Steam handles downloading, installing and activating them in-game, and will even automatically update them when a new version comes out. But the sheer volume is kind of daunting right now, so we’ve trawled through to find you the highlights, divided into three categories that broadly reflect the trends in what people have made so far.

• Fun stuff
• Useful mods
• Oh God Oh God Oh God

Fun stuff

Posh mudcrabs
Gives all Mudcrabs a tophat and monocle. Commenter Coward Duck: “This mod changed my life.”

Valve’s Space Core
Valve themselves have added the space-obsessed personality core from Portal 2 into Skyrim, who now rockets down from, yes, space, just outside Whiterun. You can kick him around, pick him up or Fus-Roh-Dah him, while he mutters Skyrim-appropriate things about space. “Also, since Skyrim was the only major release of 2011 without Nolan North in it, you should consider this mod a patch to fix that problem.”

Less Condescending Guards
At last. Guards no longer comment on your skills unless you have over 75 points in them. I don’t know about you, but when they’d comment on my Destruction magic when it was only level 32, it would rend my soul.

Pickupable Forks
Not sure how we lived without this one.

Lusty Argonian Maid teaches one and two handed
“Lusty Argonian Maid vol.1 teaches one handed, vol.2 teaches two handed.” Bethesda wish they’d thought of this.

Rabbit Rage
Gives rabbits the voice and ultra-aggressive AI of the Dremora demons. They still have no attack.

Bigger giants
Makes giants bigger. “V1.1 Now BIGGER!”

Clam Chowder
“There’s something distinctly wrong when there are clams in the world but nobody knows how to make clam chowder. ”

Blackreach Cheese Pack
“Supplements your Skyrim experience with four addtional sacks of mammoth cheese, convieniently located outside Sinderion’s shack in the depths of Blackreach. A must have modification for gamers who hunger for additional content.”
 

Useful ones

Midas Magic
An incredible suite of new abilities, including a spell to cause huge chunks of ice to fall and crush your enemies, and one that causes plant life to erupt from the ground and walls wherever you point it.

New: Relentlessly Unrelenting Force
Commenter Alphasim points outs this awesome version of the Unrelenting Force shout: it’s now a spell, and it fus-roh-dah’s people for as long as you hold the key.

Lydia no longer says “I am sworn to carry your burdens”
87% less sass.

Dwarven Robot Spider Follower
“He cannot be killed and his name is Skittles.”

All NPCs Killable
Lets you kill even quest-essential NPCs.

Mark & Recall
Two super-handy teleportation spells last seen officially in Morrowind. Mark saves your current location, Recall summons you back to it later.

Open Cities
Integrates cities into the general landscape of Skyrim, which means there’s no loading screen when you wander into them.

Ice Island
Someone’s made a whole island out of ice, with a village on it and everything.
 

Oh God Oh God Oh God

Spiders turned into Spidermen
Or more specifically, ‘pidermen. Spider removal mods are generally for arachnophobics, but it’s hard to imagine anyone finding this replacement less terrifying. Copyright infringement is the least of this mod’s worries, this infringes the human body.

Sir Dwarf
“Adds a dwarf follower in High Hrothgar. Not really a dwarf, more of a small nord.” The picture is priceless.

Killable children
Warning: the image for this one is pretty horrible. Equally disturbing is the unrestrained enthusiasm in the comments for it. Remember, making it possible doesn’t make it acceptable.

Argonian Skin Shoes
Does it bother you when there are creatures in the world whose skin you can’t use as footwear? This mod is apparently for you.

Found any other fun/useful/ohgodohgodohgod ones? Let us know in the comments.

I’m trying to play Batman: Arkham City on PC, an excellent game that was unfortunately developed in 1408 AD, the last time anyone alive didn’t know Games for Windows Live was universally hated. And it’s working – in fact, it’s working better than usual. It’s working without Games for Windows Live. That part of the game simply never starts – I’m not asked to log in, the Home key won’t summon it, the main menu option does nothing, and the game seems to function smoothly without it.

The problem is that this was a Games for Windows Live game when I started playing it, so my thirty-odd hours of progress are tied to my GFWL account. This new, otherwise excellent version of the game I’ve stumbled into has no memory of that – I’m starting from scratch.

In fact, it has no memory at all – I play for 15 minutes, and that progress is also gone when I next start it up. No errors and no warnings – it even leaves out the confirmation screen that normally warns you you’ll lose any progress since the last checkpoint. That would, after all, imply that it had saved at the last checkpoint.

And so, with the same screwed up face I wear when punching an explosive barrel to see if that ‘works’, I try to manually install Games for Windows Live.

This is one fat clown in a top hat I may never get to strangle again.

As you might have heard, PC gaming no longer warrants its own site for Microsoft. It’s games, so that makes it one of those Xbox things. gamesforwindowslive.com doesn’t even redirect there – it’s a page of classy “sponsored listings for goods and services” like jackpotjoy.com.

So I get the GFWL client from xbox.com, install it, and get an error. This is not unexpected. The neurotic error text even seems to anticipate that I’m probably on the verge of giving up already:

“A required Windows component is disabled on your machine. Do you want to learn how to fix this problem?”

… or is life too short?

Actually, Microsoft, since this is for official PC Gamer business: yes. I care, I have time, and I’m going to try to use your support process. I’m the person you were hoping didn’t exist.

I click ‘Help’, and immediately the program seems unsure how to proceed. After an awkward pause, it starts up Google Chrome and takes me to a blank white page reassuring me that I’m being redirected to the appropriate support page – but presenting me with another option to give up, just in case.

I get an error – this is not unexpected. It is, however, extremely funny.

They’ve actually taken the time to pose an Xbox avatar in a dismissive shrug. His cheerful smile says, “Oh well! Doesn’t really affect Xbox!” But his empty black irises, his blank flesh-coloured sclera, glare with a deeper corporate indifference. “YOU ARE NOT MONEY.” They say. “I FEEL NOTHING FOR YOU.”

Apparently I’ve found a glitch in the system! Well done me. With all that clever probing, including but not limited to attempting to actually play the game, I managed to catch them out! Thank God they seem so cool about it. I just need to look up error code 18307F760405E4F s:mGdrKQGKMfExOFYHmj2lJg== id:d2b83066-0f9f-4ba8-a833-abf86a9a2f03 req:89e81e05-998d-4ee7-8b7a-ccd2b5e058f8 and it’ll all be OK!

That’s when I notice the URL. Have a look at the URL.

xbox.com/en-GB/support/pc

This isn’t one error code’s obtuse solution page that’s missing, it’s the English support page for PC gaming. It’s an error. Error 18307… is that the whole support section for the PC has gone.

In this shot, Batman represents GFW Live, Mr Freeze represents Batman, and the railing represents the working classes.

I found it, eventually, by Googling. It’s a page divided into four sections:

Section 1: Is this really our fault? Please check. You’ll find that it isn’t.
Section 2: Here’s a list of people whose fault this might be.
Section 3: Maybe this is YOUR fault! Reinstall DirectX.
Section 4: “Did this solution solve your problem?”

There is no support for Games for Windows Live itself, since it has never been the cause of any problems in PC gaming.

So I’m still stuck in my Games For Windowless world, which would be nice except for the Arkham City thing. I still don’t know which essential Windows component I’m missing – is this because I uninstalled Chess Titans, Microsoft? Actually, don’t tell me. I think I’ll stay here.

BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter like its predecessors, but a less lonely one. You play Booker DeWitt, who is trying to escape the flying city of Columbia with a girl named Elizabeth before a terrifying steampunk robot called Songbird catches her. The city is a spectacular airborne flotilla of districts suspended by vast balloons – a testament to America’s cultural might, and its fondness for things that are big but not terribly useful. Our last good look at the game was a spectacular 15-minute demonstration at E3.

I spoke to creative director Ken Levine about why Elizabeth is the centrepiece not just of the story, but of the technology that drives it.

PC Gamer: Your personal story seems to be about rescuing Elizabeth from Songbird. How does that tie in to the revolution that’s going on in the world around you?

Ken Levine: Elizabeth is the catalyst for what sets this revolution that’s going in slow motion into one that’s going at hyperspeed. The fact that you bust her out of this tower where you find her at the beginning of the game… the Queen comes into play on the board.

And each side – the Founders on one side, and the Vox Populi on the other side – feels that Elizabeth is essential to them accomplishing their goals. The Founders want to keep her locked up in the tower, and the Vox Populi want to destroy her. This is because she is part of a prophecy: it is believed that if Elizabeth dies, the city falls with her.

That’s all the Vox Populi want, to take the symbol of their oppressor and make it tumble from the heavens.

Founders leader Zachary Hale Comstock isn't everyone's choice.

PC Gamer: Aren’t they also on the city, though?

Ken Levine: Yeah, they are, but you know what? They don’t care.

PC Gamer: So it’s like suicide bombing on a massive scale?

Ken Levine: Yeah. Well, if you go back to the Anarchist movements of that period, their symbol was a bomb. They have to tear down the system to rebuild it.

PC Gamer: How do you go about making the player care about a companion character like Elizabeth?

Ken Levine: In terms of emotional connection, I thought about this for a long time. Because you only know this character for a period of hours, and you have to make a connection with her. And in real life that just doesn’t happen – relationships take a long time to form.

So I spent a lot of time thinking about that: “How can you make a relationship form quickly? How do you cement a relationship fast?”

And one of the things that we kept coming back to was soldiers – the kinds of bonds that soldiers form, when their lives are in danger and they make these incredible sacrifices for each other. And I think that it is sacrifice that makes people form relationships very, very quickly, with people that you don’t really know very well.

And so I just started thinking about how we can make Elizabeth and Booker perform sacrifices for each other, and how that would draw them together. And that’s what we did with the narrative of the demo we showed at E3: a little microcosm of that.

It’s basically a story of sacrifice, and she sets up her own stakes: this is the thing she wants out of life, and this is what she wants least out of life – to go back with this… thing, Songbird.

And what does she do at the end of the demo? She goes back. And then that puts Booker in a situation where the onus is on him. She made the sacrifice for him, what does he have to do for her?

It’s one thing to say that the princess is in another castle, it’s another thing to say that she’s there because of you. And not you as in the backstory, but you as in what happened in the game.

That steampunk circus strongman suit is unbelievably cool.

PC Gamer: How much work does it take to produce a demo like the E3 one?

Ken Levine: For us it’s a lot of work, and the reason it’s challenging is that obviously you’re bringing things to a level of polish ahead of the rest of the game. But the thing for us that’s useful, that actually saves us time, is that it forces us to get real, you know? We can’t say, “Oh, that’ll be fine once that part’s in,” or “Yeah, don’t worry about that.”

It sort of forces us to bring it to a point where it actually has to stand up for itself. These Skylines, it’s not, “They’ll look good,” or “They’re going to feel fine.” It’s, “Do they look okay? Do they feel okay? Do they seem interesting? Do they seem fun?” We have to make those determinations.

Like interacting with Elizabeth: “Well, yeah it’ll be great! Trust me!” We actually have to bring it to a point where we start to get a sense of that, internally on the team, and I think that’s very valuable for us.

PC Gamer: So it’s almost like a preview for you – you’re finding out what your game’s going to be like and how it works.

Ken Levine: Absolutely. So quite often you’ll encounter things that you realise are not going to work, and you have to either figure out how to make them work, or say they’re not going to be part of the game. And that happens a lot during our demos.

Irrational mined early 20th century war propaganda for Columbia's political art.

PC Gamer:There are moments in the demo that seem scripted, and others where it seems like you could go anywhere. Can you?

Ken Levine:Well, I’d say it’s much like BioShock. It’s just that the levels are geometrically larger, and they seem more vertical. But I don’t want to give an impression that this is a Grand Theft Auto or a Red Dead game.

I think the big thing that is interesting for us in this is that… we controlled that demo, but if we want Elizabeth to do a bit of business – like the part where she picks up the Abraham Lincoln head – what if the player doesn’t go there? What if the player’s busy? What if they’re in combat at the time?

And so we have this system where we build these bits of business like the Lincoln head, and Elizabeth says to the game: “Hey, I’d like to pick up the Lincoln head now and show it to the player, can I do that?” And the game either says, “Yes, this is a good time,” or, “No.” And if the game says no, we’ll place the other opportunity somewhere else in the level for her to do that bit of business and again, it’ll check: “Hey, is this a good time?”

'I wouldn't have to kick you in the stomach if you flossed more often.'

PC Gamer: Does that mean she’ll carry the Lincoln head through the whole level, waiting for you to turn around?

Ken Levine: No, it means that we would place the Lincoln head in the level, but say she picks up the Lincoln Head and all of a sudden the player gets attacked, she has to get rid of it. So we need to account for that, or she’s carrying this stupid Lincoln head throughout the level.

But we also have another system on top of that which is saying, “We don’t want all these bits of business to either happen at the very beginning or the very end of the level, as if the player is sort of rushing them to the end.” [It] works like content distribution, saying, “Has Elizabeth just done something recently, or has she not done something for a while? We should try to make her do something now.”

So, those bits – you could say that they’re scripted in a sense, but they could happen at numerous places throughout the level, because we don’t know what the player’s going to do. So we have to account for it, and Elizabeth has to seem both fluid and consistent.

That is probably the most complicated thing – in fact, I wouldn’t say probably, I’d say it is the most complicated thing in the game, because she’s so content-heavy.

She has her roots in the Big Daddy and Little Sister characters in some ways. And I say that in terms of how we had to think about it, because Big Daddy was trying to go through all these little bits of business as well: Little Sister would get tired, and Big Daddy would control the speed he was moving at. And we had to do that in places where we didn’t know what players were going to be doing. Their paths weren’t entirely predetermined, nor were their actions on that path entirely predetermined. So she’s just like an incredibly, incredibly complicated version of that.

I don’t think anybody’s done anything exactly quite like this, because she’s performing these continually scripted things in areas where we can’t control the action.

PC Gamer: Were you tempted to put that in a restrictive context, where the player loses control of his view and has to see Elizabeth do this cool thing?

Ken Levine: We have this theory – and I can’t say whether it makes sense, but… the less we take control away from the player, the better. That’s always been our structure in terms of storytelling, it’s always been our approach back from System Shock 2 to BioShock. We try to tell a story that is deep in narrative, but without asking the player to be restricted for it – and that’s very tough to do. But we think it’s worth it

BioShock Infinite is out in 2012.

We didn’t see this coming. Stupid, I know. But when we got our hands on an early build of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I was certain it would be the game of 2011. Skyrim would be great, but it would just be Oblivion with a bit more snow. So now that it’s here, why does it feel like so much more than that?

For so many reasons – but I’ll pick four. The first is that character progression is so much more exciting, an element we’ve talked more about in our selection for RPG of the year.

That’s a fundamental change, but in other places, differences of degree are just as important. The biggest of those is just how much stuff they’ve packed into this world. A ten minute stroll in Oblivion might pass one cave and an Elven ruin – both uncannily similar to the last ones you raided. The same journey in Skyrim can lead you up a rocky mountain path, past the door to a dripping abandoned mine, under a spectacular waterfall, past rebel guards escorting an imperial prisoner, through an icecrusted underground pass, into a steampunk Dwarven ruin, through a battle between an Elder Dragon and the guards of a local village, and ultimately to an ancient Nordic dungeon that ends in a wall of Dragontongue glyphs that grant you the power to breathe jets of ice.

It doesn’t feel like a grudging reaction to a few fan complaints about monotonous dungeons, it feels like Bethesda genuinely understood how to make a richer environment. They went so many extra miles in fleshing this world out with substantial and interesting adventures that Skyrim feels like a different kind of place to Cyrodiil.

Then there’s the landscape. Mountains have a natural drama to them that gently rolling hills never did. Skyrim is the spectacular skyline other games paint on their backgrounds to suggest a wilder, bigger world than they can really give you. This time it’s really there: you can scramble up its twisting paths, tumble down its icy slopes, explore every frosted forest.

It’s so much more than just a fantasy postcard generator: this crinkled country is always hiding the next adventure behind a cloudsmudged summit or a heart-stopping drop. Not being able to see what’s over the next ridge – or where the game world ends – gives Skyrim a sense of limitless promise.

Lastly, it’s just one leap closer to the perfect open world game that the Elder Scrolls series keeps shooting for. When I first heard about Morrowind, I kept thinking there must be something wrong with it. It’s third person, right? Or the combat’s turn based? Or I’m really controlling a party? Or I can’t actually go anywhere? It can’t actually be like an FPS in a gorgeous fantasy world, utterly unrestricted and rich with story. That’s just ridiculous.

But it was, and every time Bethesda jump a bit closer to achieving that dream game, that incredible feeling of freedom hits me again. Every time they give us a new world to explore that way, my brain buzzes at the possibilities. Skyrim makes such huge improvements to the magic, the stealth, the characters and the landscape that they all feel real again, and the immersion is complete.

It won’t stay fresh forever. But when Bethesda release a game that makes Skyrim feel clunky and barren, we’re all in quite a lot of trouble.

Check out our Skyrim review for more.

Highly recommended: Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Total War: Shogun 2, League of Legends, Minecraft, Limbo.

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.

But it happened. This third game has the wealth of alternate routes and versatile tools that made Deus Ex great, and expands it with huge city hubs, packed with more sidequests and background story than the original ever had. It reworks the system for augmenting yourself to give you trickier choices between more powerful abilities. And all of those abilities are more slickly designed and satisfying to use. It’s not better in every way, by any means, but nothing else comes this close.

It’s an action game, which our neuroses tell us is automatically bad, but most of the concessions to blockbuster accessibility are genuinely, and surprisingly positive. Melee was almost comically unconvincing in Deus Ex 1: now it’s jaw-droppingly brutal and consistently satisfying. A cover system seemed like a frightening departure, but it ended up making for a much more developed and complex stealth option.

Mainly, though, it’s just so good to have it back. It’s Deus Ex! But shinier! And we haven’t played it through 26 times yet! And DLC is coming out for it! And everyone’s sharing stories about the incredible things that happened to them, and all the ways the quests can play out, and all the people they punched in the face, and what aug builds they want next. Deus Ex 4 is bound to be shit, though.

Read our Deus Ex: Human Revolution review for more.

Highly recommended: Battlefield 3, Orcs Must Die!

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.

These games have no DRM, they all work on Windows, Linux and Mac, and if you have any trouble with them the organisers offer quick, friendly and efficient support. The result: the bundles have now taken a total of more than $10 million in under two years.

But one of the main reasons these guys are our community heroes this year is what they’ve done with that success: they’ve used it as a platform to launch (or relaunch) a range of great indie games that deserve a broader audience. Four times this year, they’ve released new bundles that showcase a particular game or developer: Trine, Frozen Synapse, Voxatron, and most recently Introversion’s whole catalogue. Each one has taken more than $700,000, a vast success for games that genuinely deserve it.

The latest, Humble Indie Bundle 4, launched on December 13th and made $500,000 within its first few hours. The final total will be divided between the organisers, at least seven game developers, and two charities. But the sheer popularity of these bundles, the latest in particular, makes each of those shares substantial. In many cases, the bundles guarantee that a lot of great indie developers are able to continue making new games for us to enjoy.

The Humble phenomenon is the latest stage of an ongoing revolution in indie games. First, tools like Game Maker, Unity and a free version of the Unreal engine made it dramatically easier for anyone to make a game with no startup cash. Then Steam led a charge for digital distribution that left the indie-friendly platform the dominant player in PC gaming. Now, small developers have a new channel to get enormous exposure and sales for great games, without either a marketing budget or the need for a mainstream publisher.

It’s a huge catalyst for getting great and interesting games to the populace at large, and it’s making PC gaming better for everyone.

Highly recommended: DJ Wheat and Tastosis.

Players will be able to choose the mods they want on the Steam Workshops website, even via mobile devices, and they’ll be downloaded and installed automatically the next time you play. More details and the release date below.

If it works as planned, this will be a huge leap forwards for the accessibility modding, and a strong gesture of support from both Bethesda and Valve. More to the point, it’s just going to be really easy and slick to try out the vast selection of amazing stuff Elder Scrolls fans always create.

The normal methods of acquiring and installing mods, via places like TES Nexus, will still work.

The Creation Kit will be out in January, and will apparently be even more versatile than Oblivion’s tools, letting players mess with Radiant Story.

You can read a bit more about what Bethesda are working on, Skyrim-wise, over on the Bethesda Blog.

I’m a level 40 stealth character in Skyrim, and I’ve now honed my pickpocketing skill to the point that I can steal weapon from your hand and the the shirt off your back. In the Imperial castle at Solitude, where guards are using their weapons to practice and their armour to not be naked, this is funny. So I made a video.

Actually, it wasn’t quite that easy. Here’s why.

Before you reach Pickpocketing 100, you get access to a perk that lets you steal people’s weapons. I did this, to all the guards in Solitude, and laughed quite a lot. Then I moved on, and kept stealing everything from everyone I ever met.

At 100, you get access to the perk that lets you steal what people are wearing. This is when it gets insane. I wanted a video of it, but I also wanted a video of stealing someone’s bow while they’re practising with it. And I couldn’t find anyone left who was still practising with a bow – just those few rubes in Castle Dour looking empty handedly at their straw targets.

I didn’t have a recent save before I stole those bows, and I couldn’t find any working cheats that would let me level an old save up to the point where I could do it. So there was really only one thing I could do. I had to break into Castle Dour, get into the dungeons, find the evidence chest, and steal back the bows I’d stolen from everyone. Then I’d have to go around the courtyard slipping them back into the guards’ inventories, just so I could steal them back on camera.

It worked. So the bows you see me stealing here do belong to the guards, but they’ve only recently discovered them back in their inventories, after being missing for about two months.

So instead of a Knight, there’s a tiny Squire in an oversized helmet and no trousers, and Huntress, who expresses her character by turning around and wiggling her buttocks. The intro warns that “these heroes-in- training will have to grow up quickly” – this might be too quickly.

Playing alone, it’s a strange game. Each hero type can place a different type of defensive structure, but you have to do loads of running around to intercept all the enemies. Placing structures costs mana, and that has to be scavenged from dead monsters. It takes a long time to scrounge up enough to set up a good defence, a long time to place those defences, and a long time to walk between all the places you want to put them.

Place turrets to intercept steams of enemies.

Dungeon Defenders only really works in multiplayer: it’s co-operative, so you can each focus on one particular stream of enemies, or one particular aspect of defence.

I like to play Squire, and set up a killzone on one particular path. I place a harpoon catapult off the beaten track so it can penetrate whole lines of enemies. Then, to keep them in the field of fire as long as possible, I lay spiky barricades to block and damage them just before they leave its arc. If there’s room, I add a bouncer turret right in the middle of the chokepoint, which shunts them back or into the spikes.

These abilities are unlocked at regular intervals as you level up, and you can enhance either your fighting skills or your defensive structures. You also find randomly generated items, and can ‘invest’ in your favourites: pay gold to boost one of your weapon’s magical properties. It’s all smart and effective stuff to keep you engaged early on. After that, it relies more on you enjoying the matches themselves.

Baby Bender and friends square up to the invaders.

None of the individual interactions are especially fun, though – combat is stiffly animated and unconvincing, turret projectiles don’t have much weight, but there’s a definite pleasure in deciding where to concentrate your efforts and resources, while others do the same around you.

Strangely, Dungeon Defenders doesn’t have any good systems for encouraging players to work together. Mana, the most crucial resource, is hogged by the first player to snatch it from the battlefield. You have a shared maximum for how many structures you can build, but no individual player limits: the jerk who squanders it by overbuilding his own stuff is ultimately rewarded with a higher score.

It’s also tough to get into a good game. The browser tells you the character level of the host but not the other players, so you’re usually in a game with at least one hero too high or too low level to have fun with.

The core idea is good, but right now it’s too hard to get into a good game, or work effectively with other players once you do.

No plot spoilers here, but there are shots of the lovely scenes.

1. Icebergs

Skyrim’s Northern shore is the coldest bit, and in places looks like the arctic. Horkers – Tamriel’s version of the walrus – flop around on them. Kill them and turn them into delicious stew.

2. The bit that isn’t snowy

The area around Whiterun is one of the few places that doesn’t look uttery freezing. In fact, it looks sort of like Wales.

3. The coolest bit of rock

One of the most remarkable landmarks in the country happens to have a city on it. Solitude is awesome. Unless there’s ever an earthquake.

4. The coolest city

Every major city is unique and interesting in some way, but it’s hard to top Markarth. It feels like a place from another time, unchanged for thousands of years but still lived in.

5. The prettiest forest

Snow is nice, but trees are better. This stretch of brisk woodland feels like the great outdoors we’ve heard about from people who leave the house.

6. The highest point

OK, you probably could have found this on your own: it’s hard to miss. High Hrothgar, the place you can walk to, is not the summit though. Get a bit further in the main quest and you’ll be looking down on that place.

7. The best dungeon

Alftand, an unassuming Dwemer ruin. There’s a bit more to it. Not going to spoil what’s down there, but I can tell you it goes deep. The main quest will take you here eventually, but feel free to explore on your own.

8. The best cave

Do you like the Goonies? So do Bethesda. There’s a gorgeous, dripping, smugglers cave near Solitude, and a great quest relating to it in the city itself.

9. The best view of the aurora

You can catch the Northern lights on a clear night from almost anywhere in Skyrim, but for some reason I’ve always found the most stunning views around here. It might just be clearer weather, since it’s a warmer region. You can also get a Dragon Shout that makes the weather slowly clear up – doing that on a cloudy night will be the most magical 60 seconds of your Dragonborn life.

Playing Skyrim made me realise just how huge, fresh and exciting it really is. I asked game director Todd Howard how far it’s come from Oblivion, and what some of his favourite discoveries have been.

PC Gamer: Is Skyrim as big a leap forward for the series as Oblivion was?

Todd Howard: Hard to say… I have a hard time looking at it that way. I think it’s close. I don’t know that I would say it’s as large a leap, just because the technology gap between Morrowind and Oblivion was greater.

PC Gamer: But do you feel on the mechanics side it’s changed more?

Todd Howard: I’d say about the same. The number of gameplay changes and things like that are probably on the same level.

PC Gamer: We’ve heard about the Radiant Story system ensuring a kidnap victim is someone you’ve already met. Can you give any other examples of stuff you’ve seen it do, maybe stuff that surprised you?

Todd Howard: Let’s see… something that was good lately – but this was a bug – lately we realised that chickens were reporting crimes. I found that very funny. That was just last week: “Why are we getting caught?” “Oh, the chickens are reporting the crimes!”

PC Gamer: [Laughs] In terms of intentional Radiant Story stuff, though…

Todd Howard: Intentional things that are interesting… You can get married in the game, and I had decided to marry this one woman who was my friend. And I forgot that I had done this Radiant quest for this other guy, who it turns out had liked her.

When you get married, you can decide where you live. If you own a house, your spouse can move in with you, or you can move in with them. I had owned a house in the city of Whiterun, so I told her “OK we should live there.” I went there, and she hadn’t arrived yet, so I decided to wait. I slept.

And then she showed up. I turned around and as she was standing there, I saw another door open to another bedroom and the other guy walked out!

I had to call over the designer and say: “This guy! I forgot I did that thing!” and he said “Oh yeah, he’s going to visit her every day.”

If you make him like her, he then visits her every day, and doesn’t care if she’s married.

PC Gamer: There’s no concept of fidelity.

Todd Howard: It’s my wedding night, guy walks out of the bedroom!

I’m trying to think on my feet right now because these are just things from last week. If you ask me next week, I’m sure there’ll be something new. The marriage one is not a bug, it’s a thing – the chicken one is unintentional, a bug.

PC Gamer: When I played, I found a pair of gloves that gave me +15 damage to unarmed attacks, and it totally changed the way I played. Do you have any favourite items like that?

Todd Howard: One of my favourites is a shout that turns things to ice. On the surface, you shout and the wind turns the guy to ice, and what’s neat here is it acts as a paralysation for a period of time. So it visually looks neat because he falls over encased in ice. And during the time that he’s in the ice, he’s taking a little bit of cold damage – not enough to kill him.

When the ice is done, it kind of shatters and that hurts him a lot. So you can use the shout and incapacitate people, and then move on and hope that when it shatters, it kills them. If you hit the ice then it will shatter and hurt them a lot.

So even amongst this basic shout, there’s some gameplay: “OK, I’ve incapacitated these enemies, do I want to shatter the ice? Will that kill them? Or they’re tough enough, I’d rather just leave them encased in the ice for as long as possible and deal with something else or move on.”

PC Gamer: That’s cool – Paralyse was always my favourite thing in Oblivion.

Todd Howard: Yeah, we still have that as well.

PC Gamer: When you’re not doing the main quest, how common is it for you to run into a dragon?

Todd Howard: You have to do a little bit of the main quest – just the initial stuff – for the dragons to really start appearing, because it sits in with the story. After that point, the more of the main quest you do, the more dragons you’ll run into. But it’s hard to quantify it. They appear every once in a while. Not at a rate that is annoying… it still feels special. It’s hard to know how people will play the game and it’s a little bit random.

Sony’s new PlayStation ad – “Michael” – shows live-action versions of game characters sharing stories about the things they’ve done. If you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil more than that – it’s embedded above.

The costumes are impressive, but I can’t help feeling this isn’t how the characters I play in PC games would talk about me – or most PC gamers, for that matter. Saving the world, facing the gods, finding the good in a conflicted hero – we’ll get to it, but we’ve usually got something else we want to try first. I don’t have Sony’s voice-acting budget, so I’ve written the PC gaming version of their ad as a screenplay.

1 – INT – BAR – NIGHT
An assortment of PC game protagonists fill the dingy bar, muttering angrily to each other. GORDON FREEMAN walks in, glances around and takes a seat – but says nothing.

If the portals in Portal could take you back in time, a) your mind would break, and b) it would look like this.

It’s a video of a prototype made by game designer Arthur Lee, in which you can create portals by taking screenshots. Whatever you snapped is what you’ll see through the portal. Where it gets braintingling, though, is that the portal will take you back to the time when you took that screenshot. In other words, the portals don’t just fold space, they fold time as well. So that’s nice.

As Mike Rose over at IndieGames.com points out, there’s your Portal 3 right there.

It also puts more of the burden of choice on you: you can install any augmentations you have the points for, rather than just the ones you’ve found the right canister for.

So until you know how they all work, it’s not easy to plan your character. You earn Praxis points, the level-up currency, quite slowly at first, and there are no refunds for choices you regret. So I’ll talk you through the best augs, what they do, and what kind of playing styles they suit.

