Diablo 3 preview
Down on BlizzCon’s show floor, there’s a small clump of crumpled-looking Blizzard employees. It’s Saturday evening, and they’ve been organising the tide of humanity desperate to play Diablo 3 for two solid days. But they aren’t the target of my sympathy. It’s the peripherals I feel sorry for.
Those patient enough to brave the hours of queueing get to play Diablo 3 for a short burst. The artificially constrained play sessions mean gamers are more eager than ever to carve their way through mounds of flesh. Looking out across the Diablo 3 show area, I can see legions of mice sitting quietly underhand, gently glowing in pain as their masters pound their tops.
Games of 2012 – Planetside 2
I feel like I know Matt Higby. PlanetSide 2’s creative director lives half a planet away from me in San Diego, where he’s currently helming development on SOE’s second shot at the MMOFPS. But he once flew Reavers for the New Conglomerate in PlanetSide. He piloted a gunship, screaming through the sky over hundred-man battles. He rained rockets down on enemy tanks, he lanced snipers with his chaingun. He’s me, in a suntan and a nicer suit.
Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm preview
I don’t consider myself easily moved. I don’t cry at sad movies. I’m a stoic emotional soldier who can sit through the first ten minutes of Pixar’s Up without the slightest dampening of the face. I’m tough. So I was most perturbed when I found my throat choked and my skin covered in goosebumps as I stood in front of BlizzCon’s StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm stand. For me 2011 has been a time of discovery, as this year I found StarCraft and, by extension, esports. I found a game that captivated me and a community that epitomises both the best and worst of PC gaming. Chances are, a percentage of you reading these words will feel the same.
At this year’s BlizzCon, Blizzard revealed the new multiplayer units for StarCraft II’s next expansion, Heart of the Swarm, and I felt like my chest was going to burst with excitement.
League of Legends – PC Gamer UK’s free game of the year
Do you remember the tail end of 2010? We all wore rags and lived in dirt-floored shacks, dinosaurs ruled the Earth, and ‘free to play’ was still a dirty set of words. 2011 saw those words climb into the word shower and wash themselves clean, courtesy of League of Legends.
The Old Republic beginner’s guide
The launch of an MMO is a confusing time. The world is fresh and new, and everyone is still learning how to play it. Which is why, now that The Old Republic has launched, we’ve put together a list of our top 50 tips, learned from hours of beta play to help you get to grips with the new game. For MMO newcomers and veterans alike, we’ve created a definitive guide to classes, companions, conversations, crafting and every other aspect of the game.
Check inside for the full list of our fifty things you need to know about The Old Republic.
MLG Providence in review: the story of Leenock
Somewhere in a wastepaper bin inside Disney’s headquarters, there’s a discarded script. It tells the story of a sixteen year old kid who flew far away from his homeland to compete against the world’s best. This kid – just out of childhood and cast with gratuitously youthful chubby cheeks – is pitted against fully grown adults twice his height and nearly double his age. He makes it through open pool play: a fiercely competitive vipers’ nest full of hopefuls he’s never seen play. He steps out into the searing heat of the tournament spotlight, and wins his first few games. Then the kid falters, dropping down to the losers’ brackets of the competition. He’s jetlagged, he’s inexperienced. It seems his moment in the sun is over. But then the crowd take him to their collective heart, and begin cheering his name. The kid lifts his chin up.
He wins his next game, and his next, and his next, until he’s won thirty eight bouts of his chosen sport across a handful of days. He’s at the final. He’s sixteen years old, at the final of one of his sport’s biggest events, placed against a Scandinavian star whose robotically perfect performance so far would be the story of the tournament. Would be the story of the tournament, were it not for the kid. The kid’s played thirty eight games already. If he wins game thirty nine, he’s won the entire tournament and joined an elite number of the planet’s best.
He wins.
Watch the world’s best pro-gamers at MLG Providence live this weekend
A portion of PC Gamer has just got back from Bristol’s very first Barcraft event, to watch the Providence Major League Gaming finals. Many drinks were drunk and much StarCraft II was watched, making it a turbo-excellent night. It’s getting close to kicking out time here in the UK, but fans of tip-top level pro-gaming, don’t panic: the MLG Providence finals are still ongoing, closing up tomorrow. If you want to watch them – and you really should, as they’ve been brilliant so far – get over to their website and catch the live stream. There’s some incredible games still to go, and the whole event to play for.
We’ve also got two high-quality MLG Providence passes to give away to the first two people who comment with the name of a previous MLG StarCraft II winner below. Be quick about it, mind.
War of the Roses preview
As he fell from his horse at the battle of Bosworth Field, Plantagenet king Richard III called out “lol wtf gief horse”. This Richard III will be sitting at his PC, playing medieval multiplayer-focused battler War of the Roses. Developers Fatshark, who made Wild West shooter Lead and Gold, are including a cursory singleplayer campaign in their upcoming game, but as studio head Martin Wahlund explains, the emphasis is on multiplayer.
