The voice shouts orders again. He’s saying to wait 10 seconds for the smoke, then banzai the flag. We’d been pushing up on the objectives for five minutes now, and getting slaughtered by well placed US troops. I was so shaken by incoming artillery that my teeth felt loose in my jaw. I trust that voice — he’s what we call a ‘team player’ and can hopefully rescue success from the maelstrom of our failure so far in this bloody round.

Moments before, I had cautiously stepped around dense foliage to see if there were any pickings on our enemy’s right-flank. Just as I did, a running US trooper crested a nearby rock formation. We both snapped up, knowing the fight wasn’t entirely fair — I could take a single shot from my Arisaka and then had to manually bolt, whereas even with the worst opposing class he’d have an M1 Garand that could pump out multiple shots in quick succession. Just as I started to aim, one of my teammates landed an indirect kill with the new knee-mortar, a ground-plantable grenade launcher, and the hostile trooper’s body was flung into the air on a great gout of blood while his neatly separated limbs framed the scene behind him.

We hear the far-away rumble of artillery fire and then smoke canisters start to smack the tops of the enemy fortifications. As the clouds spread, the voice yells for everyone to banzai. I hold F and then sprint into the cloud along with most of my team, my character unleashing ‘Tenno Heika Banzai’ (‘Long live the Emperor’) from deep within. Just ahead of me is one of our officers, screaming his own madness and brandishing a katana. I think the bullet takes him in the gut because his character suddenly stumbles and then, pantomiming a hundred World War 2 movies, he slowly drops to his knees with his arms lifted at the elbow. Then he falls forward, dead.

It’s nearly impossible to see anything in the smoke cloud, but I keep running until the brown shapes ahead of me resolve into enemy combatants and I end my banzai charge with a sweep of my rifle’s bayonet and insta-kill the poor sap in front of me. The man to his right has hit ‘X’ to hug the wall in front, an emplacement position that gives him an aiming bonus when he pops out — but one that costs him his peripheral view. My bullet is guided by the Emperor and his head pops open to reveal a red mist. I feel a moment of joy followed by a moment of intense heat as the US flamethrower-wielding soldier hoses down the front line. My countrymen and I perish in a beautifully Hollywood-esque gout of liquid fire.

I honestly don’t know why we won that round, or how any round is even scored. Tripwire Interactive’s latest release Red Orchestra 2: Rising Storm demands a lot more of the player than most multiplayer FPS titles, and that includes learning the scoring system — although as expected in a game like this, playing the objective is a good start. If you played RO2‘s first release, 2012′s Heroes of Stalingrad, then you’re fairly well prepared for what Rising Storm brings — but it’s the panache with which it does so that makes this a far superior release.

I’ve fought long and hard in this Pacific theatre of war, and died in many locations. Without exception, this new arena offers far better fighting locations than the last outing. They’re still laid out in shockingly straight lines, but whether it’s the abundance of naturally placed cover or just that it doesn’t look like what gamers are used to from WW2 shooters, the environments here are the best that Tripwire have ever put together. I’ve seen close quarter city-fighting, repelled GI’s at Iwo Jima, and even took part in a night-raid at Guadalcanal and in each ‘map’ it’s the natural layout that makes it feel less like a game (although a quick look at the rectangular map can change that perception slightly).

There are a handful of things to be aware of. Rising Storm is built on Unreal — and not the good Unreal, either. Player and environmental textures can be a bit bland, and despite Tripwire’s excellent handling of particle effects and a keen eye for colour, this doesn’t look like up to the standards of a modern shooter. The good news, of course, is that as a result just about any rig will run it. Movement can be a little stilted with a few of the extra keyboard commands not something that most players will be used to, and even with remapping I’d often find myself accidentally sticking to cover at the worst possible times, or trying to find the right spot to jump over what should be a shallow wall. These movement limitations are minimal and given the slow pace of the game not something that will pop up regularly.

Also, while I’m a big fan of the unlock system, I’m concerned that I’ve already been unable to access any of my new toys, and that my stats aren’t recording properly… and this is exactly what happened with the last title. There are multiple weapon unlocks, as well as add-ons you can mix with existing weapons and what I’ve heard of them sounds great — if only I could have used them during this beta period. Stats aren’t the be-all and end-all of gaming, but if you’re going to put them into your game you should make sure they work and given this is essentially DLC, it’s very concerning that this is still a problem.

The coolest change to the RO2 formula is what the developers are calling ‘asymmetric warfare’. The US clearly have the edge in the weaponry department, so to offset this, the warriors of the Rising Sun have been given a lot of fun toys that really balance things out. Firstly, banzai-charges actually affect suppression; reducing it for the attacking infantry and increasing it on the US troops. Then there’s the already mentioned knee-mortars and katanas, the ability to set your grenades as booby-traps and — my personal favourite — by pulling the pin on a grenade and running into opposing soldiers your glorious suicide does not cost team points but it will cost enemy troops god knows what to their peace of mind.

And when you consider that any purchase of Rising Storm also gives access to all of the content from Heroes of Stalingrad and that it will all come with Steam Workshop integration means… wait, sorry, you didn’t know that bit? That’s right, buying Rising Storm gives you every map from the original release and you’ll be able to play on servers with user-made maps. It looks like Tripwire have put a lot of thought into this latest expansion and how to avoid the empty server wasteland that followed just a few months after HoS.

You can banzai over to Steam, where if you already own Heroes of Stalingrad you’ll receive a discount on Rising Storm — or if you don’t, it’s just $20 for one hell of a good shooter.

Microsoft revealed the existence of the Xbox One overnight, unveiling their new “all-in-one entertainment system” in a performance that seemed to continue the company’s trend of focusing on TV, Skype and music over actual video games.

Unlike Sony, Microsoft actually did show what their console looks like, and you can see it here. Underneath the hood it’s all a bit vague, but Microsoft are promising an 8-core x86 processor (meaning all next-gen consoles are now on par with the PC — good news for console ports), 8GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive (which is not replaceable or user-servicable, but you will be able to use external storage as a primary drive through USB 3.0).

Multiple power states will help it conserve power, as it’s designed to boot instantly on voice command. It will also feature a Blu-ray player and HDMI passthrough — so that you never have to use any other device again. It is not backwards-compatible with existing Xbox 360 titles.

The Xbox One will ship with something called “Xbox One Live TV”, which will enable you to control your cable, telco or satellite set-top box through your Xbox. This will, of course, only be available in the US at launch.

Every Xbox One will ship with an improved version of the Kinect, which Microsoft are now touting as essential to the Xbox experience — in fact, it won’t work without a Kinect attached. In a delightful bit of Kinect-related hilarity, users trying to watch the Xbox One reveal on their current Xboxes found that the demonstration voice commands coming from the live stream were picked up by their current Kinect, causing the stream to continually pause and drop out. Take a read, it’s beautiful.

According to Microsoft’s hardware program manager John Link, the Kinect is “always listening”, but user privacy will be “a top priority” for the team and the device will only be looking for specific activation commands when not in use.

Why might you want to worry about being listened in on? Well, because…

You’ll need to connect to the internet once a day

My current Xbox console sits in the living room unconnected to the internet — which isn’t something you’ll be able to do with the Xbox One, according to Microsoft vice president Phil Harrison. Asked by Kotaku whether they would have to connect regularly to play a single-player game, Harrison responded with “I believe it’s (every) 24 hours”.

This is further explained at the official FAQ, which states the Xbox One: “does not have to be always connected, but does require a connection to the Internet. We’re designing Xbox One to be your all-in-one entertainment system that is connected to the cloud and always ready. We are also designing it so you can play games and watch Blu-ray movies and live TV if you lose your connection.”

So what does the Xbox One need with a constant internet connection?

It’s because you need to activate each game

When you buy an Xbox One game you’ll be given a one-use only activation code, which locks that game to your Xbox LIVE account over the internet. Any user on that console can play it for free, but if you want to take your disc to your friend’s house, you’ll have to pay a fee — and not just a one-time activation fee, but the full price of the game. Again.

“The bits that are on that disc, you can give it to your friend and they can install it on an Xbox One,” claimed Phil Harrison again. “They would then have to purchase the right to play that game through Xbox Live.”

When asked by Kotaku whether they would pay the same price as a user who purchased it new in stores, Harrison said: “Let’s assume it’s a new game, so the answer is yes, it will be the same price.”

However, Harrison also explained that Microsoft had created a solution to allow players to sell their used games to other players online. He declined to discuss the specifics of this solution.

But how about the games?

Microsoft spent the majority of the presentation discussing how you could watch the NFL through your Kinect, but don’t worry — the Xbox One will also play games. The only games so far announced for it (beyond the major AAA releases such as Assassin’s Creed 4 and Battlefield 4) were Call of Duty: Ghosts, Forza 5, and something called Quantum Break by the team behind Alan Wake and Max Payne.

If all this has you excited you can (of course) slap down a pre-order for the Xbox One over at places like EB Games for the completely fictional price of $899. No actual Australian RRP has been confirmed (and, in fact, no international features were confirmed at all, such as what Australians would get instead of the NFL).

You can find out more at Microsoft’s official site.

Sony’s stock rose 9% after the Xbox One announcement (but it’s probably not related).

I’ll just come out and say it: I hate DLC.

Once upon a time, developers and publishers would laud an upcoming game on its merits alone, highlighting the work done on a compelling story or new gameplay mechanic. We’d buy into the hype after a couple of screenshots, an interview or even a video if we were lucky. But now we’re lucky to hear an announcement or see a trailer that doesn’t mention the bundle of pre-order extras or day one DLC that’s available. Extra guns? $5. Extra missions? $10. Feel like recruiting that master assassin into your ranks? Well, that’s $7, or part of the package if you sign up for the MasterEliteUltraPass that guarantees you all* of the extras for one low, low price of half the initial game’s cost, again.

I don’t tend to buy into some of the hyperbolic statements made by a lot of (mostly YouTube) commentators… but I can honestly state that I think DLC is right up there with DRM as one of the true scourges of our gaming pastime.

Before the days of season passes and costume packs, teaser trailers for new maps and controversial horse armour, developers actually felt the need to justify extra content. It was the early nineties, and expansion packs were introduced in order to bridge the gap between sequels. In most cases, expansions weren’t even considered until after the original development period had completed; developers would gauge reactions to the game, take feedback as to what content players wanted more of, and decided whether they could complement the existing title with an additional update. Arguably, Blizzard were behind most of the memorable, well crafted expansion packs, that enabled them to keep initial teams running on their IP (many of which are still there today, as opposed to many studios that let teams go after each game), and continue the stories of the title’s canon without creating an entirely new experience.

StarCraft’s Brood War expansion pack is still, hands down, not only one of the best updates to a game in recent memory, but a fantastic game on its own. Unlike the long, meandering tale of development delays that is StarCraft 2, Brood War came out less than a year after its predecessor. It included not only an enormous campaign mode, featuring all 3 races, but arguably featured a fundamentally more interesting story than the original alongside a stack of new cutscenes. It also added seven new units that fundamentally changed how multiplayer functioned and drastically increased AI difficulty and intelligence. It went on to be one of the best selling expansion packs in history, sitting at 96% on GameRankings and still sold in retail boxes for almost a decade after its release.

The killer? It cost half the price of the title it was upgrading, was DRM free and included a “spawn” mode for people to test multiplayer out before they bought it.

This still stands out, in my mind, as the pinnacle of what a development studio should do when they want to extend the life, world and canon of their titles. The thought that went into Brood War showed that Blizzard truly wanted to create an experience that allowed players to continue deeper into StarCraft and discover more complex situations and difficulty. It also made them a bucket of money from what was effectively a pretty cheap investment – almost all of the assets were taken from the original, outside the work done on the new areas and units. Unfortunately for modern gamers, much of this ethos — that is, crafting an experience that complements the game without overwhelming the wallets and expectations of their customer base — is well and truly dead in 2013.

EA created a behemoth at the turn of the century with The Sims, and they quickly released that in a virtual world that emulated our own, they could charge anyone for pretty much anything. How about a pack that introduced shopping malls? Halloween? Pets? University? Dating? The possibilities were endless. It worked, too — many of the expansions for The Sims sat at the top of sales charts for weeks, surpassing many AAA releases. By the time the sequel arrived, pre-order benefits had arrived on the scene, and The Sims was ripe for it. By the time the 3rd iteration had rolled around, it was basically stripped down to the bone – but EA and Maxis were ready to offer an absolutely ridiculous eighteen expansion and “stuff” packs. The “stuff: packs, most importantly, did not effect gameplay at all, consisting largely of crap to fill your house or dress your Sims. In addition, there was also a store available for people to buy almost anything else they could think of — all for cold hard cash of course.

Other publishers saw the success of The Sims franchise, but not in terms of its innovative gameplay or mechanics, but in its manner of vomiting money like a drunk after a lamb kebab. Before long, everyone was on the DLC drug, offering everything from overpowered weapons to the infamous equestrian protection we’re all so fond of. But there were titles that didn’t have things like weapons that could easily be sold. How could games like RPGs get in on the play? Simple — offer in-game cash as an option in the store, or how about 1,000 extra costumes for characters? Introduction screens for games now didn’t just invite you to start a new game, they practically begged you to get into the store and buy something, anything. Cardboard inserts offered an extra map or some other useless trinket to get you hooked, hopefully leading to an extra $10 or $20 purchase.

The problem here wasn’t that these extras were being offered per se, but more that they were of such poor quality. Most of these extra weapons or armour packs didn’t give you much of an advantage, and in most cases tended to be outclassed quite early on by a standard item. Multiplayer benefits began to skew communities, creating two or more tiers of “haves” and “have nots”, arbitrarily reducing the player base well and truly before the game had been out three months — plus you could tell many of the maps were rushed as well. Then there were the extra missions. Then there is the Civilization 5 route, where a host of existing features are ripped out and sold to us piece by piece later on, with the reason being that “so much had changed, we didn’t think players could handle it”. Uh-huh.

Mass Effect is, in this writers’ humble opinion, one of the best game trilogies of the past decade — but the DLC content was, with a few exceptions, completely forgettable. First, there was the controversy of important story arcs being locked, day one, behind a paywall. Then, extra squad members. But after we decided to take the plunge anyway, because hey, it’s Mass Effect, what we were left with was a sour taste on our tongues after dropping an extra $40 to unlock (most) of the extra missions, weapons and squadmates. So, publishers, why aren’t we just provided with this content with the (not so insignificant cost) of the original game?