Bear in mind that you earn Praxis points for accumulating a lot of experience, and you get more experience for some playstyles than others. Just shooting everyone until they die, for example, is the worst way to go. Yes, you get 10 points for each kill, but that’s in contrast to 100 for every alternate route and secret area you find. When you do take people down, doing it non-lethally and in one hit gets you the most experience. There’s an extra 250 in it for you if you complete your objective without setting off alarms, and a whopping 500 XP for doing your job without being seen at all.

1. Read minds

If you’re interested in the talky side of Deus Ex, get the Social Enhancer aug as early as possible. It’ll analyse a person’s brainwaves to give you a hint about their personality. If you start losing a heated argument, you can release pheromones and exploit your knowledge of their character to smoothtalk your way out of it. Even in normal conversations, you’ll get new dialogue options that lead to information or help it’s impossible to get otherwise.

2. X-ray vision

Whether you’re planning to go stealthy, violent or both, the Smart Vision aug is amazingly useful. It lets you line up a shot on an enemy’s head before he comes round the corner, or hide before he has a chance to spot you. It also highlights cameras, locked doors and computers – perfect for finding the nearest security console without blundering into every room. Then you can turn off cameras, bots and turrets, or take them over.

3. Stay mobile

Two augs are specially designed to get you into secret areas: Jump Enhancement and Lift Heavy Objects. Jump on top of big things, or move them out of your way. The difference is that Lift Heavy Objects only costs one Praxis point, and it also lets you throw stuff to knock people down. That makes it the better early choice. Get the Jump aug later if you like exploring: a few jumps can’t be made without it, and it’s good for getting out of danger.

4. Stab in stereo

Best aug in the game? Reflex Booster. It makes Jensen good enough in close combat that he can KO or kill two foes at once. It happens automatically, so he’ll sometimes kill a civilian as well as the guard you’re attacking, amusingly enough. It still only consumes one pip of energy, and the takedown animations are hilarious. It’s also a huge strategic asset: you can headshot one guard and melee another two in the same instant.

5. Charge up

There are two ways to upgrade the energy bar augs consume: more cells, or faster recharge. Faster recharge is much, much more useful. The default recharge time is agonisingly long, and having more cells doesn’t help much: the extra ones never regenerate automatically, so it’s only an advantage when you consume a giant jar of cyberboost. Those are rare and bulky. Just eat cyber-boost bars whenever you need more than one cell.

6. Skip boss fights

A few fights suck. Don’t suffer through them. Spend the three points it takes to get the Typhoon Explosive System aug and max out its damage. Don’t bother buying ammo at a LIMB clinic – you get one charge free, and you’ll find more lying around. Now you can run up to any boss in the game and release a swirl of explosives that will obliterate it. Some bosses take two hits, but those giant Box Guard droids only take one. And it looks badass.

7. Knock down walls

A one-point upgrade to your arm aug will let you smash down any weak points you find in walls around the levels. There are actually lots of these, if you look for them, and they’re incredibly satisfying to punch down. But be aware that the arm aug isn’t the only way to do it. Any frag explosive will knock them down too. Since wall-punching leaves you standing in the hole, it’s sometimes safer to blow them up from a distance.

8. Gain intelligence

There are many, many ways to upgrade the amount of information you get about where your enemies are and what they can see. One point will upgrade your map aug, doubling the radius your minimap detects enemies, and show even those you haven’t seen in real life yet. The Stealth Helper aug lets you see the radius of suspicious sounds you make. But more usefully, a one point upgrade shows enemy vision fields on your minimap. A huge help when sneaking.

9. Grant Immunity

A cheap upgrade most people will overlook is for your eyes: immunity to concussion grenades. Enemies don’t throw that many at you, but you find loads throughout the game, and they can send whole groups of enemies flying. Normally, your own concussion grenades will blind you even if you’re round a corner. With this upgrade, you can knock down a whole crowd of enemies right in front of you, and skewer or headshot them all before they can get up.

10. Hack more

There are four hacking augs, but forget about Hacking Analyse: you don’t need to know what’s in the nodes you capture. It’s worth upgrading Hacking Capture to level three as soon as you can: that’ll get you into most computers and locked doors in the first 15 hours of the game. You may find hacking gets hard on level three terminals – if you have two points to spare, Hacking Stealth will solve that. If you can only spare one, upgrade Hacking Fortify.

11. Hack smarter

Hacking is all about being ready for the moment you’re detected. When you click on a node, hover over the Capture option to see the chance you’ll be detected. If it’s more than 40%, assume it’ll happen. The trace program captures everything it can on its way to you, and adds points onto those nodes, making them slower for you to take. So when capturing risky nodes, capture everything else you can at the same time to get it before the enemy.

12. Hack harder

You can Fortify the nodes you’ve already taken, increasing the time limit you’ll have once you’re detected. The drawback is that Fortifying risks detection so don’t do it while you’re safe. The time to Fortify is when you’re capturing a risky node – again, anything over 40%. While that node captures, Fortify your starting node, and every other one between you and the enemy. You can do them all at once, and since you’re going to get caught anyway, why not?

Eidos say they’ll be filtering them to make sure they make sense for the game world, and these billboards are in bright, commercial, inner-city areas – I didn’t see any where it didn’t make sense for a billboard to be. In a previous build of the game they showed placeholder Coca-Cola and Subway ads, and I have to say I didn’t notice them at all.

I think it’s a dick move to milk more money out of gamers who’ve already paid full price, but I also think a new Deus Ex game, one actually worthy of the name, is too important to boycott.

I hate this stuff. Apart from the confusion, it’s annoying to be made to feel like you’re not getting the complete experience when you just buy the game itself. But they’ve done it, so we might as well sort through the mess and figure out where you get the best deal.

Be aware that we can only go by what retailers say they’ll give you – we can’t guarantee they’re getting their own listings right. In most cases, retailers don’t specify whether their offers will still be available after launch. Since the official Deus Ex site lists all the in-game content as pre-order bonuses, we’re assuming it won’t be.

The game alone

This is what I reviewed, and what I gave 94% to – it’s complete in and of itself, and you don’t need anything else for it to be an amazing game and a worthy prequel to Deus Ex. Here’s where we’ve seen it cheapest.

Where to get it:

• UK: The Game Collection – £23.49
• US: Fry’s – $39

The Explosive Mission Pack

On top of the standard game, some retailers give you this batch of in-game bonus stuff:

• Exclusive mission: Tong’s Rescue
• Multi-shot Grenade Launcher
• Remote-Detonated Explosive Device
• Automatic Unlocking Device

 
We haven’t been given any of it yet, so I can’t tell you how good the mission is or whether any of these extras are overpowered. But obviously it’s annoying to feel you’re missing out on content unless you get this. There’s another set of bonus content called the Tactical Enhancement pack, but since it doesn’t include the extra mission and is mutually exclusive with this one, it’s probably not a good idea.

Where to get it:

• US: GameStop – $49.99
• UK: Play.com – £27.99

The Augmented Edition

In both territories, there’s an Augmented Edition of the game – a sort of collector’s box set. In the Europe, it comes with all the bonus in-game content it’s possible to get – as it damn well should. But in the US and on Steam, bizarrely, it doesn’t come with any of the in-game content. You can only get some of it by pre-ordering from certain retailers like GameStop. I think that sucks. US readers, do let us know in the comments if you find anywhere Stateside selling the whole package.

If you do buy it from GameStop in the US, it comes with all the bolded items below – the same in-game stuff as the regular edition from there. In Europe, from Game.co.uk, it comes with everything below:

• 40-page Artbook
• 44-minute making-of
• Motion comic
• Game soundtrack
• E3 Trailer and animated storyboard
• Exclusive mission: Tong’s Rescue
• Multi-shot Grenade Launcher
• Remote-Detonated Explosive Device
• Automatic Unlocking Device
• Double-barrel Shotgun
• Silenced Sniper Rifle
• 10,000 extra credits

 
Warning: from previous experience, I can tell you the game feels balanced for not starting with 10,000 extra credits. You can use credits to buy Praxis Points, the level-up currency, and the early shortage of those is part of what makes level-up decisions so interesting. I hope the extra credits are optional in this package.

Where to get it:

• UK: Game.co.uk – £34
• US: GameStop – $59.99

The Team Fortress 2 Items

There are eight new Deus Ex-themed weapons and hats in Team Fortress 2 that you get for free if you pre-order either the regular or Augmented editions on Steam. But wait! You can also craft these items, find them in game, trade for them or just buy them in the Mann Co store – the weapons are very reasonably priced.

Since the Steam edition doesn’t come with any of the in-game stuff for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and we don’t yet know if and when that will be available by any other means, you’re probably best buying it elsewhere. You’ll still be adding it to your Steam games when you install it, since it’s a Steamworks game.

Where to get it:

• UK: Steam – £29.99
• UK: Steam Augmented Edition (does not include any of the in-game bonus content for DXHR) – £39.99

 
Personally, I’m going for the Augmented Edition from Game.co.uk. My guess is that the extra content will come as DLC codes you can manually enter in Steam, in which case I’ll avoid the one for the 10,000 extra credits. Shame that the launch of such a great game is marred by being nickel-and-dimed for in-game content – if it makes the game better, it should just be in there for everyone. If it doesn’t, they shouldn’t be charging for it.

But if they’re going to, then yes: I do kinda want a silenced sniper rifle.

What’s been Gabe’s personal experience of Dota 2? Quite a freaking lot, it turns out. He and the team have been playing it more obsessively than any other game they’ve made.

“I’ve played Dota 2 for about 800 hours. The cool thing about Dota 2 is that it’s probably the game that we’ve made that we’re most obsessed with playing. As a games developer, you tend to get pretty tired of the thing that you’re developing, because you had to experience all the flaws and the difficulties all along. You sort of reach the point where you’re like ‘Let’s just be done with this.’ Dota 2? Every day, after we’re done working on the game, everyone goes home and plays it till 2 or 3 in the morning.”

Our man Graham is out at GamesCom in Cologne at the moment, seeing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. He asked Bethesda’s vice president of PR Pete Hines whether the game would use Games for Windows Live – a DRM system that asks players to log in, and ties downloadable content and savegames to your online account.

Hines says no: it is published under the Games for Windows label, but it won’t use the Live part.

There was some concern back in June when the collector’s edition was announced, showing the PC version of the game with partly obscured Games for Windows branding on the box. It’s a huge relief to confirm we won’t have to tangle with the maddeningly unreliable GFWL.

I got to play Skyrim on Monday, but I’m not allowed to tell you anything about it yet. I am, however, booking a certain week in November off.

On Thursday we mentioned a massive game of Supreme Commander between six PC Gamer writers and two overpowered AIs. There’s a write up of it in the new issue of PC Gamer UK, and we finally found time to record it as a video for anyone who wants to see it for themselves.

Graham and I do our best to commentate what’s going on – please forgive my erratic observing, our patchy memories, and the bits where our voices go too quiet. We know how to fix the latter in future. There is no known fix for my numerical skills – I manage to kick this off by claiming we’re playing against six AIs, when the whole point is that we outnumber them.

If the embed above doesn’t work for you, check it out on our YouTube channel.

We’re also turning it into a video anyone can watch, with commentary from us, so stay tuned for that. You can bookmark or subscribe to our Supreme Commander tag (RSS) and it’ll pop up there.

If you’re watching the replay in-game, here are a few things you may need:

• Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance
• Patch 1.5.3599
• The Sorian AI mod (smarter AI)
• Cheat Options mod (lets the AI cheat more)

Download the MP3, subscribe, or find our older podcasts here.

At the same event, they revealed that Diablo 3 requires a constant internet connection to play – there’s no offline mode at all.

This is not the same as the microtransaction model we’ve seen in other games: Blizzard themselves aren’t selling any in-game items. The auction house will be entirely player driven: everything you see there was found by someone, and most of the money spent to buy it goes to the player who found or crafted it.

Read on for more details, and Blizzard’s justifications for it.

Blizzard’s cut

 
It will cost a small flat rate to list an item on the auction house, and Blizzard will take another flat rate fee when the sale is completed. Both figures will be in real money, but they’re not proportional to the value of the item. Blizzard say they wanted to stay away from taking a percentage cut.

“Percentages really incentivise us to manipulate the system,” says lead designer Jay Wilson, “and we don’t even want the incentive to do that, much less actually doing it.”

Despite the flat fees they take, Blizzard don’t expect it to be a money spinner for them. “We expect it’ll break even,” lead designer Jay Wilson says.

“We talked about this as a service we wanted to provide players, and not primarily as a financial model… we don’t know if it will make us money. It would be nice if it did, but as long as we don’t lose money, that’s really what we care about: that we provide the players with a great experience that doesn’t put us out of business.”

I asked if they’d still do it even if they couldn’t take a cut of the sales. “Absolutely,” says Jay.

Value to the player

 
“We think it’s really going to add a lot of depth to the game,” says executive producer Rob Pardo. “If I have more money than time I can purchase items, or if I’m leet in the game I can get benefits out of it.”

“The players really want it. This is something that we know people are going to do either way. We can provide them a really safe, awesome, fun experience, or they’ll find ways of doing it elsewhere.”

It’s true that some players bought and sold in-game items for both the previous Diablo games through unauthorised third parties. I’m not convinced that means the player base at large want it to be a part of the game.

You won’t be able to buy a game-endingly good sword at level 1, since items have minimum level requirements. But the real-world value of 100,000 gold for a level 40 character is bound to be a lot less than it’s worth to a level 1.

Other auction houses

 
No-one has to use the real-money auction house of course. “If no-one wants to do it,” Rob says, “there’ll be no trading whatsoever.” Diablo 3 will have a second, separate auction house that operates only on in-game gold. It won’t cost any real money to list your items there. But since gold itself can be bought and sold on the real money auction house, it won’t be entirely isolated from its effects.

There’ll be a separate auction house for each currency Blizzard can accept: UK players won’t see items listed by their US friends. Within regions, players can choose to switch to a different auction house, but there’s a conversion cost for buying items from the auction house that isn’t in your native currency. So European players can switch between the UK pounds sterling auction house and the Euro one. But they can’t switch to the US action house, because the US is a different region.

Cashing out

 
Each week players will receive a number of ‘free listings’ for the real money auction house, letting them put items up for sale without having to pay real money. Even if you haven’t entered your credit card details, you can earn real money from items this way.

Cashing out will be dealt with by a third party Blizzard aren’t ready to announce, and that party will charge a fee for the withdrawal. If you don’t withdraw your funds, you can spend them on other items in the auction house, or to buy anything else from the Blizzard store – which carries digital versions of all their major games, and in-game pets for World of Warcraft.

What about those other Blizzard games? “I think this works particularly well within the Diablo system.” says Rob. “99.9% of the items will not be soulbound in any way.” In World of Warcraft, soulbinding prevents you from trading many items to other players. “I really don’t see us doing it for WoW ever.”

Gold farming

 
The obvious question, then, is how this will affect gold farming: people who repeatedly play the most profitable parts of a game to sell the in-game proceeds for real money. They already plague World of Warcraft without a legal way to sell the proceeds – isn’t this just encouraging them? Rob answers with a question.

“What’s the difference between a player that plays the game a lot and a gold farmer? They’re really doing the same activity. If you are doing an activity where all you’re trying to do is generate items for the auction house, you’re not making someone else’s game experience poorer. If anything you’re making the game better, because you’re generating items for the auction house that people want to purchase.”

Since no-one can join your game of Diablo 3 without your permission, grinding gold farmers won’t be as intrusive as in the public world of WoW. Their effect on the economy, though, is hard to predict.

The cheapening

 
I have a different concern. To me, the pleasure of Diablo is finding these items – that nerdy thrill of seeing some gold letters amongst the loot that twirls out of a dying boss. Better still, of finding a randomly generated weapon whose stats put my current kit to shame.

I don’t mind that I’ll be able to sell that for real money in Diablo 3, but I mind that I could have just bought it in the first place. Not for some prohibitively huge some of in-game gold, but the spare change in my wallet.

I asked Jay if they saw this as a problem. “That’s not anything different than Diablo 2,” he says. “The best items that came through that game did come through trading, and came through interacting with other players.”

True for some, I guess, but one of the reasons they’re doing this is that there weren’t convenient ways to find and trade items in the previous Diablo games, and no safe way to do so for real money. By making it easy, legal and searchable, Blizzard have put the boring option temptingly close to the long and rewarding search for great loot. I don’t have to take it, of course, but I worry the search will seem that much longer and less rewarding with a Buy It Now button nestled right next to it.

Some games don’t have official mod support but can still be tweaked and enhanced by the community. Others, like World of Warcraft, don’t let you change the fundamental mechanics, but give you free reign over rearranging the interface and searching the auction house with mods. The official FAQ provided to us by Blizzard makes it Diablo 3′s policy pretty clear:

“For a variety of gameplay and security reasons, we will not be supporting bots or mods in Diablo III, and they’ll be expressly prohibited by our terms of use for the game.”

Having played the game, I’m not desperate to re-arrange its interface or scrape its auction house for the best prices. And it’s no surprise they don’t want you modding the online game: it would rather undermine the item market. But I do think it’s a shame there’s not an offline mode we can tinker with and create interesting things for. StarCraft 2 went out of its way to embrace that kind of creativity, with an editor so flexible you can make new games in it.

Senior producer Alex Mayberry says there were many reasons for the decision, including the prevention of cheating. Since players can buy and sell items for real money, any way of cheating to make or acquire better ones would be very lucrative – and unfair.

“It’s the trend that we’ve been moving towards,” Alex says. “Obviously StarCraft 2 did it, WoW authenticates also. It’s kind of the way things are, these days. The world of gaming is not the same as it was when Diablo 2 came out.”

I check with him to be absolutely sure: there’s no way to play without being online? “There’s no offline play, you have to be connected to the internet.”

The anti-cheat reason makes sense, but why not permit an offline mode and keep it separate from the online game?

“We thought about this quite a bit,” says executive producer Rob Pardo. “One of the things that we felt was really import was that if you did play offline, if we allowed for that experience, you’d start a character, you’d get him all the way to level 20 or level 30 or level 40 or what have you, and then at that point you might decide to want to venture onto Battle.net. But you’d have to start a character from scratch, because there’d be no way for us to guarantee no cheats were involved, if we let you play on the client and then take that character online.”

“Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t play a game by yourself – of course you can. You can go into and start any game that you want, you’ll just be connected to the Battle.net servers, and we can authenticate your character.”

If you’re finding this reasoning weak, you’re not alone. The more believable reason to deny players any kind of offline mode would be to prevent piracy. I asked Alex if that was the reason.

“One of them, yes.”

We’ve covered the Heavy, Medic, Sniper and Scout. Today’s lesson is in the most versatile class in the game: The Soldier.

Getting started

As a Soldier, you’re defined by your rocket launcher. It can hold four rockets at once, and fire them out in reasonably quick succession to damage and knock enemies around. Its true strength is that each rocket does splash damage – it hurts everything near where it hits. That makes it a phenomenal damage dealer against tight groups of enemies, and it also means it’s hard to miss at close range.

The trick, of course, is to aim at the ground: you want to hit your opponent’s feet, so that if they’ve moved by the time your rocket hits, they’ll still get caught in the blast when the rocket hits the ground.

It’s actually pretty hard to hit a specific point on the ground in front of you, because the low angle means one or two degrees inaccuracy can translate to several metres’ difference. You’ll have a much easier time hitting enemies if you’re above them: when you’re looking down, your angle of attack is steeper, which means you can afford to be a few degrees off and still hit the right spot.

How do you get above your enemy? It’ll sound stupid, but if you can’t manoeuvre to higher ground, you can always just jump. Try it against some Easy bots in Offline Practice mode: jump, aim at your opponent’s feet, and fire. It becomes instinctive very quickly. It also makes it harder for Snipers to hit you, and since you have a lot of health, they’re one of your biggest threats.

Rockets are easy to dodge, and do less damage, at long range. And it’s not a great idea to fire them when an enemy’s point blank, since the splash damage can hurt you too. So you’re king of the close- to mid-range fight. When an enemy’s too close, switch to your shotgun. When they’re too far, reload: any time you have less than four rockets in your launcher, you should be shoving some more in.

Lastly, you can use your rocket launcher to jump ridiculous heights. Look directly at your feet, then do the following, in this order:

• Jump
• Hold duck
• Fire

 
You’ll know when you’ve done it right: the boost you get is enormous, and you don’t take that much damage from the blast. If you do it whilst running forwards, you can soar over barriers or up to high vantage points. Once you learn the maps a bit, you’ll get a sense for where the medkits are. Any high ground with a medkit is worth rocket jumping to, because you’ll repair the modest damage right away.

The most valuable alternate weapons for the Soldier

The best weapon for the Soldier depends on your own skill set. If you’re a precision player with excellent mouse skills and judgement, you want the Direct Hit. It’s a rocket launcher that does much more damage, its rockets travel much faster, but the splash damage radius is much smaller. So if you hit an opponent directly or the ground beneath them, you do much more damage. But if you miss even a little, you’re useless. You can unlock the Direct Hit by getting 10 Soldier achievements, or buying it for £0.29 in the in-game store.

If you’re less dexterous than that, you can still be a great Soldier. The Black Box is the weapon for you: it can only hold 3 rockets at a time, but every time you deal damage to an opponent, you gain 15 health. 15 health isn’t much on its own, but it’s so easy to glance someone with the generous splash damage of the rocket launcher that you’ll be gaining that every few seconds. It makes you almost impossible to kill by attrition: only massive doses of damage like Sniper headshots, Spy backstabs and close-range Heavies can really take you out. You can’t unlock it with achievements, but it only costs £0.49 in the store.

Is the Soldier Starter Bundle worth buying?

To be honest, not really. Unless you want the viking hat. The two items it gives you are the Equaliser and the Buff Banner. Both are excellent, and go particularly well with the Black Box. But you can earn the Equaliser easily for just getting 5 achievements as a Soldier, something you’ll inevitably do before you’re ready to mess around with alternate weapons. And while the Buff Banner is harder to earn (15 achievements), it’s only £0.29p in the store. The bundle is £0.49, so I’ve just spent an entire paragraph on how to save 20p/30c.

Once you have both, you become an amazing Soldier. The Equaliser is the best weapon idea Valve ever stole from me: a melee weapon that makes you run faster and do more damage when you’re low on health. When you get hurt, switch to it, and run away. By all means hit someone with it in an emergency, but its main use is making you as fast as a Scout when you need to run for a health pack.

The Buff Banner gives you a Rage meter, filled by dealing damage. When it’s full, you can switch to it (same slot as the shotgun) and press fire to blow a bugle. As well as being funny, this makes you and everyone around you deal lots more damage for 10 seconds – a huge advantage.

It means you’re much more effective if you live for a long time – something both the Black Box and the Equaliser really help with. Play cautiously, stick with your team mates and just keep pelting enemies with rockets. Never risk your life to close in for the kill: if they’re weak, your team can finish them off, and you’re much more useful alive.

How to help a Soldier

Obviously if you’re a Medic, topping up their health is much appreciated. They generally don’t need you as a devoted life partner as badly as a Heavy does, but a pair of Soldiers with a Medic keeping an eye on them is an almost unstoppable force.

As the other classes, pay attention to when your Soldiers are reloading: when they’re out of rockets, it’s really helpful if you can put pressure on the enemy and keep them occupied. Often you’ll be rewarded with a surprisingly easy kill: if a Soldier’s fired all his rockets, someone’s probably on death’s door.

How to fight a Soldier

Since Soldiers are always trying to shoot your feet, jumping a lot helps. In general, don’t engage them at medium range unless you’re sure you can heap a lot of damage on them at once. If you can’t, keep your distance: their rockets are easy to dodge and low-damage at long range.

If you come face-to-face with one and can’t get away, try doing the opposite: get in their face. They’ll usually rocket you point-blank, seriously hurting or killing themselves. If they switch to their shotgun, just back off: they’re not going to kill you quickly with that.

We’ve covered the Heavy, Medic and Sniper. Now it’s time for the game’s ultimate asshole: The Scout.

Getting started

You’re fast, you’re violent, and you get shit done. Don’t let anyone tell you the Scout is weak – he’s a ferocious combat class when you use him well.

The first thing to understand is that you can double-jump: hit jump again any time you’re mid-air, and you’ll leap as if from an invisible platform. Combined with your ridiculous speed, this lets you get to perches no other class can reach without hurting themselves.

Just as importantly, it saves you from fall damage: any time you throw yourself recklessly off a high capture point, just hit jump before you touch the ground and you’ll lose all your downward velocity without taking any damage. For that reason, don’t use it needlessly: it’s handy to have a double-jump ready for if you’re knocked into a chasm or off a dangerous height.

The other special rule for the Scout is that he captures objectives twice as fast as the other classes. Exploit this. Capturing on Control Point maps is vital to your team, and gets you lots of points. On Payload maps, standing near the cart makes it move as fast as if two people were on it. You get things done.

Your style, though, should always be tricksy. Never run directly at a combat class like a Heavy if they’re facing you and ready to fire. You don’t have to – you’re so goddamn fast no-one can chase you if you run off and take an alternate route. Get deep behind enemy lines, so you’ll always be coming from angles they don’t expect. Engage enemies from behind, or when they’re busy fighting someone else, or best of all: both.

You get a massive damage bonus for firing at extreme close range with your Scattergun. Since you’re also usually attacking from an unexpected angle, it’s a good idea not to fire at all until you’re physically touching the enemy. Almost nothing can survive two point-blank blasts from your weapon, and almost no-one who’s distracted can find and kill you before you can get those two shots off.

You’re slow to reload a full clip, though, so don’t waste shots randomly: fire when you’re sure you’ll hit. If you find you’re missing a lot, try the bat for a while: it’s faster to hit with than any other class’s melee weapon, so you can just hold down fire while circling your opponent and beating them. You’ll be amazed how effective that can be.

Last point: run around the map and look for medkits. When you know where these are, you become incredibly hard to kill: you’re so fast that you can leave any engagement as soon as you’re hurt, and get to a medkit before anyone can finish you off.

The most valuable alternate weapons for the Scout

The Force-A-Nature is a hell of a thing. It’s a replacement for your Scattergun that does more damage and knocks both you and your victim back. Miles. It can only hold two shells, but it can fire them in even more rapid succession and is quick to reload.

The upshot is that is that in the 0.4 seconds it takes a surprised enemy to react to you getting up in his face, the Force A Nature can get both shots off and inflict 226 damage, where the normal Scattergun would only do 105. Since 8 of the 9 classes have more than 105 health and less than 226, that’s a pretty important difference.

Even if it’s a Heavy you’re blasting, the knockback will send him so far away that you can escape before his gun can cut you down. You can even use the gun to triple-jump, by firing it downwards any time you’re in mid-air.

Bonk is the other essential. It’s a drink that replaces your pistol – quaff it, and you’re invincible for 6 seconds. You can’t attack during this time, but it’s just long enough to get you past Sentries, which are usually the one thing on the battlefield you can’t do anything about. Once you’re behind the enemy lines, it’s hilarious to ambush them when they come out of their spawn.

Is the Scout Starter Bundle worth buying?

Yep. You get the Force-A-Nature and the Sandman, a bat that can stun people by hitting a baseball at them. It’s only £0.49p. Unfortunately you don’t get Bonk, but you do get another drink: Crit-A-Cola. It amplifies all the damage you deal and take for a short while: good for making that first shot count, but horrible once the enemy spots you.

The hat you get is pretty naff.

How to help a Scout

Keep enemies busy. Even if you can’t win a fight, it’s valuable to ambush classes like the Scout if you just fire a few shots off at them then hide again. They’ll concentrate on you, and the Scouts on your team can get the jump on them.

How to fight a Scout

Most classes can kill a Scout if he’s running straight for them – get into a corner or tight corridor so the Scout only has one direction to come at you. That way all your shots will probably hit, which is usually more damage than a Scout can afford to take. If you’re still having trouble hitting them, switch to melee and swipe constantly – Scouts find it hard to resist getting close.

Yesterday we talked about how to get weapons and hats, and on Friday we took you through which classes to start with and how all the modes work. Today we’ll go through the basics of all the nine classes, and how to find out more about their weirder variations.

How do all the classes work?

 
This has changed a bit over time, and it depends on which items they’re using, but it can be handy to have a basic guide to the vanilla versions to get you started.

Scout: The fastest class, and you can capture objectives twice as quickly. But combat is a risky business: your weapons are best up close, but you don’t have enough health to get shot much at point blank range. You can double-jump and take alternate routes to get to places enemies aren’t expecting. Attack them when they’re focusing on someone else.

Main thing to worry about: the Engineer’s sentry guns. They’ll shred you and there’s almost nothing you can do against them. For this reason, you’re actually better at defending your team than invading an entrenched enemy position.

Soldier: Tougher than most, slower than most, and armed with a rocket launcher. Reload any time you’re not firing, aim at your enemies’ feet so you’ll catch them with splash damage if you miss, and retreat when you’re low on health. You’re tough enough to escape most dangerous situations, and if you keep doing damage and staying alive, you’ll notice you start to score more critical hits. Critical hits with a rocket launcher are a hell of a thing.

Main things to worry about: Heavies at close range out-damage you, and Snipers at long range can headshot you and dodge your rockets.

Pyro: Harassment class – you are amazingly annoying. Your flamethrower sets people alight, which is usually enough to make them run for a health kit or water. Spray some attackers then get out of the way: you’ll often stop their assault and survive.

Most importantly, the secondary fire on your flamethrower lets you bounce rockets, sticky bombs and grenades back, so you’re great at defending your team. You can also use it to put out allies who are on fire, or shunt enemies away. Engineers love having you around to defend their Sentries and check for Spies – there’s no friendly fire, so torch team-mates indiscriminately.

Main thing to worry about: Heavies kill you so fast that it’s hard to get away in time.

Demoman: Ambush class. Your grenade launcher is a good way to make a corridor a bad place for enemies, but the Sticky Bomb launcher is even more devastating. Shoot stickies on corners or above doorways, then right click to detonate them when enemies come through. You can also pile them up near sentry guns to take them out in one fatal blast.

Main thing to worry about: Soldiers and Heavies will kill you in straight combat.

Heavy: The slowest class, but the absolute deadliest in a straight fight at anything from medium range to point blank. Your gun takes a while to spin up, and you can barely move while it’s firing, but everyone immediately in front of it will die or run away.