“We want a huge skill component like Mount & Blade, but we’d also like to make it a bit more accessible. It should feel natural: like the way you start playing Battlefield or Modern Warfare. You don’t have to be a pro before you start playing, so when you get attacked you should get a feeling for how to defend yourself.”
Syndicate preview
This article originally appeared in PC Gamer UK issue 233.
Syndicate – like its top-down, squadbased predecessor – imagines a future war between merciless corporations, fought by hypertrained and utterly amoral killers. These corporations are sinister and faceless business octopi, with tentacles in every industrial pie. They’re the world’s largest and most influential companies. Were this real life, the player would be working for a 2069 version of Apple.
Instead, Syndicate’s main character, Miles Kilo, works for the worryingly blandsounding Eurocorp Syndicate. The game’s developers, Starbreeze, haven’t said what Eurocorp sell yet, but the company puts its name on guns. Any business happy to plaster their name on the barrel of a rifle isn’t going to be too altruistic.
Planetside 2 preview
This article originally appeared in PC Gamer UK issue 232.
Matt Higby isn’t surprised there aren’t more massively multiplayer shooters out there. “They’re fucking hard to make.” What surprises PlanetSide 2’s creative director is the lack of attempts by other developers to emulate 2003’s ultra-ambitious PlanetSide. “You talk to anyone who was a PlanetSide player, they’ll go all misty eyed.”
Fellow ex-players, please join me in a spot of eye-misting. I played PlanetSide for a year after the game’s launch, seeing the same potential in the game that Higby still eulogises today. “It’s an excellent team-based game, it has a lot of action and it’s just cool being able to hold a tower with 50 people when 200 people are coming in to it. You can’t compare it to anything else.”
Why Blizzard invited the world’s best StarCraft: Brood War players to Blizzcon 2011
Jaedong, Fantasy, Bisu, and Jangbi are some of the world’s premier StarCraft: Brood War players. This year, these four StarCrafting superstars were invited to Blizzcon.
But why were they there? Sites like Teamliquid swirled with rumours prior to the event: they were there to perform show matches, playing 1998′s Brood War on the big screen to foreign fans. They were there to test out the next StarCraft II expansion, Heart of the Swarm. They were there to mark their transition from professional Brood War – still the majority esports share in Korean viewing schedules – to StarCraft II. But Blizzcon came and went, and the four players were absent from headlines outside of citizen-papparazzi snaps and videos. Why were they there, flown out to Anaheim from their Korean home? The answer is simpler than you might expect. Read on to find out why.
StarCraft 2 tournaments will move over to Heart of the Swarm “when the community decides”.
Just when you think you’ve finally got your head around defending a 1/1/1 push and locked down your warp prism/immortal micro, Blizzard are adding a set of new units to StarCraft II’s multiplayer armies. But what happens to SC2 tournaments like MLG and the GSL who’ve built their empires around Wings of Liberty’s multiplayer? Will they be forced to move over to Heart of the Swarm half way through their season?
World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria’s Pandarens are playable. Also, they’re pandas.
Don’t know about you, but spending my time sat on a hillside in central China, eating bamboo and getting hugged by volunteers sounds like a nice life. Unfortunately, we can’t all be pandas. But wait! Thanks to World of Warcraft’s next expansion Mists of Pandaria, we can all be Pandarans.
Jonah Lomu Rugby Challenge released in UK and US on October 21 to satisfy your desire to chase eggs
Rugby’s first global superstar is more than a bit under the weather, sadly suffering from kidney failure at the moment. The game that bears his name has also taken a knock: the PC version of Jonah Lomu Rugby Challenge will now be released on October 21st.
The game is one of the very few PC gaming options left to people who want to pretend to run very fast into another man while carrying a weird shaped ball, and initial previews have been promising in comparison to lacklustre showings from other developers. It’s already been out in the southern hemisphere for a while, but the slip likely won’t make UK PC rugby-ites too angry anyway, as they’re all too tired from getting up at 4am to watch the ongoing World Cup.
Rage review
I’ve just picked up a keycard, and I’m confused. I found it in a power station, out in Rage’s wasteland. It was about a foot wide, and bright blue, and now it’s in my inventory. What the hell do I do with it? Do I sell it? I swear I’ve done this before. Does it… does it go in this bright blue door, over here?
Swoosh. The door opens.
For all its open roads and bright blue skies, for all its sweeping canyons and hub towns, Rage is still resolutely an id Software shooter. For all their pre-release bluster of expansive worlds and template departure, no one knows this better than id Software. The keycard is as much of a nod to their previous works as the Doom mug collectibles players can sell to shopkeepers, but it also feels like an acknowledgement of a design lineage: despite the apparent differences, Rage is the continuation of the corridor.