Because, well, we’ve already demonstrated that we’re more than happy to pay for it. For all of the complaints about day one DLC, we’re all desperate for more of the same that we buy everything on offer, rolling the dice, in the hope that what we get complements the existing experience. But, it doesn’t. Everything feels tacked on, overpriced and lazy. Not only that, but it feels like that much of this content could have been easily integrated into the original title, creating a more cohesive link, rather than dropped abruptly onto the end.

It’s not just Mass Effect either. How about Fallout 3? Dead Island? Borderlands? All of these titles would later deliver”full featured”, story-based DLC that promised to introduce an extra avenue of plot and character development to their stories. The developers don’t lie in this respect – DLC is usually always an afterthought, but there lies the detriment to the final product. If what we’re paying top dollar for, on top of the original purchase price, isn’t as good as the original product, because it wasn’t designed to be part of it, then why are we being offered it in the first place? There are exceptions to the rule of course – most of the GTA DLC has been great, especially The Ballad of Gay Tony, but it still doesn’t escape the overall bastion of poor development decisions.

I don’t buy DLC because I don’t like the direction I see it taking our industry. Most of what I have played or items I have purchased do not feel like worthwhile products, especially when I can usually find a fantastic, all inclusive, indie experience for the same price I’m paying for a substandard add-on. If you hate DLC, then follow my example and just stop buying it. The only way publishers and developers will stop trying to cash in on our enthusiasm is when we stop buying the snake oil every single time.

With the news that Path of Exile were launching a gateway to bring down the lag for players in Australia and New Zealand, we called Grinding Gear Games’ Chris Wilson to get the low-down on where the F2P-ARPG is at, why now is the right time for a low-ping gateway, and their plans for the future.

If you’d like to play Path of Exile, you can download the beta client free from our file library here (quota-free for iiNet group customers).

GON: Chris, you’ve been in open beta for a little while now, since January in fact — can you tell us a little bit about how everything’s progressing?

Chris: So we’re now at 2.46 million registered users. So we had a large surge of people who became interested in the game, and who have joined our community, which has exceeded our expectations. Most of the game’s performance so far has exceeded our expectations, and this has raised some issues with how do we handle all these users, but thankfully the tests we’ve done prior to open beta were very optimistic in terms of user numbers so we were (barely) able to handle the amount of people that flooded our servers. And it did cause a few weeks of instability while we dealt with issues that only manifest when you have more than 50,000 people playing at once. But we we have those under control now.

GON: So what is your peak concurrent player count?

Chris: We’ve hit 70,000 in the first week of release. We’re very pleased with that. There was an awful lot of stuff combining at the same time with the game being very new and a lot of people talking about it which caused us to really strain the servers, but thankfully it’s dropped a bit to a more maintainable rate at the moment.

GON: Have you identified any issues in the beta that you’ll need to address going forward before launch?

Chris: We have found a lot of things based on player feedback and our own analytics that we can improve. There are various systems that we’ve been working on with the players to find better solutions to. For example loot allocation in the game, a lot of players would like it to be a bit more forgiving and less free-for-all, so we’ve been looking into a variety of options which will hopefully launch by the end of the month.

GON: When we last spoke you anticipated the third act being the final before launch. How do you feel about that now?

Chris: We added most of the third act in beta release, missing off about the last third of that act. And we are expecting that we will have that as the major content added at launch. It basically finishes off the story, adds a much more climactic boss encounter, and a lot of new areas. And we’re also working on the fourth act of the game which isn’t going to be ready for launch at the end of this year, but it will come maybe 9-12 months after that.

GON: So you’re still anticipating a launch in October-December?

Chris: Yeah, at the moment we’re targeting very late September or early October.

GON: And 9-12 months after that, the fourth act?

Chris: Yes, although that will depend a lot on support from the players. If they continue being generous with their support then we’ll be able to do it quickly, and if they’re not then I guess it will take longer. We have to use their money to develop it, and the rate of support dictates how many staff we have working on it.

GON: How many staff do you have now? Have you scaled up since beta?

Chris: We’re up to 39 now, including our customer support department, and that’s the department that’s grown the most.

GON: That’s really good! That must make you… the third biggest developer in New Zealand now?

Chris: Something around there. I’m not sure of the exact studio numbers. After we last spoke, everyone came down on me for misquoting the relative sizes of the NZ game development industry. So I’ll check my figures before I actually comment!

GON: Fair enough! So you’ve activated the in-game cash shop?

Chris: Yeah, when open beta started we stopped selling access to it and so it became public, and we allowed people to use the credit that they’d purchased during closed beta and also to purchase new credit that they can use to buy microtransactions. That’s been very popular. We’re constantly adding new ones, trying to get a few in every week, and people have been letting us know what they’re interested in seeing next.

GON: Have you been seeing a lot of people willing to pay out for new stuff?

Chris: It’s been very good, looking at the rates of support from the users and we’ve been finding it helps to run specials so that people can get some of the more premium things at a discount occasionally if they’re patient.

GON: So you’ve just activated the AU/NZ gateway for a week or so now. Can you tell us about how the ping has gone down since then and what feedback you’ve been seeing from affected players?

Chris: Sure. So we added it to the realm toward the end of last week but in a way that the public couldn’t see, but as of yesterday we’ve made it so the public can log in to it, so we’ve got one day of feedback from the public plus one more of testing from ourselves. For people who are used to playing on a 200-250ms connection to America, they say it’s like a different game because they’re playing in Australia with sometimes less than 30 ping. From NZ we get about 50 ping. There are some issues with the server that we’re working on resolving with the host, some initial configuration issues, and we suspect it’s just a matter of replacing that physical machine with one with different hardware. But from a networking point of view as far as we’re concerned it’s working extremely well, and it validates a lot of what we were hoping we would get. It’s a strange case because we’re running the realm internationally through different server hosts.

The thing about Path of Exile is that players can play together regardless of which server they’re playing on, so if you have a friend in Europe you can play with them and trade items, even though their server is located in another continent. So normally we do this because the data centers we use are linked together, they have really good connections, but in the case of the Australian one it’s with a different company so it’s our first case of actually going through ‘the wild internet’ as it were, to connect between them.

GON: So where is your gateway located physically? And what did you have to do to get it set up?

Chris: I have no idea what city in Australia it’s located in. Which in a way shows that this kind of stuff is handled transparently (laughs). In order to set it up, the first challenge was finding a server host that was able to do it. And the difficulty there is the cost of international bandwidth. It’s prohibitively expensive, but we have a good deal on that with this server, and it was just a matter of soliciting a test server to see how well it performs and then once we were happy with that we can order a lot more and scale it up to support a larger Australian population on there.

GON: Do you have a lot of AU/NZ players? Can you give us a rough estimate of how many there are?

Chris: It’s difficult to know exactly, but my estimate is somewhere in the region of about 4%.

GON: So 4% of your 2.4 million?

Chris: Yeah I would say it’s somewhere in the region of about 100,000 game accounts signed up through Australia and New Zealand.

GON: You said that the cost of international bandwidth is prohibitively expensive. Is this something you’re finding worse in Australia than any other country?

Chris: In New Zealand and Australia it’s SUPER expensive compared to the rest of the world. In some cases, one hundred times as expensive. So that is prohibitive. Except now that we have a good deal arranged with the server, it should be sustainable.

GON: Now one of the most common reactions to the gateway news was “But these are NZ devs, why did they take so long to make a gateway for themselves”. Can you explain to our readers the realities of game development and why it took this long to make this decision?

Chris: Well I guess there are a few things in play here, and the first one is that although we’re based in New Zealand, our customers generally aren’t. We’d love to be able to support them, the New Zealanders, especially because we’re based there, but the priority has to be the other 98% of players who we have to make sure come first. Because of that, launching an international realm was the first goal in getting that sorted out. And now we’re in that stage of open beta where we’re not encountering stability issues of the core game, you know, everyone else is playing happily overseas, that’s about the time we can look into supporting other territories. In addition of course New Zealand and Australia are very hard to target because of the cost of bandwidth.

We’ve received quotes in the order of multiple dollars per gigabyte of data, you know, like domestic internet rates or worse in some cases because it’s reliable co-located rates. So we’ve received quotes that… there is no way our company could afford the quantity of bandwidth that would be required to run servers there if it was that bad per gigabyte value. Thankfully you can get better rates if you organise larger bulk deals and tie them into server hosting. So we have eventually been able to get one sorted out but it’s not an exaggeration to say that this is literally the sixteenth or seventeenth server hosting company we’ve spoken to.

GON: How do you feel when you see New Zealanders or Australians complaining about this? It’s obviously very difficult for you to be in this position, since you obviously have to deal with the business realities but also you want to support your home team at the same time?

Chris: I would love to give the New Zealanders and Australians a place to play, I mean, if they were playing locally, it’d be easier for us to be greedy and to go and do that at the cost of everyone else, but we decided it’d be best to put most of the players first despite that fact it actually inconveniences us. Another thing is: having the game from New Zealand run at 200-250 milliseconds of ping has encouraged us to make sure the game works acceptably at that latency.

There are a lot of games like Vindictus for example, which is an Asian action-MMO, that game limits it so you can’t connect if your latency is over a certain amount, and they did this because they have quite a fast visceral experience but it requires the latency to be low. Whereas in our case we know that some people are connecting from… like we had connections from the middle of Africa. I don’t know how they’re getting internet, but they’re playing our game and it’s important that the game is playable with a lot of ping. We do an awful lot of action-prediction and stuff like that. When you click to attack it starts the animation going straight away even if it’s going to be a full second before the data gets back to you with the result. And while you certainly suffer playing under conditions like that, it still feels relatively immediate to do so.

GON: I guess this must have made you a stronger developer to have to work under these conditions, but did it provide any difficulties in testing? Were you able to really test the game properly?

Chris: We have our internal servers in our office and we also had the servers in the states so to some extent the experience that we were missing was the experience between these two. The ones in the office have less than a millisecond of latency, and the ones in the states maybe 200 ms away. So we were missing the experience of trying it at any less than 200 ms but thankfully, that’s what our giant army of beta testers was for and they gave us plenty of feedback on that.

GON: When you look to the future you’ve got the fourth act coming and before that, the public launch, but what’s the next step for Path of Exile beyond more acts and more content. Do you have plans for maybe a foundry-style mod toolkit, or any sort of player creation tools? Just spitballing — what have you got in the works?

Chris: We’ve looked into the idea of community content and there are definitely some opportunities there. One of the things to note is that because it’s an online game with a secure economy, you can’t let the players literally decide “this is the exact layout of the dungeon and we’ll put the monsters where we want” because they could make it too easy. So there has to be a degree of challenge that’s maintained. We have quite an interesting plan for the future of Path of Exile which involves both continuing forward with the core game, new acts and so on, but also taking advantage of the league system where we can run — think of it as new servers of the game that have a fresh economy and new rulesets.

We’ve been running race events that last between say, one and eight hours, using the system for quite a while now, I mean there’s several running a day now, six today for example. It’s like a fresh start in the game and you get the chance to race other players. It’s unique in action RPGs because it lets you see who’s better at the game rather than who has spent the most time accumulating items. We have some interesting twists on that in the future that we believe will be very addictive, and our goal is that alongside having a strong normal action-RPG we’d like there to be a lot of repeatable content in these interesting events.

GON: Do you have any plans to introduce a real cash economy into these events? Betting on peoples’ performance for example?

Chris: We are very interested in catering towards the more meta e-sports style stuff. With regards to wagering, I mean we’ve discussed wagering from in-game items all the way up to real money and… of course there a lot of legal implications of real-money wagering, and similar kind of abuse issues that can happen with in-game wagering. I mean people will happily throw matches and stuff to get a better sword, if needed. It does have some interesting points but we really value our streaming community and the people who take the events seriously as a pseudo e-sport, and we have better streaming integration coming in the future for example.

GON: I’ve been playing Neverwinter, and a lot of people are using their Foundry tool to create maps that are basically just easy mob grinds and experience farms. Is this the sort of thing you’d have to worry about with player-authoring tools as well?

Chris: Right. One of the things we are planning on selling is the ability for people to customise the parameters of one of these league events, but in a way that can only make it harder. That way you get bragging rights for completing a very difficult event, rather than the ability to just set it to be too easy and make a lot of progress.

GON: Making it too easy does sound pointless, but… I guess if they’re willing to pay you money?

Chris: It should be interesting. Though it really depends. As long as we can keep it safe for the other users. You’ve probably seen with the design of our microtransactions the goal is that people with money can’t get any kind of advantage over other people in terms of actual progress.

GON: And that seems to be working out quite well for you — there’s a lot of MMOs which are struggling with microtransactions because people know it’s pay-to-win, and so they avoid the whole game like the plague.

Chris: Yeah. It’s difficult as a player to commit yourself to playing something where you know that someone can just trump all of your work by spending twenty bucks.

GON: Chris, thanks a lot for your chat and it’s been really good to talk to you!

Chris: Thank you for your time!

Late last week, we sat down with Blizzard’s lead encounter designer, Ion Hazzikostas. Aside from having an awesome superhero-style name, Ion also manages the raids, scenarios, and other encounters that make up Mists of Pandaria’s patch 5.3.  Read on for all the details of the new scenarios, why Blizzard are cutting the XP required for the final five levels, and how he feels about WoW’s recent drop in subscriber numbers.

GON: I spoke to Dave Kosak recently about 5.2, and he said that Blizzard were hoping to pull the camera out a little with 5.3 and show what’s going on with the rest of the world, rather than just Pandaria’s local problems. Can you talk about how you’ve achieved that and give us a quick summary of how the overall global storyline in 5.3?

Ion: There’s definitely a strong focus on Horde and Alliance storylines, much as we saw back in 5.1, where we had a focus on the developments there. What we’re seeing really is the Alliance coming together, and the Horde falling apart. There are a lot of tensions among the factions that comprise the Horde, after the events seen in the Dagger in the Dark scenario. Vol’jin is clearly not happy with Garrosh’s direction and the way that’s going, the trolls in the Echo Isles are in open rebellion, and so players are going to see this story unfold through new scenarios in 5.3 and the outdoor world.

We have scenarios that focus on what Garrosh has been up to, and some of the questionable things that he’s been doing, and we also also have some outdoor content, some quests for Alliance players to go behind the lines of the Horde as spies working with the Alliance spy groups, to see the fortifications that Garrosh has been building up and some of the sketchy activities he’s up to. There’s also a bunch of outdoor quest and event content in the Northern Barrens, which is quickly turning into a battleground with Garrosh’s Kor’kron in open conflict with the other forces that are there.