Main things to worry about: Snipers at long range, Spies behind you.

Engineer: Can build turrets that attack enemies automatically, dispensers that refill allies’ health and ammo, and teleporters to get people from the spawn point to the front line. These all cost metal, which you get by picking up ammo and weapons on the field.

Because you need so much metal to build, upgrade and repair your stuff, it’s good to get a dispenser up somewhere safe where you can sit near it, and build your Sentry gun right there. Once it’s up and upgraded, it’s the most powerful defensive weapon in the game.

Main things to worry about: Demomen piling stickies up on your stuff, Spies sapping your equipment and backstabbing you.

Medic: Fire your healing beam at anyone who’s injured, then at Heavies and Soldiers who are in combat. Always stay behind your patient: smart enemies will try to take you out first, because you’re what really makes the team hard to kill.

Main things to worry about: Snipers, Soldiers and Pyros targeting you – don’t be afraid to run for a healthkit if you need one, you’re the only person you can’t heal.

Sniper: Find a quiet spot with a long line of sight to an objective, wait for your shot to charge up a little, then click on peoples’ heads. You have to be scoped for your shot to charge up. Target Medics first, if you can.

Main things to worry about: Spies creeping up behind you, other Snipers being better at headshots.

Spy: Switch to your disguise kit and use the number keys to dress as an enemy of that class. Engineer or Sniper is often a good choice, since it’s not suspicious to see those guys out of combat. Right click to cloak, and get behind enemy lines before decloaking. Your knife kills anyone instantly if you stab them from behind, but is almost useless if you don’t. It also breaks your disguise, and you can’t fire or attack while cloaked.

Main things to worry about: bumping into people – it reveals you if cloaked, and tips the enemy off if you’re disguised. And steer clear of Pyros entirely: their flame only has to touch you once to reveal you as a Spy.

Tom, I’ve been playing for a few hours and I’m still pretty goddamn confused. What does slapping someone with a fish do? How does that guy have a guitar? Why am I covered in milk?

 
Yeah. There are a lot of weapons in this game, and not all of them make a hell of a lot of sense. The game tries to tell you what killed you, but when that thing is a golden statue of someone called Saxton Hale, it sometimes raises more questions than it answers.

Luckily, there’s an awesome official wiki where you can look up anything you don’t understand. Bookmark this, because for some reason it’s still not the top result for ‘tf2 wiki’ on Google. It should be, so allow me to SEO it up a notch: tf2 wiki.

Look up the class you like to play, and look up the class that kills you most. You’ll find all the info on the various weapons they can have, how to get them, and what they’re good for.

In our last few guides we talked about where to start with classes and game modes, and how to get new items. You can always find our latest Team Fortress 2 guides and browse them all here.

Yesterday we took you through which classes to start with and how all the modes work. Today we’ll tell you why that man has an octopus on his head and how you too can unlock a sandwich.

How do I get items?

 
As you play, you’ll randomly be awarded new weapons every few hours – it happens more often on busy servers.

Every class also has a set of weapons that can be unlocked by earning a certain number of achievements, and these are the quickest way to get something specific for a class you like. You can see what the achievements are by clicking the rosette icon at the bottom of the main menu: there’s a dropdown list that’ll let you browse by class. Doesn’t matter which ones you go for, these items just unlock when you have a certain number: usually 10, 15, or so.

Eventually you’ll start finding items you already have, or that you don’t want. You can reduce these to scrap metal by crafting them together, and then use that – and other weapons – to craft ones you don’t have yet. There are hundreds of recipes for this stuff, the best place to browse them is over on TF2Items.com.

To get this sword, spend fifteen years of your life developing Team Fortress games.

You can just pony up and buy them for real money. Almost everything is available to buy in the Mann-Co store accessed from the main menu. You’ll have to put some money in your Steam Wallet to do so, but you can do that when you check out. The cheapest items are only £0.29 or $0.49c, but be aware that the minimum you can add to your Steam Wallet is £4.

As soon as you buy anything, however cheap, you become a Team Fortress 2 premium player, and you’ll be able to find and craft rarer items. If you care about items at all, it’s worth putting that first £4 on. Buy a £0.29p gun, then spend the rest on a cheapo indie game if you don’t want to buy any more in-game stuff.

Once you are a premium player, you can trade items with others by going to the main menu, clicking Items, then Trading. You can trade with anyone on your friends list when you’re both online, or anyone in your current game.

No, I mean how do I get hats?

 
Oh. Well, you can’t unlock most hats with achievements, but once you’re a premium player, all the other methods apply. They’re just much, much rarer to find, much, much harder to craft, and much, much more expensive to buy.

The easiest ones to get are rewards for buying other games or achieving something in those. There’s a full list of all the promotional items and how you get them over on the official wiki.

Tomorrow: How do all the classes work? What the hell is going on?

Update: part two is now up, covering how you get new items.

Which mode should I play?

 
First of all, have a play around with the offline training mode – it’s good for the very, very basics. When you’re ready to go online, click Start Playing – you’ll have to choose a game mode. The default is Payload, but it’s a little complex. Click the arrow on the right and pick King of the Hill. It’s a mode where there’s only one control point to fight over, and whoever holds it longest wins. It’s Team Fortress 2 in its absolute simplest form, so it’s a great place to learn how all the classes work.

If Start Playing fails to find you a game, go back to the main menu and click Browse Servers. This is a big scary list, but once it’s finished loading, look for one that has a number less than 100 in the Latency tab. If they’re all jumbled up, click the Latency tab to sort by that.

You can make this list easier to browse by setting a few filters at the bottom: you don’t want full servers, empty servers, or password-protected servers.

Which class should I choose?

 
Once you’re in game, pick either team. You usually can’t join the one with the most players. Then you’ll have to pick a class.

A good starting choice is the Medic: you heal people on your team by firing a beam at them, and that’s immediately useful and appreciated by your team mates. At the basic level, it’s all you need to do. And that gives you time to watch how your team mates play, see who beats whom, and learn a bit about what the weapons do.

When you fancy a change, switch to Heavy. You’re slow, and your gun takes a while to spin up, but once you start firing someone’s usually dead by the time you stop. You’re also the first person Medics will think to heal, and since you just played Medic yourself, you know how to be a good patient and keep them protected. It’s a really satisfying relationship.

After that, it’s mostly personal preference. Soldier’s the best all-rounder, so another good early choice. Don’t stick with any of them for too long until you’ve played all nine: each new one you try helps you understand the role of the others better too. Spy is probably the hardest to be effective with when you’re a beginner, but he’s worth playing just so you understand roughly how they work.

Some classes, particularly Spy and Demoman, work very differently once they unlock certain items. To describe all the differences would be long and pointless. But if a black Scottish cyclops charges at you with a giant sword, get out of the way. And if a you hear an electronic crackle shortly after a Spy appeared to die, he’s alive, and he’s behind you.

Bored of King of the Hill now, how do the other modes work?

 
Payload: the attacking team must escort a cart along some railtracks to an objective. The more of then stay near the cart, the faster it moves. The defenders can stop it by killing them, or standing near the cart themselves.

Payload Race: same as Payload, except both teams have a cart. Up to you whether to focus on escorting your own cart, or stopping the enemy escorting theirs. First cart to the finish line wins.

Control Point: much like King of the Hill, but with five control points. You fight over the central point at first, then whoever gets that can try to take the next point along on the enemy’s side. You can’t capture a point if you don’t own one next to it, and you lose the game if the enemy team captures all your points.

Attack/Defend: just like Control Point, except the red team owns all the points at the start. Only the blue team can capture: once they take a point, it’s theirs forever. Red wins if they can hold out for a certain time.

Capture the Flag: each team has a briefcase in their base. They have to capture the enemy briefcase, and bring it back to their base. If their own briefcase has also been stolen, they can’t score a point until it’s returned. First team to a certain number of captures wins.

Next: How do I get items? How do I get hats?

Exploring is the best bit of Minecraft, and exploring underground is the best bit of that. Call me a procedural dork, but I’d be happy if the rest of Minecraft’s development was just adding endless new geographical features to the terrain generation engine.

Notch says he’s having a hard time keeping the details of 1.7, the Adventure Update, under wraps. Generally all the juicy details of each Minecraft update trickle out on his Twitter feed in snippets and shots like this one, so we do a lot of “Small feature added!” posts and not many “Megaton preview!” articles on it.

It’s the nice thing about the internet: we can tell you stuff we care about even if it’s not mega news for everyone. But it’s also the reason it hasn’t really made sense yet to do a real Minecraft cover in the mag: there are no juicy details to be had that you don’t already know.

It’ll be interesting if he does manage to keep the rest of the Adventure Update secret, but immediately posting this shot doesn’t make it look likely. Here’s the full res version in all its dingy glory:

We’ve contacted Notch to inquire about his breakfast this morning, but there has been no response at time of going to press. And so the secrecy begins.

Nope! Marketing director David Silverman says they’re putting the female Shepard, and the male one, on the box for the collector’s edition of the game. And they’re now working on a new trailer for the game that stars the female version of the hero. Silverman says they’re working on her appearance, but that it’s been influenced by input from the cult fanbase the female Shepard has inspired.

The image above isn’t an actual screenshot of the result. We all know, of course, that the real female Shepard looks exactly like mine and all others are imposters.

So, er, does this mean we’re getting an Elcor squadmate too?

Thanks Alex Hopkinson.

It also has unusually good AI, and this is a story about that.

The Fields of Isis is a map split by mountain ridges. One in the middle divides your possible routes to the enemy base. Two outside each base concentrate all incoming forces into a tight chokepoint, making it easy to defend. I’m fighting a single top-level AI, and I have a plan.

The quickest stuff to build in Supreme Commander is Tech 1: basic tanks and planes, stuff you can pour out of 10 factories at once without your economy flinching. To build anything higher tech takes a major investment to upgrade your factories, but Tech 2 is a hell of a thing once you reach it. You’ve got dozens of weird and interesting things you can build, and it’s all brutally efficient: units that cost 3 or 4 times as much are 10 to 15 times more powerful, and that’s incredibly satisfying to see in action.

Tech 2 turrets, in particular, are amazing. SupCom’s not usually a game about rushing, so defensive structures are vastly more powerful than offensive ones of the same cost. If you get to Tech 2 before your opponent, and you build turrets instead of units, they will obliterate everything.

That’s my plan. But I’m not going to make my chokepoint into a killing field, I’m going to do it to his.

This is basically impossible: you can’t get to the enemy’s chokepoint before he leaves it, and if you upgrade to Tech 2 straight away, you can’t afford anything much to defend your own territory. Apart from anything, Tech 2 turrets take time to build – your engineers would get shredded by the enemy army long before they finished one.

If something’s impossible in Supreme Commander, you get your commander to do it. He can take on a small army alone, he can explode with the force of a nuclear bomb, and he happens to be an engineer on the side. But it’s a big map, and the commander isn’t fast. By the time I walked him over there, and got the resources together to upgrade him to build Tech 2 stuff, the enemy would have an army easily capable of shredding him. And I’d need him at home to help upgrade my factories anyway.

So my actual plan is a bit ambitious. I keep my commander at home, build an air factory, and get it to Tech 2 as soon as possible. That lets me build an air transport big enough to carry him, and tough enough to survive any Tech 1 interceptors that try to bring it down. While that’s building, I upgrade the commander himself to be able to construct Tech 2 stuff. That finishes around the same time the transport completes, so he hops in and flies out to the enemy’s front door to build a forward base.

It’s tricky, but the economics of it just about work out. My commander finishes upgrading a little early, which frees him up to help build the transport. The enemy has taken a terrifying amount of the map by this point, but he’s still only churning out Tech 1 tanks. He’d have to send them all at once to damage my turrets faster than I could build them. So the transport finishes, my commander climbs in, and it carries him out to the front line. This is actually kind of cute, it holds him the way a cat holds a kitten: dangling limply by its neck.

The moment he lands, I change my mind. I don’t want a turret first, I want a shield. They’re slightly quicker to build, and once up, I can build turrets inside their radius without anything punching through to stop me. They drain a lot of power, but I think my engies at home can ramp up their generator production to handle it.

Again, the economics just about work out. I’ve been playing Supreme Commander for so long that I’ve actually started to read the tooltips about how much things are going to cost me, so I crash my economy less these days. The second the bubble pops up around my commander, I have him build a line of Tech 2 turrets right at the barrier.

It works spectacularly. The range on these things is huge, so most stuff doesn’t even get close enough to trouble my shield. I build two more shields just in case, and one anti-air turret, then start building factories. I’m not going to use them yet, just upgrade them all to Tech 3 so I can eventually build an army tough enough to punch through the enemy’s own defenses.

I even take some risks, upgrading my commander with some combat improvements and having him stray into the enemy base to take out a few minor buildings on its perimeter. Appropriately, that’s when I notice my base is gone.

I had wondered why my economy seemed to be going down rather than up, and the explosion of my biggest power generator helps explain it. Most of the rest of my original territory is populated by blackened wrecks or enemy structures. One engineer – one! – got past my anti-air turret in an air transport, landed, and built a Tech 2 turret in my base. It’s still merrily destroying – there’s plenty to shoot at in its vast range.

This would be embarrassing enough if it wasn’t the same tactic I’d just used on them. And it would be bad enough even if I had built a few basic units for emergencies. I have nothing. The only way I can get my economy back is to march there myself – using my commander – and take on that turret in person.

My upgraded commander does beat a Tech 2 turret, but it takes him a while to get there and clean up all the mess. I still have almost all of the map, but my base was the backbone of my economy, and rebuilding is slow. It also takes up all of my attention. So ten minutes later, I’m somewhat surprised by what comes out of the enemy base.

They’ve built a Galactic Colossus. It’s the toughest thing in the game. It’s a humanoid robot the size of a skyscraper that shoots lasers from its face and sucks tanks into its crushing hands. Three Tech 2 turrets and a few shields are not going to stop it.

I have ten Tech 3 assault bots out by this point, so I send those at it too. But realistically, I know nothing I have can take this down. I try telling my factories to send their units to the other side of the map when they come out, to group up there, but it’s not long before the thing’s face-laser has melted the factories too. The enemy didn’t have much to work with, but they put it all into this one gambit, and it’s going to work.

Wait, am I the bad guy here? The story of this war is an amazing tale of resourcefulness and heroism – for the AI. It kind of paints me as the vast oppressive empire, bullying them and stealing their land. The plucky rebels used my own dastardly tactics against me, and did the impossible. They distracted my forces while they built their last, best hope of victory, and won.

I’ve lost, and I think I might have deserved it.

I don’t know how any of those things will work out yet, or how much of the game they really represent. But the last game, Hitman: Blood Money, was so nearly perfect that you can see what they need to do next. This is what they need to do next.

1. Don’t let the story interrupt the jobs

Every one of the best missions in every one of the four Hitman games has been a straightforward hit. Every one of the worst missions in every one of the four Hitman games has been a story-driven scenario with a different objective. Whatever story you want to tell with Hitman Absolution, IO, please tell it with the contracts and the briefings between them.

We don’t want to rescue a priest, we don’t want to steal a tribe’s idol, we don’t want to walk across most of Japan in the middle of winter, we don’t want to save Agent Smith again. Even if you write a great story, any time it asks us to do something other than get to a guy and kill him, it’s going to grate. That’s not what we’re playing for.

2. Make disguise more of a game

Disguises are what make Hitman interesting: it’s a game about deception rather than conventional stealth. And every major leap forward for the series has happened when the deception logic got better. With Blood Money, it’s finally reliable most of the time. But that also means Blood Money seemed to reach the limit of what you could do with it.

Each disguise type gets you access to certain areas, and each mission has one type of disguise that’ll let you go anywhere without the guards hassling you. Once you figure that out, your strategy becomes a little reductive: get that disguise, and you’re basically done.

I think the next stage is to have no perfect disguise. To make the player seriously think about: “Would this guy know I’m not a cop? Would that guy know I don’t work here? Who’s the one guy in this room I need to steer clear of?”

That’s actually pretty simple to translate into game logic: your disguise is convincing to everyone except guards of the same type. Cops know you’re not a cop. Bodyguards know you’re not on this detail. Garbage men know you’re not their buddy Frank, who’s being slowly compacted in the back of their truck. Whoever you’re dressed as, that’s who you’ve got to keep your distance from.

I mentioned most of this to Graham, and he explained a bit about what they are doing for Absolution:

Yeah, they’ve worked on those a lot, and they were one of the things they specifically flagged as being improved, mostly as an extension of the better AI.

In the demo shown, 47 disguised himself as a cop. That prompted different groups of people to treat him differently. Like, one cop thinks he knows you, and chats away. Or you head into an apartment owned by some potheads, and if they see you, they get panicked, frightened, threaten you, might attack you. If you just go in dressed in a suit though, then they’ll be more friendly, invite you to party, etc.

There is a ton of dialogue in the game, and it changes based on what you’re wearing.

3. Playgrounds, not warzones

Blood Money got this, for the first time in the series. I’m a little worried that Absolution won’t. The scene Tim and Graham saw has the cops hot on your tail, shooting at you from a chopper. That’s a warzone – albeit an escapable one. Hitman is at its best when you’re free to roam the levels, because it’s only by scoping out an area that we can come up with an interesting plan to pull off a hit.

Graham did ask the developers about this. Here he is, telling me that:

I specifically asked: would there be missions where no one knows you’re a hitman, and you can just walk around and plot and set stuff up? And they said yeah, there would be. I don’t know if that’s the majority of the game or not – the game is certainly more cinematic, and the cover system and movement makes it look more action-oriented. But there was enough potential choice in just the one mission they showed that I’m pretty confident there’ll still be plenty free-form stuff even if you are being hunted a certain portion of the time.

4. Let us upgrade what we like

Each Hitman game brings us closer to a decent character progression system, but they haven’t quite pulled it off. Blood Money had copious upgrades for every time of weapon and equipment, which is the right direction, but then it made them all ludicrously cheap to buy, but locked off until certain points throughout the campaign. In other words, you could easily afford everything available to you after each mission, so there were no tough decisions to make.

How about: don’t do that. I know, they’re worried we’ll just upgrade the pistol to be silenced and awesome as soon as we can, and they’re right: most of us will. That’s because we like the pistol, and want to use it. It’s the perfect assassin’s weapon, which is probably why IO keep showing it in every concept piece and game box in the series. By all means make the upgrades for it pricier, and more in depth, but don’t just artificially lock them off in the hope we’ll give up and try other weapons.

I’d also love it if we could upgrade weapons we find and take from the scenes of our crimes. The silenced .22 in Hitman Blood Money is one of the most satisfying weapons in gaming history, so it’d be great to hang on to it and make it a little more accurate. I’m sure everyone has their favourites.

5. Reward subtlety

That’s the motif of the series, of course, but it feels like they’re only just getting started with it. Hitman 2: Silent Assassin was about being a silent assassin. Blood Money introduced accidents: ways to pull off a hit without anyone even suspecting foul play. But there was no particular incentive to do so.

I’d like to see them keep running with that idea. Give us the satisfaction of seeing an obituary recounting a tragic death with no-one to blame, if we’re smart enough to make it look that way. Better yet, give us ways to frame other people. The opera mission let us put a real gun in an actor’s hand without him knowing, but again – no acknowledgement for it. Brief us on the victim’s known associates, who’d have a grudge and who’d make a likely fall guy.

6. React to our performance better

To be fair, the Hitman games are already far better at this than most. We get graded on both violence and noise, and even given a special title for our performance. But there’s still plenty of room to expand on this.

The current system isn’t great at understanding the difference between violence and sloppiness. Bodies discovered during the mission destroy your rating and increase your notoriety, making your face better known to guards in future missions. Yet the newspaper writeups after each mission detail every casualty, so clearly all bodies get found one way or another. If no-one sees you, why does it matter when bodies are spotted? Why would that give the cops a better photo-fit of your face?

I’d like to see Absolution track heat and visibility separately. How badly the cops want to catch me has no influence on how clear a picture they have of my face.

If I open fire on a crowd and let witnesses get away, then of course I should be more easily recognised in future missions. But if I silently stalk and execute every guard on the level, and no living soul sees my face, I should be as inconspicuous as ever.

The difference between that and a minimum-violence approach should just be how much manpower the police think they need to devote to guarding VIPs in future. This guy took out 20 armed guards? Let’s make sure we have 40 on this VIP.

7. Don’t make the tutorial the demo

The frustating thing about being a Hitman fan is that when you tell someone Blood Money is one of the greatest games ever made, they can say this: “Oh yeah, I played the demo of that. It sucked.”

It’s frustrating not because they’re wrong, but because they’re right. It really did. The demo, which was just the tutorial level, advertised the game as being precisely what it was not: a linear, scripted obstacle course where the challenge is to figure out what you’re ‘supposed to’ do.

Obviously IO should try to make a better tutorial, but even if they pull it off, it’s not going to be a good way to sell the game. I want everyone to know why Hitman is inventive, rich, ambitious, brave and incredible. Put an actual mission in the demo, please.

8. Maybe don’t delete our savegames?

Yeah. That was an odd one. Blood Money limited the number of saves you could make per level, which was annoying but not actually a felony per se. What was strange, or ‘pointlessly dickish’ to be more specific, was that it would delete these savegames if you quit mid-mission.

I don’t mean that in an abstract conceptual sense, that by not storing them it was effectively deleting them. I checked: it creates the files, you can see them on your hard drive if you alt+tab out. Then it deletes them.

It’s the kind of treatment you might expect from a virus rather than something you paid for. And it had no effect on the game’s difficulty, it just arbitrarily punished people who didn’t always have time to play a long, thoughtful and creative mission in one sitting.

Maybe don’t do that.

Both Tim and Graham came away impressed by Absolution, and it does sound like they’re doing something cool on the disguise front. I just hope they’re not going too crazy with the scripted stuff, and that they don’t change the basic formula too much. It was just hitting its stride with Blood Money, I couldn’t bear to see it turn into the sort of guileless beat-em-up the first trailer shows.

Download the MP3, subscribe, or find our other podcasts here.

PC Gamer: That structure was something you moved away from in SupCom 2, I wondered if you considered it a mistake, or just something you hadn’t perfected yet.

Chris Taylor: One of the things that at first I thought was kinda novel, and then wondered if that was the right approach, was designing a game for myself. So Total Annihilation was a game I designed for myself. It was like everything I wanted in an RTS game, I put into Total Annihilation. Units could shoot while they moved, real physics, the fact that stuff was more emergent – based on rule system rather than hardcoded. So there’s a lot of things that I really wanted to do.

But as I went along and as the stakes got higher and as the games got more complex and the teams got bigger, I started thinking to myself: well, maybe I should be designing this game more for the people who are playing it, and not myself. Which I think actually works well. I mean if you talk to some very successful developers and teams, they say “Oh yeah, we sit around for hours and days, and we try out all these different ideas and gather all this feedback, and we do a lot more of that kind of research.”

And so I went more in that direction. And what happens is you get games that can actually sell more. So Supreme Commander sold more units with its somewhat less surprising and quirky game design than Total Annihilation did. So it was kind of true; if you wanted to make a game that people enjoy and wanted to play, you had to pay more attention to what they thought, what they wanted to do. So it works.

But you do lose some of that crazy artistic stuff. Game design is an art. It’s a real challenge. So what we’re doing with AoEO is we’re trying to make sure people are comfortable, and they can jump in and they can play, but then there’s some modes, some boosters, some content that has fresh ideas in it.

Just the fact that we have the Defense of Crete, for example, where you’re playing co-operatively/competitively, you actually have to explain it to someone a few times before they understand exactly what that is. You’re like “No no, you’re playing with a buddy against the computer, which is a comp-stomp, and then you’re going to turn around and you’re going to compete with your other friends – single or in pairs – to beat their score.

So that’s where we’re taking it to some places where people might [say], “Oh yeah, really? That’s an interesting idea.”

So let me answer your question by saying that it’s a mix of both, it’s a mix of doing some fresh things that are kind of interesting and new, and doing some things that are comfortable. So you have one foot in each camp, as you push a design forward.

Previously Chris told us why he thinks Steam’s dominance will shift, why he couldn’t go back from free-to-play games, and why PC gaming is bigger than ever.

On Tuesday we’ll have a podcast of this interview – with both Chris Taylor and Danan Davis of Microsoft Games, so you can hear what else they had to say about PC gaming, Age of Empires Online, Rise of Nations and the future.

Chris designed two of the world’s cleverest strategy games: Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander. More recently, he and his company Gas Powered Games took over development of Age of Empires Online, a free-to-play version of the old classic. He thinks Steam’s dominance will shift before long.

PC Gamer: What do you think of Steam? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Digital distribution generally seems to be a good thing, but is it bad that Steam has something close to a monopoly?

Chris Taylor: I have games on Steam, I have an account, I buy games there. I have three different digital distribution platforms on my PC, it’s driven mostly from the game I want to play. If it’s on there, if it’s exclusive, it narrows the field. I actually don’t generally have to do a whole lot of soul-searching.

Your question though was what do I think of the fact that it’s taken a footing? It’s obviously extremely popular. Kudos go to the Valve guys for having the vision to build it. And they made a big bet – they made a big, scary bet, and they get rewarded for that.

Ask me the question about where they are in the market five years from now: I think it’s gonna shift. I think the playing field’s gonna level out. Because exclusive content drives it. I mean once upon a time we had a Sega console. There was a company called Atari that had a big market position. It changes and it shifts based on the way the company continues to evolve and interact with its customers, the service it delivers.

I think that now we’re seeing so many new players come, they have to come to the market with their first party games. And if they deliver really outstanding games, the platform follows. So I think it’s all gonna work out in the end. But like I said, you’ve got to give kudos to those guys for jumping in and being first and doing a really good job, and taking a chance.

Previously Chris told us why he couldn’t go back from free-to-play games, and why PC gaming is bigger than ever. Tomorrow we’ll have his thoughts on Total Annihilation, and why his priorities changed as he moved on to Supreme Commander and Supreme Commander 2.

More recently, he and his company Gas Powered Games took over development of Age of Empires Online, a free-to-play version of the old classic. Here are his thoughts on why the platform has never been stronger.

PC Gamer: I’d like to ask you how you feel about the general state of PC gaming. We’re kind of at a weird time where sometimes it’s all doom-and-gloom and piracy is ruining everything, but then we’ve also got stuff like Steam, and it’s getting much easier for new developers to get something out there. Is this an exciting time for PC gaming, or a scary time?

Chris Taylor: It’s pure excitement, there’s no question. That’s an easy one.

PC gaming had one problem. We had a retail presence problem because we started to get into this transition, we lost retail space, so there was this reaction to that, so less product went into development. But I don’t know who was taking stock, because between The Sims, and World of Warcraft, and what’s happened in China with PC gaming, what’s happened in terms of PC games being played in the social and casual space, it’s all around us.

I think PC gaming went from a “Huh, is there a problem here?” To “Oh, not only is there not a problem, but PC gaming is bigger than ever.” It just had to go through a little bit of a reinvention.

The piracy problem is gonna be all but solved as we emerge here, and I think the new question is – which I love – is “What’s the future of console gaming?”

And I used to joke about that last year, when people were interviewing me. Off the record, I was going “You know, they should really be asking about the future of console gaming.”

Now people are. This question is starting to come up. And I was like “Ah, I don’t know – but that’s your problem. Don’t look at me.” I don’t have to answer that question, because I know what the answer for PC gaming is now, and I have a PC gaming company, right? I make PC games. And I’m about as happy about where we’re at as an industry and as a platform than I’ve ever been.

Yesterday we heard why Chris couldn’t go back from free-to-play now, and tomorrow we’ll have his thoughts on Steam and the future of digital distribution.

But far from being a stopgap between full-priced games, Chris says that working with the free-to-play model has convinced him it’s the future of the entire real-time strategy genre, and gaming in general. He says whatever he makes next will inevitably end up using it too. I tackled him to the ground in London recently, and demanded to know why.

PC Gamer: Are you just totally sold on that [free-to-play] model now?

Chris Taylor: I am so sold on that model! I am so ready to tell you that this is the future. Games will never be the same again now that we’re onto this way of approaching it.

And it changes, believe it or not, the way we design from the beginning. Not just the way we think about the game after, it changes the way we build the game to start with.

PC Gamer: So if you were making the next game in the logical sequence from Total Annihilation to Supreme Commander, you would do it as a free to play thing?

Chris Taylor: No matter what I tried to do, I would end up here. Because it’s the right way to go. I mean, people would be so crushed to hear they can’t play co-operative quests, to hear they couldn’t play all these modes we’ve got. They’re just going to ask for them. They’re just going to flat-out say, “Where are they?”

You play a quest – let’s say you don’t win. It happens. But you got all the stuff you collected, all the experience points you get, you get it all. So it’s cumulative. So the more you play, the more stuff you get.

It’s a great experience, very rewarding. I saw that model emerging in other places, it was popping up here and there, it was bursting through. It’s like nature, it’s just coming through all the cracks and crevices. But to see it full on now, it’s pretty clear. I don’t want to play a game and set the game down and have nothing to show for it. I have to have accumulated something for all that investment of time.

PC Gamer: So is AoEO what Gas Powered are doing for the next X years?

Chris Taylor: Yeah. We have other things, smaller things but other things going on. The great bulk of the company is working on Age of Empires Online, and we will be for, hopefully, years and years to come. There’s no telling, there’s no seeing totally into the future, but that’s the plan.

We’ll have Chris’s thoughts on the state of PC gaming tomorrow.

Ubisoft have just announced Ghost Recon Online, a free-to-play multiplayer game in their near-future combat series. The launch trailer is above, showing some in-game footage of the character classes in action. We’ve had a play of it, and you can read what we thought in the first Ghost Recon Online preview.

ACT 1

INT. BIOWARE OFFICES, EDMONTON – DAY

TOM FRANCIS
How are the romance options compared to previous games?

CASEY HUDSON
Well yeah, it’s going to be similar to Mass Effect 1 and 2. Like I say, we’re not introducing any new characters that are going to be love interests.

CASEY and TOM share a meaningful glance, then stare wistfully out at the snow as we FADE OUT.

ACT 2

EXT. TWITTER – NIGHT

A million typographical variations of WeLoveBeiber bark trending hashtags in the background.

CASEY HUDSON
Happy to confirm #ME3 supports wider options for love interests incl. same-sex for m&f chars, reactive to how you interact w/them in-game.

ALL
Whaaat.

