Independent Argentinian developer Miguel Ángel Pérez Martínez describes his game, Fa'el: Beyond the Gate, as "an action/exploration adventure game inside a delightful 2.75D world filled with pixel art that bends around itself and inside out." Not 3D. Not 2D. Not even the rare 2.5D. We're talking about a previously undiscovered dimension in gaming: 2.75D.
While some of us are anxiously awaiting the holiday break so we can catch up on sleep (nope), see family (nah), and play through a disgusting amount of video games (bingo), the dedicated team at BioWare will also use that time to continue working on Dragon Age: Inquisition, playing through its latest build. Executive Producer of the Dragon Age franchise Mark Darrah explains on the company's blog that BioWare has always used the break to allow its teams to play through what they term the "Holiday Build." Basically, as complete of a build of the game as possible.
We usually get a little metal with our mayhem whenever a new Strike Vector trailer surfaces, and the latest video doesn't disappoint. The indie, ship-based shooter has released some new footage to go along with a call to arms for any pilots eager to try out the game in an open beta set to start in early January.
We're all impressed and excited by the potential of the Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles. It’s amazing technology, but persuading game developers to actually invest time and money in implementing it will be no small challenge. Today, Oculus VR revealed it has hired former Electronic Arts senior vice president David De Martini to tackle that challenge with its new publishing initiative.
The Large Pixel Collider—if you haven't already been introduced to it through the faint but ominous humming that now haunts your dreams—is the most powerful gaming PC we've ever built. With four Nvidia GTX Titans and an irresponsible surplus of everything else, we're using the LPC to capture gameplay footage of supreme quality, with ambitions to go beyond 4K and into a resolution super-realm populated by beings of pure light energy.
Echoing the Christmas truces that took place along the 1914 Western Front during World War I, some DayZ players on Reddit want to spend the day with their baseball bats shouldered and their guns tucked away. Since the game often acts as a sort of laboratory for human behavior, any proposed ceasefire in the DayZ Mod or Standalone alpha will take place as a simple—but maybe revealing—experiment.
PC Gamer editors are prohibited from celebrating Christmas. For the team, the end of the year is marked by an event known as “GOTY Sleepover,” a time where we somewhat-voluntarily sequester ourselves away from our families and loved ones in the interest of a greater good: selecting the best PC games of the year. We gather in a room with a very heavy door and very little ventilation and stay there until we’ve reached a unanimous decision on every award category. It’s a lot like the Papal conclave, but with more Cheetos.
The word "gameplay" sits proudly on top of the PC Gamer style sheet's forbidden words list. It was banished from our collective vocabulary for being a lazy replacement for more meaningful, accurate words. That's a problem, because I need to now write about League of Legends' Showdown - the second in Riot's experimental "Featured Gameplay Modes". You see the problem: less than a paragraph in and I've already written "gameplay" three times. We'll soldier on anyway, but please, for the love of all that's Christmas, nobody tell our production editor.
By Chris Kinniburgh.
I was selected as one of the 300 Steam Machine beta participants. A few days ago, I received a 35 pound crate filled with foam and Valve's prototype hardware.
The Steam Machine is modular, and multiple configurations have been released to testers. Some contain i7 CPUs and Titan graphics cards, others have i3s and GTX 660s. My Steam Machine is equipped with a 3.2GHz quad-core i5 CPU, a GTX 780 GPU, and 16GB of RAM. After plugging the box in, and tucking it into my entertainment console, I pressed the large circular button on the front of the case. The machine boots to a GRUB boot loader for less than a second - one of the few reminders that there's a Linux OS under the hood. After a brief loading period with a purple steam logo, the machine boots to a familiar Big Picture Mode view.
While Dota 2 players are currently in the grip of Frostivus Wraith-Night, such necromantic festivities can't last forever. Valve are already planning the next update, and have announced its theme, if very little else about what it will involve. Referred to as "The Year of the Horse", it's due to arrive toward the end of January, to coincide with the Chinese New Year.
As numbers go, 1.37 is pretty unassuming. In terms of game updates, it's the sort of number that would herald a percentage decrease in assault rifle bullet drop, the removal of Herobrine, or the fixing of a rare bug that caused all enemies to be jam. But major game changing features? Surely you'd save that for a proper tenth decimal place.
Not if you're War Thunder, apparently. Their 1.37 patch is a significant update, bringing fancier visual flair through DirectX 11 support, as well as new planes, a new custom missions system, and completely redesigned unlock progression. A developer video rounds up the changes of this numerically surprising patch.
Asus are planning to expand their Republic of Gamers line-up with two new high-end Nvidia cards - The Poseidon GTX 780 and the GTX 780 Ti DirectCU II. The Poseidon will add a hybrid cooling solution to the GK 110 GPU at the core of the standard GTX 780.
For all its infinite wonder, space is kind of a jerk. It would be bad enough if FTL was about navigating its various deadly pitfalls, but the game goes one further - pitting you against a selection of deadly alien races and their many weapons. Despite all this, and as good as the space roguelike was, I always felt that it could use more variety and options to support the need for repeat playthroughs. Step forward FTL: Advanced Edition, which will be made available as a free upgrade to the base game next year. Along with the already detailed ships, weapons and events, its developers have now announced another race of murderous foe. It looks like space is being upgraded to an ultrajerk.
At this point, it seems to be a given that PCs - at least those created for gaming over the last couple of years - can easily keep pace with, and in many cases beat, what's currently being done on the next-gen consoles. That's not to say the future is a certainty, especially when a game's performance is often less about the inherent power of your system, and more about the developer's specific efforts to optimise and support a platform.
So what of Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment's Tom Clancy's The Division? It's certainly the prettiest post-apocalyptic wasteland around, but will its dynamic lighting and uber-particles look quite as spiffy on our PCs. According to a community Q&A session with the developers, yes.
It's not people that are the casualties of the small slice of war depicted in this trailer, but places. Specifically, it's the Libyan city Tobruk, which gets roundly shelled, shattered and exploded, all to demonstrate Sniper Elite 3's new fancier tech. At least, that's the case for the first minute of the trailer. After that, people are definitely the casualties. One person, to be precise, in a particularly gruesome way.
Simogo has announced that it's developing Year Walk for the PC and expects to release it on Steam in early 2014. Year Walk is a first person adventure currently available only on iOS—it received much critical praise for creating a mysterious, creepy vibe loosely inspired by the folklore of Simogo's native Sweden.
Before running away for a few days of holiday revelry and hardcore gaming, Evan, Cory, and Tyler gathered to reflect on the games they put the most time into in 2013. Watch the whole five-video series on the PC Gamer YouTube channel, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more regular content, gameplay footage, and conversations.
You probably noticed that the Steam Holiday Sale is on and that all your money is quickly disappearing. But your shopping frenzy may have distracted you from the news that Metal Gear Rising: Revengence was also made available to pre-purchase for a 33 percent discount, bringing it to $20. It will unlock and be available to play on January 9.
A few hundred thousand people are already playing the DayZ alpha, and I’m one of them. I’ve recorded my journey so far, one, remarkably, that hasn’t yet ended in death.
Did you ever crash to desktop and wish you could sue Electronic Arts over the buggy, unstable quality of Battlefield 4? Well, if you bought stock in the company between the dates of July 24, 2013 and December 4, 2013, you can! Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP is seeking to file a class action lawsuit against EA and "certain of its officers and directors," with the claim that EA knowingly misrepresented the quality of Battlefield 4 and how it expected it to preform financially. This is on top of a similar investigation led by Holzer Holzer & Fistel, LLC.