GON: Now you’ve got an impressive four new scenarios in 5.3, as well as the Heroic modes for existing scenarios. Out of all of the four new scenarios, which is your favourite and can you tell us a bit about how it was designed?

Ion: One notable feature in 5.3 is that back in Pandaria there is an excavation happening, in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. Garrosh and his forces have drained one of the lakes in the vale and been mining, deep beneath the surface. He’s hired a bunch of goblin mercenaries to dig in search of the secret rumoured to be kept down there. This scenario basically takes players alongside a goblin member of this expeditions, running into various horrors down there that make it very clear there’s some dark force that is being unearthed — coagulated dark oozes, things along those lines. And it turns out that at the depths of the mine this excavation has stumbled upon a sealed titan chamber that predates most of Pandaria’s history. And inside they find a box, and the not-necessarily-wise member of the goblin expedition that you’re with in this scenario opens the box.

GON: Of course.

Ion: Right, and so a very dark power is released, and players will see the events that unfold there. It’s doing a lot to set up what is going to be the continuing story arc of Mists of Pandaria going ahead into patch 5.4, and it’s cool to let players play through the story so that they really experience it, and understand what’s happening, and feel like a part of it.

GON: So that’s your favourite out of the four scenarios?

Ion: I think so, yes. I mean it’s hard to pick a favourite, they all have very strong story and gameplay elements, but that’s definitely a particularly interesting one.

GON: What’s the process for creating a heroic mode for existing scenarios, and what balance concerns do you have to address?

Ion: It’s not a huge deal, but it definitely involves a lot of playtesting. There are two main differences. First off is simply the gear level to which they’re tuned. Our regular scenarios which have been updated to heroic modes were originally designed for fresh level 90 players who may be wearing item level 430 or so gear. And they needed to complete it by groups in that gear so that they could gear up. Obviously players right now are literally twice as strong. So the old scenarios, the normal scenarios, really don’t offer any challenge, and that makes them potentially less interesting than they otherwise could be. The simple part of it is just cranking up the numbers accordingly.

But then, one of the big differences, and one of the things that is exciting about heroic scenarios, is that we know there’s going to be some environment of communication and cooperation among members of the group, whereas regular scenarios randomly assemble individually queuing players into a party of three, so you don’t really know the people that you’re playing with. You have to queue for a heroic scenario with a pre-formed group of three, so we can assume there’s going to be a bit more in the way of coordination, maybe some crowd control, pitching in to help each other out — which basically lets us have mechanics that call for those responses, and hopefully create more interesting gameplay. Since really, that sort of cooperative gameplay is the essence of MMOs, and what makes them fun.

GON: Have you had a good response to these new scenarios on the PTR?

Ion: So far yes — people seem really excited about them and to be enjoying them. We’re looking forward to people giving them a shot on live. They also give a very large amount of valor points, so players looking to get their valor points to upgrade their items using the new upgrade vendors that are returning in 5.3, will find that heroic scenarios are a really great way to do that.

GON: I was going to ask, because I’ve seen some players express concerns — well, players are always yelling about everything — some concerns about the amount of time it takes to get sufficient valor points to gear up with vendor epics. Now you’ve just said these heroic modes are a great way to get valor points, how do you feel about the current valor situation, and do you feel adding more heroic scenarios is going to soothe these concerns?

Ion: I think that we definitely look at the rate of valor, it’s something that we’ve increased since 5.0. We found that at the start of the expansion, where many players were doing dungeons to get gear, and daily quests to get their reputations on a regular basis, valor was just kind of coming in incidentally and it wasn’t something players really had to worry about actively, which kind of masked some issues with the ratios at which different activities were awarding valor. The intent was always that you should be able to pick the activities you enjoy most, you can play with your friends, and you can get valor playing solo, in a group, in a large raid, whatever you prefer.

So over the course of the last couple of patches, we’ve increased the amount of valor awarded by various activities and that’s going even further in 5.3. Valor from heroic scenarios, and then we’re actually DRASTICALLY increasing the amount of valor awarded from challenge modes, such that doing a challenge mode dungeon, even if you don’t get a stellar time, just bronze or even no medal at all, will still give you in excess of 100 valor for one dungeon clear. So players who are just looking to try out new types of content with their friends should have more options than ever before. We don’t want to make something that feels like a chore, but clearly if we get the numbers wrong it could veer into that territory, and that’s when we have to make an adjustment.

GON: I’ll come back to that in a second — for now can I ask about the 5.3 world event. What’s going on there?

Ion: It’s a lot of dynamic, outdoor quests and event-driven content. It’s a slightly different type of outdoor content than we’ve had before, it should have a more event-driven feel, where there are random things happening — there could be a caravan crossing the Barrens that comes under attack, and any players nearby could go and defend it, and if they successfully defend it, everyone nearby will share in the reward. So it’ll have a slightly different feel to regular WoW quests, where you go and talk to an NPC and they ask you to go and perform a specific task, and you go do it, and return, and the hope is that it’ll create a place for players to adventure and, on our PVP servers, to come into conflict with one another.

GON: It’s only available for a limited time this event, with the story set to continue in 5.4, is that correct?

Ion: Yes.

GON: So how long to players have to complete it?

Ion: Until 5.4. Obviously we haven’t announced the date for that, but there should be a fair amount of time for players who are interested.

GON: As an encounter designer, are there timed events like that where you’ve made, and you feel sad that they’re going away — you’ve spent time on them and now they have to be shelved and nobody will ever play them again?

Ion: A little bit! But I think on the flip side it’s actually one of the cooler parts of a massively multiplayer online game like this, it’s a reminder that the world can actually evolve and change, and we’re always a little bit sad as designers to lock our work away and not have people experience it in the future, but the flip side of that is that the world is actually going to be different tomorrow to how it is today. Which is a really good reason to check it out today, but also a reminder that there’s an evolving story, that the player’s role is actually changing the world around them.

GON: If we can jump again to pet battles — they’re being tweaked in 5.3. Can you explain why Blizzard is tweaking the stats behind pet battles, and how player responses have been in general to this feature since the introduction?

Ion: I think the pet battle feature is one that we view as a huge success. A lot of players from a broad spectrum of previous game playing styles, from casual solo questers to hardcore raiders to high-end arena players have had a lot of fun just doing pet battles, and collecting and using that to fill their time as they explore Pandaria. We’re not viewing it with as fine a balance as… we’re not trying to balance it the same way we do our PVP or our classes, but we are keeping an eye on the evolving metagame, pets that seem overpowered, some that are dominating the high-end matchups, and we will make adjustments accordingly to make sure that people feel their pets can be competitive. It’s something that a lot of players spend a good amount of time doing, and care a lot about.

GON: Do you have any plans to expand the pet battle system in any meaningful way — tournaments, something along those lines?

Ion: No concrete plans for any kind of massive expansion, I think we see ourselves continuing to incrementally add new content. All options are on the table for different directions we could take it in, we’re very happy to have a popular and exciting system like this, but there are a lot of cool places it could go for sure.

GON: Earlier you said you didn’t want to have any content that felt like a chore. Now I guess that ties in nicely to a big change in 5.3 where you’ve reduced the experience required on the final five levels by a fairly impressive 33%. What’s the rationale behind this?

Ion: Ultimately it’s to make it easier to level alts. There’s a certain pacing to the game as a whole, particularly when the expansion is new, there’s a lot of things to see, to do, to explore, and once you get to max level there’s a whole new process that begins there and a whole power curve, beginning back then with scenarios and dungeons, because things like Looking For Raid weren’t open at the time. So there was just a very different overall pacing to the content, whereas at this point many if not most of players playing Mists have at least one max level character, and they’d like to get multiple alts caught up so they can also experience that content, and we’d just like to make it easier to do that.

GON: In a broader MMO sense, comparing WoW now to how it used to be at vanilla launch for example, how do you feel the ‘value’ of experience points have changed? A lot of old, old-school WoW players who have complain the game is too easy now, but a lot of new players are definitely enjoying it and a lot of established players are enjoying, as you say, the ability to rapidly bring up an alt.

Ion: I think we’re continuing the direction that has been the case for years and years now. We initially began adjusting the levelling curves from one to 70 in the Wrath of the Lich King timetable. Originally in vanilla WoW I think it took me something like 13 or 14 days play to get my character up to 60, and that while effective at the time, also created a tremendous barrier to entry for players who are coming to the game anew or returning after time off and want to play with their friends that are max level. And one of the values that’s important to us is that there shouldn’t be too many barriers to getting back in and playing with their friends. Reducing the max experience required is just one of the steps we can take towards that end.

GON: Do you have any plans to address the people who are clamouring for new customisation options, hairstyles, etc? You don’t have to look far into a WoW patch notes thread to see somebody angry about the lack of new haircuts available… what’s Blizzard’s timeframe on this? I know you’ve been working on redesigned character models.

Ion: Nothing concrete to announce at this point, but we’re definitely aware that players love the ability to customise their character, as an expression of themselves and their aesthetics. The transmogrification feature is one that’s been extremely popular and we’re well aware this is something that players want, and it’s something we hope to be able to offer, but nothing solid to announce just yet.

GON: In terms of actual workload and resources, is developing new hairstyles and that sort of a thing a big deal, is it something you could work on but you just don’t have the manpower at the moment?

Ion: I think the reality is that it’s a question of prioritisation. We would like to do that, but there are players who also, for example, want new models for the dungeon bosses and raid bosses that they fight, and don’t want to see just a reskin of an old model. And it’s the same team of character artists that are doing all of these things, so it’s just a question of what’s more important. It doesn’t mean that we don’t care about it, or that we don’t want to do it, it’s just a question of what has to come first. And so the core features, such as new creatures and things along those lines have to take priority.

GON: We saw recently that WoW subscribers had dropped to 8.3 million. Now that’s obviously still the biggest subscription MMO by a long shot, but what I want to ask is — in your day-to-day job, do you have to consider subscription number fluctuations like this? Are you or the studio ever given direction to change the content in accordance with these numbers, in order to maybe recapture them or aggressively grow them?

Ion: It’s not about the numbers per se. I mean clearly we want to make content that as many players as possible will enjoy. And we pay far more attention to our forums, our fansites, to what our players are saying to us directly, and to what we ourselves are experiencing as we play the game, than we do to abstract numbers. Because that gives us more guidance to be gained from direct feedback. Ultimately we just want to make the best game possible and the game that is the most fun possible to play, and we’re confident that if we meet those objectives, subscriber numbers will follow.

GON: And you have no concerns about the majority of the loss being in the Asian market?

Ion: I think there are certainly business considerations. As an encounter designer, I have no reason to believe that players in Asia have a different definition of a fun dungeon or a raid boss than players in North America or Europe, and in fact the feedback comes back very similarly. So our focus is just on creating fun experiences, epic encounters, and that’s what we try to stay focused on.

GON: Thanks very much Ion for your time.

Ion: No worries, my pleasure!

Patch 5.3 releases tomorrow.

When I played Anomaly: Warzone Earth a couple of years ago, it was a refreshingly different take on the tower defense genre, but one that seemed almost more like a proof-of-concept. Now, with Anomaly 2, this reverse-tower-defense concept has been polished up and expanded into a well-developed new iteration that offers a number of neat new twists on the idea. This includes a multiplayer mode that is the real selling-point of the sequel, but which might struggle to find a stable player-base.

Anomaly 2’s single-player campaign is a marked improvement on that of the first game, even if the story remains somewhat perfunctory and almost superfluous. It’s well-structured for teaching you all about the game’s approach to tower defense, and mixes in the new elements so you won’t be bored if you’ve played the first game. The most prominent of these new elements is that almost every unit can transform, switching between two modes with different characteristics and functions.

This is what you’ll devote most of your attention to during the campaign, making sure your convoy of units is appropriately configured for the threats it faces, i.e. switching long-range units with a narrow arc of fire to shorter-ranged modes that can cover every angle. This focus on configuration extends to a much greater emphasis on the marching order of your convoy than the first game’s campaign had. New enemies necessitate switching fast-firing units to the back of your convoy, to let the slow-firing heavy-hitters pound away at them, or vice-versa.

Selecting your route through the alien-infested levels was the meat of the first game — but in Anomaly 2, it’s just the basic level of tactical gameplay. It all adds up to a very satisfying and engrossing tactical experience, but it’s not without its flaws.

For example, certain missions punish sub-optimal route selection more harshly than others, and some require a very specific mix of units and mode-selection for success. This obviously reduces opportunities for players to take their own approach, rather than searching for the one correct way to tackle a situation.

Multiplayer is where Anomaly 2 really shines, and where its innovation is strongest. This is asymmetric multiplayer, with one player placing turrets that the other must deal with as their convoy travels to their goal. It’s a really compelling multiplayer experience, but it’s also a bit complicated to pick up, even if both players have finished the singleplayer campaign. Given that multiplayer games live and die on the size of their player-base, this complexity barrier might make it hard for Anomaly 2 to maintain enough players to provide a satisfying and well-developed multiplayer scene. This would be a shame, because it’s a game that’s really worth learning.

Anomaly 2 is definitely worth picking up if you enjoyed the first game. If you missed the first game, or found it lacking in complexity, Anomaly 2 might hit the sweet spot for you. And if you can get together with some mates, then you’re in for a great time with the multiplayer.

Good:

• Expands the original’s mechanics
• Well-structured singleplayer campaign
• Excellent and innovative multiplayer

Bad:

• Limited range of choices in certain campaign missions
• Multiplayer takes a little work to get into

Anomaly 2 is available for $14.99 on Steam. If you already own Anomaly: Warzone Earth, you’ll get 10% off the purchase price before May 31st.

This review copy was supplied by the developer.

If I’ve learned anything from the decade of my life I’ve poured into Sid Meier’s magnum opus, it’s that life is never easy if you’re hell bent on guiding your nation through a peaceful course of prosperity, science and trade.

The Mayans were one of the first ancient civilizations that focused much of their efforts on developing a society that rewarded intellectual, artistic and economic development. Throughout the initial few thousand years of their existence, significant inroads were made into equalisation of labor, educating the masses and building a strong trade system that allowed for infrastructure development and growth. The benefits of this ground work peaked during the “Classic” period in the early AD’s, where the Mayans were leaders in perfecting some of the most important technologies of the era; in particular the foundations of writing, the modern calendar and astronomy.

But at some point during the 8th and 9th century, Maya experienced an almost systematic collapse of the entire state, to the point where the entire population disappeared and the facilitation of construction, art and inscriptions ceased immediately. Because the extent, speed and enormity of this event was so severe,  there is still no universally agreed rationale to explain what actually occurred during that 100-year downfall. Theories range from the attack and subsequent displacement of the population by the Spanish, the hand of whom the Mayans had suffered almost constant harassment and attempts at colonization for decades. An alternate thought was that due to overpopulation and lack of available land, the Mayans could no longer support themselves and fell due to their own successes.