ACT 3

INT. TOM’S INBOX – NIGHT

CASEY HUDSON
At the time, we hadn’t finished resolving all of our character plans, and things always get more fleshed out over time. The game has evolved since then as we finalize our scope. All the great stuff that enriches our games and creates a complete experience happens as we transition from initial plans to final implementation.

TOM FRANCIS
Oh OK, fair enough.

Previously, Casey told us how your choices throughout the series will influence Mass Effect 3′s ending, how they used Mass Effect 2 DLC to experiment with ideas for the third game, why you shouldn’t shoot the hideous sacs on a Reaper Rachni, and that Tali will return as a full time squad member.

More Mass Effect 3 details tomorrow. You can subscribe to all our Mass Effect 3 news and previews if you use an RSS reader.

Casey Hudson: Wrex will be… basically everyone that’s a main character is in Mass Effect 3. Everyone – every single team character in the entire series – is in Mass Effect 3, but not necessarily as a squad member. So Wrex will be there but not necessarily as a full squad member.

The squadmates we can confirm are Garrus, Liara, Ashley or Kaiden, James Vega, and the one that we can mention that we haven’t mentioned before is Tali.

PC Gamer: Will some of the main characters who aren’t full squadmates tag along for one mission?

Casey Hudson: Yeah. Basically when the story moves to deal with that particular main character, there might be a plot where they join you for a little while, and they’re with you for that mission.

Casey says the returning characters, particularly Shepard him or herself, make the Mass Effect series unique.

Casey Hudson: I would argue that this is the only trilogy in games. There have been games where there were three, but in terms of planning it out from the beginning, with a story that was meant to span three games, and actually finishing all three games – I don’t know if that’s ever been done before.

Certainly bringing your character across and those decisions, that hasn’t been done before. So we have a really, really exciting opportunity, which is to take all of the stuff that we’ve built and it’s not now just about continuing it, but it’s about letting people end it. And end it in ways that, especially if you’ve been following the series, you know what it would mean to end certain conflicts in certain ways. You know the values behind it, and the history behind it, and especially the people that are affected.

We talk about the Genophage, and how you could resolve that in different ways, because you know so many people affected by it: Grunt and Wrex and Mordin and these characters that you can actually put a face on. So it’s pretty exciting to be able to finish it.

You can hear more about what Tom thought of Mass Effect 3 in the PC Gamer UK podcast, and we’ll have more juicy info from Casey tomorrow. You can subscribe to all our Mass Effect 3 news and previews if you use an RSS reader.

We each talk about the way we played it, how the game responded, our favourite augmentations, and how the game measures up to the mighty original.

Download the MP3, subscribe, or find our other podcasts here.

Tomorrow Graham will tell you about his hacking-focused style, and on Friday Rich will try to talk and sneak his way through the whole thing. We’ll avoid specific plot spoilers, but inevitably we’re going to be mentioning situations you’ll encounter yourself when the game comes out in August. In the meantime, you can read our general impressions in my preview, and all our spoiler-free impressions in a Deus Ex special of our podcast.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution starts with a conference call between four or five shadowy figures. It’s possible they’re conspiring. I’m not going to talk about that, and I’m not going to talk about the next half hour: it’s an only semi-interactive intro, so it doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the game.

I’ll start from the first meaningful choice you get: you’re flying out to stop terrorists from stealing a secret new augmentation prototype from your employer, Sarif Industries. Sarif himself is, for some reason, your personal caddy in the chopper on the way over. Would sir care to murder his opponents or render them unconscious? Murder? Very good. And would sir prefer to engage at range or close quarters? Close quarters murder, an excellent choice if I may say.

That gives me the revolver. Hang on, I have a 5,000 pixel wide picture of it somewhere.

Dropped in front of two SWAT agents, I suddenly get the urge to use it. I’ve already played this first mission sensibly, at a hands-on event with the console version. So this time, I ask the question every gamer must ask themselves at some point in their lives: “Can I just, like, shoot these guys and take their stuff?”

BLAM. Yep! His colleague is appreciably startled, but only gets one shot off before I switch my aim to him. Friendlies aren’t invincible in this game, it turns out. And mouse control makes shooting people in the head much, much easier.

The SWAT guys in the next room are alert but not hostile – they heard the shots but didn’t see who did it. It’s an unsolvable case, guys, give up. It definitely wasn’t the guy with the revolver now ducking behind a crate to pick you off.

This is harder: three armoured guys at once. I get the captain easily, but have to take cover as the other two spray fire back. The switch to third person when you hide feels much nicer now that I’m playing on PC – it’s almost identical to the way Rainbow Six: Vegas works, and that’s one of my favourite shooters.

One SWAT guy reloads, the other pushes forward. I peek out to shoot the reloader, then stand up to melee the other. Giant chisels flick out of my wrists, I stab him in the throat and spleen, then smack him to the floor.

Wow, I am a terrible person. With a free assault rifle.

I go easier on the terrorists, only breaking their arms and jaws with non-lethal takedowns. I dive into cover and bring out the revolver when things get out of hand. Pretty soon I find the hostages – they’re only an optional objective, but I screwed this up badly during the console hands-on session. This time I’ve already found the defuse code for the bomb in someone’s’ e-mail, so I stroll in and save everyone easily. Then, I wonder.

How will the game handle it if I save the hostages, then kill them myself?

“Pritchard,” Jensen radios in, as he stabs both fist-chisels through a woman’s ribcage. “I’ve found the hostages.”
“I’m relaying good news, I hope?” Jensen throws the woman’s limp body onto the sofa and turns to the next.
“They’re fine.”

For science, I headshot the rest of them and sneak out the vent. Deal with that, game.

Later in the mission, I get my first Praxis point. These are how you buy or upgrade augmentations for your now semi-mechanical body. It costs 2 to buy a new one, so if you want to spend your first right away, you can only upgrade what you’ve got. One of the upgrades for your arms lets you haul and throw heavier objects, so of course I went for that.

First thing to throw: a goddamn turret. I have to sneak by a security camera to get behind it, so I pick the whole gun emplacement up and hurl it at the camera. It smashes, naturally, and I leave the turret facing a corner like a misbehaving child.

Finally I face the lead terrorist, Zeke, who has another hostage. Negotiate? Sure, I’ll negotiate with bull- hang on, missed. I’ll negotiate with- oh, he’s killed the hostage. I’ll negotiate with- well, yes, I just shot him in the end, so that’s not really negotiation.

I also shot the guy who burst through the door immediately afterwards, before I even realised he was SWAT. Then I shot all the other SWAT troops on the helipad, then I shot all the other SWAT troops on the top floor, then I discovered the entire complex had been completely repopulated with SWAT troops. And I did the whole mission again, in reverse.

It’s like Hitman: these guys aren’t hostile until they see you attack, so you can stalk them carefully, get them on their own, and puncture them with your fist-chisels without alerting their friends. I have no idea why Eidos Montreal thought I might go through a whole 90-minute mission backwards after I’d already completed it, but they accounted for the possibility. And for a deranged serial killer like my character, it was fun in a whole new way.

Shock 2 is a sci-fi survival first-person action RPG, which is just a list of my favourite words. We can’t claim they don’t make them like that anymore, because they’ve made two like that in the last three years and they’re working on a third (BioShocks 1, 2 and Infinite). But they don’t make them quite like this anymore.

Fire it up, and the first thing you notice is you’re tall. First-person games often make your viewpoint lower than it realistically would be, to avoid environments feeling claustrophobic when viewed through the small window of your monitor. Shock 2 has a very different feel, and it comes out in your movement too. You don’t burst into a full-blown sprint the moment you touch the forward key, you build up to it smoothly. And you come to a stop smoothly too, which screws you up the first time you try to do some fiddly jumping. You also have no air control: the moment your feet leave the ground, your trajectory to hit it again is completely predetermined. Perfectly realistic, but again, most shooters cheat to help you out.

The result is a game where you feel weighty, real, even a tiny bit cumbersome. But you have a sense of yourself in this place. You’re not just a camera zooming around to the next thing to shoot. That’s partly why it’s frightening: it’s hard not to associate yourself with this fragile body lurching around the corridors of the Von Braun, being bludgeoned with lead pipes and frazzled by green laser pips.

Pre-emptive apologies

Yet a lot of the horror wasn’t really about your own predicament. The zombies bludgeoning you weren’t undead, living dead, or brain dead: they were parasite-infected people who knew full well what they were doing, and didn’t want to do it. “Hurry! Run!” is what you expect to hear from your vulnerable female sidekick, not the deformed wretch you’re running from. And when they catch you, there’s no ferocious roar; just a tormented “I’m… sorry…” as they bring their blunt implements awkwardly to bear.

It gets worse. The stiff, screeching Cyborg Midwives turn out to have had their machine parts forcibly inserted while they were still alive. Then come the eggs, erupting on contact into slithering worms, infected spores, or swarms of blood-drinking alien insects. But even when the hordes of semi-invisible toxic spiders show up, nothing SS2 throws at you is ever quite as startling as the screech of its psychic monkeys. Once they start shooting fireballs, the Von Braun has become hell.

The Von Braun is makind’s first faster-than-light spacecraft: a huge vessel, all five decks fully explorable. The hub structure has been used before and since, but it’s never quite as exciting as when it’s on a space ship. You pass the central elevator dozens of times on every floor, its satisfyingly chunky yellow button a reminder of all the places you haven’t explored yet. Each deck feels different: Engineering the hellish radioactive bowels, Med/Sci the convenient home base, Hydroponics a disgusting jungle, Operations an intimidating nexus of ninja-infested boardrooms, and Recreation at once luxurious and sinister.

Dead quiet

The people who lived there are all dead, infested or fleeing, but their lives were still in evidence through their recorded messages to each other. Audio diaries have become a cliché since, but that’s not what these were. Almost all were messages from one crew member to another, and sometimes you’d find the reply. It might not have had Quark from Deep Space Nine in it, but the non-actors give the kind of naturalistic performances you rarely hear anymore. Most are just people talking, which simply doesn’t call for acting with a capital A.

Most articles about System Shock 2 are primarily about SHODAN, but for me she was never the focus. It was these smaller stories I spent my time thinking about: Tommy Suarez and Rebecca Siddons’ impossible quest to find each other in the chaos, Delacroix’s panic long before anyone else saw the problem, Diego’s subtle transition from proud UNN officer to servant of the enemy, Bronson’s ruthless measures to curb the threat – and her utter defiance to the last breath. Since SHODAN’s influence is unknown at first, little of the incidental plot actually relates to her. And it’s the incidental stuff that kept me company as I crept through Shock 2’s endless corridors.

Survival horror is really just the cooler cousin of resource management, and in a nerdy way I think that’s what keeps me coming back to System Shock. The permanent upgrades to your cybernetics are much more meaningful and exciting than Deus Ex’s augs, and the frightening ammo drought has you frantically reconfiguring your weapons mid-fight to spend your shots more efficiently.

The firefights themselves aren’t much fun, in shooter terms, but the guns feel like guns. Every shot jerks your aim off course with a startling bang, reinforcing your instinct to make each count.

Eight years later, BioShock would surpass it as an action game, but BioShock never felt as clean, smooth and crisp. That still makes its predecessor more exciting to explore – even the third and fourth times round.

Reinstall is a monthly regular in the magazine in which we revisit classics that are still worth playing today. This article first appeared in issue 220 of PC Gamer UK.

Whaaaat. The team behind Hawken, this ridiculously good-looking futuristic shooter, are a tiny indie studio who made what you see here in just nine months. TIGSource say Adhesive Games are only nine people, including an artist from the similarly gorgeous aborted fantasy game Project Offset. What they’ve accomplished is ridiculous.

The game’s going to be a first-person multiplayer shooter – most of what you see here is taken from a third person spectator mode, but we do get a glimpse of it being played in-game at the end. The movement of the mechs looks a little rough in places, but we don’t know how far out this is yet. All we know is that its environments are already more artistically and graphically exciting than most mainstream games. Come on, guys, give the multi-million dollar triple A studios a chance.

Stupidly pretty shots follow.

The important bit is that it’s not part of the Bad Company sub-series, whose last entry Bad Company 2 is what most fans are playing these days. That means it can handle 64 players, fighter planes are back, and most exciting of all: you can lie down. All these things were in Battlefield 2 but lost in the Bad Company games. If Battlefield 3 is going to be the culmination of all the things we love about the series, what else does it need?

Rich, Tim and myself came up with ten demands and cut them together into a blackmail note using letters hacked out of Edge magazine with our Future-branded safety scissors. Then we typed them out.

1. Jets for pilots only

Battlefield 2’s saddest sight was the aeroplane queue. You could gauge the tone of a server on spawn by checking how many workshy freeloaders were bunny hopping around an empty runway, desperate for their jet to reappear. For every competent pilot who could flip upside down, fly under a bridge and still drop a cluster-bomb on that oncoming column of tanks, there were ten chumps who’d leap into the cockpit and fly their multi-million dollar charge into a tree. By hanging around miles from the main conflict and depleting the fighting force, Battlefield 2’s idiot pilots killed the game for the rest of us with our feet on the ground.

Battlefield 3’s jets are confirmed, and I pray that DICE have found some way to kill the plane-camping trend. Maybe by introducing a short test before players earn their air-driving license, including reading and writing comprehension. Inclusion of the word ‘lmfaooo’ would constitute an insta-fail.
Rich

2. A Steamworks server browser

We tried “Make a new server browser!” Then we tried “Make a better server browser!” Then “Make a server browser that works!” It didn’t work. Bad Company 2′s is marginally more usable than the previous Battlefield games, but it’s still bad, finding friends is still a pain, and the ‘Play now’ button is still the ‘Play never’ button. I tried it just now – after five minutes of churning, it put me on an empty server.

Our revised request: “Give up. Use Steamworks. It’s free, it uses Steam, and it works.”
Tom

3. Infinite imagination married to absurd physics

This video sums up Battlefield perfectly for me. Bored of dogfighting? Get out of your plane, fire a rocket, and get back in. It’s easy for developers to stamp down on silliness and stupidity, especially when the game they’re making is so drawn from reality. But that’s not as fun as absurdity. My favourite Battlefield moments were the times when, on a private server, the PC Gamer team raced jets through dams, tried to park six tanks in a swimming pool, or swapped jets in middair. Whatever the Battlefield team decide to do with Battlefield 3, I hope it retains that core absurdity.
Tim

4. Co-op against bots

This may be futile – a co-op story campaign is already confirmed, and bots are already anti-confirmed. But I’ll make my case anyway.

Co-op campaigns are great, typically much better than single-player ones. But they’re essentially the same kind of thing, so they don’t help the true multiplayer side of Battlefield. DICE are keen to stress that their efforts on the campaign won’t affect the multiplayer, but the loss of bots really does.

Not everyone wants to take on a world of viciously proficient players in one of the most brutal shooters around. And even those that do sometimes just want to mess around. Even if they suck, bots let us do that. They’re the perfect way to learn the basics of the game without being slapped in the face for not having unlocked the M60, and they’re often more fun to play against with a friend than real people are.

Playing Battlefield 1942 with two players against hundreds of incompetent bots was amazing fun, and one of the only times Battlefield’s ridiculous side – standing on aeroplane wings firing a sniper rifle – mixed with its brutal side.
Tom

5. Complicated sniping

The sniper rifles in Bad Company 2 came from some alien world that had its gravity turned up way too high. Long range shots would dip over their course, and this made them brilliant. For one, it made preternaturally gifted snipers less effective: those that survived on the speed of their right wrist alone suddenly had to calculate trajectories. It also made a successful, map-long headshot unbelievably satisfying. Lining up a sprinting target, judging his course, working out the height compensation, then lancing him through his stupid brain is a pleasure I’m desperate to recreate in Battlefield 3.
Rich

6. Huge maps

They don’t all have to be vast, but there’s a kind of experience you can’t have on tightly focused maps – one I uniquely associate with Battlefield. It’s being alone with my squad, miles from the action, lying on top of a gas tower – the fighting just distant booms. All other radio comms come through with a crackle, but when my sniper says ‘Enemy spotted’, it’s clear and close. That distance makes the war feel terrifyingly huge, and your experience in it very personal. You’re not just another screaming voice in the fray, you and your men are moving strategically through a vast landscape to achieve something specific in a greater conflict.

I think that’s why I never got quite as immersed in Bad Company as the previous games: the tighter maps make it a frenetic onslaught like Call of Duty, without these moments of peace and perspective that make the war feel real.
Tom

7. Destructible buildings

Bad Company 2’s ‘collapsing house’ noise shot straight to the top of my list titled ‘gaming noises that make me go “ohshitohshitohshit!”,’ right next to the gurgle of Ravenholm’s headcrab-chucking zombie. Houses used to be my friends. Their walls would save me from bullets, their staircases would provide neat little fire channels. Bad Company 2 broke my trust in houses.

It was a game where the safe and mundane turned against you in seconds, and it made the battlefield fluid and consistently lethal. Every time I escaped from a collapsing building, I left exhilarated. I’d turn and look back at the empty air where, a few seconds ago, stood concrete and bricks.

Battlefield 3 promises to be a bigger game. When you hand sniper rifles to internet soldiers and tell them to go and play across a mile of sand and buildings, it means repeated long-range death. Frustrating death. Unless you play the sniper’s game better than he does, you’ll never shift him from his hidey-house. But if you can bring the sky down on him, crush his friendly walls thanks to the weird magic of the Frostbite engine, you can turn the tide of the battle.

I’ve had a good taste of what previous versions of the Frostbite engine can do, but now I want more. I want to be able to accurately punch holes in rooftops, I want to be able to extract the core of a building with such precision that it topples. And I want to be able to blow everything – everything – into small chunks of masonry. Cover is so last year.
Rich

8. Defibrillators

The shock blocks, the shooter rebooters: they make you hardier against ventricular tachycardia. When the Battlefield series introduced these, I discovered I find saving lives as satisfying as taking them. Healing isn’t enough: that’s just buffing a number so it doesn’t drop to another number. Running through a firefight to a fallen comrade and bringing him back from the brink of death is saving someone, and it feels amazing.

Given that they’ve typically died of a gunshot wound to the head rather than a heart attack, I realise the mechanic makes absolutely no sense. I just hope DICE know that’s no reason to take it out.
Tom

9. Clear objectives

The Rush games mode introduced in the Bad Company series had one major success: team focus. Battlefield’s traditional flag-capturing is creatively stupendous fun when you’ve got a crew of communicating squadmates, but dipping into a server and pootling between unmanned flags alone is a lonely experience. Rush – with its two objectives, and two sides fighting to destroy/protect them – guides players into choke points. By doing that, it creates the kind of ridiculous firefights and moments of personal glory that make you alt-tab out of the game, IM your friends and type “GUESS WHAT I JUST DID.”

Even the most ham-fisted of Bad Company 2’s teams eventually point themselves at the right target in Rush mode. The game’s long, narrow maps corral have drawn battle-lines, letting two great waves (both armed with automatic weaponry) crash into each other. Conquest maps are more amorphous. When I hop into a Rush server, I’m guaranteed satisfaction; in Conquest, I get frustrated and self-important.

I’m not suggesting Battlefield 3 drops flag-capturing entirely. I’m not even suggesting DICE port Rush mode over verbatim. Instead, I’d like them to take Bad Company 2’s excellent lessons on board. I want to be led by the nose, given reasons to push toward the largest concentration of enemies. I want to be yanked into valleys of death, be a willing participant in the game’s killing fields, not a solitary figure skirting the outskirts.
Rich

10. Chain of command

I understand the simplification in Bad Company 2: you don’t want squads to be these ultra hardcore private clubs with a leader shouting at everyone and ruining their fun. So there’s no leader, squads are just little friendly gaggles of soldiers who happen to be able to spawn on each other.

It works for getting a few people to stick together, heal each other and improve their chances. But without prior organisation, squads rarely achieve anything. Everyone can designate a target for the squad, but precisely because of that, no-one pays much attention when they do.

Battlefield 2 might not have been as noob-friendly, but it was clear and decisive. Squad leader says we go there? We go there. Squad leader says hold? We hold. Whether he was a pro or a noob, we’d follow his orders – frankly because we got bonus points for it. I was as happy to follow orders as give them, because in either case, anyone who doesn’t like it can just leave the squad.

It meant Battlefield 2 – and 2142 – had an uncanny way of forming relationships between players. Anyone can make a game that’s fun if you play with friends in an organised squad. Battlefield 2 was one of the few that could inspire that experience between total strangers. Back in Karkand, I’d follow ^^andy^^05 to hell and back. On Oman, mrbuzzard and neurax executed my orders perfectly. And I got so attached to my squad in Dragon Valley that when my commander asked me to send them on a suicide mission, I countermanded the order and went rogue, leading them to a better point of attack and winning the game. I want that feeling back.
Tom

Those are our ten. What are yours?

He told iO9: “In a way, the template is the first season of Mad Men – what if Don Draper were a game developer? The main character is a mysterious guy and something about his mysterious past makes him good at his job. Don Draper would be an awesome videogame designer, so what if we moved him into 1998 in a videogame company?”

It’ll switch between the developer’s real life making games and the worlds of the games themselves. “A lot of it will be set in the game worlds.” Austin says. “I don’t know if I could get myself to write a heroic fantasy novel, so this is the closest I’ll get. I’m sneaking my way in the back door by having people playing heroic fantasy in the novel. There will also be a Cold War spy world and a scifi world. They’ll move in and out of the game worlds.”

Austin was working in the games industry himself around that time. So if he says a man who spends most of his work hours drinking scotch, having affairs and finding new ways to say “What?” would make a great game developer, I’ll bow to his superior knowledge.

The other book he’s working isn’t game-related: “I’m retelling familiar scenes from Nixon’s life and filling in the parts we don’t know with Lovecraftian horror.” A sentence which caused our production editor Tony to tragically explode with excitement.

I named Bulletstorm as one that nearly put me off with its overbearing opening, but which I later came to like. The game’s creative director, Adrian Chmielarz of People Can Fly Studios, read it and was nice enough to take the time to respond. With his permission I’m publishing his response in full here, and since he asks a few questions I’ll respond below.

Tom Francis (@Pentadact) editorial for PC Gamer is not just about Bulletstorm, but the very mention of my game caught my attention. It’s a great read. It’s also thought-provoking, hence this note from me.

There are games in which the designers grab you by the neck and drag you through the entire experience. CoD: Black Ops is indeed (as the editorial mentions) one of these games. I spent 30 minutes killing the same respawning group of enemies before I realized the game wants me to kick a barrel – and when it exploded and the group died, they never respawned again and I was finally able to continue. For the first 30 minutes, I felt I was merely an actor is someone else’s script, but when I play games, I want to be the writer, not the actor.

However, come minute 31, thanks to the sheer awesomeness that is Black Ops I just stopped caring. I went along with it, and had a blast. The game took me on an unforgettable journey filled with incredible set pieces and great personal moments. And that sequence with going back and forth between the spy plane and the ground troops? Mindfuck.

And I’ve just realized that I don’t want to be the driver all the time. Sometimes I just want to ride shotgun. Although probably a better metaphor would be: sometimes I want to drive to wherever I want and however I want, and sometimes I want to have a clear destination and I want my GPS to tell me how to get there.

I get what Tom is saying. Luckily, the crucial sentence of his editorial is: “Let those of us who are itching to get to the game, get to the game” and not “Stop making games like this, make only games like that”.

However, apart from occasional logical problems (e.g. “You can never break through to us with brute force – morons like me will always out-dick you” – so, if “always”, we don’t need to change anything, right?), the article is written under one assumption: that developers do what they do to FORCE players to experience what they want them to experience. That it’s our ego that dictates these solutions.

That’s simply not true. The main goal of ANY developer is not to fight “dicks” – as Tom noticed, most of the time we can’t win this fight anyway – it is TO HELP PLAYERS WHO ARE JUST NOT GREAT AT THIS. And by “NOT GREAT” I really mean: “Don’t have a hardcore gamer’s mind and experience”.

Example: enter a room. Kill enemies. The exit door now has an arrow saying “go there”.

“DICK” PLAYERS: Fuck you, you don’t tell me where to go, I want to discover it myself.

THE REST OF THE WORLD: Thanks, I lost my orientation fighting all these dudes, and you saved me some time – I don’t need to test every door now.

See what I’m saying here?

On a side note, I’m not entirely sure why Bulletstorm was used as a main example for this editorial. Except for the opening minute, you can skip EVERY cinematic, no one forces you to use Adrenaline Rush moments (just as Tim noted that itself), etc. It’s actually one of the most “free” games available, even offering a mode (ECHOES) that is 100% pure gameplay with every scripted event, dialogue line and cinematic removed. So there.

Later, I did not remember doing this.

Adrian’s CoD example shows he totally gets it. Some of his objections I agree with, and others are me not making myself clear enough, so I’ll pick out the ones that need a reply:

sometimes I want to drive to wherever I want and however I want, and sometimes I want to have a clear destination and I want my GPS to tell me how to get there
Me too. A GPS is fine. I’m complaining about games that kick you into a cab and slip the driver a tenner not to let you out until level 3.

“You can never break through to us with brute force – morons like me will always out-dick you” – so, if “always”, we don’t need to change anything, right?
I didn’t mean to imply that successfully outdicking you is a pleasurable experience. With the greatest possible respect and no small amount of unease: it’s horrible. You can’t stop us rebelling, but you can stop us having fun when we try – I guess it’s open to interpretation who’s been outdicked in that scenario.

I keep having to play the game that came free with my graphics card in 1998.

The main goal of ANY developer… is TO HELP PLAYERS WHO ARE JUST NOT GREAT AT THIS.
Yep, I’m sure that’s true. And your example of pointing out the next door to go through is entirely tolerable. I mentioned Bulletstorm’s “Press F to look in the right direction” system as an example of how bad my reaction to this stuff has become – though I do think paying out in-game currency for swift obedience is crossing the line.

The stuff that drove me to write that editorial is when my head is put in a vice (as it is at the start of Bulletstorm), when my aim is forced onto something (as it is right afterwards in Bulletstorm), when time itself slows to a halt until I press the key I’m supposed to press (as it is next, in Bulletstorm). It’s when my walking speed is halved and my weapon disabled, as it is regularly throughout Bulletstorm – including two occasions during combat, presumably because I wasn’t where the game expected me to be. It’s every time my hand is forced, and on-screen control prompt shows up to pretend it isn’t.

If you made all that stuff into a cut-scene, which is what it is, you’d look at the start of Bulletstorm and think “Man, that’s a 13 minute cut-scene, a 12 second fight, then an 11 minute cut-scene. We can’t do that.” And you’d get a call, and it would be me, and I’d say “Exactly.”

Your other option is the end of linear time.

As you say, Bulletstorm is by no means the worst offender. But if I’m not great at this, none of that stuff helps me play the game. And it doesn’t help for precisely the same reason it annoys the hardcore gamers: it has nothing to do with the game.

It’s presumably a way of burning through some backstory, character development and exposition, but it comes at a time when I’m impatient, frustrated and have no investment in it. Tell me the story once I’m invested, and get me invested by letting me play your awesome game. You can still teach me the controls with on-screen prompts, you just won’t have to freeze time to do so.

I’m not entirely sure why Bulletstorm was used as a main example
Not because it was the worst game to do this stuff, but because lately it’s the best. It’s the first time in ages a bunch of people I respect have recommended something I hated when I tried it. It’s a key example because the offputting forced stuff is masking a great game, one I would have given up on if that was all I had to judge it on.

It’s no real tragedy that Call of Duty is so riddled with set pieces – that’s all it’s really got left. But Bulletstorm actually has exotic weapons and satisfying mechanics, ones that work because of player freedom rather than despite it.

You’re absolutely right, Bulletstorm deserves extra credit for Echoes mode, I should have mentioned that. It’s not quite how I want to play a game first time, but it would have been a good fallback if I had given up on the campaign.

35 minutes into Bulletstorm, 30 seconds before it becomes enjoyable.

Cheers to Adrian for the smart and informative response – if he has anything to add, I’ll update this post.

Update: he did!

Let me start by spoiling the ending: I hear you, Tom, your heart is in the right place, and any next game I’ll make will certainly make a good use of this discussion.

However, hand holding is not going away entirely.

“You can still teach me the controls with on-screen prompts, you just won’t have to freeze time to do so.”

Oh how I wish it were true. But it’s not. Not making it 100% guaranteed that people learn how to use a certain button or a gameplay feature is like booking a vacation in Mordor: you can do it, but it’s not necessarily a very wise decision.

Let me give you an example. In Bulletstorm, you can turn off the profane language. I’m not talking about beeping out the swear words. I’m talking about replacing entire lines with alternate ones, something we and Rick Remender worked hard on. This way you don’t even know when the characters curse and when they don’t, the experience is very fluid.

Originally, we made it so the players had to choose the language (profane/alternate) before they could play the game. But then we thought: “Fuck it, people already have to go through a couple of info windows before they get to play, let’s not make it even more painful – let’s put that option into Options menu. Everyone will find it if they want to”.

Worst. Decision. Ever.

It really cost us. My opinion is that our Metacritic score is a few points lower just because of that decision. Just as an example, check out the review from Wired, where the reviewer didn’t really like the dick jokes (calling them our “Achilles’ penis”, which hurt, but was also awesome). That’s absolutely fine, but I wish he knew about and was able to choose to play with the alternate dialogue.

But even leaving Metacritic aside, I just see some gamers having a problem with the language. One time I’ve decided to contact one of them and told her about the option. She then contacted me back and said this was a game changer for her.

Sure, here at PCF we all prefer the sailor’s mouth version of the game (as does the majority of Bulletstorm fans), but there is a reason why we provided the alternative. And all of that down the drain just because we’ve decided that the language choice should be optional, not obligatory.

“It’s when my walking speed is halved and my weapon disabled, as it is regularly throughout Bulletstorm.”

Okay, I’ll let you in on a little secret: this is still better than a loading screen. 99% of the games out there use “walk and talk” to cover the streaming in of a new part of the level, and the ability to sell a little dialogue at that point is merely a bonus. Just so you know.

Now going back to the root of the problem.

Once again, I hear you loud and clear. I guess a good summary of the whole discussion is something we’ve done in Bulletstorm right after you find the Leash. In the first fight – when you can use the Leash for the first time – we freeze the screen until you press the Use Leash button. And we do this twice. In the second fight, you’re free to move and do whatever, but the only way to progress is to leash and impale two enemies.

