.
Double Fine’s Stacking “coming soon to PC”
Here’s some excellent news that slipped past on Friday. Double Fine’s Stacking will be getting a PC release. The news was delivered with some low-budget puppetry on G4TV, spotted by RPS. You play as Charlie Blackmore, a tiny Russian doll in a beautifully realised world populated by slightly larger dolls. Charlie can jump inside other characters to manipulate them, jumping them into even larger dolls to stay hidden, take on disguises, and gain access to each larger doll’s unique abilities. You can see a few of those on show in the launch trailer above, and the in-game footage embedded below.
There’s no release date yet, but it’s a happy turn for Double Fine, who have been away from the PC for a while. In October they released Costume Quest on PC with a statement from Tim Schafer saying “we have always said that if it were up to us, we’d release our games for the PC. Well, now… it’s finally up to us!” Hooray! Perhaps we’ll see the likes of Brutal Legend hopping over as well.
Battlefield 3 trailer created by Freddie Wong
Battlefield 3 publishers EA have commissioned internet video guy Freddie Wong to create a trailer for their uber-popular manshoot. Wong and his crew were given just 10 days to make the video, according to Kotaku.
And it’s OK. It’s the kind of gameophilic effects-filled extravaganza Wong is very good at making, but bear in mind that Wong is one of those people who probably thinks Michael Bay is good at directing films. According to this making-of video, it also had a proper budget, with real explosions and tanks and $300,000 lenses and everything.
Question is, is it better than CoD’s tongue-in-cheek but similarly Hollywood take on virtual warfare?