History lessons aside, the story of the Mayans and the mystery of their disappearance from the world is a circumstance I’ve always wanted to replicate, but have been unable to within the existing framework of Civilization… until now. Firaxis have blessed me with a restricted (Single Player, Fixed Nation, Fixed Map Size) preview of their promising new Civ 5 expansion, Brave New World, which finally returns focus to three of the most undervalued elements of the game – culture, trade and science. Overhauling trade, adding a set of new policies and widening culture based victory avenues are just a few of the new additions to the game.

At first, not too much seems to be different. Two years of patches have smoothed out much of the bugs and glitches, tidying up the interface and providing more information to what’s happening during turns. A new tutorial system pops up at various points during the match, alerting the player to new features and functions (as well as, annoyingly, some old features that most players are already well and truly aware of) and offering information on how to effectively utilize them. Experienced players will notice the new Ideology tab on the Social Policies screen, which comes into play during the late game and provides a secular form of pressure via cultural influence, in the same way religion did in Gods and Kings.  It doesn’t take too long, however, before we’re introduced to the Caravan, Brave New World‘s most attractive new feature.

Caravans, and eventually, Cargo Ships, offer the ability to effectively generate “free” wealth for both of the civs involved, as well as shifting trade items like horses and iron. Each route lasts for roughly 30 turns before it can be re-evaluated and changed, all the while being boosted via scientific advancement and bonuses. Essentially, they work in the same manner as workers – you set and forget them. One of their better functions is the ability to traffic food from one of your cities to the other, effectively saving part of your populace from starvation and facilitating growth in desert or ice cities that may not usually do well on their own (Las Vegas, anyone?).

On their own, trade routes don’t really become essential parts of a burgeoning superpower until you meet all of your neighbours; once other nations grow jealous of your growth and wealth, it becomes imperative that your relations with them (and city states) are managed effectively. War is still not good for business.

Improvements aside, it can still feel a little difficult to avoid conflict with other countries without simply bribing them, although the AI has drastically improved since the atrocious algorithms that created sociopathic warmongers out of almost all of your opponents. The new World Congress (precursor to the UN) helps quell (or exasperate, if you prefer) a lot of the heat, allowing you (if you’re leading it) to force civilizations into treaties and regulations that disallow them from accessing tech or over-militarising to a point that threatens your existence. Spies can also now be turned into Diplomats, who can lobby and bribe parts of the “world vote” into your direction.

The creation and use of Great People and Great Works have also drastically expanded, via new buildings and research points, in turn making their spawns much less random and generally more strategic, especially if you wish to win the respect and cultural reputation that allows for victory. Works, such a famous works or art or poetry, developed by these units feeds into a new “Tourism” element, forming a type of “offensive culture”, that is physically stored within your cities’ various cultural buildings. Tourism points flow into the overall pool, ballooning your territorial influence.

During my recent interview with Civ 5 lead Dennis Shirk, we discussed how the original “static” cultural victory left players turtling inside their territory, pooling culture until the count ticked over. His promises to overhaul this have borne some element of fruit – while balancing the various options that “Great People” provide (speeding up development or boosting influence) is certainly more interesting, it doesn’t truly dull the war drum inside, with the game practically begging you to build a little self defense if you refuse to.  “Come on man”, your military adviser beckons, his eyes shifting to the side like the evil genius that he is, “what’s the harm in setting up a little nuclear deterrent?”

Has Firaxis succeeded in letting us recreate the mysterious rise and fall of Mayan history? Well, it’s come pretty damn close. The improvements to trade and culture significantly raise their in-game status and strategic power to the point where they can no longer be ignored or exploited via military means alone. A strong, focused and commercially minded pacifist could easily push influence across a wide area of the map, if left unchecked. The World Congress throws a odd shaped spanner in the works and looks like it could be a hell of a lot of fun in multiplayer, although that particular element was not included in the preview. Keep an eye out for our review closer to the expansion’s launch.

Gigabyte, makers of all things gaming, have decided to celebrate the launch of Metro: Last Light by offering the games.on.net readers the chance to gear up and take on the unforgiving underground of the Russian metro.

That’s right: win this competition, and you walk away with a brand new Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660… and a brand-new Aivia Osmium mechanical gaming keyboard (with Cherry Brown MX switches). With these babies attached to your rig, you’ll have everything you need to crush the mutants into submission.

But wait! There’s more!

These are the special Metro: Last Light editions of the GTX 660 — so you’ll score yourself a free copy of the game as well! Very nice.

There are two prize packs to win, and each one contains the card (with copy of the game) and keyboard — so don’t delay!

Wondering how good Metro: Last Light looks on PC? Why not check out our detailed, nine-minute long video review and see for yourself!

Holy crap! How can I enter?

Good question! To enter this competition, all you need to do is in 150 words or less, describe one of the mutated creatures now living in the radioactive Russian underground. It can’t be an existing Metro enemy, it has to be something you made up. It can be as serious or zany as you like: the two most creative entries as selected by our judges will walk away with the prize.

Leave your entry as a comment on this article below. Remember! 150 words or less. This competition is also open to Australian residents only.

What else do I need to know?

This competition runs from now until 11:59 PM Adelaide time on Sunday 26 May. It is governed by the terms and conditions on this page.

Editor’s Note: After we ran our massive interview with Nate Mitchell, VP of Product behind the Oculus Rift VR headset (read part one here, and part two here) we were contacted by Neil Schneider from Meant To Be Seen 3D, the core developers behind the open source Vireio Perception drivers that many gamers have been using to turn games into VR-capable 3D experiences.

He asked us if he could issue a statement to clear the air around the issue of Vireio drivers vs. native Rift support, and we agreed. So without further ado, take it away Neil…

***

Let me begin by saying that I’m supportive of the Oculus VR SDK and Nate is 100% correct that a native VR game has competitive advantages over anything a VR or stereoscopic 3D driver can deliver. Oculus’ strategy is the correct one, and Vireio Perception’s role is to fill the need for games that don’t or won’t have native VR support. It’s not our intention to replace or substitute the benefits of true VR rendering and programming.

Nate’s remarks as they are written are misleading, however, and I would like the opportunity to answer his criticisms.

Andres Hernandez (Cybereality). Toy Gun!

First, Cybereality, whose real name is Andres Hernandez, is an MTBS forum moderator. He’s helped out with coding parts of the website and has contributed a lot of time to the community over several years. He still does. The same goes for Palmer Luckey, who also has roots as an MTBS moderator for years, and still maintains the role.

Long before the Rift was launched, Andres announced plans to release commercial stereoscopic 3D drivers for VR devices like the Oculus Rift. What made these drivers unique compared to the other products is that they supported head tracking which is a core feature of the Rift and is available through other means by off the shelf products. This isn’t a simple “mouse look” as Nate’s comments suggest. The game rolls and turns with your head movements; it does this by using a combination of mouse look and adjusting the projection matrix so that you get all three axes of rotation.

Head roll, deep 3D, table corner is protruding with Vireio Perception

Realizing that he was getting hired by Oculus VR, Andres decided to release his VR drivers as open source so he could put most of his energies into Oculus VR. Since that time, Vireio Perception went from one solitary programmer to three talented volunteer coders who are collaboratively working to build the next iteration of the software.

According to the article, Nate’s primary concern about the Vireio Perception drivers is latency, and that this latency is somehow disorienting for gamers. While I will be the first to tell you that Vireio Perception has a major problem (I mean MAJOR), it has little to do with latency.

Stereoscopic 3D, a core feature of VR and the Oculus Rift, requires that the left and right view appears on the screen at the same time. If the software is working correctly, you should see the left and right view, next frame, left and right view, next frame, etc. etc. Each frame has to show both views simultaneously.

Vireio Perception drivers are a software hack to get the same results from games that weren’t designed to do this. On the fly, the drivers take existing video game data from DirectX API calls, create a second camera view where none existed before, and pass on a left and right view to the display – in this case the Oculus Rift.

When Andres was working on the Vireio Perception code he got nearly everything correctly, but for whatever reason, the left and right views were out of sync. So even though things are happening faster than our eyes can easily perceive, the left and right views are not being updated at the same time in each frame. That was a piece of the puzzle he just didn’t have enough time to solve, and that’s how the drivers have been behaving right up to the current build.

This is one of those errors where you know something is wrong, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. Nate is calling it latency, but it’s really something very different. There is a happy ending to this story, and I will get to that shortly.

The biggest problem with Vireio Perception is the user interface (UI). The Oculus Rift is designed in such a way that the screen’s field of view goes beyond what your eyes can actually see. The majority of games place the HUD elements in the far corners of the screen which means that even though the UI is there, you can’t see it! This is a real problem when you are dependent on in-game menus or health and ammo indicators. There is also the issue of the game’s crosshair not being accurate in 3D mode because it wasn’t designed for that purpose.

Now the good news!

Convergence Portion of SHOCT Mechanism

First, the time differential problem between the left and right camera views is largely corrected. As long as users follow our settings guide and use the SHOCT tool (Schneider-Hicks Optical Calibration Tool), we think the next public build is going to be a lot more comfortable for extended gaming periods.

While Vireio Perception started as just supporting DirectX 9, we have been hard at work adding DirectX 10 and 11 support. We also think the crosshair problem will be easily solved with an add-on 3D crosshair or something similar, and we are experimenting with different methods to get existing game HUDs more VR friendly. This problem hasn’t been licked yet, but we have ideas.

I know this sounds crazy, but not one of our programmers have received their Oculus Rift yet! Imagine the improvements that will be made once they have the actual SDK in their hands!

So this begs the question: does native VR support have a real advantage over VR drivers like Vireio Perception?

Yes, and this is why. Vireio Perception makes it possible to track nearly all your head’s movements. It’s kind of like a mouse look, but it’s much more advanced. However, unless the game is designed to behave differently, your body and head movement are one and the same.

Native VR games let you look around and walk as two distinct movements just like real life. Depending on the game, there are additional hacks and modifications that can be found to replicate this behavior, but it’s not a simple driver fix. It’s also likely that there is a lower latency with native code as Nate describes, but this hasn’t been reported as an issue by excited Vireio Perception gamers with mid to high range PC gaming equipment.

I will finish by saying that I’m very proud of the Vireio Perception development team for their continued technical innovation and their positive problem solving attitude. When he got wind of Nate’s remarks, Philip Larkson’s first comment was “all we can do is keep improving it (Vireio Perception)”. With a Skype smiley, Chris Drain said “Doesn’t mean I don’t want to replay old stuff that’s never going to get first party support though!” As for John Hicks, he didn’t have to say anything. He’s just setting an example and is hard at work on the next wave of Vireio Perception.

I should point out that there are other products out there. There is a lot of excitement for Vireio Perception because it’s free and open source, but there is also a commercial package called VorpX in development, and with the help of NTHUSIM HMD, I think that established brands like Dynamic Digital Depth’s TriDef Ignition and Nvidia’s 3D Vision drivers will be able to repurpose their established 3D software for VR. At least, it’s something I’m hoping for. I don’t know if the NTHUSIM / 3D driver mix will have head tracking, so I’m looking forward to seeing what they cook up.

Palmer Luckey & Neil Schneider at CES 2013

Let me finish by saying that whether people love or hate VR drivers doesn’t matter. What matters is that VR is being taken very seriously by game developers and gamers alike for products in the not-too-distant future. I expect that there will be plenty of AAA titles and independent game releases with innovative VR support someday soon. In the meantime, MTBS’ community is just happy to help fill the large gap of games leading up to that point. After all, helping foster community driven ideas is what we do best.

We’ve been carefully evaluating the entries to our BenQ Gaming Monitor giveaway, where three lucky people will be heading home with a brand new BenQ RL2450H gaming monitor. These monitors were custom-made in accordance with the direction from some of South Korea’s top StarCraft II players, resulting in an experience powered by a dynamic contrast booster to adjust levels on the fly and keep you at maximum alertness.

But enough about that! Who are the winners? Well I’m very pleased to announce, after much deliberation, that our winners are…

Writing Category

We had a lot of great entries and tales of terror in this category, but unfortunately there could be only one. And our winner, with the worst sob story of them all, is assa46.

I currently have only 1 monitor (21″ BENQ-G2220HD) the fact that is tiny is only half of my problem, whenever I am playing a game, midway through the screen goes black and I usually die before I can turn it back on. It has been doing this for over a year now, I can’t even play games now without the worry of it shutting off. Getting a new monitor would be really great and I would be able to return to gaming once again.

A tiny 21″ monitor that blacks out in the middle of games? We must help this person. assa46, a shiny new 24″ BenQ RL2450H is on its way to you.

Drawing Category

Once again some very stellar entries in this one, but the judges felt that forum regular a3gis‘ entry showed a truly terrifying scenario of global extinction should the man lose at a game of Solitaire.

Congratulations, a3gis! Please don’t kill us all.

Video Category

Very few entries comparatively in this category, but all of them top notch — unfortunately, only one entry could win and it was tarvang whose madcap jumping and arm-flapping genuinely told the judges that he was the one who would get the most excited.

Some great runner-up entries from xsphera and AuV2 Jason, respectively. Check them out!

Tarvang, if you could please post a follow-up video once your monitor arrives showing the real happy-dance in action, that would be perfect.

Congratulations to all the winners!

I’ll be contacting you by private message on the forum shortly to organise your prize collection. Thanks to everybody who entered, and thanks to BenQ for supplying the prizes. Look out for our next competition very soon.

Metro: Last Light is the direct sequel to Metro 2033, and promises to fix all the complaints about the original while simultaneously looking drop-dead gorgeous and pushing your PC as far as it can go. Does it live up to the claims? Find out in our video review.

WARNING: Metro Last Light is rated R18+ in Australia. The following video contains scenes and language that are not suitable for viewers under 18.

This video can be downloaded in HD from our file library by clicking here (quota free for iiNet group customers).

Editor’s Note: At the time this video was being cut together, the FOV patch had not yet been released. It was made available overnight, and Steam users should update their game now to get it working.

Good:

• Drop-dead gorgeous
• Amazing atmosphere and attention to detail
• Great PC support (aside from the lack of FOV control)
• Meaty gunplay and clever mechanics

Bad:

• Ultra-linear and in love with its own story
• Bad voice acting, poorly-written characters
• Makes you crawl at a snail’s pace everywhere outside of combat
• Heaps and heaps of quicktime events and silly contrived situations

In part two of our interview with Nate Mitchell, VP of Product at Oculus Rift, we discuss upcoming resolution improvements to bring the tech into HD, how the reaction has been from both indie and major developers, and how they’re dealing with simulation sickness issues.