As I said, hand holding is not going away, but there’s certainly a value in that second solution, something that the first one doesn’t have.

Since it started with futile ranting into the wind, if this discussion leads to any tweaks in the way choices are presented in a future game, that would be a great result. Obviously games shouldn’t just be built for dicks, but hopefully our extreme sensitivity to this stuff helps highlight where it goes too far. Thanks again to Adrian for reading and taking time to explain the thinking behind this kind of design, it has been both educational and fun.

And by the time Ryan won the game, he had something to rant about.

Ryan’s account of how he did it is on Untold Entertainment Inc’s blog. It wasn’t complicated, but the panel’s reaction to how he won made things interesting. He’d used deception to win a social game, but the panel felt he’d broken the rules.

Once they eventually permitted him to speak – with a condition he immediately broke – he tried to explain why he felt developers are too quick to criticise those who break the rules. The session was about social game developers wanting the same respect other devs get, and Ryan stood up for Farmville creators Zynga, of all people. He feels the development community dismiss them for breaking the rules, but are happy to use the same tactics in their own games.

The jealousy was too great, we had to know: could it ever come to PC? I asked creator Derek Yu.

“There’s a very good chance we’ll see the HD edition of Spelunky on PC at some point.”

“;)” Yu added.

Hot randomly-generated damn.

In his talk at GDC, Derek said he thought of Spelunky HD as a sequel to the original platformer. The first was made in Game Maker, a cheap and easy tool for making (mostly) 2D games from scratch. Derek calls tools like this “the equivalent of a sketchbook: lets you get your ideas out very quickly.” Twitterer Kinten posted a tantalising fuzzy photo of the screenshot Derek showed of multiplayer in action.

While it’s by no means confirmed, Derek’s answer is exciting because it presumably means he’s not under any exclusivity agreement with Microsoft that would prevent him from bringing the game to PC. That’s the fear when a great indie game gets an even greater version on Xbox Live Arcade.

Valve would be nuts not to want this on Steam, and evidently Derek himself is up for it. With the Super Meat Boy guys recently revealing that their game sold dramatically faster on Steam than on XBLA, Introversion saying Microsoft “make you work harder [but] don’t back it up with sales”, and Team Meat chiming in again to call the XBLA development process “a mind fuck”, perhaps the days of indies seeing consoles as the big time are coming to an end.

I’m a horrible gamer. Hopefully it doesn’t show in ordinary conversation, but as soon as I start playing something, I become an asshole.

The instant the first character speaks, I reflexively want them to shut up. If there’s text on screen, I’m not reading it. If there’s a cut-scene, I’m skipping it. If there are no enemies to shoot, I shoot my friends, and if I can’t shoot my friends, I shoot just next to my friends and then swing my crosshair onto them as quickly as possible in a lame attempt to glance them with a bullet I know won’t do anything. I thought that was normal.

Then, playing Bulletstorm the other night and hating every second of it, I had an awful realisation: this is my fault. I’m the reason games suck now. I’m the lazy, belligerent jerk every mainstream shooter seems to be designed for, and it’s because of gamers like me that they’re built this way.

Update: Bulletstorm’s creative director responds.

Unskippable cut-scenes exist because idiots like me skip the skippable ones. There’s text on screen because idiots like me don’t listen to the characters, and the characters are repeating what the text says because idiots like me won’t read the text. Friendly characters are invincible because idiots like me would shoot them, and we’re not allowed to shoot them because idiots like me will try anyway.

I’m a game designer’s nightmare: an angry, crazy asshole who’s impossible to engage, has no emotions other than irritation and impatience, and at times seems to be trying to ruin every scripted sequence and miss every set piece.

Bulletstorm actually bribes you – with real, spendable in-game currency – to look in the right direction when something cool happens. You get more points the quicker you press the F key to swivel toward where the designer wants you facing. And it’s become a point of pride for me to refuse to do so until the timer runs out and a text prompt points out that I’ve earned no points. I stare at the ground. LOOK: SOME MUD. THIS ROCK TEXTURE IS INTERESTING. DO YOU HEAR SOMETHING? I DON’T.

At one point the reason the game wants you to turn round is that enemies are pouring in behind you, and I still wouldn’t do it. I charged backwards, bullets slamming into my spine, staring fiercely at a hot dog cart.

How does a gamer get this way? Is there some deep psychological damage I’m repressing from my childhood?

I don’t think so. I was the ideal gamer as a kid. I only got games on my birthday and at Christmas, so they were rare, magical things to be treasured and explored with patience and an open mind.

30% of the time, they would simply not work. When they did, they were awkward to control, illogical to play and often absurdly difficult. I don’t know how many games I actually completed in the dark DOS days before GameFAQs, but I diligently explored them all as thoroughly as I could, with a sense of wonder and excitement. Games got better, and my excitement only grew.

It changed with Half-Life, a remarkable game that showed the world how cinematic and atmospheric the medium could be. The world, broadly, got the wrong end of the stick. ‘Games can be like films!’ The world decided. ‘We can script exactly what happens!’ The world decided. ‘We can play out whole scenes with digital actors just the way we want, and the player will happily stand there and watch!’

Not really, world. The player, in my case and the case of the legions of dicks like me, will beat your digital actors in the face with a crowbar six times for every word they speak. We’re not watching your expensively acted conversation, we’re punching the words ‘SHUT UP’ into the wall with bullet holes. Not everyone sat quietly through that long tram ride – people like me were crawling over the chairs in crouch mode and trying to stick their heads out of the windows.

For the most part, Half-Life and its sequel did it right: you could always look wherever you wanted, and after the intro you were usually free to move. You generally couldn’t interact with the scripted sequences, but for logical reasons – they happened out of reach or behind glass. That subtlety was lost on its imitators, who’ve been progressively hobbling the player, smacking him around and locking his head in a vice more and more with each game since.

Call of Duty is barely interactive now. I had to play one scene in Black Ops four or five times before I figured out what the game designer needed me to do for the game to progress without glitching. Another time you’re forced to put broken glass in someone’s mouth and punch him. And the Cuba level doesn’t even really need the player to be there, except as a camera dolly.

I bore with Black Ops because I was reviewing it – when it’s my job, of course I’ll wade through any amount of bullshit to find out if it ever stops or gets better. But it doesn’t, it’s not alone, and it’s stuff like this that’s broken me.

I don’t have Attention Deficit Disorder, designers – you do. Only one of us in this relationship is forcing the other to look at what they’re doing. We’re locked in a destructive cycle of dickification: I resent when you take control away from me, so I’m as much of a dick as the controls permit. You see dicks like me being dicks in your playtests, and you think of new ways to be bigger dicks back: to force me to watch your scenes, play out your script, follow your high-school reading level plot.

Together, we have ruined mainstream videogames. And for my part, I’m sorry.

The first thing you have to do in Bulletstorm is shoot at an unarmed man’s head while drunk, then kill him. ‘Hate’ is an awfully strong word to use about these things, but I hate the person who made me do that. I’d probably like them if I met them, but all I know right now is that they wanted everyone who played their game to belch in a man’s face while they murdered him. I have to do it, because Rich gave this game 80% (I hate him too), so I know there’s a good game beyond this. And I still love games, when I’m allowed to play them.

It feels like six hours of bullshit – but it’s probably one – before the overscripting eases off and you finally get a decent weapon in Bulletstorm. And suddenly, it’s a game. It’s a fast, fun, vicious and inventive shooter with a magnificent visual imagination and an exciting sense of place. It’s exactly my kind of thing.

But in a desperate, frantic attempt to engage disinterested jerks like me, it tried to shove its horrible characters, misjudged script and awkward on-rails sections down my throat before showing me what the game was really about. If it wasn’t for Rich’s review, I’d never have drudged through that miserable dross to the game I like beyond.

I am an asshole, it’s true, but game designers are misunderstanding how to deal with that. You can never break through to us with brute force – morons like me will always out-dick you. The fact that you disapprove of what we do with our freedom doesn’t mean you should give us less of it – it means you should give us more. Let us miss the odd pretty explosion or line of dialogue, and let us run on ahead. Let those of us who are itching to get to the game, get to the game. Once we do, we’ll still be assholes. But we’ll be assholes to our enemies, and we’ll enjoy it.

Below are a few of my favourites – including the best screenshot of mud you will ever see. But grab the whole zip of 100 1920×1080 screenshots from Duncan’s site Dead End Thrills for the whole collection. You’ll also find some amazing images of the Mass Effect games there, and many more. Can Crysis 2′s urban scenes ever measure up to this?

Graham’s question to the office: “Is it just incredibly easy to make amazing special effects now?” We are trying to figure out how the this self-funded live action tribute to the Modern Warfare games can look quite this good. Toronto-based We Can Pretend Productions have recreated key scenes from the plots of the first two Modern Warfare games with creepy accuracy, and in this trailer they show a glimpse of where they’re taking it next.

It was bizarre and irritating that Modern Warfare 2′s single player story ended without you bringing Makarov, responsible for that infamous airport massacre, to grisly justice. That countdown turned out not to be Modern Warfare 3, but it looks like it’ll advance the story of the series anyway. I hope Activision don’t shut it down first.

You’ve read our impressions, now see it for yourself. Yes, the single player campaign of DICE’s new shooter looks unbelievably gorgeous. The multiplayer will support 64 players on PC, and the new engine lets you destroy even more of the terrain than Bad Company.

Laaame.

YouTuber Mr Yaridovich calls it The Elder Scrolls VI: Equestria. It’s the audio from the latest Skyrim trailer, including Max von Sydow’s foreboding voiceover, set to clips of My Little Pony cartoons, and it works remarkably well. Don’t miss the dragon shout, and the crash to a halt towards the end.

[Via redditor Jeffgoldblum]

Update: looks like the login servers are down at the moment, meaning you can’t create an account in-game. Some of the mirrors for the demo don’t go up until 12.00AM PST / 8PM GMT, so that may be when the servers will wake up.

Update 2: the problem is a server overload. It’s not affecting everyone and Crytek are working to resolve it, but have no ETA yet.

Update 3: all working our end now, try again if you had problems. Anyone still having issues, let us know in the comments.

The demo features two game modes and two maps: Skyline is a fight across rooftops, and Pier 17 is a wide open, smashed up version of the real location on the southern tip of Manhattan. Which, before the alien invasion at least, had a great fish market. There’s a guide to the tactical nuances of Pier 17 here, and one for Skyline here. Neither provides a practical guide to negotiating a fair price for hake.

Once you’ve tried it out, let us know how it runs on your rig – Crytek have made a big deal of the CryEngine 3 being more efficient than the one they built for the infamously demanding Crysis 1.

American Fandango

Art: American Gothic, Grant Wood (1930)
Game: Grim Fandango (1998)

Wallpapers
800×600
1024×768
1280×960
1280×1024
1600×1200
1680×1050
1920×1080
1920×1200

Campbell’s Exploding Barrels

Art: Campbell’s Soup Cans, Andy Warhol (1962)
Game: Half-Life 2 (2004)

Wallpapers
800×600
1024×768
1280×960
1280×1024
1600×1200
1680×1050
1920×1080
1920×1200

D0G Playing Poker

Art: Dogs Playing Poker, C. M. Coolidge (1903)
Games: Sam & Max Hit The Road, Wolfenstein, Fallout, Reservoir Dogs, Half-Life 2, Nintendogs, Half-Life

Wallpapers
800×600
1024×768
1280×960
1280×1024
1600×1200
1680×1050
1920×1080
1920×1200

A Far Cry from the West Bank

Art: Untitled – Israeli West Bank Barrier, Banksy (2005)
Game: Far Cry (2004)

Wallpapers
800×600
1024×768
1280×960
1280×1024
1600×1200
1680×1050
1920×1080
1920×1200

The Extraction of Adam

Art: The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo (1512)
Game: BioShock (2007)

Wallpapers
800×600
1024×768
1280×960
1280×1024
1600×1200
1680×1050
1920×1080
1920×1200

The Persistence of Portals

Art: The Persistence of Memory, Salvidor Dali (1931)
Game: Portal (2007)

Wallpapers
800×600
1024×768
1280×960
1280×1024
1600×1200
1680×1050
1920×1080
1920×1200

Trouble at t’Mill

Art: Coming from the Mill, LS Lowry (1930)
Game: Darwinia (2005)

Wallpapers
800×600
1024×768
1280×960
1280×1024
1600×1200
1680×1050
1920×1080
1920×1200

The Girl with the Black Pearl Earring

Art: The Girl with the Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer (1665)
Game: Beyond Good and Evil (2003)

Wallpapers
800×600
1024×768
1280×960
1280×1024
1600×1200
1680×1050
1920×1080
1920×1200

The Vivisected Man

Art: Vitruvian Man, Leonardo Da Vinci (1487)
Game: Spore (2008)

Wallpapers
800×600
1024×768
1280×960
1280×1024
1600×1200
1680×1050
1920×1080
1920×1200

JACKCON

Art: Various, Jackson Pollock (1942-1953)
Game: DEFCON (2006)

Wallpapers
800×600
1024×768
1280×960
1280×1024
1600×1200
1680×1050
1920×1080
1920×1200

This might be of interest to financially comfortable PC gamers who like to caress things other than mice, particularly since there’s been a long string of highly unofficial apps attempting to cash in on the game’s gigantic success on PC. Mojang honcho Markus Persson says the iOS version won’t get all the same updates as the PC one, only those that make sense for the platform.

Would you stroke this pig? If so, turn yourself over to the authorities.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/02/21/minecraft-iphone-and-ipad-versions-in-development/feed/ 23 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/02/17/the-minecraft-experiment-final-entry-cake-or-death/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/02/17/the-minecraft-experiment-final-entry-cake-or-death/#comments Thu, 17 Feb 2011 10:54:49 +0000 Tom Francis http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=39770 [..]]]> When I first started playing Minecraft a few months ago, I played with a rule: if I die, I have to delete the entire world. After a lot of false starts and a lot of lost worlds, I managed to build a portal to hell and get back alive. Now I’m home, and the experiment is about to end – all that’s left is to die.

The diary starts here, and this is the final entry.

Playing this way has been an interesting look at how stakes change the way you feel in a game, and how you play. Since I started, Minecraft creator Notch has said this will actually be a formal mode in the game eventually, one that forcibly deletes your world on death.

I found that each death gave me a new phobia, something I’d be disproportionately terrified of in every subsequent life. By the tenth, I’m so afraid of everything that I’ve actually become pretty safe – that’s why it’ll be my last life in this experiment.

That said, I’m currently looking through my inventory and I’ve just heard a Creeper hissing behind me.

World 10, deaths 9, part 1

Yes, the hissing was a Creeper. Yes, it exploded. Yes, in the face. Yes, all my stuff.

The blast took out my storage chest, with all my valuables in it. That doesn’t destroy them, though, just sends them flying. It only knocked a few hearts off my health, thanks to my shiny new armour, but I have another concern: don’t items disappear after a while? There are dozens here and my inventory is already full – how long do I have to save all this?

I scramble around in the wreckage trying to craft a new crate. Every time I move something around, a new useless object automatically pops into the empty slot because I’m standing on it. Eventually I manage to get enough wood to slap together a chest and cram fistfuls of ham, string, feathers and gold into it. Then, inexplicably, I set fire to myself.

For some reason I’ve always kept a little puddle of lava in the corner of my base here, and for the first time I’ve accidentally stepped in it. More frantic rummaging: I have a bucket of water in here somewhere, and I would really like to not be on fire anymore.

I finally find it in the back of the chest, flood my own home and extinguish the flames with a hiss. I am alive.

Now I have the same difficult decision I face every time I come home: should I bake a cake, or kill myself?

World 10, deaths 9, part 2

The cake argument is persuasive: Notch added the recipe to the game to celebrate winning the IndieDB Indie of the Year awards. I went to hell and found my way home – that’s a much bigger deal. And it’s a sort of enticing long-term quest: it takes wheat, milk, eggs and sugar, each of which is somewhat tricky to come by.

On the other hand, there’s the tempting prospect of death. The experiment is over, but I can’t just leave – it has to end with me dying and finally deleting this last, huge world that’s been my home for so long. I don’t really want to meander around while I wait for something to catch me out, I want to die on my own terms. I’m thinking of digging a pit down to the base of the world, then building a tower all the way to the top of the sky (there is one), and jumping off one into the other.

Or I could do both. I have cane to make sugar, I just found an egg, and I have buckets to milk cows with, but the wheat will take days to grow. This pit, and the tower, will take a day to build. I can start growing wheat now, work on my deathtrap while it matures, then bake a delicious treat and take my own life on the same day.

This is the plan:

• Plant wheat now.
• Prepare the other ingredients.
• Dig a pit to the bottom of the world from directly beneath my beacon, and a tower from the top of the beacon to the top of the world.
• Harvest the wheat.
• Bake the cake.
• Climb the tower.
• Pour lava on my own feet to set myself on fire.
• Throw myself off the tower.
• Commence eating cake mid-air, restoring health as the flames burn it away, and making sure I’ll survive long enough to be killed by the tremendous impact of hitting the hardest possible ground from the highest possible height.

It’ll be brilliant.

Farming wheat turns out to be much harder than killing yourself. I had to do research. You’ve got to hoe the land, then irrigate it by pouring buckets of water into channels around the soil. Then you plant the seeds, but you’ve got to do so without trampling on any of the hoed land or planted seeds, or leaving any hoed land unirrigated for too long. After a lot of faffing and trampling and wasted wheat, I finally got them all planted. Now for the most exciting part of this adventure: watching wheat grow.

OK, I’ll just let the wheat get on with it.

I block off the water beneath my beacon and dig carefully down through the dry land. It takes most of a day before I hit Adminium, the indescructable stuff at the base of the world. When I do, I decide I’d rather break my legs on Obsidian – the stuff just has more sentimental value to me. I forge a block from lava and water, directly below the beacon, then climb back up.

The wheat is not done. Maybe it takes a whole season, like real farming. According to the wiki bonemeal can accelerate the rate at which it grows, but like an idiot I threw all my bones away a few miles back. The next morning, though, I find one among the trees – probably from a skeleton who burned to death in the morning sun. His loss is my chemical farming catalyst: I grind his bones and throw the dust at three stalks of wheat, instantly turning them into health bundles ready to be made into a delicious cake. This makes perfect sense.

The cake, once I’ve made it by throwing all the component parts into a wooden box with a saw drawn on the side, is vast and delicious-looking. I have everything I need. I dump everything I don’t, then set about building the tower.

The only tricky part of this is getting above my beacon and then drilling a hole through it from the top – it’s covered in fast-flowing water, so I have to drop blocks of sand onto it to make a stable platform first. The tower I build isn’t directly above the pit, it’s one square back so that I can step off, fall the height of the sky and plummet straight into the tiny vertical shaft into the ground. On fire, eating cake.

Once the tower’s done, it’s the middle of the night. I don’t want to die in the dark, so I just stand gormlessly at the top of the world waiting for the sun to rise. It’s actually rather nice – as long as you don’t move, this is one of the few completely safe places in the world. I can see Creepers hopping around in the forest, dismayed by everything they see. I can see Skeleton Archers weaving around the field of burning woodchunks that was once my forest. A sheep wanders vacantly along the beach. And finally, the sun starts to rise.

World 10, deaths 9, part 3

I asked if anyone in the office wanted to see me die, and they all did. I didn’t say I meant in Minecraft. I made my platform two blocks long, so that I can pour lava onto the block I’m not standing on and let it flow into me – that way there’s no risk of it knocking me off in the wrong direction and fatally not killing me. I make sure I know exactly how to switch from lava to cake in a hurry, so I can start eating as soon as I start burning, then I’m ready.

I pour the lava out, and as soon as I hear myself say “Oof!”, I switch to cake and back carefully off the ledge.

Two things go immediately wrong. I’m falling, yes, but I’m not on fire. For the first time in my life, I’ve managed to take damage from lava without catching light.

And I can’t seem to eat the cake. I’m right clicking, which is the use button, but it’s just causing me to swing the cake wildly like a club, beating it against the stone column as I rush by.

Suddenly there’s a slap and the cake disappears. Did I eat it? Did I eat it in one, violent bite? I’m plummeting through the earth now, cakeless and unburning, and in a split second I hit the ground. I die with the same weak ‘oof’ that the lava elicited, my possesions spew out of my body, and it’s game over. My score, apparently, is ‘&e0′ – it seems appropriate.

World 10, deaths 9, part 4

Luckily, I recorded the whole thing. And it’s only when I watch it frame-by-frame that I discover what really happened.

Firstly, I was so well armoured that the lava never even reduced my health, which is probably why it didn’t set me alight. That lead to my inability to eat cake – I hadn’t taken any damage so there was nothing to heal. That meant ‘using’ the cake was attempting to put it down, but against a solid wall that just causes me to slap it fruitlessly against the rock. But when I passed the Earth’s surface, there was an extraordinarily brief interval when I was under my beacon, but not yet in the ground – so no rock in front of me. In that moment, I slammed the cake down on the ground and vanished into the ground forever.

It’s about the most anticlimactic video you’ll ever see.

Update: commenters inform me that the other reason I couldn’t eat the cake is that it has to be put on the ground before it can be consumed. Personally, I prefer to pick up whole cakes and push them into my face until they’re gone, but whatever Notch.

Confusingly, the cake stays in my hand a few frames after placing.

If the world continued to exist after I was gone, some passing adventurer might spot a tower of cascading water tumbling into a secluded bay. If he poked his head through the veil, he’d discover a beautifully made cake inside lying on a pedestal, directly in front of an unfathomably deep hole with a hideously twisted corpse at the bottom of it. I doubt he’d ever figure out the full stupidity of what happened, but the thought is as good a reason as any to delete it.

Worlds: 10
Deaths: 10
Conclusion: Cake is difficult.

If you’re interested in how far I came, here’s a map of the journey home – click for the big version. The game only generates terrain around where you are, so the black areas are where I never explored.

You can see the point at which my compass started pointing in a different direction – I guess it just gets more accurate once you’re in roughly the right area. My journey through hell was shorter and more straight forward:

To give you an idea of the scale, here are the two together – I started in the top right, went to hell, travelled as far as I could, then came back and had to walk eight times further home.

Huge thanks to everyone for reading, your comments and Likes have made this a pleasure to write. If you enjoyed it, tell people – this sort of article takes some time to do, but we can justify doing more of them if the people who like it spread the link around. In the meantime, there’s a similar diary I once did for strategy game Galactic Civilizations 2 up on CVG.

Minecraft is currently €14.95 directly from the developer at Minecraft.net – that’s about £12.60 or US $20.25, and there’s a limited free version you can play there now. It is, as I’ve tried to demonstrate, awesome. If this diary persuaded you to buy it, let us know in the comments.

But BioWare are still experimenting with how their game should work, in everything from the structure of the plot to the genre itself. Both Mass Effects have problems, ones they could solve with Mass Effect 3. So as we did with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, we’ve put together a list of the fifteen things we’d like to see to make Mass Effect 3 the Empire Strikes Back of the series instead of its Revenge of the Sith.

1. A little faith

Previously, on Mass Effect:
“Guys, I saw Saren kill a guy!”
“We don’t believe you.”
“Here’s a recording.”
“OK, we believe you. Find him!”
“Found him. His ship is a Reaper.”
“We don’t believe you.”
“His Reaper ship is killing you now.”
“OK, we believe you. Save us!”
“Done. Oh look, another Reaper!”
“We don’t believe you.”
“OK, well I found the Reaper, defeated it, saved the world and sent you proof.”
“OK, we believe you.”

What not to do next, on Mass Effect:
“Uh oh, three-hundred and forty-one Reapers are hovering nineteen feet above the surface of the Earth in plain view of over a billion people!”
“We don’t believe you.”

The first time anyone in a position of power doubts my warnings in Mass Effect 3, I’m out. Earth can burn, I’m doing this for the rest of the game.

2. More varied combat

Mass Effect 2 did a good job of making the player classes feel very different, and most have an interesting central mechanic for combat to revolve around. But within that, the hundreds of individual fights could become painfully familiar. Pretty much every fight took place in the same kind of room full of crates and low walls – which popped up from the ground if they weren’t already there – against the same procession of enemy types. I’d love to see some more interesting threats that require us to change our tactics, and some bosses with more interesting concepts than “A guy with a lot of hitpoints”.

3. Free run of the galaxy

Pretty much all we know about Mass Effect 3 is that it’ll be about defending Earth from the Reapers. I’m hoping that doesn’t mean we’re actually on Earth for much of the game – the core thrill of the series for me is zooming around the galaxy lecturing people and punching things. The trailer seems to support that, at least: it’s a soldier on Earth, hoping Shepard’s up in space saving them.

4. Broader choice of weapons

Streamline if you must, but let us shop for weapons. We need to see their stats, pick the one that suits our style and tweak it with mods of our choice. Mass Effect 2 only featured a handful of different guns, and the few new ones you found appeared to be outright better. They usually were, but it was hard to ever know because the game wouldn’t give you any hard facts about their power.

Unlocking enhancements for them was a fiddly and illogical process, requiring you to have found a certain damage upgrade from a certain shop before you can give your weapon the larger clip mod you just found. ME1 forced tough decisions about which weapon to fit your best ammo mod to, in ME2 you just acquired everything you could. ME3 doesn’t need to follow the first game’s system, which was a little flabby, but it needs those tough decisions.

5. More convincing romances

The love interests in ME2 are like the Dr Evil henchman who caves if you ask him anything three times. There doesn’t seem to be any connection, attraction or reason for you to hook up, they just capitulate because the player executed the necessary number of flirts. Let us chase someone, make someone chase us, and let our potential relationships be based on something. Even if it means fewer candidates for Awkwardly Animated Sexy Time.

And please don’t close off all those options to players of the wrong gender. Great as it is, Mass Effect is not such a literary masterwork that it would completely ruin a delicately crafted character to check the bisexual flag. And we know that’s all it takes, because modders have already done it.

6. No coolant clips

Scouring the battleground for these after every fight was not fun. Switching weapons just to reload them before picking up another clip was not quick, or fun. And continually running out of ammo for your favourite weapon made no sense in the context of these supposedly universal coolant clips. If you must have ammo, just restock it after every fight. And for God’s sake call it ammo, you’re not fooling anyone with the nonsensical coolant concept.

7. A mix of the personal and epic

ME2′s actual story only happens in a few brief bursts, and the rest of the game is just team-building exercises. It’s mostly good stuff, but it can feel like enforced time-wasting when there’s a world to save. It’s pretty obvious you’re not actually going to need ten companions in-game to complete it, but you have to appease them simply because that’s the game – once you’re done, there’s not much plot left to play.

Conversely, the quest to track down Saren in the first game felt vast in scope. There just wasn’t a whole lot of squad development along the way. I’d love to see Mass Effect 3 combine the two: a substantial mission to track a truly loathesome villain across the galaxy, with optional squad development missions like Mass Effect 2′s loyalty quests. The main plot should introduce us to characters who already have good reason to join us, and spend its time developing a larger story rather than forcing us to do favours for them if we don’t want to.

8. A less fiddly cover system

Neither of the current Mass Effect games nailed this. Both glue you awkwardly in a position where you can shoot enemies that walk past you, and ME2 seems to think ‘hide behind something’ is similar enough to ‘vault over it into enemy fire’ to assign them the same key.

Sprinting and vaulting over things are both a high energy, speed-oriented modes of movement – make that one button. Crouching and hiding behind cover is a cautious, protection-oriented action. Make that a different button.

I don’t mind fewer controls, but putting sprint, jump, crouch, take cover, and use all on one button is simplifying to the point of complication.

9. No Cerberus

After making them out to be al-space-Qaeda in Mass Effect 1, Mass Effect 2 forced us to work for them simply by the lack of a dialogue option not to. The first game establishes Shepard as the kind of person who has no trouble countermanding orders from her own superiors and cutting off the galactic council mid-conversation. Stepping down from that to not having the guts to say no to the organisation who – in my case – once killed my entire squad is just absurd.

The idea of co-operating with a terrorist organisation with both sympathetic and villainous elements could have been interesting, but only if it’s an option. If you force us to do it, with the laughable implication that they’re the only place in the galaxy we could possibly obtain a space ship with which to investigate the Collector attacks, it’s just frustrating. Have I completely forgotten I’m an officer in the Alliance Navy? Why can’t I even attempt to make contact with them?

With Mass Effect 3 focusing on the defense of Earth, I’m hoping the Alliance will be the dominant player. Someone whose orders it actually makes sense to follow.

10. A closer knit squad

Mass Effect had 6 potential squad mates, Mass Effect 2 has 12. That included some great characters, but it meant they had virtually nothing to say about your adventures outside of their own loyalty missions. They didn’t feel like family, just employees.

Keeping the number down would help BioWare focus on letting them interact with each other and giving them more dialogue when you have them with you. And if they truly have a stake in the plot, there’s no reason someone in a Kelly Chambers type role can’t make suggestions about who’ll be an interesting companion on a given mission – “Wrex has a personal connection to the phage, Commander, he might appreciate coming along.” Apart from anything, it’d give us something other than combat effectiveness to consider in choosing our squadmates, which currently tends to see us taking the same two people everywhere.

11. Better class abilities

The Vanguard class has Charge, a spectacular biotic stampede that slams your opponents flying through windows or off rooftops. The Infiltrator can turn himself completely invisible, and come out of nowhere with a sudden smack to a key enemy’s head or a fatal sniper shot. The Adept can create a black hole at will, sucking people out of cover and flinging them around the room.

The Engineer can make orbs of light irritate people slightly. The Soldier can give his weapons extra damage. I feel like BioWare may have run out of imagination halfway through class design.

Give Engineers something devious – hacking AI opponents is a step in the right direction, but comes too late to define the class and the Infiltrator gets it too. And give Soldiers something brutal – if the Vanguard’s bodily slamming herself into enemies, the pure combat class has to be able to one-up that. Ammo types doesn’t really cut it.

12. Old friends

I have to admit I can’t imagine how Mass Effect is going to deal with returning characters. Wrex, Kaiden and Ashley were left as side characters in ME2 presumably because they could die in the first game – no sense putting in the huge amount of voice work to make them a team member if they might not even be alive to recruit.

But to its credit, Mass Effect 2 lets everyone die. That means there aren’t many people left from either game who BioWare can be sure will live to see Mass Effect 3 – in fact, here’s a chart.