Catch up with part one of our massive Oculus Rift interview here.

GON: You’ve mentioned that you’re focusing on one single kind of Rift for the consumer launch. Can you explain the reasoning behind that? Some might argue that there’s another niche of older, cashed-up hardcore gamers who would be happy to pay two grand for a really high-end version, on top of the consumer version? Isn’t it just a software issue, as the biggest difference would probably be resolution?

Nate Mitchell: There’s two main reasons. One is that we want game developers to only have to target one version. We want them to be able to say ‘ok this build of the game runs at 60 frames per second, at this one resolution, and it’s perfect for the Rift’. Having that is crucial for game developers; they don’t like developing for multiple specs. That’s one of the biggest problems with gaming on the PC, it’s so fragmented that there are all sorts of weird problems. That’s part of the beauty of the iPhone, the consoles – they’re single hardware specs.

GON: But PC devs are used to developing games that support multiple resolutions?

Nate Mitchell: That’s true, but the second point I want to make is that we haven’t sorted out all of the details there. There’s the whole question of how does the form factor of the Rift change with different LCD panels. There’s an incredibly amount of hardware decision making that goes into the Rift design using the panel that we use. It’s not like we can use the same exact panel, but at higher resolution. It’d require a full redesign from the ground up to go with a different panel. So for right now we need to stay laser focused on shipping one design, one Rift. In the future, if we turn into a billion dollar company manufacturing our own displays, I’d be happy to offer a deluxe version of the Rift with a higher def screen and all the bells and whistles, but these screens cost millions of dollars to develop. It’s out of our scope right now, we’re very much piggybacking off all of the display manufacturers, using their technology for our product.

GON: Do you think Oculus will ever develop and release input devices for VR, or are you  always going to stick entirely with the HMD?

Nate Mitchell: We are incredibly interested in human-computer interaction. There’s a couple of our guys here that focus all their R&D on researching and evaluating what the best input device for VR is. The dream, when you imagine VR, is being able to look down and see your hands, see your fingers and interact with the world as you would naturally. We’re not necessarily there today but there is Microsoft’s Kinect, and the Leap Motion, and a number of other companies in that space doing some incredibly interesting things. We really believe that the future of VR gaming as a platform will go in that direction. So the short answer is no comment at this time, the long answer is it’s a super-interesting topic and we’re constantly researching it.

GON: Is input a harder challenge than the headset challenge?

Nate Mitchell: I wouldn’t say it’s harder – I would say it’s different.

GON: On to the subject of simulator sickness, what are you doing to minimise this?

Nate Mitchell: Man, that could be a whole interview by itself. It’s impossible to talk about all of it. For the most part, we need a couple of things. We need positional tracking, that’s a major potential factor right now as we don’t have it yet. From there we’re going to continue to improve the SDK, adding things like hopefully positional tracking, more predictive tracking, head and neck modelling, all those tiny features make a huge difference. The final step is the content. We’re working with game developers endlessly – a huge portion of my GDC talk was specifically dedicated to what devs can do to avoid simulator sickness. We’re developing a best practices guide that outlines a bunch of this stuff. For example, right now, any positional tracking movements that you encourage in the game can create some sensory conflict. For example, having a lot of computer screens that look like the user is supposed to bend down to read. Also, moving the player backwards through space at high speeds seems to have a pretty negative effect on people. Taking away camera control for a cut-scene and removing head tracking is no good. Having the camera move in a way that isn’t related to head movement is a sure fire way of making someone feel simulator sick.

It’s a matter of educating developers – I was just talking to DICE yesterday and they’re super excited by the challenges. But they don’t see them as show stoppers, they see them as “how can we design the game to lend itself really well to VR”. We’ve already seen developers tap into this. The CCP guys developed EVR, this VIR space sim, and did this incredible job where they took all the things we’ve been talking about and applied them to their game. You’ll notice if you have a chance to play EVR – you can only move forward in space, all of the cut-scenes and UI are integrated into the game world, the player never loses control, there’s always head tracking. There’s even a great visual identity with the player’s body sitting in the cockpit. When you combine all that you get this really cohesive experience, and your brain says “wow, I’m really piloting a space ship”. It feels awesome.

GON: Big budget developers are really risk averse – they’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars so have to be sure their game will sell. Rift is still going to be quite niche for at least the next five or so years, do you foresee that most of your software support will come from the indie market? Or is it that these big budget guys are so incredibly excited about VR, you know personally passionate about it, that we’ll see a Rift mode sneak into the bigger titles? You were just at Dice, is that what you saw?

Nate Mitchell: It’s impossible to say. Let me just answer a couple of things that you said. First of all, we don’t believe that Rift is a niche product at all. In fact we believe that it has an incredible attractiveness to the mass market. It all depends on content. If you ship only Battlefield 3 on the Rift then yes, it’ll only attract the hardcore gamers. Which isn’t necessarily niche, but let’s say it is for argument’s sake. If you have Minecraft on the Rift, that’s a very different market segment that’s going to want to try Minecraft VR.

I certainly think that in the beginning, a lot of the excitement and new experiences will come straight from the indie community. We’re doing a lot to support the Indie community, with Unity integration, the SDK, and we’re going to continue to do what we can to make it as frictionless a platform as possible. Even if you’re not a developer, if you buy our dev kit you can develop something, share that with people and get involved with the magic of VR.

I think what you said though is absolutely true, the reason that Hawken is coming to Rift is that we walked in and showed them the Rift and they were like “Wow, you’ve done it – how can we use this with Hawken, this will be so cool”. We hear that over and over and over. Take John Carmack – John wasn’t thinking there’s money to be made in VR, he was thinking “this is incredible, I want to step inside Doom”. What we hope is there’s a couple of Rift evangelists at every company that push for, even unofficial, Rift integration. That’s all we need.

GON: Anything else you’d like to add?  

Nate Mitchell: Yeah, what do you think of the Dev kit?

GON: I’m a graphics whore by nature, and have tested a lot of VR headsets. It’s definitely the best I’ve seen by far, but resolution is a huge issue. Today’s games are so detailed due to HD screens, and all that detail gets lost in the low resolution panel. So games with simpler, sparser environments tend to look better. I’m not even sure 1080p will be enough – the immersion comes at the cost of clarity. It’ll be interesting to see if people find that trade off acceptable. I also found scale in games rather strange – proportions of landscapes and objects that look fine in 2D suddenly look really fake in 3D. So devs will need to start using more realistic scales and proportions.

Nate Mitchell: I promise you that we’ll be fixing that (resolution) in the near future. We’re also working with more developers so there should be more made-for-VR stuff in the near future. Two quick points. One is that Vireio Perception is not the way it’s meant to be used. We’re not against it, but we do stress that driver-based VR is not the best experience. Also, give us the benefit of the doubt – this first version is a tool for developers. When we do, if we do, show a higher resolution display, I’d be really excited to hear your thoughts. I think you will be impressed.

Nate Mitchell is the VP of Product behind the Oculus Rift, the virtual reality headset turning heads and stomachs with its impressive technology and affordable entry-level pricing. Bennett Ring sat down with Nate to talk all things VR, what’s in store for the Rift, and whether or not the PS4 will be powerful enough to run their tech.

GON: You’ve been associated with some interesting start-ups. What attracted you to Oculus?

Nate Mitchell: When we met Palmer I was obviously intrigued. Palmer is an incredibly interesting guy, an incredibly smart guy, and when we got talking about the Rift, it became clear there was this great blend between Palmer’s hardware experience and our software experience – Michael Antonov (Chief software architect at Oculus, formerly of Gaikai and Autodesk), Brendan Iribe (CEO of Oculus, formerly of Gaikai and Autodesk) and I . Then when Palmer actually showed us the Rift, just the most basic demo, I remember the moment I put it up to my eyes, and then took it off, I knew immediately that I wanted to be involved in the project, and that this was the future of gaming. At that moment we jumped on board and decided to invest our time and energy to make Oculus a next generation VR gaming platform.

GON: Looking at the eventual launch of the consumer version, what do you think will be more important – having perfect hardware, or nurturing a rich software ecosystem for it? And how do you balance those two very separate requirements?

Nate Mitchell: It’s a great question. It does really rely on both of those things being great. In the most basic sense, great software is a must-have. Without software, the hardware is really nothing. But our team’s focus is on hardware. The way we balance it is to not focus too much on the games. We have game developers out there making games, we’re not making first party content. Our goal is to build the absolute best hardware possible, giving game developers all the tools they need, and hopefully that in turn cultivates that great software ecosystem, that brings us the triple A, killer app for the Rift.

GON: There’s the open source Vireio driver that has been developed by fans of the Rift, why aren’t you doing that internally when it seems to be a really promising way getting a large library of software to work with your hardware for a minimal amount of effort?

Nate Mitchell: Vireio Perception was actually developed by a guy called CyberReality, a member of the MTBS3D forums, and we’ve since hired him as our community manager. We really, firmly don’t believe that a great VR experience can be achieved at the driver level. I think that if you play any of the games that Vireio supports, there are a handful that work pretty well. For example, Half Life 2, which is all first person, very few cut-scenes, basically all done through the eyes of Gordon Freeman, that’s a perfect fit, right? So Vireio Perception with Half Life 2 on the Rift is a decent experience, but the vast majority of the games that the driver supports, you get a mediocre, if not poor experience, that really disorients the user. You can’t have low latency head tracking when you’re doing mouse emulation. Even the best games just don’t play well in VR with Virieo Perception – or any other driver. It really does need to be implemented by the game developer.

That’s something we’ve preached since day one, because VR is hard. VR is incredibly challenging. The UI alone requires game design changes, let alone camera controls and things like that. That’s why we’re investing so much into creating a great SDK, to let developers really tap into the hardware and develop an ultra-low latency VR experience. Everything else, those are nice hacks, and they might be cool experiences, but it’s not something where we would invest our time. We’d rather focus on “made-for-VR” gaming, or ports done by the developer, at the metal, where you get the highest quality experience.

GON: Do you think there’s a lot of crossover for developers of first person games, so they’ll be better at VR?

Nate Mitchell: That’s really hard to say. It really depends on the developer and the experience they’ve created. First person lends itself very nicely to the Rift, but we already have a number of third person developers and RTS/God games investigating the Rift having as much success, if not more, than first person games.

GON: In terms of the consumer launch, from your perspective what’s the number one thing you need to do to make this the killer device?

Nate Mitchell: The number one thing on the top of our list, since day one, has been a higher resolution display. The Rift is all about immersing you visually in the virtual world, and the display is at the crux of the experience. Right now, the dev kit is still relatively low resolution because of the high magnification. Bringing that res up, hopefully in the 1080 range, increasing pixel density, just ups the level of immersion so much. It makes it a much more fun experience. We’ve been investigating that stuff in the office for a while. I can promise you that it helps quite a bit.

GON: I’ve been using the Rift dev kit, and the resolution is obviously a big issue. You mentioned Half Life 2, and when I was looking at Alex, the female companion, her head was just 10 pixels across. This is at relatively close range. You lose a lot of her emotions. It made me think that maybe 1080p probably isn’t going to be the ideal solution either. Do you think it’s realistic to aim for a 2560 x 1440 panel in the next year and a half?

Nate Mitchell: That’s hard to say, because I’m not deep in that display industry, but obviously that tech is there and people are working on it. Whether or not that’s something we can tap into I can’t say. But what I can say is that 1080p in a form factor like the Rift is approximately double the pixel density of the developer’s kit. It’s a night and day difference. What you’re saying is true, you really want a 4K display in there, but even that 1080p is such a huge jump in terms of immersion and visual quality that it’s certainly going to be enough for the consumer version of Rift. But yeah, you’re absolutely right, I’d love to see even higher resolution versions. There is another challenge though, as the game has to render a consistently higher resolution every time we up the resolution of the display. One subtle benefit of the current panel is that even high-end games can render at that low resolution and easily hit 60 frames per second. Jump to a 4K screen and you’re not going to render Battlefield 3 at 60 frames per second. Maybe you can, but you’re going to need some truly serious graphical horsepower to get there. Again, we’re just on the cusp of the hardware being ready for all this. You look out five years, and you’re right, that’s the direction we’ll go.

GON: It’s interesting that a lot of the media coverage of Rift doesn’t cover what’s powering it – the system at the end of the HDMI cable. They want higher res, without thinking about the PC requirements to power it. On that note, the Playstation 4’s specs are out, do you think it’s powerful enough to run a 1080p Rift?

Nate Mitchell: Absolutely. It really all depends on the content. Look at two random games. Minecraft running on a PS4 versus Battlefield 3 running on a PS4, there’s a completely different graphical horsepower need under the hood to get those running for the Rift. You’re going to be able to have quality high-end smaller experiences in the consumer version, running off a tablet. Even potentially Ouya or the Ouya 2. It’s not necessarily the hardware that is the bottleneck, it’s the content. I think you’ll find the PS4, based on the specs they released, has definitely enough horsepower there to get some high quality Rift experiences. It’s going to really depend on how game developers leverage the hardware.

Based on what I’ve seen of the next-gen engine technology, like Unreal Engine 4, people are designing their engines this time around for 60 frames per second up front, there’s now a stigma about 30 frames per second, which lends itself really well to transition to VR gaming.

GON: Sony has experimented with consumer Head Mounted Displays in the past with their HMZT1 and T2, are you concerned that they’re going to come in and copy the Rift’s idea, pumping their immense resources into their competing product?

Nate Mitchell: No. The Rift SDK is not a DLL that anyone can just hack into. The whole SDK and all the work we’ve done is tied to the Rift hardware. So Sony would have to copy our hardware…

GON: That’s what I’m saying though – how do you stop Sony or another company from looking at what you’re doing, how you use the lenses with the screen, and using that basic design to build their own VR headset? Do patents protect you enough to stop Sony from doing that?

Nate Mitchell: We are well protected and we take Intellectual Property protection super seriously. I can’t go into any of the details, but it’s not something that we’re worried about. I think what is a more realistic situation is one of the big game manufacturers like Sony, stepping up and saying they’re going to develop their own competitor to the Oculus Rift. Different SDK, different system, but same goal of consumer VR. At that point it’s just a question of who has the better hardware, who writes the better software. Everything we do here every day to build the Oculus platform, we’re confident that we’re going to stay in front. It’s a challenge.

GON: How do you stay in front when you’re facing off against these multi-billion dollar behemoths, who have thousands of engineers? What is it about Oculus that puts you in this rare position to be the leader in such an exciting new hardware field?

Nate Mitchell: I don’t want to give away all our cards, we’ve got a couple of things up our sleeve that give us an advantage. But I can say that people in very large companies are very surprised at just how much we’ve done in such a limited time frame. Even more than that, and I think it’s the crux of it, is the building of a great team with top talent in the industry to work on this next-gen platform. We’ve already started that process, we’ve built an incredible team, who we believe are the best in the world to deliver consumer virtual reality, and we continue to expand that team even today. Incredibly smart, passionate developers working on this thing, iterating in ways that big companies just can’t. We’re building our dream, hoping it comes together.

Tune in for part two of our massive Oculus Rift interview tomorrow.

Rise of the Hutt Cartel, the first expansion to The Old Republic, was released last month with a promise of fresh content to play through and more carrots to chase by upping the level cap from 50 to 55. So, with the galaxy saved and level 50 reached, my character headed back to his starship, to find a holocall waiting for him. After a cutscene featuring a delightful action sequence with some training droids, and a conversation about the imminent destruction of Makeb, my giant green Jedi zoomed off to the newest entry in Star Wars lore.

Players on the Republic side are tasked with trying to push the titular Hutt Cartel off the planet Makeb and save it from a mysterious energy that is pulling it apart at its core. Much of the story quest is well written, and provides ample opportunity to leave people for dead, save villages, flirt with daughters and all the other things one expects from modern RPG dialogue.

Many of the new cutscenes are a treat, with panoramic shots of your starship, hammy action sequences and general Jedi awesomeness. RotHC works towards adding some excitement into the conversations of your main character, who in previous cutscenes has been mostly static.

In the background, the planet Makeb makes a passable effort towards providing some fresh scenery. Its horizon is lined with towering mesas, while the ground has plenty of jagged rocks, canyons and mercenary bases to stop you staring into the sky for too long.

Like all other planets in TOR, Makeb has a long, fully voiced storyline that takes you across the entire zone to complete its many objectives. But unlike other planets, Makeb does little to give you something to do in between these objectives. Normally, you’d have quite a few side quests with dialogue cutscenes, then whatever you had to do would be spaced roughly between your location and the major storyline’s next objective.

For some reason, BioWare Austin have decided to forgo this and instead place repeatable daily quests in each area. These are almost always issued with a text popup and seem to invariably involve accessing a computer console of some kind, because apparently space-faring races enjoy leaving computers out on the patio. These quests are relatively short and only repeatable once a day, which means that you’re required to spend a fair amount of time moving between objectives by just grinding through mobs.

If you’re lucky, you’ll have a bonus mission to give you some extra experience for killing them, but mostly you’re just grinding. This impersonal approach to side quests makes it hard to stay engaged with what you’re doing, as every story beat is followed by a mind-numbing mob-grind.

The new hope in RotHC is the addition of space binoculars macrobinoculars and scanner droids. These two new features come with brand new quest lines attached to them, both of which send you back to planets you’ve previously been on to find hidden items and new areas.

For example, the first quest for the macrobinoculars takes you back to Coruscant, a low-level planet, so you can search out droids and transmitters placed by a mysterious spy known as “The Shroud”. With a press of a button, you enter a first-person binocular view which allows you to zoom in on otherwise inaccessible places to scan the devices left by The Shroud. After finding all the objects in an area, you’re presented with a new objective that leads you to a hidden room inside a cantina. Here, you use the binoculars once again to solve a puzzle which finally allows you to confront one of The Shroud’s lieutenants. The addition of new, more puzzle-based questing makes for a really refreshing change in the TOR experience, and one which I’d like to see expanded on.

Alongside this new style of quest, RotHC also adds a fairly standard achievement system that rewards you with titles for completing some of the harder tasks, along with a range of class tweaks designed to remove previously unused skills and add additional ones for the five extra talent points players will receive. As well as these, RotHC offers new end game dungeons to take on with your guild — but as I’m not part of such a guild, I unfortunately can’t comment on their quality.

What Rise of the Hutt Cartel fails to add is an extension to The Old Republic‘s greatest selling point: its class quests. As I previously mentioned, planets in TOR had their own story that stretched over the time you spent in that area, backed up by a unique, fully voiced class-specific quest-line that stayed with you for your entire levelling career. I had hoped that RotHC would continue these brilliant class quests for another five levels, but I can only assume that budget constraints have forced BioWare Austin’s hand and prevented them from extending these. This makes most of the content feel more like an epilogue, rather than an extension to the grand story your character has participated in thus far.

With only the planet-wide quest and the new puzzle-style quests engaging me, and the grinding and lack of a personal story quest force-pushing me away, I found the expansion to be — for me, at least — wholly unnecessary. If you’re still playing and just eager for anything new to do on your max level characters, RotHC is worth looking into. But if you’ve previously left TOR and are waiting to see if this new content makes it worth getting back in, then this isn’t the expansion you’re looking for.

Good:

• Cutscenes are a step above the vanilla game.
• Planetwide story is fun, ample roleplaying opportunity
• New puzzle quests

Bad:

• No addition to personal story
• Gets very grindy at times

Rise of the Hutt Cartel costs $9.99 for subscribers and $19.99 for free players. You can buy it at the official SWTOR website.

This review copy of the expansion was provided by the publisher.

Amidst the shadowy corridors and hushed, low-lit rooms of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified’s recent live-action teaser, there’s a strong suggestion of secrets and subterfuge. The trailer appears to reveal that your role in 2K Marin’s upcoming third-person shooter is as a member of a department that does not officially exist, responding to threats that can never be openly acknowledged due to the panic they would cause across a 1960s America.

Having recently played a level of The Bureau, it has become a little harder to reconcile this premise with the actual game. For the most part, this is because it is now readily apparent that extra-terrestrial activity is not only occurring in isolated incidents within localised areas of the US but is instead cropping-up at dozens of sites across the whole country. What’s more, the single incident that I’m dispatched to deal with during my hands-on time involves multiple skyscraper-sized alien towers hovering over Pima, New Mexico.

In short, the alien invasion is happening on a level that would be hard to convince the general populace to dismiss as stray weather balloons, errant military tests or funny-looking cloud formations. It’s at this point that I begin to suspect that the “Erase the Truth” tagline may have less bearing on the gameplay than I had originally hoped.

“[Erasing the truth] is more the prime directive of the Bureau; more an overall meta-goal of the organisation as a whole,” confirms Nico Bihary, senior publishing producer at 2K. “So, you don’t finish a goal and then get a breakdown saying that you achieved ‘a 30% cover-up’, for example. Instead, it’s interwoven as part of the narrative experience.

“For us, the game is really about battlefield management, that’s really the entire focus but there are also elements of a strong narrative experience.”

The battlefield management to which Bihary refers consists of a choosing three agents from a roster of eight and tooling-up before hitting the field. There are a number of familiar franchise elements at work here and anyone who’s played Fireaxis’ excellent XCOM: Enemy Unknown will recognise certain abilities, alien species, weapon types and character classes, even as the 1960s setting seeks to differentiate The Bureau from its sister-title’s near-future aesthetic.

There’s still an HQ to manage, for example, with a research lab to put to work to decipher the secrets of alien technology, an agent recruitment and training process and an Ops room where you’ll choose which of the optional and story-critical missions to tackle and when. However, as Bihary suggests, the real focus of this tactical third-person shooter is the battlefield management; adapting to the ebb and flow of the fight as it happens on the ground, rather than taking Enemy Unknown’s more detached, isometric eye-in-the-sky overview.

In practice, this lends more immediacy to combat without it devolving into a twitch shooter and Enemy Unknown’s at-a-glance cover rating system of zero, half or full cover is implemented to good effect here. However, cover-alone is not going to win you the war and if you’re going to make any inroads to eradicating the alien threat then more aggressive action is required. It’s here where The Bureau’s tactical leanings reveal themselves.

Battle Focus is The Bureau’s radial-menu management tool for utilising your squad’s abilities and tactics, which are essential for triumphing against the often superior number of alien invaders on the battlefield. While you directly control the movement of one of your agents, the other two require your input to position them toward advantageous flanking positions or to be pulled out of harm’s way. Accessing the Battle Focus menu slows down time but still requires a modicum of quick thinking to manage each agent’s movement, combat targets and their use of abilities, which can be queued and combined for optimal execution.

In truth, the abilities themselves are hardly innovative, with the ability to lift enemies out of cover, draw aggro, lay mines and turrets or take extra time to deliver a critical headshot among those available. The way in which these powers can be combined, though, offers scope for personalised strategies as well as the opportunity to find the most potent combination against different enemy types.

It’s satisfying to taunt an enemy with one agent while another lines-up a headshot, and amusing to flush-out multiple entrenched Sectoids by levitating a turret so that it can fire over their makeshift cover. What this amounts to is a degree of familiarity with the powers at your disposal and a UI that looks similar to that found in Mass Effect, while the more hands-on approach that’s required in order to win skirmishes draws meaningful influence from The Bureau’s turn-based brethren, Enemy Unknown.

With a total of around half a dozen abilities per max-level agent class, it’s these combinations that provide The Bureau’s combat variety, while choice of agents, weapons and upgrade paths also offer a personalised approach to each mission rather than it being proscribed by the level designers:

“It’s less about creating a bunch of constraints that say you have to have a specific class or character to be successful, because I don’t think that works,” reveals Bihary. “It’s instead about understanding what the pillars of an XCOM game are: tools, technology and tactics and then letting you work out how to combine those pillars to be successful.”

In all, I come away from playing The Bureau: XCOM Declassified both hopeful and a little disappointed. It’s hard not to feel like 2K Marin has missed a trick by not tapping into the more cerebral covert ops suggested by the live-action teaser. However, it’s also promising to sample a single-player third-person shooter that requires an understanding of the options and abilities at your disposal and encourages you to experiment with them, while also asking that you tailor the behaviour of your AI squad mates to your particular liking.

As with the series’ infamous approach to perma-death, it’s a gamble that could prove immensely satisfying if everything else falls into place.

The Bureau arrives on PC and consoles in August.

For more on the game, read our interview with the developers where they lament how “obscenely accessible” modern games have become, and what they are going to do about it.

Before my five-hour marathon with Dotnod Entertainment’s Remember Me, I sat down in Microsoft’s darkened Xbox Room in Sydney’s North Ryde and went over my notes one last time. It seemed strange that much of the chatter about the game centered on Nilin, Remember Me’s female protagonist.

Apparently, a female lead was too much, with some publishers refusing to pick up the game because of Nilin’s gender. But what was even stranger was that despite a strong showing at GamesCom, there was very little discussion about the game itself, save what details could be gleaned from the trailer videos.

Set in Neo-Paris more than seventy years in the future, Remember Me creates a world where social networking has invaded the last vestiges of our privacy: the brain. Thanks to the Sensen implant from the Memorize corporation, citizens can store and share their memories digitally, creating a host of new opportunities for the subversive, authoritarian state.

Nilin works for a group of renegades called the Errorists, who use memories as a variety of weapons. Memories of secure codes, security installations and more can be stolen; memories can be brought into the physical world as a hologram, necessary for accessing or traversing several areas. Memories can also be altered entirely, although that power largely seems confined to Nilin and doctors with blank cheque books.

The Errorists initial rebellion failed miserably though: in the opening scene, Nilin is sprawling on the floor, screaming in agony while her memories are wiped clean. As she shuffles into place for a second round of treatment, her brother Edge creates a diversion and our hero makes her escape.

From there, the world of Neo-Paris opens up. It’s beautiful in its own way without being groundbreaking. The vibrancy and feel of Neo-Paris — particularly the contrast between the dank sewers and the touch of heritage and order found in the privileged districts — is something to behold.

It also made me long for the times when Remember Me was still called Adrift; back then, Dotnod were planning an open-world style of game, and I would have dearly loved to scour the streets and sights of Neo-Paris more.

Even if you want to search your surroundings, you can’t. The game is fairly linear, so ledges and walls that look like they’re accessible often aren’t. I’m not trying to advocate sandbox or open-world games over their narrative-driven counterparts here, but seeing a world as interesting as Neo-Paris, and then being unable to explore that further, is disappointing.

Exploring and moving around, however, is competent enough. Nilin leaps and traverses walls far more efficiently than Nathan Drake ever could, although the movement is more assured; she doesn’t slip as often, beams don’t collapse with the same regularity. You can’t make missteps unless you deliberately jump into open space or fail at one of the relatively basic movement puzzles; Remember Me is more Prince of Persia than Assassin’s Creed or Uncharted in this way.

The UI guides you via a pair of orange arrows, and there was only twice where the camera angle made it hard to see. Luckily, the path forward was fairly obvious though and I never once had any troubles with the camera while adventuring.

It wasn’t until I got backed into a corner mid-fight that the camera became a problem, but it never lasted long enough to be anything more than a minor annoyance. Nilin usually fights side-on or facing the camera, but things occasionally get awkward if you have to spin around to target an aerial opponent (more on these later).

As a whole, my relationship with the combat was the complete opposite to my love affair with Neo-Paris. After the initial disappointment of not being able to traverse the city as I liked, I learned to appreciate it for what it was. The combat, on the other hand, instantly feels amazing. Punches and kicks land with a satisfying thud, the animations are smooth as silk and the controls are simple and intuitive.

Most fighting is close-quarters and executed through a series of combos, predominantly the X and Y buttons (a PC build was not available for this preview). The trick with Remember Me is that you can configure those combos to grant different bonuses by unlocking Pressens.

There are four classes of Pressens. The first three will either enhance your damage, refresh the cooldowns on your special moves faster or help regenerate your life, while the fourth simply enhances the effect of the previous Pressen in the combo.

The real advantage is the ability to pause and switch out your combos at any time to something more appropriate for the fight at hand. The inputs for the combos don’t change, only its effect, which is a great help for those who struggle at fighting games.

Slower players will particularly appreciate the window of opportunity after you land a hit: it’s enormous. It’s near impossible to miss a combo unless you’re forced to dodge, and even then the system, in some instances, allows you to jump over your current target without cancelling the current combo.

Occasionally you’ll need to clear out the area a lot faster, and that’s where special Pressens (S-Pressens) come in. Accessible via an Assassin’s Creed-style scroll wheel, S-Pressens are typically wide-scale AOE attacks, although the first one you’ll unlock allows you to chain combos simply by mashing the X and Y keys.