 
Anyone stand out? Yep, Liara is the only squadmate who’s guaranteed to survive both games. If BioWare don’t want to waste voice acting budget on people the player might not have access to, their only option is one of the least interesting characters in the series. (Don’t tell her I said that, though, technically we’re still dating.)

BioWare should just bite the bullet and do the work of adding returning squad members even if they might not be alive in everyone’s game. And I think the top of that list has to be Wrex. We love the toad-faced psycho so much that him just saying “Shepard.” has become one of the series’ most quoted lines. Grunt’s directionless teenage angst in Mass Effect 2 didn’t scratch the lovable Krogan itch, we need Wrex back. He’s only dead if you shot him yourself in Mass Effect 1, and if you did that, you can’t be too upset about not getting him back in ME3.

ME2′s characters are trickier – Mordin is clearly the best, but he’s also a tragic-death magnet: he’s the character most likely to die even if you did his loyalty mission. He’s the only character I never get tired of listening to, though, so he’s my second pick for a returning squad mate.

Garrus and Tali are the obvious fan favourites to keep, and I’m fine with the rest not being recruitable so long as they show up in some role. Thane is the most interesting, but he’s terminally ill. That has to come into play, or it risks feeling like a cheap sympathy ploy.

13. An Elcor team mate

[EARNEST] These lumbering aliens are the most likeable and interesting guys in Mass Effect’s galaxy. [ENTHUSIASTIC] The fact that they can’t emulate inflections in human language and have to prefix every statement with the intended tone is an endlessly entertaining twist, just different enough from HK-47′s declaratives in Knights of the Old Republic not to retread the same jokes. [HOPEFUL] Having one as a permanent member of your team would be great both for comic relief, and as a starting point to discover more about their race. [REFLECTIVE] And their elephantine shape would just be fun to see loping about the Normandy.

14. Female Shepard on the box

Unless you want to have lips thicker than your wrists and talk like a sportscaster, you play as a female Commander Shepard in Mass Effect. It’s not just aesthetic. Jennifer Hale’s voice gives Shepard a different character: battle hardened, world weary and hard edged. And honestly, there’s a desperate shortage of female sci-fi characters who can be decisive and aggressive without lapsing into some ridiculous Bitch Archetype.

Wait, who's that guy?

I realise BioWare will never do this – for some reason 80% of gamers want to look like a vacant Calvin Klein model with a buzzcut, so he’s the posterboy. But it’s always worth asking for more than you realistically expect to get.

Speaking of which…

15. Tali’s face

Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

If you could force all game designers to obey ten simple rules, what would they be? We’re looking for rules that would truly make games better, and preferably ones that are viable. “Thou shalt make your game free” might be nice at first, but we’d lose some great developers before long. Let us know in the comments, and grab the mag to see why we chose ours.

Yes, that's me pretending to be Moses.

I’ve just found the largest and thickest forest I’ve ever seen, and I’m desperately resisting the urge to set fire to it.

World 10, deaths 9

I don’t, in the end. Burn the forest down. I wander through it appreciatively until I reach the coast, then remember I need wood and hack down sixteen trees. From these I fashion a boat, and then I’m back where I most like to be: on the open ocean.

For eight days I’ve been following my compass, a device made from redstone and steel that always points to the exact spot that you arrived into the world. I came back from hell miles and miles from home, since distances there are magnified in this world, so I’ve been relying on that needle to guide me to the only place I know. And as I sail merrily along, the needle suddenly changes. Dramatically.

Dramatically, to me, is about 45 degrees – when you’re walking painstaking mile after painstaking mile, one degree off could be disastrous. More to the point, if it was correct before and wrong now, it’s going to be virtually impossible to estimate the correct direction. I could keep my boat going roughly the same way it already was, but every time I hit an obstacle it’s going to get harder to get back to that bearing again.

So I don’t really have a choice – I’ve got to follow the needle. I steer my boat around and head towards a river delta, then stop. Whoa, what is that?

Floating islands! Among my favourite geometry errors! It’s tempting to build my way up to them, but when I’ve done that in the past, I’m disappointed to realise that I’ve unwittingly turned them into non-floating islands in the process, and the thrill is gone. I am not a clever man.

I disembark anyway – I can’t get much further in my new direction by water. On land, I walk until it gets dark, then keep walking until I’m actually in mortal danger. That happens pretty quickly – two skeleton archers turn up and I glimpse a Creeper, so I dash for the nearest cliff face and bury myself inside.

As soon as I block up the entrance behind me, it feels strangely familiar. Seems like only yesterday I was hiding in a 1×2 hole without the faintest idea of what was growling outside. Actually it doesn’t – it seems like freaking ages ago. I’ve been to hell and back since then. I’ve walked miles – and not just the eventful miles I’ve written about. Long, lonely miles between those, with nothing to report.

So I’m not going to let the dark stop me. But after last night’s near death experience, I’m also not going to brave the outside world. For the first time since coming back from hell, I do what I should have been doing every night: tunneling.

When I hit caves, I brick them up. When I hit metal, I don’t dig it out. And when I get bored, I dig up and check for daylight. Eventually I find it, and clamber out.

During the next day’s walk, I spend a lot of time thinking about cake. This is one of the days I’m writing about, so imagine the ones I skipped.

I think cake needs wheat, for the flour, but I have everything else: buckets to milk cows with, sugar cane for taste. I ask Graham how you get wheat, and he teaches me: basically, hit the ground with a hoe. From then on, I bound across the world smacking my hoe against the ground faster than a pimp on a pogo stick, hoovering up the wheat seeds that pop out.

On one of the rare occasions that I look up from my drive-by farming, I see fire. More mystery fire? Or is this the one I started before I left for hell – am I finally home?

As I get closer, still half-heartedly hoeing, I see the real cause: there’s a small lava lake here. It probably just set fire to some livestock who then wandered into a tree. I’m actually a little relieved that I’m not the only thing burning this world to the ground.

So I get back to farming for about twenty seconds. That’s when I look up and see something else – water, glowing, in the sky. That’s my beacon. That’s the bay I arrived in. That’s my portal to hell. I am home.

I’m home! The only way the sight of this place could be more magical is if I’d arrived at night. I’m bounding deliriously towards it when I realise the sun is actually setting. I stop. I’m not in any hurry, I could just…

I turn around and walk in the opposite direction for two and a half minutes, just until it gets dark, then go back.

It’s my beacon! Glowing in the night sky! There is no way this could be any more magical – particularly since it’s in no way contrived! Yaaay!

The first thing I do is hop my inadequate barricade and dig through my storage chest, finally offloading the spoils of the weird lands I’ve seen, and snatching back a few much-missed tools (my gold watch!).

Which is when I hear the hiss.

Next: The Final Entry – Cake or Death

I’m swimming my way to a new continent, but there’s something sploshing behind me.

World 10, deaths 9

I’ve only been sploshing along for a few seconds when I start to hear another set of sploshes very, very close behind me. On foot, you have a sec to look behind you as you run away, but in water you’re just too slow – I can’t risk it. And soon there are three sets of sploshes. I’m sploshing as fast as I can splosh, but the sploshes are hot on my splosh and I’m honestly not sure I can outsplosh them.

I reach the other coast before they die down, and I spin around the moment I climb up the sandy bank. Nothing, just a dark expanse of water. Wary, I scamper up the hill and suddenly hear a growl.

The growl is not the zombie I see in the distance ahead of me. It’s the three zombies eating my left arm, with a skeleton archer backing them up.

They gnaw through my battered armour incredibly quickly, and when I back away I start taking arrows to the face. Suddenly, I’m terrifyingly close to death. I’ve just about managed to get my bow out, so while wildly backpedalling back to the coast I just fled from, I twang out every arrow I own in a frantic torrent. Another arrow hits me as I let them loose, and I’m on a single heart with almost no armour.

This is it. If mine don’t kill the archer when they land, I won’t survive another hit. I’m spending about 20% of my brain thinking of other ways out of this situation and 80% pondering whether it makes a good end to this diary. This life has gone on for so long that I can’t imagine starting again, and I think the experiment will have run its course when I meet my end.

My arrows don’t kill the first zombie. My arrows don’t kill the second zombie. My arrows kill the third zombie, and my arrows kill the archer. I’m safe. Jesus that was close.

Further up the coast, there are trees but they’re crawling with monsters. I’ve chewed my way through five slabs of raw pork so I’m in peak physical condition, but I still don’t want a fight until I have a fresh set of armour. In the words of Jack Bauer, I don’t have time to smelt. Not at night.

The sun is coming up, but I want to clear this forest quickly. One spider is actually climbing through the treetops, so I sneak up the coast and just set light to a branch. I feel like a terrorist, diving back into the sea after setting the wheels in motion.

Once it’s properly ablaze, I climb back up. A cow watches me, his big eyes seeming to ask, “Why, Tom?”

As the flames ravage the land and the sun rises, I see a speck of red in the leaves and realise there was never a spider there at all – it was a bright red flower, miraculously growing in the tree’s canopy. Some rare, fragile epiphyte, now on fire. I’m probably not going to tell David Attenborough about this.

I’m half wondering if I’m even going to be able to ruin the landscape with deforestation after I’ve ruined it with fire, then I crest another cliff and see the area I’m about to enter.

I’m so setting fire to that.

Next: There might be something wrong with me.

I’ve just escaped a small procession of skeletons who suddenly emerged from a hole in a mountain, and now I’m exploring a weird new land.

World 10, deaths 9

Once I’ve lost the undead archers, who eventually burned to re-death in the sunlight anyway, I find the desert beyond doesn’t last long. Beyond, more weird mountains. I’m halfway up one when I see something that makes me want to get back down immediately. Squids!

These things were added to the game while I was still in hell – not known for its aquatic wildlife – so this is the first time I’ve set eyes on them. And there’s loads. I’ve moderately sure they’re not hostile by default, so I’m keen to get down there and swim with them. They say that’s one of the things you have to do in Minecraft before you die – or one of the things you tend to be doing in Minecraft when you die, I don’t recall which. Let’s go!

I even thought to refill my bucket, meaning I can make a waterfall on the spot and swim down it. Don’t question the physics, it works. It works unless, in a boneheaded attempt to drag your bucket of water to your inventory bar, you drag it out of your inventory and simply hurl it off a cliff. I am doomed never to do this trick successfully.

It takes me so long to get down to the water safely that it’s starting to get dark, so I slap a few torches on the cliff face so I can still see the little guys as I swim with them. Look, they’re cute!

OH GOD THAT’S NOT CUTE.

I’M GETTING OUT.

Now it’s dark, I’m wet, and squids are scary. I should hole up for the night, but the drive to make progress is too strong again. I press on until I hit water, and stop to make a boat. This is when I realise I only have one plank of wood – not even enough to make the workbench I’d make a boat with if I had the wood to make a boat. I look around for trees, and this is when I realise I still am in a desert – just one with a coast. No trees. Screw it, I’ll swim.

I’ve only been sploshing along for a few seconds when I start to hear another set of sploshes very, very close behind me.

Next: Bad things.

I’ve just half choked to death on an avalanche of sand, so today I’m just trying to stay out of trouble.

World 10, deaths 9

My long walk home has taken me through a lot of different regions in this world. I surfaced from the subterranean hell portal on the edge of a huge arctic tundra, with frozen seas, snowy mountains and intriguing caves.

I found a black sheep there, something I’d never seen before, and had to check he wasn’t just dirty.

That region eventually gave way to a weird land of sandy caverns: I kept finding the stuff stuck to ceilings in fragile formations that collapsed when I touched them.

Then it was block world, a land of oddly cuboid mountains with pretty waterfalls and lonely trees.

I tried to survive a night outdoors on one of its cuboid mountains, by just covering the peak with torches and setting light to all the trees – monsters can’t appear in the light. It half worked, but there was a tragic pig casuality.

That was last night. It’s morning now, and I have the precarious job of getting back down.

As I hop from tiny ledge to tiny ledge, digging down when I can see it’s safe, I realise what I really need for situations like this: a bucket. Thanks to the wonders of what we’ll call Notchphysics, water flows slowly when poured, and can be swum in as it does so. So I could lower myself gently down a cliff face in a shaft of water, poking my head out occasionally for air.

I have a bucket, but for some reason it’s empty. I’m sure I remember filling it before going to hell, just in case I ever set myself alight. I honestly wasn’t sure what I’d done with the water until I came to write this post – there it is at the top, washing a clean black sheep. Idiot.

So I had to add a little to the cliff face on my way down – the cobblestone blocks you see here were my stepping stones.

Seconds after reaching the ground I find an interesting cave, and once again waste a whole day’s worth of sunlight exploring the pitch-black depths. It’s a huge complex, rarely branching but always continuing in the same direction – luckily the direction I’m headed anyway. And while it’s full of monsters, I feel like I’ve got the hang of them now. I even kill a pair of Creepers calmly, at range, without setting fire to myself or flooding the cave or accidentally carving a bowl. This bow has changed me.

When I finally emerge, it’s still dark and I’m in another new land. The sun rises as I sneak through a forest, setting fire to trees for light, until I reach a cliff.

Oh, ace.

I’m calling this region Twin Peaks, on account of my rich literary imagination. I found some water in the cave, so I’m able to just sort of pour myself off this cliff, and float safely down to the coast below.

I’m about to move on to the desert beyond, determined to ignore any intriguing caves that might tempt me to waste another day in the dark, when I spot something odd in the left peak. Through a tiny window in the rock, three skeletons are watching me. Here’s a screenshot in which you can’t see it at all.

OK, this I do need to investigate. But it’s not until I get closer that I realise they’re not entirely blocked in.

Thursday: MOVING SWIFTLY ON.

I’ve just escaped a monster-infested coast in a tiny boat, and I’m back on track toward home.

World 10, deaths 9

Boats are the way to travel. Fast, easy, no risk of Creeper attack. I’m enjoying speeding across this ocean so much that when I hit the opposite coast, I veer right to follow the waterway around instead of disembarking.

This world is so watery that I’m able to sail for most of the day, occasionally, shipwrecking myself and rebuilding my boat the other side of a troublesome peninsula. I’m still sailing when the sun goes down, and while I’m safe out on the water, avoiding land gets harder in the dark.

I don’t have a good plan for where I’ll hide for the night, so I skull along the coastline keeping a healthy distance from the Creepers and Skeleton Archers roaming it. I finally moor up at a cliff, deciding I’ll just dig into the rock and avoid the open entirely.

Surprisingly soon, I break into a natural cave. It’s flooded, making a lovely little underground lake – the kind of place I’d probably set up in if I didn’t already have a home to go to. It’s while I’m splashing pointlessly around in this paddling pool that I suddenly notice I have three pieces of string.

While many pensioners could proudly say the same, this has special significance to me – it means I can make a bow. I’ve been stockpiling arrows for most of my life in anticipation of this day, but virtually the only way to get string is to kill spiders, and I didn’t dare tangle with that many of them before I went to hell.

I slap down a workbench and construct my super weapon, the final solution to Creepers and Ghasts. I have 85 arrows for it, so I’m not shy about testing it out. It’s incredible – like a medieval machinegun. After peppering the walls of this cave with arrows, I happily get back to digging.

There’s a lot more rock to get through this time, but after a few minutes I hit air again. And in the gloom ahead, I see the most extraordinary thing: fire.

Lava, I’m used to. Fires I started, I know those well. But this is completely the opposite direction to all the terrible things I’ve done since I came back from hell. Am I home? So soon? What else can cause fire but me?

As I get closer, I recognise the blaze and remember the one other thing that burns: Spawners. Rare, weird devices that churn out one type of creature indefinitely. A rattle and a thwunk confirm that this one spawns Skeleton Archers, the nastiest thing on this plane of existence short of a Creeper. Spawners are found in dungeons, which as I discovered in a previous life, also contain chests of ‘treasure’ – predominantly eggs and string. Yes, this is definitely worth risking my life for.

I’m cautious at first, erecting a barricade with a single hole in it, to let me shoot my new bow at the skeletons without too much risk of retaliation. After killing a few, though, it occurs to me that the whole point of this Spawner thing is that it spawns indefinitely, and this would be a quick way to burn through my arrow supply.

So I break down my wall and charge in sword first. I am perforated. There are about five of the damn things in here, and though I slap down a few torches, they’re grey bones against grey rock and almost impossible to spot in a hurry. Eventually I run away, tail between legs, grilled ham in mouth.

Once I’m healed, I decide to be more strategic. I have a handle on where the chests are in that room now, so I can brick it up and take out chunks of the room just big enough for me to reach through.

It’s a perilous, stupid process, not helped by the fact that I start it with my inventory full and have to frantically throw dented metal trousers and feathers at the skeletons trying to shoot me. But after some time and a lot of damage, I escape with my prize: two leather saddles and some gunpowder. Goddamn it.

After digging through the mountain for a while, I realise I’m going to need to dig up a bit to actually see daylight again. I do my usual staircase pattern to climb as quickly as possible. Soon I hit sand, which means switching to my old diamond spade. I’m careful, spading only sand that’s ahead of me and not directly above. But sand doesn’t play by the normal rules. It sometimes stays hanging in the air until a block next to it is disturbed. I’m not sure exactly how it happens, but I’m spading some sand ahead when suddenly a heap of it falls directly on my head.

Now I’m panicking. When gravel or sand falls on you, you choke on it. I have never survived this. I flail wildly with the spade, but after a few crunches it makes no further sound, suggesting I’m not making any progress to clearing this shit off my face. My health is ticking down and it wasn’t high to begin with, thanks to SaddleQuest. I can’t think what else to try, so I just try to buy time – bringing up the inventory, dragging cooked ham to my toolbar, and scarfing it as fast as I can.

Not knowing what else to do, I try switching to a pickaxe so that I can knock out any rock that might be blocking me from escaping this suffocating sand – I can’t see a damn thing, so it’s hard to know why I can’t seem to move or hit it. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, but after a few frantic blows, suddenly my airways are clear and I can see. The sand is gone, but I have no idea what I did right. And when I look at my hand, I realise I actually pulled out an axe. Whatever I finally hit with it, that can’t have been the best way to do it.

I’ll settle for being alive, though.

Next: A pig is tragically killed.

I’m trying to follow my compass home, but I seem to have surfaced from a spelunking trip in the dead of night, on the most monster-infested coastline I’ve ever seen in the game.

World 10, deaths 9

I could turn back – it’s not far to my hole. But since I made almost no progress home yesterday, I ought to press on through the night. It’ll probably be OK – they’re just skeletons, they have a hard time hitting you if you’re moving.

I skirt around them and try to head homeward, but the route takes me worryingly close to the gloomy forest. Soon there’s a thwuck! and I’m being shot from the dark. I can’t see anything in there, but I also can’t stop to place torches without being hit. Thinking about it, I do know of a way to create a lot of light over a large area with very little effort – I could just start another forest fire.

I snag a leaf with my flint and steel as I scamper by, and soon the whole coastline is ablaze. I lose the skeleton easily, but just as I’m leaving the safe glow of the forest inferno, its light lets me glimpse what’s ahead.

D:

It’s a Creeper. Those I’m still scared of. I double back, immediately hit a burning tree and singe myself. I head left, jump over a small ridge and into a pond below.

D:

Shit! I scramble to get out of the water, but the Creeper gets me before I can get a purchase on the bank. The blast knocks off a chunk of health, but I’m alive. The beach is still crawling with zombies, so I turn back to the burning forest.

D:

Some men just want to watch the world burn. Some Creepers just want to watch those men, creepily, from a forest.

Beach it is.

There is a Creeper here, but luckily he’s not looking my w-

D:

RUN. Run, and think about how that’s going to help. Creepers are almost exactly as fast as me, and when I hit the water and slow down, the Skeletons that roam the coast will be able to hit me with their arrows.

None are in range right now, and the Creeper is a little way back, so I have a few seconds. Quick, what’s the recipe for a boat? I think it’s a V-shape of wood?

D:

Damn it, no, it’s planks not wood. Why do I have so little wood? Wait, that’s not normal wood it’s some kind of hard wood I’ve picked up. I still have loads of normal wood. Build build build!

D:

Dammit, I’ve made a bowl! This is far too small to set sail in! Boats are a U shape of planks, not a V! More planks! More planks!

D:

A boat! Chuck it in the water! GET IN GET IN GET IN. I’m in, I’m looking furiously in the opposite direction of the Creeper, and I’m holding the forward key much, much harder than I need to. I have no idea how close it is, but by what feels like the skin of my teeth I make my spectacular getaway.

Next: I don’t know, I’ll probably find cool places and get in fights.

It’s my first day back in the real world after a gruelling trek through hell, and I’ve come out miles from home. I’ve also managed to set the world on fire, which I’m pretty sure I said I didn’t want to do.

World 10, deaths 9

I’ve been away from this dimension so long they’ve invented a new type of tree.

The real world is excellent. There are colours other than red here, and things freeze over much more often than they do in hell. Once I emerge from the forest fire I created, for example, I find an ocean that did just that:

My compass works here, too. The needle points the way to my spawn point – home – so that’s where I’m heading.

There’s still lava, but it’s much easier to avoid. This little dribble of it has formed a useful safety moat around itself in the ice. Thanks, thermodynamics!

On the other side of the icesea, there’s an intriguing cavern. I should probably be making the most of the daylight and only stopping at places like this when night falls, but I can’t resist.

It goes a long way back, long enough that I have to remember how to make fire happen without setting the world on fire. Torches, that was it. Coal, that’s the stuff. Sticks, I remember these. Light!

I get carried away exploring this huge cave complex. Each new area is pitch dark until I put my torches down, but nothing nasty emerges from the black when I do. And I keep finding metal – something I ran clean out of in hell, making new pickaxes to replace the ones I wore down tunneling my way through it.

By the time I find an opening to the surface, I’m a) 87% iron, b) so far from where I entered that it’s a different climate zone outside, and c) completely in the dark.

I’ve done it exactly wrong – wasted a safe day in the dangerous dark of the underground and emerged just as the bad things come out at night.

But I can still make the best of this – I can hear a spider squeaking nearby. I went to hell with 2 bits of string, and you only need 3 to make a bow: weapon technology I’ve only dreamed of until now.

Rather than emerge from my hole, I decide to tackle this challenge like a hero by waiting in the dark until he comes near enough for me to stab him in the arse.

It works, but after one stabbing he understandably scuttles off. Reluctantly, I climb out of my hovel and am immediately shot in the face by three consecutive arrows.

Ow! The real world has got nastier since I was last here. My armour means the attack isn’t fatal, but ducking and weaving their next shots is too tricky to do while fighting them. Instead I run for the coast, because the sea is the only place I’m sure I won’t encounter anything worse.

Ah.

Friday: The Skeleton Coast.

World 10, deaths 9

I’ve come back from hell, with all my pickaxes exhausted, only to find myself in a cave. A sealed cave. I’m surrounded by solid rock with no tools.

Nice try, real world. But I just came back from hell. Solid stone isn’t going to stop me, I’ll punch it out with my bare hands. I’m getting out of here.

After about five minutes of manly stone-punching it occurs to me I have a full stack of wood in my inventory. I could have used that to make wooden picks, used the stone I mine to make stone picks, and I’d probably be on the surface by now.

Better late than never, I make picks and keep digging. Eventually I hit earth, which I punch just to feel manly again, and a while after that I hit water.

Water! I haven’t seen it in days, and now I’m swimming in it. I’m happy to wade slowly against the current, dig along a little and tunnel up again.

Water! I haven’t seen it in seconds. Some kind of underground river runs all along this area. So I turn right and dig along in a different direction, blocking up the flow to make progress easier.

Water! I dig up. Water! I swim down, find a tiny pocket of air to catch my breath, and dig up one more time. Water!

And this time, through it, I see stars.

The reason this underground river seems so big is that it isn’t underground or a river – I’m under the sea. I’m not confident I can swim back to my air pocket this time, so I just swim up. It’s impossible to tell how far it is to the surface, but I don’t have much choice.

Three bubbles on my air-meter remaining, no sign of the surface.

Two.

One.

Aaaaand I’m drowning. But just as I do, I burst out gasping into the night air.

I’m alive, I’m out, and I have no idea where I am. It takes a second before I can even see land, and several minutes before I reach it.

When I do, I clamber up a grassy bank and find myself on a dark peninsula. I don’t have a torch handy so I make light the way we do it in hell: slap down a block of hellstone and spark it up with flint and steel.

It catches first time, and I find myself in a forest. A forest that is now on fire.

This isn’t good for the Nobel prize in conservationism I was rooting for, but I’m not in any immediate danger, so I spend most of the night just watching the flames spread across this new continent. Before long the sun starts to rise and, perfectly, Minecraft’s gentle piano music kicks in for the first time in ten days.

I’m back in the right plane of existence, and all that’s left now is the long, long walk home.

Next: The long, long walk home.

World 10, deaths 9

I’m making a staircase to the ceiling of hell. Sounds sort of poetic, but it’s actually incredibly dull. I’m going slightly mad from staring at endlessly exploding low-res rocks by the time my pick hits Adminium directly above – the only substance in Minecraft that can never be destroyed. I’m as high as I can go and as safe as I can be, so all that’s left to do in this dimension is dig as far as I can humanly go. In other words, stare at more exploding low-res rocks.

I slap down some hellmud to double-check I’m heading in the right direction – the screaming faces in it point right, so I’m on the right track. And so I dig.

I wouldnt say I go entirely mad during the process, but I’ll say this: it’s a straight tunnel. I dig in one direction, never turning, deviating or encountering any kind of gap, obstacle or danger. But I still have to put mud down to check, three times, that I’m still heading in the same direction.

After hundreds, perhaps a thousand metres, my diamond pick finally snaps. That’s saying something – hell stone only takes one hit to knock out, and diamond picks can take an extraordinary beating. I brought a stack of metal and a stack of wood with me for just this eventuality, so I punch out a little alcove and set up a workshop to make some steel pickaxes.

I make four, and in ten minutes I’ve broken three of them. I’ve gone an extraordinary distance, and it’s not until my last pick is half broken that I think about where I am.

I’m at the roof, both of this world and presumably the other one. When you portal to or from hell, I think your altitude is preserved. I’ve been assuming that you always come out on land, but I don’t actually know that. If I portal through and come out at cloud level, I’m going to be spectacularly screwed. I don’t think that can happen, but there’s no point in taking the risk. I may as well use my remaining pick strength to dig down, and hopefully come out at ground level.

So I build a staircase down. That’s all I’m going to say about that, because it’s every bit as boring as building one up. Up until the point where I fall into a huge cave.

There’s a moment of utter panic before I realise I’m on dry land, I haven’t taken that much fall damage, and this place is actually pretty sweet.

Big, open, lots of adorable rotting zombie pigmen, and there are only a couple of Ghasts. This might actually let me get significantly further before I head back home.

I’m on the second level of this cavern – in the gaps I can see a lava sea and another level of rock down there. That would be ideal for the portal, but I’m going to get as far as I can without digging first.

Pretty soon I reach a ledge that’s blocked by mud. It’s plain sailing on the other side, and I don’t have to use up my last pick to get through this – I can use my shiny diamond spade. I knew that thing was worth the 148.3 million dollars I could have made selling the raw materials instead.

That’s when, predictably, a Ghast attacks. I don’t have a choice, I spade out some mud directly beneath my feet to sink out of sight, before the fireballs scorch off too much health. Once I’m hidden, I dig down through the rock more carefully, in the hope of reaching the ground floor – it uses up precious pickaxe durability, but it’s pretty much life or death now.

When I finally do break through, the ground floor is perfect – wide open spaces, exactly at lava level, with spectacular views of the surrounding cavern that make it a suitably impressive place for an obsidian portal to another dimension.

The only problem is the Ghast. He evidently hadn’t lost track of me through all my digging, and now he’s making the regional fireball count annoyingly high. It’s not hard to survive, but I need some peace to build my portal. So I start to erect a small wall, being careful not to bait him into shooting it to pieces.

Unfortunately a zombie pigman is standing in the way of the next block I urgently need to place, so I bat him out of the way with the rock in my hand.

Wait.

Shit!

No! I didn’t mean it! I’m sorry ugly pigjerk! I forgot you were actually pretty vicious when pissed off, and that pissing one of you off pisses all of you off, and that I was surrounded by you, and that you never, ever stop stabbing me with golden swords until I’m dead. I swear, I thought you were defenceless when I hit you in the face with that rock!

I run backwards as their gold blades swing at me robotically, scarfing ham and slapping down blocks to try and block them. For the most part is just puts them on a pedestal while they stab me, but at last I manage to get two blocks up in quick succession and delay them a second. It gives me a chance to make a proper barrier and then – remembering the Ghast might destroy it at any time – dig frantically downwards with my bare hands.

I don’t know how long I’ve been digging. I blocked the shaft up above me in case the horde of angry pigmen got through the barricade, so I’m in the pitch dark. After a while I start tunneling more sensibly, staircase-style, so I can’t fall into any lava pits. Eventually I hit a small, empty cave, and I’m done. No more digging. I have the space, I’m building it here, and I’m going home.

I only have 14 bocks, the exact number needed to build a proper portal, so I am very, very careful to build it exactly right. You can leave off the corners and it’ll still work, but without a diamond pick I don’t have anything hard enough to chip out a misplaced block, so I could easily screw this up and leave myself stranded in hell forever.

For once, I don’t. I build a perfect portal first time, light the center, and soon I’m facing the wibbly purple interface I stepped through to get here many days ago. I take one last look at the quietest, nicest place I’ve found in this noisy, horrible dimension, then step through.

I’m enclosed in solid rock.

Fuck.

Next: Surfacing.

Click for the full, art-only cover our subscribers get.

It’s Top 100 season. The PC Gamer collective got together and did science on their opinions, and the resulting list produced the best 100 PC games of all time. Last year was the first time an independent game has been PC Gamer UK’s best game of the year, and almost all of our selections looked very different to previous votes.

We’ve also got our definitive review of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, the expansion that has ripped up the most popular virtual world in gaming to make it better. Plus filthy details of CD Projekt’s forthcoming RPG The Witcher 2 – it’s a little classier than its predecessor, but also more explicit. And we have a huge preview of standalone expansion Dawn of War 2: Retribution, including details of the Chaos Space Marine and Imperial Guard campaigns.

There’s loads more, including our review of Battlefield: Bad Company 2: Vietnam, previews of Dungeon Siege 3, Dungeons and The Old Republic, plus the best indie game you’ve never heard of.

You can grab the issue online, postage free, here from Wednesday. If you want it sooner, and regularly, and cheaper, and with a sexier cover, and you like us, you should subscribe here.