The one I ended up using the most was an AOE stun, because it revealed hidden enemies and also gave me enough time to chain a couple of combos which I’d already configured to regenerate my S-Pressens. Normally the cooldown on your specials can be one or two minutes, but a successful combos could cut that time in half or even completely depending on the length of the combo.

The system is easy to execute and looks good, but as the game progresses, completing anything beyond a basic combo becomes a little troublesome.

It starts once the Scorpion aerial crowd-control robot is introduced, which is also called Seraphim in the “Enemies” trailer. Nilin can only kill Scorpions with the Spammer gun, acquired after a boss fight in the second chapter.

Killing aerial enemies isn’t an issue. The problem is that once the waves of enemies grow, killing Scorpions becomes your ultimate priority, otherwise you’ll never be able to finish a single combo. Enemies can take up to three or four combos before they fall — less if you specialise in damage — but the Scorpions’ rate of fire will always force you to dodge before you can finish the combo.

There’s nothing wrong with that as a fighting strategy, but it soon became my only strategy. It dulls the combat experience when you’re simply recycling battle tactics. The vaunted customisation of combos and the fluidity of attacks take a backseat as well; it doesn’t really matter what your combos are before you kill your aerial opponents, and once they’re dead you can do anything you like.

The saving grace is that the fights themselves are fun to watch. Nilin fights a bit like Sonya Blade, with a full suite of cartwheels, flip-kicks and spinning punches. Remember Me’s engine didn’t miss a single beat, and it should be just a treat on a high-end PC.

The boss fights are a little more interesting, although the ones I battled – Kid X-Mas and the Madame, overlord of La Bastille — felt largely similar to something you’d experience in Devil May Cry. Each had three distinct phases, with the window for opportunity becoming smaller and smaller as the fight neared its completion.

It’s here that the combo system will probably see the most use too. Against Madame, I needed the use of my S-Pressens much more quickly, so I rotated my combos to focus solely on cooldowns, with a short three-hit combo solely for regenerating life. Against X-Mas, taking damage was less of a concern, so I concentrated on doing as much damage as possible.

It’s a fun system in principle but how good it works in practice really depends on the enemies and the waves themselves. Hopefully there’s more variety in the later chapters; a major chunk of this gameplay could become rather tedious.

The underlying theme of social networks, their abuse by the state and the willingness of its citizens’ to supply personal information, on the other hand, was intriguing and relevant. I would have preferred to see the leapers designed as homeless, mentally dishevelled Neo-Parisians rather than zombified shells teetering on the edge.

Dotnod’s creative director, Jean-Maxime Moris, has already publicly said that the game is not trying to leave a message or serve as some kind of allegory for the potential issues posed by Facebook and Twitter in the real age. The four chapters I’ve seen certainly don’t do that, and I’d like to see the direction the story takes beyond that point. But it’s an interesting take on the cyberpunk theme.

It’s not a wholly unreasonable premise. Watch Dogs is taking a similar tack, although it focuses more on technology and hacking, collective information and the nature of subversion, whereas Remember Me concentrates on the personal, the loss of identity and redemption.

The start of every episode shows Nilin in a featureless, almost Animus-like area, where she reflects on the events of the episode prior, questions her motivations, the motivations and actions of her brother — are they really siblings? — before weakly deciding on a course of action.

I say weakly because there’s little emotional strength in anything Nilin says, not in the scripting itself or the delivery. As a heroine, Nilin starts out quite vulnerable. The cut-scenes thereafter reinforce that, and that weakness works nicely with the idea that your memories, your last barrier of privacy, is now (effectively) a public commodity.

I’d have to see more of the story to be sure, but I’m still on the fence about Nilin. My biggest concern is that Nilin as a character — once her fears are replaced with the confidence that comes with the capacity to rewrite memories — doesn’t evoke much emotion at all. She’s just there. I was more interested in Neo-Paris, the background of Edge, the Errorists. Incidentally, you can read more about that if you want; journals called Mnesists are scattered throughout the city, and you can access them through the in-game menu (again, a bit like Assassin’s Creed).

Something that feels much more at home are the memory remix sequences, Nilin’s treks through the mind of her enemies and/or targets. The first remix you encounter, strangely, happens while an assassin employed by the Madame holds a knife to Nilin’s throat. The idea that Nilin, who absconded from prison and all the torture she experienced within, can somehow combine all her talents to convert an assassin’s memory before her jugular gets sliced open is a little fanciful, but sure, I’ll roll with it.

Anyway, the memory remixes are essentially a puzzle sequence. You’ll watch a scripted sequence before being handed the power to rewind and fast-forward the memory at will. At various points indicators will flash over items, which you can tinker with. Adjusting items changes how the memory plays out, and the objective is to mess with the right items to create a memory that’s usually diametrically opposite from reality.

My only gripe was with the rewinding/fast-forwarding mechanic; you control the memory by rotating the left-stick either clockwise or counter-clockwise, which makes no sense whatsoever. If everybody’s memories are digitised, then logic follows that I would be watching them like a video file.

Video files have progress bars; you don’t rewind them in circles like a VHS tape. It’s needless busy work and seems so out of place to have an action in a futuristic cyberpunk game that’s designed on technology from the 1970s.

But that’s really an incredibly minor point: the memory remix sequences are actually rather fun. They’re more intricate than their initial appearances, and the downshift in pace is a welcome change from the frenzied melee combat.

Another welcome surprise is the orchestral score. I wasn’t expecting to hear the booming tones of the brass section as I gazed upon the clouds for the first time, or the pulsating rhythm of the strings during my flight from La Bastille, but there it was.

Occasionally, the interjections were seemingly random. There was a curious moment while I was rotating the camera, admiring the city’s design and examining the complexity of the textures — they were quite flat in places, but this isn’t final code and there’s the PC version to consider — when the brass band exploded at full volume. I’m sure there was something momentous that I was supposed to be looking at; it just so happened that Nilin’s backside was in full view.

That experience summarised my time with Remember Me: surprising. Not always a welcome surprise, but surprising nonetheless. It’s an odd feeling, having walked in completely ebullient, impressed by the bravado in showing off a whole five hours of gameplay.  I’m still curious to see how the rest of Remember Me turns out, but my expectations are now more attuned with reality instead of the cyberpunk fantasy in my dreams.

Remember Me launches in Australia on June 7.

It seems like collectible card games are turning up everywhere these days. They’re one of the biggest growing genres on mobile devices, have enjoyed a recent revival in the physical format, and are even getting the once-over from major developers such as Blizzard. Now, thanks to indie studio Nival, the standard tower defence is getting shaken up too with Prime World: Defenders.

After a comic-book style introduction into the world of Prime, the substance called Prime and its influence on magic and technology, the game begins. The concept is pretty simple, with the player having access to a variety of towers and magic spells. The former requires Prime (money) to build, and the more you use a particular tower, the more expensive it becomes.

Magic, on the other hand, functions as a panic button of sorts. Some spells will slow the enemy, others function like a grenade. There’s no cost to magic, although some spells come with a lengthy cooldown, but I found it was largely unnecessary for most fights. But it’s once the CCG mechanics are introduced that the game really starts to become more interesting.

Every tower or spell in the game is accessible in the form of a card. Before each mission, you can review your upcoming enemies and adjust your “hand” — what towers you can play — to suit. It’s a nice little touch, acting as a great warning when you need to prepare for airborne enemies and so on.

Since every tower and spell comes in the form of a card, occasionally you’ll get double-ups. Those cards can then be combined to level up the original card, a process called “evolution”. Evolving cards unlocks upgrades while improving the attributes of the base tower.

You can also combine, or “fuse”, towers with other towers or special cards. Artifact cards, for example, increase the effectiveness at which a tower can be fused. Fusing is another method of upgrading your towers, and it’s a cheaper and more readily available option. But it’s also less effective; you might need three or four cards to upgrade the more expensive towers.

All of this is paid for with silver, earned from the completion of levels. Silver can buy items and booster packs from the in-game store as well, while special, rarer cards are available through gold, which you earn through bonus challenges and levelling up. Each level gives you extra little bonuses here and there — 10% extra silver, an extra slot for magic, more room for towers and so on — but you need silver to pay for that too.

Given that the fusing mechanic is the only thing in Prime World: Defenders that is actually cheap, you’ll need to grind quite a bit if you want everything on offer. The levels don’t change in these side missions, beyond one or two spaces being blocked, allowing you to reuse the same tactics over and over again.

The main missions thereafter are more perplexing. You’ll be defending waves from two or three different directions, with three, four or more antennae that buff the attackers. These can be killed if you place a tower nearby, although often the locations are strategically irrelevant. If your initial line of defence is broken though, the attackers are almost impossible to stop even with emergency magic or a last-ditch tower, so it’s a tight balance.

Not everything in Prime is to my liking. The camera, for instance, only rotates smoothly if you draw a circle with your mouse, shaking wildly and moving only inches with any other standard movement. I’ve also got this nagging feeling that there’s an in-app purchase somewhere around the corner, even though I know that is definitely not the case. Perhaps renaming the store or gold to something that sounds a lot less like a transaction of hard currency would do the trick.

As for the rest, I’m pleasantly surprised. I’ve enjoyed my time with Prime World: Defenders (even though the game refused to load when Steam was in Offline Mode!). It’s an impressive little title from Nival, and definitely something worth following up on if you’re a fan of the genre.

Prime World: Defenders is available now for pre-order on Steam for US$12. The game launches on May 22.

NeverWinter is still “technically” in beta (although characters will not be wiped before launch), meaning much of the foundation content may change before full release. Please consider this more of a “detailed hands on” than a comprehensive review, especially since it’s likely to rapidly change over the course of the next few months.

When it comes to the MMO genre in 2013, a particular saying instantly comes to mind — “The more things change, the more they stay the same”. The formula for success has been been well and truly established, over the ashes of a plethora of failed titles. Developers now know what works and what doesn’t, replacing potentially risky gameplay mechanics with small refinements to well trodden, successful systems such as real-time combat and dungeon crawling.

So if anyone should be in a position to know precisely what failure looks like and how to hopefully alleviate it, it’s Cryptic Studios, reborn under the Perfect World banner to develop the second Dungeons and Dragons MMO – Neverwinter. With three (and a half) titles under its belt, Cryptic are one of the most experienced development houses in the industry, coupled with a publisher (Perfect World) considered a rising star after a host of successful free-to-play efforts in both Asia and the US. Can this team strike gold with one of their most ambitious projects yet?

Let’s face it, if you’re thinking about playing Neverwinter, then you’re in one of two boats. Either you’re a complete MMO tragic and pretty much jump at the chance to dip your toes in yet another virtual world, or you’re a bit of a DND fanboy, secretly harboring fantasies about shooting magic missiles and shouting “Huzzah!” while you adjust your wizard hat. The good news is that both boats won’t be disappointed to dock at this port — Neverwinter is a remarkably polished and well-designed playground. Very little has been promised, in terms of majestic sandbox elements or siegeable guild halls, and so as a result, you don’t feel gazumped once you realize that these are the same old quests, you’re the same old warrior and that red dude over there probably wants to skewer you with his long sword.

Dig a little deeper, however, and things aren’t quite as they seem.

Cryptic have gone back to the drawing board when it came to designing Neverwinter‘s combat system, which is not only clever in its operation (easy to learn, hard to master), but actually manages to inject some much needed strategy into the same old dance. The removal of automatically regenerated health prevents you from using time to barge your way through dungeons, and instead forces careful movement during battle, actually thinking about each thrust, cast, block or dodge in order to preserve precious (and expensive!) potions or managing cooldowns on healing spells. Everything is in real-time, with both mouse buttons dedicated to raw strikes while the keyboard maps certain skills that require selection before combat begins. There are no enormous skill mazes here here — taking a page out of the book from Guild Wars 2 and TERA, the game offers a limited set of abilities that can be learned or upgraded via skill points assigned during leveling.

Unfortunately, progression is remarkably linear, with the main questline following a reasonably straight path of missions above and below ground, coupled with a talent tree that doesn’t enjoy much branching out. If you decide to be a Guardian Fighter, for example, you’ll likely find yourself doing a lot of blocking. All of the time. Thankfully, the various dungeons are long, sprawling and varied in their design and structure, with difficulty levels curving at an acceptable rate. Cryptic have also thrown in timed events that reward you for completing certain quest or mission types within a certain period; such as fighting back a player-created invasion via the Foundry, or competing in a skirmish with other players. The only problem with this system is that some of this content can take much longer to complete than the time allows — I remember rushing through dialogue and battles as the seconds ticked away, eventually losing my 150% experience reward.

It’s also quite difficult to feel like you’re part of a community — while the cities are (currently) bustling with commerce, people and a surprising lack of spam, the game feels a little lonely. Entering dungeons, where you will spend a significant amount of your time, are instanced affairs that feel cut off from the wider fight. Unless you’ve made a conscious effort to find other players, whether via chat, your guild or matchmaking, you’ll probably take advantage of the companion system, which allows you to purchase allies to fight alongside you.

Many might hail this as a clever addition for players who enjoy playing it alone, but its quite a blow to building a community of social raiders that are forced to rely on one another to expand. None of the content is especially enthralling in a solo context, and while it is certainly a challenge to try and complete it without a team, it’s also a little boring and disheartening to take down a tough boss without a single other player to share it with.

And then there’s the supposed killer app, chopped and changed from its original incarnation in Cryptic’s other offering – Star Trek Online. Neverwinter‘s Foundry system unlocks for players once they hit level 15, which probably takes about seven or 8 hours of play on average, and unlocks a very detailed and easy to use editor that sits on top of the main client. From here, players can essentially customize an entire story based quest-line from painstaking building a plot and characters, to building maps, items and even costumes. Feel like basing your adventure inside a tall and ominous tower? Sure. Want all of the NPCs to speak Farsi? Why not. Feel like recreating the plot of the 1997 masterpiece, AirBud? Well… that could be a little difficult. But my point is that creating strings of quests alongside a team of NPCs inside an environment of your own choosing is astonishingly accessible. If you ever tried creating your own quests and dungeons in Skyrim, you’ll probably feel at home here, although the Foundry does a much better job of containing your ridiculous fantasies inside a relatively open sandbox.

Sadly, not as much kudos can be given to a lot of the content created by the current crop of players. While there are some obvious standouts (An adventure called “I am Slayer” is a fantastic demonstration of how the system can be easily adapted to existing environments) others are just messy, broken and plain stupid attempts at cashing in on memes, recreating quests from other games or building poorly designed, maze-like dungeons with duplicated assets. In order to combat a sea of crap, however, the game allows a voting and rating system to push most of the garbage out of plain site, and even allows approved player made content to be played as a “daily”. But already, players are exploiting this system in order to easily farm equipment, gold and experience by developing clever, easy, environments that meet the specific requirements on the surface to become “reward quests” but allow for easy, repeatable extraction.