World 10, deaths 9

Space! After digging under an entire sea of lava and what felt like most of the rest of hell, I’m finally on the surface in a huge, beautiful cavern of twisting platforms and glooping drips of lava.

And, unfortunately, Ghasts. Every time I mention my trouble with the fireball-spitting jellyfish, someone in the comments tells me to bat them back. It doesn’t sound like the kind of sport you try to learn when you’re playing with a no-respawn rule, but what the hell. My armour’s in surprisingly good nick considering, I’m at full health thanks to my hearty stock of grilled pork, and I’d love to clear this awesome cave out and claim it for myself.

BOOM.

BOOM.

Bat.

BOOM.

I hit one! The other three hit my chest, my face, and my hiding place respectively. I don’t want to play this game any more.

The one fireball I did manage to whack back just shot off uselessly in the wrong direction, so any hope of actually defeating the Ghasts is dead. The route from here to the other side of the cave, in the direction I’m meant to be traveling in, is criss-crossed with tickles of lava running over the rock. Jumping those with fireballs knocking me around just doesn’t seem wise, so I’m going to have to do a little more digging to survive this.

It’s not so bad, actually. I’m just below the surface, so I keep breaking through to fresh air, and by fresh I mean heavy with the stench of mutant zombies made from rotting pig parts. I also keep breaking through to lava, but that’s nearly killed me so many times that it’s now almost routine to rapidly block the flow and have a panic attack.

Eventually I’ve tunneled almost to the other side, and I break out into the open and immediately have to stop myself. I’m over a sea of lava, familiarly enough, but it’s tiny. The ocean is to the left, all I’ve got to cross is a tiny inlet – almost jumping distance.

It’s not jumping distance – I’m not that stupid. I need to build a bridge. The Ghasts are far enough away that they’re not firing at me right now, but I don’t want to risk that happening suddenly, and while I’m standing over a one-block-wide bridge over lava.

It takes me a minute to figure out the logic of the situation – I can build a barrier, but they can destroy it. So I need to build a barrier without them seeing me. They can shoot through hell rock, but they won’t do it if they haven’t spotted me in the first place, however close they roam.

So I jump up, briefly entering the danger zone but not while any are near, and slap one block down in mid-air. When I land, that block is high enough that I can keep building others onto the side of it to form a full screen, blocking line of sight for every Ghast in that direction.

It takes a while, but eventually I’ve got a barrier behind me, and the beginnings of a bridge ahead. As I walk precariously out onto it, I extend the wall alongside me to hide me from that angle too.

For once, everything goes my way. I build all the way to the other shore, not wanting to risk even a tiny hop over molten rock, and I’m safe.

This side is pretty deserted, and it’s about as far as I can go in the direction I’m headed. I’ll have to burrow through this wall to get any further.

In this moment of safety, I realise I’m tired. I’m not surprised that journeying through hell is hard, but I’m exhausted by how relentlessly I’ve had to fight to survive. I’m not even getting very far – I have to be so careful about each threat that I’d probably be making more ground walking at a normal pace in the real world, even though distances are seven times further there.

So instead of digging through this wall, I dig up. I do what I tried to on that island in the lava sea – head for the roof of the cave, and dig into the ceiling until I hit the top of the world. You can’t dig through it, but you can dig along it. There may be lava up there – I assume that’s where all these trickles and falls are coming from – but there won’t be Ghasts, and digging in a straight line would be refreshingly simple. I’ll dig until everything I can dig with has snapped, then I’ll finally slap down these fourteen blocks of obsidian and build a gateway home.

I’m ready for the ‘back’ part of ‘hell and back’.

Next: The journey home.

World 10, deaths 9

So far, my exciting journey to hell has taken me to an island in a sea of lava, then ditched me there with no hope of escape. I’m surrounded by angry flying jellyfish that fire fireballs, sandwiched between those above and lava below.

I have established that I cannot go up. I’m still certain that I cannot go across, under this much fire. So the only hopeless route left to try is down. Maybe the lava level is different beneath me, or there’s some kind of gap in the sea.

After a few minutes of digging, to my amazement, I realise there actually is. I’m well below the sea of lava that surrounds this island, but I’m still digging through gloriously dry and only mildly scalding rock. Is it possible I could actually tunnel my way under the sea?

Once I think I’m low enough, I slam another wodge of hell-mud down. The screaming faces it’s made of always face the same direction, so I’m using them as a compass. Facewards is that way, so I dig left.

I dig for a long time. When what’s above you is probably a sea of molten rock, it’s easy to resist the temptation to surface and find out exactly how far you’ve come.

After hundreds and hundreds of metres of tunneling, I decide I’m probably safe. I’m careful, though, with a block ready in my quickbar to block any lava-leaks soon after I hit them. I build a staircase, slowly, searching for anything other than this blood-coloured hellstone.

At last, I hit mud. Mud! I’ve never been so happy to see your tormented faces swirling around in the filth! I’m probably in a cave or something! I’ll just shovel this out and burst out into the…

Lava. That’s lava, I’d know it anywhere. I have to brick this up now.

It spills out before I can, and my next block doesn’t seal the breach. But after fleeing manically for a few seconds, I have time to turn and brick it off properly.

Fine. Back to digging.

It’s some time before I get up the courage to surface again, and when I do, I hit neither lava nor open air. I’m in a cave.

It’s small, gloomy, semi-detached, and parts of it are actually on fire, but compared to my claustrophobic tunnel it’s a mansion. I trundle through it, find a crack to another cave, and break through into there. More space!

These little pockets of air go on for miles, separated by thin walls or small gaps I have to knock a few blocks off to widen. Until eventually, I break through into one that’s a little larger.

Next: the cavern.

World 10, deaths 9

In case merely being in hell was too pleasant, I am in a pit, in a sea of lava, in hell. I got to this island by walking backwards into thin air and laying a bridge beneath me as I went, but the floating Ghasts of this dimension smashed it with fireballs and knocked me off. The stretch I’ve got to cross to get to dry land is even bigger than the one that nearly killed me, so I poke a hole through the rock to check just how big, and do some risk analysis in my head.

No.

That’s what my calculations come out as. I’m not doing it. It’s a miracle I made it to this halfway house without dying. Now that I know how dangerous bridge-moonwalking actually is with this many flying jellyfish around, the prospect of doing it for even longer with no safe haven between here and dry land is just stupid. I’ll just take one of my, er, other options.

I can’t dig any further down, because I’ll hit the lava sea. I can’t build up, because I’m surrounded by Ghasts and there’s nowhere safe to go on this island. I can’t go across because it would mean bridge moonwalking under fire again.

But wait – maybe I can go up? The nether world is a giant cave, and the roof is made of diggable rock. Building a vertical column beneath your feet is much faster than constructing a bridge as you walk, and once I hit the roof I could dig into it to hide from the Ghasts.

It didn’t sound like history’s sanest idea, but there wasn’t a safer option. I dug around my little pit, hollowing out the small island I was on to gather as much rock as possible to slap down beneath my feet as I went. Then… well, whatever its flaws, my plan wasn’t complex. Jump up, look down, place blocks.

The moment I hit open air, the Ghasts scream. It sounds like a pet shop going through a meatgrinder. By the time I’ve placed five blocks, the first four are obliterated by a fireball smashing into the ground where I started. At ten metres, I lose metres six through nine. I’m fifteen metres up when a shot hits the ground I’m actually standing on, sending me plummeting back to the tenth with a jolt. That’s where I am when the first one hits me in the face.

The whole column is gone now, and it couldn’t save me if it wasn’t – the blast knocks me clean off it and slamming back down to the island. I scramble around the dark rock looking for my hole to hide in, and catch the edge of another blast. I don’t have time to look, I break my cardinal rule and dig directly down. The ground gives way, and I drop into the large cave I dug out when I was collecting rock.

I’m almost dead, and my only hope of escape just got demolished. Hope you guys had a good new year, because I spent it in a pit eating ham and crying.

Next: I take the only way out.

1. A better level up system

If I want to be a good swordsman in Oblivion, the last thing I should do is pick Blade as one of my specialty skills. If I avoid it completely, I can still get better with a sword through practise, and it won’t raise my character level. I can become the greatest swordsman in the world for any given level.

Improving skills with practise is a cornerstone of the Elder Scrolls series, and it has potential. But TES V needs to find a smarter way to blend it with the intentionality of character customisation.

2. Content that doesn’t scale

We need to feel like leveling up makes us more powerful. If the whole world levels up with us, that sense is lost. It also makes the game world too even: nowhere is particularly dangerous in Oblivion because everything is so politely level-appropriate. Morrowind had some level-scaling, but enough fixed danger to feel wild, and enough genuine progression to be compulsive.

3. Vicious combat

At level 1, hitting someone with a warhammer feels great. They just crumple. In the late game, though, you and your enemies have such a vast pool of hitpoints that every fight is a war of attrition, which makes each blow feel meaningless. It needs to be quick, vicious and deadly, whatever level you’re at.

4. A bigger voice cast

Unless one of them is Billy West (Fry, Dr Zoidberg, Professor Farnsworth, Zapp Brannigan, Richard Nixon, Abraham Lincoln, Leo Wong and Humorbot 5.0 in Futurama), you can’t use the same few guys for a world with hundreds of characters. You don’t have to stump up for big names like Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean again – their celebrity didn’t make the game better. Spend that money on a dozen more decent, varied performances.

5. Better faces

Look what you did to Patrick Stewart:

"Hi! Have you seen my parents? They were a raisin and an ape."

6. No face zoom

Regardless of looks, it’s not polite to get up in someone’s grill to quite this extent. Particularly if it involves extending your neck more than three meters.

7. NPCs who know when to shut up

Hey guys, the player’s here! Let’s all make canned smalltalk at the same time! Make sure your reply doesn’t quite relate to what I said, and it’s one he’s heard three times in the last two minutes! Good day!

8. A more exciting magic system

The Destruction school of magic I inderstand. Restoration: yes. Even Illusion – invisibility and whatnot, great. Then Alteration? Spells that alter things? Don’t all spells alter things? And Mysticism – as opposed to scientific magic? Some of the spells are great, but the schools themselves are well overdue for an overhaul to make them more logical, distinct and exciting.

9. Weird places

Forests are great. I have no issues with hills. I love a good lake. But I hope Skyrim has some regions that are just a little off, a little alien, a little non-Tolkeinian. That’s why there are hordes of Morrowind fans who never accepted Oblivion – that and:

10. A proper PC interface

Come on, nerdy stats and inventory lists are what the PC was made for. Let us at ‘em. Oblivion’s interface is capable of listing between THREE and SIX items at a time before you have to scroll. Same goes for the map – if Bethesda have any idea how important a really good map can be to the sense of being in a fantasy world, the size of the damn thing in Oblivion didn’t show it. These aren’t huge issues, but look: modders fixed them in a day or two. If you seriously don’t have anyone who can do that before release, hire those modders.

I know every cross-platform developer loves to say “All three versions are identical,” to wash their hands of the platform wars, but guys: they’re not. One of them is played with a mouse and keyboard from two feet away. Notice this.

11. Varied dungeons

I remember this place from such places as the last place.

We know you can do this now – Fallout 3 is an object lesson in filling an open world with interestingly different locations. Fantasy equivalent of that, please.

12. A main quest without the padding

The Oblivion gates themselves were the least interesting thing in Oblivion, reducing a freeform game to straight combat. So please don’t ask us to fight through six of them in a row – very few players realised that they were even optional. The main quest in TES V should be as long or short as the interestingly different content you can make for it.

13. A villain we hate

"Hold on, I forgot what I'm fighting for. Oh yes, vague malaise."

It’s hard to really get worked up about demons bent on destroying the world. I’d rather they didn’t, but I have nothing against them personally. In Mass Effect, no-one really hated the Reapers. The guy we couldn’t wait to kill was Saren, because our beef was personal. You don’t have to have them kill our father/mother/brother/son/girlfriend – in fact that rarely works. They just have to be a bastard, and one who’s getting away with it.

14. Modding tools

Bethesda have always been good with this – The Elder Scrolls Construction Set is a modder’s dream, and the 24,000 mods it’s led to demonstrates that. Almost every other niggle with Oblivion in this list was eventually addressed by the community. Unless you have a secret formula for making TES V all things to all people, please keep giving people the tools to tinker.

15. Free horse armour

World 10, deaths 9

Right, a sea of lava. I can probably do this. There’s probably a way to do this. This might be doable.

I could turn around, of course, but the whole point of this experiment is to get as far as possible in one direction in the Nether realm, so that I’ll be eight times as far from home when I build a portal back to the real world. If I turn back every time I hit an obstacle – well, it’s hell. It’s made of obstacles.

The only thing I can think, staring out at the lava sea while dodging the occasional Ghast fireball, is that I’ve been in a situation like this before. Trying to avoid Creepers back in the real world, I moonwalked through the air building a one-block bridge beneath me as I went.

Ghast fireballs would make that tricky in this situation – you can’t stop and carefully peer over the edge to place the next block. The fireballs don’t just hurt, they destroy everything in a four metre radius. The bridge itself would be smashed and I’d fall – which, over lava, is frowned upon.

But it’s really the only option. If you do it perfectly, aiming at exactly the right spot and slapping a block down with metronomic precision when the end of your bridge comes into view, you can keep moving continuously as you do this. Not fast, but maybe fast enough to be out of the blast radius when the next Ghast shot hits.

So I have to do it exactly right, and it still might not work. I hate things like that.

I do need some breathing room to get started, so I can’t build this bridge from the surface. I duck back underground and tunnel out to the cliff face, so I can start my bridge out of sight of the Ghasts, in a hopefully fireball-free zone. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was famous for his strict insistence on a fireball-free working environment, as I recall.

Perfect.

OK, well it’s less perfect now.

That’s better.

This is daunting. But there is a clump of land out there – an island of zombie pigmen I can drop down onto when I’m half way, to restock on blocks and hide to let the Ghasts disperse. I gulp, turn around, and walk backwards out over the sea of molten rock.

Donk.

Donk.

Donk. Donk. Donk. Donk. Donkdonkdonkdonk- BOOM.

Donkdonkdonkdonkdonkdonk-BOOM-donkdonk-BOOM-donkdonkdonkdonk-BOOM-donk-BOOM-do-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-donkBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM.

Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. After minutes of being able to see nothing but the lava beneath me and the blocks I’m frantically donking down, I’ve glimpsed the island and it’s in the wrong place. I need to be at least ten metres to the right to land on it when I drop off this bridge. With the storm of Ghast fireballs reaching fever pitch, my bridge in tatters, I have to very, very carefully change direction.

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOMBOOMBOOM Donk. Donk. Donk. Donk. Donkdonkdonkdonk-BOOOOOOOOOM

It hits me. My bridge is obliterated and I’m sent flying into the air, exacly over the lava coast of the island below. But the fireball hit in front of me, sending me backwards. Backwards is the way I want to go. That gives me just enough momentum to reach dry land during my fall, at which point I pummel a hole in the blood-red rock until I’m sitting at the bottom of a dark pit, safe from Ghast eyes.

I dig a chunk out of the rock and light a fire in it to see my surroundings, and immediately burn myself on it.

God damn it.

Next: Crossing the other, bigger lava sea.

If you loved Supreme Commander, you probably didn’t like Supreme Commander 2. And if you didn’t like Supreme Commander, you probably didn’t play Supreme Commander 2. It was an awkwardly pitched sequel: a game that solved the accessibility issues of the first game, bought primarily by people who didn’t want them solved.

Since its release, though, sustained precision fire from the Tech 3 Patch Cannon has knocked SupCom 2 into impressive shape: a large-scale RTS with smart economy management, but easy to play and understand at the basic level. It still dominates PC Gamer’s lunchtimes, every game leads to apocalyptic clashes of plasma-spitting tungsten monstrosities, and it’s become my favourite title of 2010.

Not that I’m suggesting anyone play the campaign: don’t. Play a one-off game against the Easy AI to get started. Then get some friends in and play the way we do in the office: cooperatively. Our last big game was six PC Gamer writers versus two top-level AIs with massive resource bonuses, and it got a little out of hand.

Playing field

The map is Desert Canyon, a huge dust bowl surrounded by tall mesas with mass points on top of them for anyone with jetpacks, transports or teleporters. The outer edges are a forest of these, while the centre is a huge open expanse.

At the top of the map, we have the two Cheating AIs. They produce resources 200% faster than us, their units build twice as fast, and they level up in combat at a ridiculous rate. Below them, clockwise around the dust bowl, we have: Tim, who doesn’t play much SupCom but has joined in to try the DLC. Rich, who plays Illuminate and likes to teleport giant humanoid robots across the map. Graham, who builds meticulously neat, self-sufficient bases, then masses artillery and planes. Me, a Cybran obsessed with making my experimentals invincible with hundreds of mobile shields. Tom Senior, who likes to spread his base out and make outposts. And Jaz, who makes land units then ferries them about in air transports.

Damage control

The game starts, and within a few minutes Tim and Jaz are under attack. They’re closest to the AIs, and the onslaught is tough to defend. Jaz builds waddling Harvog assault bots, loads them into large transports, then uses the new Illuminate air teleport ability to zap them directly into the enemy base. I don’t have time to check up on how that works out, but pretty soon Jaz’s commander goes nuclear and his whole base is levelled, so I’m guessing not well. He’s out, and Tom Senior is next in line.

Tim takes heavy damage too, but isn’t quite eliminated: the AI smash through his base, but leave a few buildings standing and just move on, down towards Graham. They often assign low priority to finishing you off: once they’re sure you can’t win, they won’t risk damaging their units more than they have to by attacking your last defensive positions. Tim stomps his commander down to Rich’s base and hides among the power generators, using his remaining mass to build artillery.

Rich himself gets to work on Colossi: vast bipedal deathbots that fire white-hot lasers from their faces. Meanwhile, Graham is building enough energy generators – in a perfect grid – that he’ll never need to leave his base. Converting energy to mass is inefficient, as Einstein pointed out, but it means avoiding the risk of expanding.

From the moment the game starts, everything I do is geared towards building a Monkeylord as soon as humanly possible. It’s a laser death hose on spider legs, and it’s the size of a city block. It’s also the toughest unit SupCom 2 has ever seen, and the idea of one of those surrounded by Adaptor shields makes me giddy.

This is why I particularly love Supreme Commander 2 in co-op. To me, making big land units and lots of little shield generators seems like the obvious way to play. To Graham, never leaving his base seems natural. Rich just likes one unit so much he’s going to build it forever. So you have this huge map with every player working towards their own masterpiece of base construction and unit composition. They’re not scouting the enemy and then mechanically building the counter to whatever they see – it’s much more about personal preference and the way you like to fight.

Deadly swarm

Tom Senior is in trouble – tanks, missile launchers and mobile artillery are swarming his Megalith outpost. The Megaliths themselves are doing their best with their long-range lasers, but he’s losing buildings now. Luckily, my Monkeylord is done.

This is how you want to try out a unit: against a swarming field of tanks. Its giant laser pops them like bubblewrap, so fast he could write his name in their ranks if his name was a bit shorter than ‘Monkeylord’. Soon we’re holding back the hordes reliably enough for me to get my commander down there, and start putting up artillery to pressure the AI’s forward base, built in the remnants of Jaz’s.

On the opposite side of the ravine, Rich’s Colossi are trudging into the Space Temple: a giant spire that can teleport any unit extraordinary distances across the map. They’re jumping almost all the way to the enemy base, and coming face-to-face with SupCom 2’s other vast humanoid killing machines: King Kriptors. The Kriptors fire scorching flame from their fists, the Colossi fire their facelasers, and it’s almost as if titanic things are in some way clashing.

Back at Tom’s base, the enemy hordes are getting more serious. Kriptors are showing up, with pet Cybrannosaurus Rexes. They smash up my artillery and almost all of Tom’s base before I can get Soul Ripper gunships out to deal with them. My Monkeylord is nigh invincible, but even he can’t kill units of that size before they blow up whatever they like.

Then, the ultimate disaster strikes us all: the end of lunchbreak. This is bad. At the time, this match wasn’t strictly work-related, but it was far too exciting to abandon. So instead, I dialled it down to the slowest game speed, and we all pressed Alt + Tab and got on with writing things and shouting at games companies. For the rest of the day, the game ran at a glacial pace in the background, our empires running on autopilot while the AI hordes built up around us.

This never used to happen. At launch, a game of SupCom would almost never go over 40 minutes, so it fitted comfortably into a lunchbreak. But Gas Powered have wisely leaned towards larger and larger maps with the content they’ve added, both free and in the paid DLC. Super units such as the Monkeylord are longer-term projects to build, and longer-term challenges to destroy.

When we switched back at the end of the day, the news wasn’t good. Tom, Tim and Jaz had all been eliminated, and Graham’s game had crashed out, blowing up everything he owned. Only Rich and I remained: he with 14 Colossi milling around in his base, I with five Monkeylords clustered in mine. My Commander and original Monkeylord were still alive in the ruins of Tom’s, but as I checked up on them, more enemy experimentals emerged from the fog of war. Oh hell.

Back to base

Five Monkeylords. Six dinosaurs. A Kriptor. Two Megaliths. A hundred tanks. I had my commander top off the Monkeylord’s health, then spent some research points to jumpjet him the hell out of there and back to the relative safety of my base.

Trying to get a better handle on how screwed we were, Rich built an Illuminator: a new structure that can momentarily reveal almost the entire map. It’s an eye-opening overview of the battle as it stands. And when he finally charged and activated it, it revealed a sea of horrors. This vast empty desert was now teeming with robotic death. Uncountable Monkeylords. Hundreds of Kriptors. Fleets of flying fortresses. Dozens of Soul Rippers.

It was pointless to try and fight it all. Our only hope was a single joint strike on one of the AI’s now heavily shielded bases. I unlocked air transports, picked up my Monkeylords and flew them over to Rich’s base. He set his teleporter destination as far as it would go towards the green base, and marched his 14 Colossi into it single file. In about eight minutes – it’s a big map – we were in position. Even with our ridiculous combined force, wading into that base was an explosive slog. I had to back us up with Bomb Bouncers to defend against artillery, and Soul Rippers to deal with the enemy’s endless flying fortresses.

Eventually, we punched through. As Rich’s Colossi finally made it up the central ramp to the base, I flew my Monkeylords up the cliffs on either side to attack his Quantum Disruptor artillery directly. His fully upgraded, shielded, self-repairing base finally crumbled. We’d lost nearly everything, but we’d taken this one base. We’d destroyed one of the commanders. And we’d proved, in theory at least, that we could win.

Then we looked at the enemy forces again, and decided we might be better off dead. Ctrl + K sets anything you’ve selected to selfdestruct in five seconds, so if you’ve selected your buildings, units, engineers and commander all at once, it’s about the only thing more spectacular than the battle we just had. It seemed like a fitting end.

Download the MP3, subscribe, or find our older podcasts here. It may take a little while to pop up in iTunes if you get it that way – something odd going on with our RSS feed lately. Thanks for listening.

World 10, deaths 9

Minecraft is loading the Nether, which is its version of hell. I’m usually impatient with loading screens, but this is one I wouldn’t mind lasting indefinitely. If it’d just crash and dump me back in the real world, that’d be fine too.

But no, it’s cruelly quick, and now I’m in hell. I step out of the portal in a vast cavern, thin lavafalls pouring out of the impossibly high ceiling in the distance, and a handful of zombie pigmen shuffling around in the dark in front of me. They’re harmless, so long as you don’t attack them, and actually a rather good source of grilled pork if give them a friendly nudge into a bonfire.

It is, in other words, the last thing I expected it to be: quiet. No immediate danger, nothing scary in the distance, lots of open space to get my bearings. Exactly what I need, because now I’ve got to pummel the bejesus out of this portal with a diamond pickaxe, so I can take all the blocks with me on my journey across hell. Without them, I’ll have no way back home – only obsidian can be used to make a portal between worlds, and it doesn’t occur naturally anywhere in hell.

It takes a long time. Every block has to be hit dozens and dozens of times before it breaks off and can be picked up, and there are 14 of them. I’ve just chipped off my eighth when there’s an ungodly screech.

Ghasts.

They sound like a kitten with chalkboard teeth trying to eat a hyena made of razorblades. They’re giant jellyfish that float, unreachably high, and spit fireballs down at everything on the ground.

Most of the time, they’re not a huge problem – they fly high enough that you can avoid their projectiles in time so long as you keep moving.

And most of the time, mining obsidian is not a problem – it takes a while, but you’ll get it eventually so long as you don’t move at all.

This presents a dilemma, and it’s the kind of dilemma you have to solve with a fireball on its way to your face. I chose move.

This is when I discover the rock beneath me is not in fact rock, but a sea of screaming faces that stick to my feet in such a way that I can barely move. Shit like this is going in my TripAdvisor review, Nether. Two stars MAX.

I wade through the face-mud with fireballs slamming into it behind me, then finally drop off a ledge onto normal, non-screaming land. I scramble underneath it and consider my lack of options.

There are many – all kinds of lacks, really. I can’t go back to the portal – there’s no hope of chipping any more obsidian off with the Ghast there. I can’t wait it out – more Ghasts are as likely to come as this one is to leave. I can’t go on without the obsidian – you can cut corners to make a portal with 10 blocks instead of 14, but it leaves you exactly as boned if you only have 8.

The only way to get back to the portal without getting torched is under ground. I can dig through the screaming face-mud until I tunnel underneath the last few chunks of the portal, and chip it out from below.

It’s a good idea, but one which very quickly leads to me bursting up through the mud in the worst possible place: directly beneath the Ghast, and nowhere near my portal.

I bolt back down as the fireball hits above. OK, I saw it. It’s about three blocks this way, then five that way, then a couple up and whunk! I’ve struck obsidian. Congratulations, Tom, you’ve discovered the thing you just came out of.

Once I’ve mined it all out – I get all 14 blocks just in case I screw something up later – I’m ready to set off. My quest is to just walk in one direction, as far as my tools will take me, then portal back to the real world. Distances travelled in the Nether take you 8 times further in the real world, so when I get back I should be absolutely miles away from home. I’ll then trek all the way back, with a compass to guide me.

The only thing I have to decide now is which direction to head. I don’t want to have any risk of getting confused and doubling back on myself, so I orient myself with the only constant in this world: screaming facemud. If I look directly down at a block of it, and move so the faces are the right way up, the direction my portal was facing when I came through is left. That’s where I’ll head.

Oh.

Next: Crossing the lava sea.

Minecraft is about to go up in price, so today is your last chance to buy it for €10. Obviously I recommend it. When it officially reaches beta today, the main niggles with the mutliplayer will be gone and the price will be €15.

World 10, deaths 9

I’ve found four blocks of diamond, and you only need three for a pickaxe. The only thing I know how to make with a single diamond is a diamond spade, so I make a diamond spade. It would have been sensible to hang on to it until I find more, for a second pick, but I just really like the functional opulence of a diamond spade.

Despite kicking myself yesterday, the mistake I made with the portal didn’t cost me much. It meant I needed this diamond pick to correct it, but I would have needed it anyway: my plan is to go through a portal to hell, then dismantle that portal on the other side and rebuild it miles away to get back home.

After an eternity of chipping away at it, the erroneous block pops, and I can get on with the satisfying business of casting the rest of the portal frame. It’s done before mid day – all I’d need to do is set it alight with some flint and steel, and the portal to hell would spark into life.

But I’m not ready.

I need ham. It’s the best way to restore health, and I’m likely to lose a lot of it over there. I have to kill a dozen pigs, two dozen, and roast their delicious meat to maximise its restorative taste.

So I do. But I’m not ready.

Night has fallen, and the beacon is bothering me. I improved the tower that marks my home by pouring a few buckets of water off it, but it’s not quite right. I’m going to arrive back in the real world miles and miles from home, I want to be able to see it when I make it back. I want a star-shaped wooden platform, with torches behind the waterfall.

So I do it. But I’m not ready.

I need redstone. I’ll have to build a compass to find my way back here when I return to the real world, and I’ve heard it takes redstone. I’ve found some, but it’s in my storage locker. I should grab that first.

So I do. But I’m still not ready.

Wood! What about wood? There’s no wood in hell. I should stock up on wood.

I stock up on wood. I stock up on stone. I stock up on metal. I even take some sand. Then I fret that the sand and wood is taking too much potential ham-space, and ditch it. Then I stock up on water. Then I wonder if I should go looking for more diamond to make armour with. Then I wonder if my beacon is tall enough. Then I wonder if I have enough pickaxes.

Then I stop being such a dithering prick and set light to the portal.

It bwoops into life, swirling purple and glowing softly in the night air.

I’m almost ready. The only thing wrong with this scene is that it doesn’t feel very dramatic. I’m going to hell, there should be some spectacle here.

I turn around and look at the closest tree for a while, then set fire to it. It starts a forest fire that rages across the hill behind me, enclosing the portal between a crescent of fire and the water of the bay.

OK, I’m ready.

On Wednesday:

Day 1, 6AM

Discovery is what I was hoping for. I think one of the close runners up, Containment, would probably have led to a more interesting selection of games, but I had a clearer idea of what I’d do for Discovery. I knew if this one ended up being picked, I would have to make something involving randomised content. That’s what makes Spelunky so exciting to play, and that’s probably the greatest game about discovery I’ve ever played.

Unfortunately I’m not Derek Yu, and I only have 42 hours, and I’m wasting time writing a blog. So my game will be a little less ambitious.

To fit the theme, I feel like the pleasure of the game has to have something to do with the discovering. And the only thing gamers truly and instinctively care about is stuff that benefits them in the game. So not only does it have to be the content rather than just the scenery that is randomised, the unique elements of that content have to feed back into character progression in some way.

My plan currently is for something top down, where you direct your character – probably a robot – around a large landscape with the mouse, encountering enemies with randomised stats. Destroying them will let you salvage some of their traits, so a very tough enemy would boost your hitpoints when you destroy it.

Someone on the Ludum Dare site joked that everyone should not only have to stick to the chosen theme, but also combine it with Christmas. So if I can draw it in any meaningful way, I’ll set my game in the snow.

Day 1, 8AM

I present to you, SnowBot! So called because the only things I have made for it so far are some snow and a robot.

It is the ugliest game ever made, but it works – the robot chases your cursor while you hold the mouse button, and decelerates when you release it.

Obviously with 48 hours to make something, you start to look at what really takes time, and the answer is invariably ‘tweaking’. So I made a pact with myself: no tweaking till the game is virtually done: of graphics, movement, controls, anything. I’m allowed to change things once or twice to get them functional, then they’re set in stone until the rest of the thing is in place.

I have two days, so my plan is to make the game in one. That way I can spend the second day making it good, or making up for how badly I failed to meet this ridiculous deadline on the first. My game is going to be crude and ugly no matter what, so I’m happy to make it even cruder and uglier to give myself some time to balance it and make it more fun.

In my head, this meant getting a character moving around the world in the morning, then making content in the afternoon. Turns out the first part only really took an hour, two with all the faffing with all the blogging and setting up screen captures for the time-lapse video I’m hoping to make of this process.

So next up is putting an enemy in the world, and letting the two shoot each other. Video games.

Day 1, 1PM

Two surprising things have happened: firstly, I’ve made a game that works already. There’s no point in playing it yet, since it does nothing interesting, but that was all I hoped to achieve today. This’ll give me time to make it interesting today, and make it good tomorrow.

Secondly, now that I’ve made enough of it to see what it’s going to be like, I realise it has almost nothing to do with the theme. The angry deathbots you meet aren’t randomised yet, but even once they are I think running into them is just going to feel like encountering enemies in an arena. It technically is discovery, but because they’re simply off-screen rather than visibly obfuscated, it’s not going to feel like it.

I’m not going to worry about that too much yet – my priority order is to make it interesting, then make it good, then make it fit the theme. Here’s what it looks like now:

The blue circles are shields: I didn’t fancy putting a bunch of work in just to recreate the conventional hitpoint bar or health meter on your interface, so I went for something more visual and in-fiction. Right now each shield takes one hit, but as you can see that makes you impractically large for not much health, so I’ll probably tighten their size and thickness before I’m done, and perhaps make them come back online a while after they’re taken out.

The enemy will have these as well, and they’re one of the things that’ll be randomised, so it’ll be very obvious when you’re facing something tough. Not sure if I’ll also have big hulls – that’d mean introducing an armour system as well, which may defeat the point of the shields.

I do plan to have large engines/tracks for fast bots, and a large turret or power core of some kind for things with a lot of firepower. Basically, if I can have at least three functionally important metrics that enemies can vary in, and make each one visually readable at a glance without any interface, I’ll be close to what I want.

Challenges right now:

• You’re in a fairly large open field of snow, and I’m not sure where to take the environments from there. I’d love it to be infinite but that’s technically tricky. I’d also love some randomly placed obstacles, but I’m wary of creating much art work for myself – I want time to redo the actual robots.
• My control method didn’t work: holding the mouse button to make your bot chase it was fun, but it meant you’d never be able to fire in one direction while moving in another. I’ve changed it to Cannon Fodder controls – click to move, right click to shoot somewhere else while you’re on your way. It doesn’t feel quite right with current movement speed and screen size – you’re at your destination before you’ve got more than a couple of shots off. May rethink.
• Random enemy movement was trickier than I thought. I’ve done it, but they’re rather geriatric: quivering with indecision when deciding where to move. I’ve realised the way to make it look better is have them pick an arbitrary direction, turn, then move. But that’s also the way every other game does it, so I’m still wondering if there’s a more interesting way.

Title ideas: Sighs of the Snowbots? Snowbot Snores?

Day 1, 11PM: Almost Fun

The screenshot I’m about to show you won’t look spectacularly different to the one earlier – I still haven’t fixed the horrible protagonist bot or the laughable kid’s snow effect. But to play, it’s already close to what the finished game will be.

The main thing is randomised enemies, with visually apparent stats. Randomisation will be part of the Discovery element, and also just the fun of the game: it’s never going to be a great shooter, but it’s already kind of cool to blunder into a triple-barreled deathbot with hyper speed and discover a whole new echelon of boned.

The visual apparency – representing every stat in the shape of the enemy rather than a stats readout – is part of that too. It gives your read on the enemies immediacy, and that’s a catalyst for fun. I need all of those I can get. Hopefully you can tell which one of these enemies has more firepower, and which one is better protected.

What you can’t see, and what you probably won’t even find if you play it, is the ridiculous amount of fun I’m having with it.

Most of this afternoon was spent thrashing out the enemy movement to be more convincing and dangerous, and all of this evening was spent drawing just a few bad sprites – it takes me actual time to get pixel art to the dismal level of quality you see here.

Then in less than half an hour, I did the coding legwork to implement every chunk of art into modularly assembled, dynamically scaled, randomised deathbots. And the game’s gone from being a tame arena where I can always win through knowing the tricks, to a terrifying robot safari where things with crazy muzzle velocities can also outrun me, and I see combinations I hadn’t pictured.

It’s not exactly good, yet, but it’s an amazing thrill to see that kind of stuff come to life from a few simple maths statements. I can pretty much stomach art work if it’s for a game that can stretch and recombine it to endless different purposes.

I’ve also had an idea for how to relate the game more obviously to the Discovery theme. It’s fun to try and creep up on these bots when they’re not looking. They turn round if you shoot them, to prevent the game being too easy, but I’m going to make it so that you can subtly scan them if you get up close and undetected.

If they have a module you’ve never used before, you’ll gain the ability to salvage it if you later kill the bot. And if they don’t, you’ll be able to read their robo-thoughts. Not entirely sure what I’m going to do with that, but even if it’s just an array of pointless introspection it should be fun to write.

Day 2, 1PM: Feature Complete

Which is to say: not graphics or content complete. So brace yourself for a painfully similar screenshot:

But the two tiny changes you do see represent pretty much everything else I needed to get done for the game to make sense: you can now scan enemies when they’re not looking to steal the details of their weapons, then use that info to rebuild their guns, shields and engines when they’re dead.

I’m happy I’ve got to this point, but there’s a lot more to do. I have a choice of a few fairly major areas to work on, and I’ll list them in my current priority order:

• Player guidance: Even in an ultra quick experimental game I don’t think this step is remotely skippable. If I don’t get a few basic tutorial messages in to explain how to play the game, no amount of readmes will ever make up for it.
• Balance: Bots of random strength spawn in random positions. So that kinda sucks. I just need a few lines of code to make weaker ones spawn near the player, tougher ones further away, and to make certain configurations excitingly rare. This’ll have a big effect on how much fun it is to play.
• Environment: I’d like to add water around the edges to make this an island, and possibly a fortress wall at the top.
• Objective: Right now there’s no long term objective. Ideally I’d like to have you scanning and stealing parts until you’re strong enough to assualt a fortified wall to the north and escape.
• Graphics: I must at least make some proper plasma blasts, and ideally add explosion effects and a better player bot. I also need to take one more go at making snow look less awful – I’d like to make it grainy and randomise the ‘dunes’ a bit.
• Extra feature: scale. I’d really like to have double- and half-size bots roaming around, with accordingly different toughness and speed.

The reason graphics is so low is that the time it takes is such a wildcard – sometimes I get something bad right away, other times it takes me hours to make something bad.

Let me know if you think my priority order is nuts.

Current title idea: Scanno Domini. Other scan puns welcome.

Day 2, 1:55AM

Jeeesus. Five minutes to go, and my game is zipped up and submitted. Grab it here. Feels strange and amazing to be ‘done’ with something – I’ve tinkered around with games for months without getting to a point I’m happy with. And while there are a few items not grayed out on my Scanno to do list, I did much more than I ever thought I could in two days. And I actually have fun playing the result.

Rather embarrassed about Gunpoint now. It could probably be done in a week.

The finished game is pretty much what I planned: a top-down shooter with randomised enemies, whose randomised bits you can steal for yourself. I didn’t end up scaling much dynamically, except the gun sizes. I couldn’t find a way to make it look right in the time, so it was quicker – even for me – to draw a few engine and weapon types. The differences are more immediately interesting, too – “Ooh, blue plasma?”

Number one thing that went right was definitely time management. I had two days, so I picked something I thought I might just about be able to do in one. It was done in one and a half, so I had that crucial half day to take a working concept, find the fun, and make the game about that.

I don’t know if I actually made it fun, but it’s so much closer than it would have been if I’d picked a more ambitious idea and only just got the basics hammered out. This is my first finished game, and given the time limit I thought I’d end up with something a lot more half-baked.

It is buggy, and its tutorial is just gibberish, but in an ideal circumstance it’s conceivable that it could convey to you what you need to know. Oh, except that you have to press R to restart.

Thing that went least well was trouble shooting. I’m rarely good at this, but on the scanning ray in particular I just went out of my mind. It’s still buggy – won’t always scan everything there is to scan on your first scan – and I may have messed up other things in the last minute fixes.

I said I was going to leave graphics till last, but in the end I decided it was worth a stab at them if I gave myself a hard time limit. I basically managed to turn the visuals from offensively ugly to merely very crude. I’m OK with crude. There’s just a particular look to very bad graphics that’s not endearing or ignorable or in any way OK, and I had to try to avoid that.

I also took time to put in sounds for almost everything important, and I’m really glad I did. I knew they’d be important to the feel, but I didn’t quite appreciate how important the feel would be to the overall thing. It’s not an art game, it’s not very brave or inventive, so it really needs to have some decent ‘pew pew!’s in.

I have exactly no time tomorrow to polish this up and also submit it to the jam, the less strict contest that gives an extra day. Which is a shame, because it needs a few bandages to hold it together properly, and a few basic human rights like a choice of resolutions. I will do those things, just not right away. For now, I am done. Thanks for reading.

World 10, deaths 9

I’m determined not to make any mistakes when building my portal to hell. I built dozens of these in a preview build of the Halloween Update to write about it for this site, and even once I’d figured out the exact dimensions the portal needed to be, I screwed up repeatedly. The beaches of my test world were littered with irregular obsidian ruins, aborted attempts that were going to be too short, too narrow, or had their aperture obstructed by a cackhandedly placed block.

That was in a version of the game that starts you with 64 blocks of free obsidian every time you spawn. Now I’m in a world where I have to cast every square of the stuff by hauling lava up from the center of the Earth, and flash-cooling it with sea water to form a volcanic rock so hard that nothing I have can break it. Doing that in the wrong place would be a disaster.

You see where this is going.

I’m have so little faith in my ability to get this basic 2×3 doorway correct that I actually build a 2×3 placeholder rectangle of stone, to physically prevent me ever placing a block where empty space should be. Then I build a small mould around the base of the left vertical, fill it with lava, then splash water on it. Obsidian! And it’s definitely in the right place.

I build up slowly, making a little staircase to let me get to the top of the portal to cast it, and build a wide lava trough for the top piece. It’s easy to get this exactly right, because I’ve got the stone placeholder below to guide me: the opening has to be 2 blocks wide, so the top piece has to be four blocks wide. I splash water over all four blocks and make a perfect top bar.

See it yet?

I didn’t, until I stepped back to admire my work so far. Perfect vertical. Perfect top bar. Now to do the last… Ah. I see it now.

I’m making obsidian by pouring lava into a mould and pouring water over it so it solidifies. The word ‘pouring’ comes up twice in that sentence. To pour stuff into a place, you need the place above it to be empty. The top bar is done. There’s no way to fill in the block below it to make the right side of the portal.

OK. OK. It’s OK. Let’s look on the positive side. A new quest! The quest to find some goddamn diamond so I can make a diamond goddamn pickaxe to fix this utter goddamn disaster.

My main caves are pretty much spelunked out now, but I keep seeing an interestingly dark hole across the bay. It’s time to investigate.

The dark-looking hole is indeed dark, so that clears that up. I creep through slapping torches on the walls then running away like a tiny girl in case I find anything scary. This is what I have become.

I have to dig through a few thin barriers, but other than that this cave network is all natural – and it goes a long way down. Because torches don’t light anything up until you place them, I’m forever walking to the very edge of what I can see to place one, meaning I have no idea what’s directly in front of me. For example, here’s what I see before I place a torch:

Scary darkness. But once I put a torch down, I can see that it’s just:

OH GOD.

Luckily, I discover after three minutes of tactical standing still, this particular Creeper is too stupid to move. I back slowly away, brick him up, and take the other route down.

Immediately, there’s the familiar clatter of bones, and I brace myself for a hail of arrows from some invisibly grey skeleton I will never find before he kills me. Then there’s a pop, and it stops. I round the corner to see this:

An arrow, lying tellingly next to some lava, and oh yes: diamond.

Next: Everything goes better than expected.

World 10, deaths 9

Shit. There’s a Creeper guarding my stuff, directly between me and the sweet sweet lava I need to finish my portal to hell.

In the ongoing war between me and the violently exploding Creepers, the score is three nil: they’ve killed me every time I’ve tangled with them. So even with some armour, I’m not betting the whole world this guy won’t kill me the second I drop down there.

I need some way of killing him from up here, or shooing him off so I can make a trap or brick him up in a corner. I think bows are a thing, but they’re not a thing I have or know how to make. There’s no chance he’ll wander off on his own – the second I peered over the edge he looked up at me with his horrified expression, and has been staring at me ever since.

What else do I have? A sword, some gravel, a bucket of water… a bucket of water! The deadliest weapon of all! I’ll make a waterfall and wash him away. In fact, there’s a pool of lava a way behind him, I might even be able to wash him into that.

He has the saddest face, as the current drags him away from me and I quickly lay down a barrier in case he can overpower it. He can’t, he just thrashes armlessly as he stares miserably into my eyes, drifting slowly backwards.

He’s not going to reach the lava, though, and soon he wiggles his way out of the stream and hops up to the barrier to stare at me some more. I look around the safe zone I’ve created, spot some lava and scoop it up in my empty bucket.

Sorry dude. If you weren’t already wearing your dismayed face, I’d suggest you put it on.

He wilts with a hiss in the magma, I scoop it back up, take down the wall, and get back to spelunking.

I only need one more trip-worth of lava to finish my portal, but I also want to find some more metal to make a complete set of armour before I go to hell.

I’d like to say “I’m not taking any chances,” but I’m taking a huge chance – I’m going to hell. There isn’t really a safe way to do it, but I’m certainly going to stock up before I leave.

Before long, I have enough metal to turn myself into a walking tin can, and I’m on my way to being ready.

Just so long as I don’t fuck up my-

Next: Yep, I’ve fucked up my portal.

The change list is over 7,000 words long, includes 350 separate changes, and alters things as basic as what character attributes like ‘Strength’ actually do. If it does what it sets out to, this will be a new game – consider it Elemental’s second stab at a launch. We’ll be having a thorough play of it and letting you know what we think soon. Elemental players should see the patch in their Impulse games list, check for updates if not.

In October, Stardock announced that those who bought the game in the first couple of months after launch would get the first two expansions free. As I said in my Elemental review, I actually had fun with the game despite its problems. I can’t wait to dive back into it over Christmas and see if it’s become the game it always hinted at.

Download the MP3, subscribe, or find our older podcasts here.

To help explain what we’re talking about a bit, Nidhogg creator Messhof was kind enough to let us post a video of Graham and I playing it. It’s embedded below.

It works something like a two-player version of the original Prince of Persia – whoever is killed in the initial swordfight takes on the role of a guard, trying to stop the other player progressing. He respawns endlessly until he succeeds in killing the other player, at which point their roles reverse and the former guard can now progress in the opposite direction. The swordplay – largely thanks to the ability to simply throw yours at the enemy – is hilarious.

Thanks, redditor NukaColaJunkie.

World 10, deaths 9

I have discovered shall we say ‘some’ obsidian. It’s about six times as much as I need to build a portal to hell. But it’s not proving easy to extract – it takes about five thousand pummelings of my steel pickaxe, then pops into nothingness. Also there’s lava underneath.

I’m pretty sure I need a diamond pickaxe, but even if I knew where to get one, it would only succeed in ejecting a cube of obsidian into the lava below.

I feel like there’s a way to use science here.

This stuff formed when a waterfall hit a lava lake. Since I can pick both substances up with buckets, there’s no good reason I can’t make my own series of single-block lava lakes and pour my own series of mini waterfalls onto them. In other words, I could cast a portal rather than having to mine the materials for one.

I want to make my portal at the bay above ground, so I make a few buckets and load up on lava. Water’s not going to be a problem. It’ll take a few trips, but that’s OK – I have lots more of this cave complex to explore on the way. Really, the only problem would be if the outside world turned out to be completely swarming with Creepers and then some of them followed me back down when I ran away and oh God.

So I’m not going that way. But it’s day time, I do want to get back to the surface before it gets dark again. I dig up in the opposite direction, a separate staircase branching off from the main one near the surface.

I come out in a forest, far from the- oh no there’s one. Two. This is getting ridiculous. Instead of running back down, I just build up: I’ve got hundreds of blocks of cobblestone from my mining, and very quickly I’m completely out of the blast radius of any possible Creeper explosions. In fact, I can see my beacon in the bay from here. Hmm. What if I do this?

It’s ridiculous, and ugly in a whole new sense of the word, but it does get me back to the bay. The Creepers there are nowhere to be found, so I build a rudimentary mould where I want the first bit of my portal, and start doing science to lava.

Experiment 1: Pour in lava, then pour in water. Result: water. The lava vanishes completely. Hmm.

Experiment 2: Pour in water, then pour in lava. Result: lava. The water vanishes completely.

Experiment 3: Perhaps if I pour both onto opposite sides of the mould, they’ll flow in and meet at the same time? Result: they do, there’s a loud hiss, and they produce cobblestone. The most common and useless block in the world.

Experiment 4: Fill mould with lava directly, then pour water on the side of the mould. Result: the runoff water hits the lava, and hiss! Obsidian!

By this stage it’s actually getting pretty late, so I dig some holes in the sand to store the rest of the lava and head back down.

When I get to my workbench and furnace, about halfway down, I find I have an old friend waiting for me.

On Wednesday: facing the Creeper problem.

The controversy around Gamebryo can be summarised as: good at trees, crap at faces. It made Oblivion’s landscapes gorgeous, but led to some ugly people and odd behaviour. The way it transitioned between low and high detail scenery as you moved through the world also caused some blurry textures and suddenly appearing objects on some machines.

Since Bethesda’s parent company ZeniMax now owns id Software, the second most popular theory was that Skyrim might use id Tech 5, the engine developed for their next game Rage. Apparently not – “all new” suggests this is one developed specifically for Skyrim, or at least not seen in other games yet. Here’s Nick’s Tweet.

 
Well, I think I know what I’ll be watching on a loop for the next eleven months.

World 10, deaths 9

To get to hell I need an obsidian portal, and I’ve finally found obsidian. But it’s immediately next to a lake of lava. Anything that falls into lava is instantly destroyed, so the second I mine this block, the obsidian it produces will fizzle away into nothing.

Luckily, that isn’t the only obsidian in the room. I’m in a flooded cave, and I can see more of it beneath the shallower water. If I can stop the water flooding into this chamber, I can mine the rest of the obsidian underneath.

I consider just bricking it off, my de facto solution to all life’s problems, but right now I also have to wade against the current to get out of this place. I’d rather just block this water off at its source, if I can.

So I swim upstream, and find it all flows from a huge waterfall in a dark shaft above the tunnels I’ve dug. Through some wonderfully nonsensical physics, I’m able to swim very slowly up the waterfall, keeping my head and hands out of the flow so that I can breathe, and even place torches on the cave wall as I ascend.

I am musing, as I swim upwards through freefalling water, about how I’m going to get back down. I think I have an idea. I scramble up onto the rocks at the top, wade a little further up, and finally find the tiny hole where all this water is coming from. I brick it up. And then, immediately, turn round and jump in the water.

It doesn’t vanish right away, it flows its natural course one last time. So I’m able to ride this final wave to the shaft, fall down it on a soft cushion of water, and tumble all the way back down the rapids to the chamber I came from.

A few seconds after I splash onto the flooded cave floor, the last of the water tumbles after me, then trickles out of the chamber and leaves the cave floor dry.

Oh my God.

OK. That should be enough.

Next: turns out it’s not enough.

Note: Minecraft is about to go into beta on the 20th of December. That means the price will go up from €10 to €15. If you’ve been tempted by this diary, grab it now to save some change. You also gain +25 hipster points for being able to say you played it when it was still in alpha.

World 10, deaths 9

So I’m going to hell, getting as far as I can through it, then coming home. It’s going to be hard – The Nether dimension is scary enough when you can respawn, and I’m not the kind of hardcore player it was designed for. But I learned a lot in my death slump, and I almost feel like I know how to play this game now.

First up, wood. Punch trees.

Next, coal. I need light. I’ve found this is much easier if you don’t actually mine for it – wander around for a while and you’ll usually spot some on the side of a mountain. I make a quick sandy beacon before setting off, so I can find my way back, then go on a coal hunt.

This world is really nice – a secluded bay in a densely forested coast, set against a- shut up! I see coal!

Coal coal coal coal coal.

The sun is setting by the time I head back to the bay, and it’s almost night when I get back. I have everything I need from the surface world, though, so I make a stone pickaxe and burrow carefully down from a little cove.

I don’t mine directly up, I don’t mine directly down, I don’t mine directly ahead, and pretty soon I hit black. Not coal, but empty space. I’ve dug into the roof of a pitch black cave complex.

I’m not dropping down there. Instead I dig horizontally for a while, one block above the roof of the cave, then down. It’s solid rock here, so I can double back on myself as I go down, and eventually hit the cave from a more survivable angle.

I drop my first torch, and it lights up a still pool of water, with veins of coal and metal running through the rock above it. Now we’re in business.

Still playing it as safe as possible, I don’t mine anything yet – I want to light up this whole cave network before I risk turning my back on it. It’s an awesome place, riddled with underground rivers that spill out of the walls into pools, and ominous sub-levels I’m not prepared to go down yet. And there’s more metal here – lots.

I get to business. What I’ve learnt from my death slump is that armour is not optional, so once my first batch of metal is smelted I bend it into a breastplate and some boots. I also make a stone sword – metal is better, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference in combat.

Once I’m kitted out, I go back to my staircase and start digging down. That’s another thing I’ve learned – resume digging where you stopped digging, or your route back to the surface can get bafflingly complex.

Before long, I hit light. Wait, what? Could this be- oh, it’s a torch. It’s that lower bit of the cave I lit up, I’ve just dug through a wall. Oh well, back to the coal face.

Before long, I hit dark. Any sense of deja vu is interrupted by a chilling clatter of bone. Skeletons.

I hate skeletons.

But I’m ready. This cave isn’t so deep it’ll hurt to drop down, and if there were any other threats down there I’d hear them. I glimpse him for the briefest moment, then drop.

THWUCK!

Where is he?

THWUCK!

Ow!

THWUCK!

In the corner!

THWUCK!

STABSTABSTABSTABSTAB pop.

Phew.

I’m about to start putting down torches when I realise – it already is light down here. There’s a glow coming from the far side. I head towards it and see this:

A waterfall into a lavalake. Short of a lavafall into a waterlake, that’s the best thing I’ve ever heard of. And wait, is that… I brick off the flow of water to check.

It is! I’ve struck obsidian.

Next: Yeah, good luck mining that.

Killing Floor is an office favourite at PC Gamer, and this is an impressive amount of weaponised festive cheer. See their Christmas update page for the rest of the disgusting details.

World 4, deaths 3

I am distraught. I’ve lost the best world I’ve seen, forever. This one is just a bunch of blocks.

The next day, in a cruel twist, Notch adds a ‘Crouch’ key that prevents you falling off ledges.

Come nightfall, I still haven’t sorted out a safe house or torches, and I take one too many risks with an arrow-firing skeleton. Dead.
 

World 5, deaths 4

I’m still playing with my rule, but the fear is gone: the world I’ll lose if I die now is replacable. This one’s snowy, which is nice, but nothing special.

I’m killed by an exploding Creeper on my first night.
 

World 6, deaths 5

Mobbed by spiders.
 

World 7, deaths 6

Ignored own advice, dug straight down, plunged into lava.
 

World 8, deaths 7

Fell off one too many mountains.
 

World 9, deaths 8

Skeleton Archers again.
 

World 10, deaths 9

Okay, this is getting silly. I need an objective. The hardcore rule doesn’t really work if your only goal is to survive: that’s not something you can make progress towards, so no progress is really lost when you die. Unless you spawn in the absolute perfect place in the absolute perfect world, as I did in World 3, the stakes are actually pretty low.

Happily, this realisation hit just after a major Minecraft update. I’d taken a quick break from the experiment to preview it a few days earlier: it’s a new, hellish dimension called the Nether. You get to the Nether by building a doorway made out of the hardest usable rock in the world, obsidian, then setting it alight. It creates a portal to a world full of zombie pigmen, ever-burning stone, and giant flying jellyfish that spit fireballs.

The objective I needed was obvious: go to hell, journey as far as my tools will take me, and get back alive.

Now, where the hell do you get obsidian?

On Thursday: Oh, there it is.

World 3, Deaths 2

I’ve built the tower on the cliff above my cove, so it’s easy to hit the water and land safely – but briefly terrifying anyway. When I surface, I admire my handiwork, and immediately hate it. That is the most ugly, stupid thing I’ve built since the Millennium Dome. Forget navigation, I don’t want to get home if it looks this shitty. It even undermines the prettiness of the waterfall I had my landscape gardener (me) install earlier.

Hmm. I think I nearly had an idea there. Waterfalls… pretty? Towers… ugly? Ability to create waterfalls… limitless? Nope. There’s some kind of solution there, but I’m not getting it.

I go back up, building a second tower next to the first to get to the top. There, I very carefully build a stone platform, and a small scaffold to stand on beneath it. I use the scaffold to place torches on every side of the column, then build my way to the top level with a few extra blocks.

At the top, I empty a bucket of water off the edge of the platform. It forms an ever-flowing waterfall, spilling down over the treetops below and into the sea right next to my existing waterfall, forming a veil across the entrance of my cove. It looks awesome, even from up here.

I want the torches to glow through the water from all sides, because I think it’ll look cool at night, so I have to make a waterfall on each side. For the left and right waterfalls, I can stand in a free square and tip a bucket out in the direction I want. But for the last one, facing inland, I want it to start from the only dry square left. Otherwise, my beacon will have a bald spot – one I’ll never see, but one that will bother me eternally anyway.

I stand in the current of the first waterfall, fighting it to stay on the platform, then tip the final bucket out. I’m paranoid about falling backwards off the ledge, so I push forwards constantly. The second waterfall spills down, flowing inland, and suddenly I’m standing in it. Holding forward.

I’m swept violently over the threshold, flung clear of the falling water, and left mid-air, sickeningly high over dry land. My only hope is if the water somehow hits the ground before me, spreads out into some kind of pool and…

It doesn’t.

A fountain of metal, stone, sand, torches and sticks explodes from me as I hit the ground, and the last thing I see in front of my dying face is the egg, still intact.

On Tuesday: FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU-

World 3, Deaths 2

I’m alive. I bound up the steps to my cove home and splash around in the bay. I’m alive! I punch a pig in the face until it explodes in a shower of pork chops, and scarf them raw. I’m alive! I look up, mid-chew, to find another pig staring at me. I’m alive, pig! Don’t judge me!

Someone told me to try using the leather thing on a pig, so I do. It’s a saddle! I use the pig. I’m riding a pig! I’m aliiiive!

My plan to explore the world by pig-back is cut short when I realise he’s already going in circles, three metres from where we started. I climb down and decide to do some exploring by foot.

Almost immediately, I am lost. My sense of direction isn’t brilliant in real life, and in-game it’s even worse. I can’t see the ocean any more – which way was it? What colour was it? Where is saddlepig now?

I’m backtracking, but without knowing which way I was tracking, the back could be front or side and I might be side or front-tracking. It’s getting dark. And that’s when I see a light.

Civilisation! Friends! Hope!

No, this is a torch I put on a tree in a torch-placing frenzy the day I discovered fire. It also happens to mark the entrance to a tunnel that leads under the mountain to my cove house. I’m home!

There’s a low growl.

God damn it, guys. I catch a creeper trying to follow me inside, and block him off with a clump of earth. In my main cave, I find a zombie peering out of a dark hole in the corner. And then THWUCK! Arrows start shooting in from the entrance.

I brick up the entrance. I have armour, weapons and health, but I’m not risking a fight with something that out-ranges me. I heroically poke the zombie a few times with my sword, since he’s stuck helplessly behind some rock, and my home is basically clear, so I hole up for the night.

Clearly, if I’m going to do any more exploring, I need a way to find my way back. Losing my cove in a world eight times the size of Earth would be as bad as losing the world itself.

So that night, I hatch the most ingenious and original idea any Minecraft player has ever had: I will build a tower! As tall as the clouds! A beacon to guide me home! No-one has ever had this idea before!

I do it in about forty seconds the next morning: looking downwards, jumping, and laying a cube of rock beneath my feet with each hop. Then, I’m at the top of an impossibly high and impossibly ugly tower that I’ll be able to see from almost anywhere. So I jump off.

On Sunday: falling.

World 3, Deaths 2

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!

Fire! I mean lava! But also I’m on fire! My head is completely submerged in a blob of the stuff, but I pull myself out and scramble frantically up the steps away from the flood.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!

I’m still on fire! It’s miles to the surface. I have seconds to live. But wait! The underground river! It’s not far from-

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!

I’m not going to make it. I’m not remotely going to make it. I’m down to my last couple of hearts. And then I remember:

I’m holding a full bucket of water.

I spasm around trying to put it into a usable inventory slot and slosh it straight onto the floor beneath me.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!

It gushes out in a cascade and puts me out, but washes me all the way back down the steps and back into the lava.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!

One half of one heart. I haul myself out of the lava onto the bank of volcanic rock it formed when the water hit, and finally plonk down in the drink the other side.

Hiss.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Okay.

Don’t mine directly down.
Don’t mine directly up.
Don’t mine directly ahead.
Avoid mining as a career.

On Friday: I stick to the surface. The safe, safe, surface.

Despite being a tiny indie studio, they’ve built an incredibly tactile and convincing physics-driven animation system for combat. In other words, things hit each other really hard, and it doesn’t look dumb, wrong or fake. They’ve just added the ability to assign enemies to teams and make them fight each other, so the latest vid shows some brilliant rabbit v. wolf gang violence.

Elsewhere Overgrowth has elements of free-running platformers and open world games, and there’s a comic covering the dog-heavy backstory. Wolfire’s development blog is a great read in itself – they did an excellent post on PC game piracy versus lost sales back in May.

You can play around with the Overgrowth alpha if you preorder the game ($30). But be aware that it’s more of a spawn-things-and-mess-around alpha than an hey-wait-this-is-already-awesome alpha like Minecraft.