But these are largely teething problems, and the concept of the Foundry feels like a much better fit within a world and gamestyle focused on contained and rigid environments than a title promising deep and wide space exploration. The tweaks to the editor make using it breathlessly easy after a few hours of experimentation, and the ability to explore and play your creation in real-time, as the developers would, is very cool and allows for almost unlimited content. The developers are obviously planning for expansions and dynamic content to be introduced into the game, but as yet it’s unknown how this will be offered. Being F2P, Neverwinter has a cash shop and a number of “packages” that offer extra items and bonuses to experience. At present, free users are restricted to 2 character slots per server, a surprisingly small inventory and reduced bank slots. Personally, I found no impediments of disadvantages for not paying a cent, and like other Perfect World games, there are very few pokes and prods for you to purchase anything.

For a game that almost came out of nowhere with very little fanfare, I’m very pleasantly surprised with Neverwinter. It does little to overhaul or revolutionize the MMO roadtrain, but where it excels is within its challenging and strategic combat system, that encourages players to mix up their parties and reduces the traditional disadvantage of healing or tank characters. The addition of the Foundry makes this title almost mandatory for gamers who enjoy customising and building their own experiences, and offers it in a manner that is very polished, user friendly and accessible. Sure, the quests aren’t much and the road to endgame is about as non-linear as Call of Duty, but who cares?

Maybe MMO developers need to stop promising the world when they can only offer a city, and instead focus on making what they have just plain, good old fun for everyone.

Sound like fun? You can download the Neverwinter open beta client from our file library right here, and save yourself 3GB of quota (iiNet group customers only!).

It took me a little while to warm up to Mars: War Logs. Somebody had described it to me as “the poor man’s Mass Effect”, and having enjoyed Mass Effect as much as I did, I jumped at the idea.

If you’ve heard that as well, forget it. You will have a better time.

Frankly, I get a much greater Fallout vibe from Wars: Mar Logs, and it’s not just the aesthetic. Vaguely diesel-punky in appearance, the game — believe it or not — takes place on a war-torn Mars. Different factions are duking it out for control of Mars’ resources and you are caught in the middle, in the POW camp of one faction.

I say ‘you’, but I really mean one of two characters whose roles you play. Confused? Let me explain. You run around, level up and make decisions as one Temperance, or Roy as he prefers to be called (or Space Elvis as I’ve taken to calling him). But his past is relatively unknown because the story, the cutscenes, the journal entries are all from the point of view of Innocence, Roy’s companion. It’s weird, and it threw me for a bit.

Also, Lars: War Dogs has sort of a virtue-name thing going on, if you haven’t noticed already. Mostly they appear to be ironic: Innocence for example is still young and naive, but has been to the front lines and has seen and done horrible things in the name of war (I also had a great time shouting, “Oh God, Innocence is DEAD!” every time he died).

There’s a lot to love about War: Lars Mog. The combat, for example, is interesting with equal parts strategy and button-mashing. On one hand, you’ll be mashing the buttons as fast as you can to get a hit. On the other, though, there are three buttons for melee, depending on if you want to break through someone blocking, say, or to keep an enemy on their toes. And when you’re fighting martian dogs, they can only take damage from behind — so they’ll come right at you, but you’re constantly evading, trying to get behind them.

It’s an interesting mix and it’s just challenging enough to keep you wondering: “Can I take this guy?”, and making it feel like a victory if you do. Having said that, there are some fiddly, annoying parts to the combat — so sometimes when you die it will be infuriating because COME ON, WHY DIDN’T THAT HEALTH INJECTION WORK ARGGGHH

When you’re dying a lot though, it’s probably not the games’ fault. It’s probably time to upgrade your gear!

I didn’t notice this feature for an embarrassingly long time, but in a way that was sort of a blessing. In your travels around Mars you’ll find yourself hoarding quite a collection of space-junk, metal, chemical components, that sort of thing. When you find yourself with a weapon or armour with upgrade slots, you can use this junk to upgrade your things, for example, adding a sheet of metal to your clothes to protect yourself, or a spiky head of nails to your iron bar to deal some more damage.

There is a substance called “serum”, which up to the point I’ve played, hasn’t really been explained. It’s some sort of biological substance — you can take it from fallen enemies, resulting in their deaths — but it’s also used as a currency, as well as for the creation of health injections. So you can use it to buy things, weapons, armour, health injections, but in a pinch you can use a lot more of it to make yourself a couple of injections to tide you over.

Related to this is your reputation. You gain reputation by generally being a good guy, doing quests in a nice way, and saying nice things. A great way to lose reputation quickly is to murder people for their Adam serum.

I enjoyed the questing system as well. For certain optional quests, War Togs doesn’t take the usual RPG approach where you either ignore a quest or take it and eventually succeed — you can actually fail them if you’re careless. Without too many spoilers, while trying to escape the POW camp, I had an optional quest to convince one of the more friendly guards who was fed up with the place to come along. The choice of the wrong dialogue option meant he wouldn’t be coming with us, along with all the changes to the story that that could mean.

It also opened up a completely different quest to poison him slightly to get him sent home. I’m a good dude like that.

I’ve focussed heavily on the good parts of this game. It took me awhile to warm to it, starting a bit slow and such, but in general I truly enjoyed what I played and really, the only negative aspects I came up with are fairly trivial. Things like the occasional spelling error, some fairly wooden voice acting and pretty dated visuals might mean more to you than an interesting storyline, and if that’s your bag, maybe this isn’t the game for you. It also has one of the worst cases of Invisible Wall Syndrome I’ve ever come across, and that can get pretty infuriating.

There’s a lot to love about Mars: War Logs: the setting, the combat, the way quests and conversation work. Unfortunately, a lot of it is hidden behind some questionable voice acting, dated visuals and poor animation.

If you’re looking for a solid sci-fi RPG though, with some really interesting elements, and can get past these fairly superficial obstacles, I would definitely give this one a shot. It’s not as fancy as your latest triple-A game, but hey, it’s also only twenny bux on Steam.

Good:

• Interesting setting
• Divergent, dynamically-changing quests
• Combat is generally satisfying
• Great value for the price

Bad:

• Voice acting is mostly poor
• Overall dated look
• Stiff animations

Mars: War Logs is $19.99 on Steam. This review copy was provided by the publisher.

Don’t Starve’s campfire should be the starting point of legends. In truth, it serves more utilitarian purposes —flickering warmth fighting winter’s grasp, defending against the horrors of the moonlit hours, and cooking device for a would-be Bear Grylls. Yet as history will tell, the campfire is also the place for stories, so good they’re told a million times, each variation grander than the last. And what better tool for story creation than a world of horrors and your own papercraft marionettes?

While Klei aren’t new to the frivolities of violence, their experimental curiosity-turned-community obsession in Don’t Starve is their most delicate creation, as if lifted from the very pages it was sketched on. Klei entrusts you with their papercraft pet, Wilson, and leaves you with a parting message. Don’t break it. Don’t kill it. And most of all, Don’t Starve!

What Klei also gives you is a sandbox, drenched in the macabre, brought to life in delicate lines and stood to attention like a pop-up book. It’s the kind of place likely to be written off as “Tim Burton’s Minecraft”, or “Sadistic Terraria”, or perhaps “Wilson in Wonderland”. Yet Klei’s line work has a charm all of its own — a life of its own — seen there in the wide eyes and hesitant expressions drawn to life on Wilson’s as-yet unbearded face. It’s all a picture of childish innocence, kept alive on a sadistic heart, pumping blood to each and every caricature.

The first time you lay eyes on the Tallbirds, tending to their nests and striding about with ease: an eyeball atop legs that tower above you. Your first night spent in near pitch-black darkness, surrounded by hordes of spiders, slave to your curiosity. Or the pigs and their little houses that recall nursery rhyme imagery even as you bludgeon them to death for the berries that grow in their backyards. For a world of 2D navigation and flat plains, it’s easy to fall head over heels and lose yourself in these fairytale forests.

Once the stage is set and the pieces begin to move, it’s a game of timid progress, resource gathering and accidental pyromaniacal tendencies. Much like Minecraft’s axe and torch, the campfire is an early invention cobbled together, there on the first night, but it isn’t one to be discovered on your own: Don’t Starve’s creations all arise from its crafting menu, where new recipes open as you construct scientific machines of wonder and wonderment, in an effort to twist and contort and work your magic to ensure this world spins on its 2D axis around you.

Yet as the nights pass by, the stories to be told become ones of busywork more than bewilderment. Its locales may expand breathlessly and with ease, but its ladder of a progress system forces you up with claustrophobic linearity. In that way all of Don’t Starve’s tales are doomed to begin and end in tragedy — in the gathering of familiar resources and the sudden strike of death — leaving the fleshy in-between to cultivate unique tales built on the randomness of its world and linearity of progress.

In truth, there’s too much of the latter and not enough of the former.

Before too long you see behind — and through — Don’t Starve’s paper-thin papercraft aesthetic, and once you know how its gears and levers bring its props to life, it becomes a less inviting place to be. The hunt for food turns to a search for the unique, in hopes of returning to the campfire with a story worth telling, while instead Mr. Minecraft is regaling onlookers with grandly built towers, and the Hollow Undead tell of demons defeated and fires kindled, in Miyazaki’s otherworldly realm.

For now this campfire is left to the frustrations of Wilson and his growing beard, and the tossing and turning nights of sleep playing host to dreams of what Don’t Starve could have been — or might one day become. And he’s worth cheering for — if for nothing else than an excuse to return to this pop-up book of wonder. Fingers crossed there’s a more exciting story to tell when we do.

Good:

• A pop-up book of a macabre nursery rhyme world, with a style that’s equally as charming as it is creepy.
• Opening hours of discovery and entertaining mistakes (Can anyone say burning down your own structures?) that may be enough to make a visit worthwhile.
• An ever-growing expanse of content: a developer open to feedback and six months of promised content and expansion.
• Wilson can grow a beard. Now that’s character progression.

Bad:

• The aesthetic wonder soon wears off.
• Little room for freeform approaches to familiar scenarios. Start, harvest, build, repeat.
• Blueprints are a blessing and a curse: less experimentation, less discovery.

Don’t Starve can be purchased for $14.99 on Steam. The reviewer purchased this copy at their own expense.

This competition is now closed! Thanks to everyone who entered.

Thanks to BenQ, we’re giving away three — count ‘em, three — brand-new BenQ RL2450H RTS gaming monitors to our adorable gaming audience. These monitors were custom-made in accordance with the direction from some of South Korea’s top StarCraft II players, resulting in an experience powered by a dynamic contrast booster to adjust levels on the fly and keep you at maximum alertness.

Want to know more? Here’s our comprehensive review!

How do I get one?

Good question! There are three different categories in this competition, and you can only enter one of them. Choose wisely! Your options are:

WRITING:

In 150 words or less, leave a comment that explains how much your current monitor is ruining your life and why you desperately, desperately need to replace it with a fully-sick BenQ RL2450H.

DRAWING:

Draw and post an image in Microsoft Paint (or equivalent, no Photoshop wizardry please) that shows just how angry you get when you lose at a game — a loss that might have been prevented, if only you had a BenQ RL2450H.

Host that image up on the internet (sites like imgur.com are ideal) and post it (or a link to it) in the comments below.

VIDEO:

Record a video of yourself that shows just how excited you’d be if you won a new BenQ RL2450H gaming monitor! Host it up on YouTube (or similar) and leave a link to it in the comments below. No time limit on the videos, but if we get bored and leave, it’ll probably hurt your chances of winning.

What else do I need to know?

The competition closes at 11:59 PM on Wednesday May 15. It is governed by the Terms and Conditions available here. It is open to Australian residents only. Other than that, you’re good to go!

Good luck!

Greenheart Games’ debut title Game Dev Tycoon has received a lot of press lately, primarily for their inventive and undeniably ironic cracked release where piracy ends up bankrupting your fledgling game start-up. The company, started by brothers Patrick and Daniel Klug has set out with a mission to “develop games that are fun to play instead of mind-numbing money-grabbers”. An honourable endeavour – but how does the actual game fare?

Greenheart’s motto is: “Less social, less ville, more game.” How deftly ironic that the art style looks lifted from the pages of Farmville itself. The same greyed pastel faces on the same size avatars, with the same stiff character animation delivered on the same uninspired isometric maps. It seems in their rush to distance themselves from Zynga, they have come full circle and made their style exactly the same.

The similarities to Zynga don’t cease there. It seems, too, that they have accidentally copied their business strategy of cloning other, more successful games and passing them off as their own. Because as I played through the game I noticed a distinct wave of nostalgia for a game I played three years earlier — Game Dev Story, by Japanese firm Kairosoft.

You see, in the original Game Dev Story, you hire staff with varying ability in design and programming, before setting them to work on building a game. It’s different in the recent Game Dev Tycoon, where you hire staff with varying ability in design and programming, before setting them to work on building a game. Wait… did I just repeat myself?

Okay, well in Kairosoft’s game, you accrue research points to unlock different game genres and train your employees, with the occasional boosts to productivity which – watch out – could also generate more bugs. Whereas in Greenheart’s game, you accrue research points to… and boost… hmm, you do the exact same thing, I guess.

At least the cute naming conventions are original, right? The Sonny Playsystem? Ninvento Game Sphere? Hilarious. But not for a second their own concept.

Game Dev Tycoon does a thorough job of gutting the far more charming, far more original Game Dev Story – hanging the husk of its predecessor in exactly the same fashion as the alien from Men in Black wore the skin of that dead farmer. There is a line where a game is no longer inspired by, and in fact, a carbon copy of its predecessor. Game Dev Tycoon crossed that line, marked it as its own, and then had the cheek to scold people for pirating it.

Indie game development is afforded much more innovation than its commercial counterpart, and  it’s a crying shame to see one company cannibalise another’s creative endeavours. Poorly made knock-offs at least have the good graces to be cheaper than their legitimate counterpart — but with Game Dev Tycoon running a cost of $10, and the original game asking but $3 — I struggle to find even one point of difference in this rip-offs favour.

It’s best to leave the game to rate itself.

Good:

• Some plagiarised elements still maintain shreds of fun

Bad:

• Art is uninspired, regurgitated Zynga fare
• Trite, watered down and diluted gameplay
• Lame shoutouts to game development celebrities
• Game Dev Tycoon is bad and the developers should feel bad

Game Dev Tycoon is available on the developer’s website for $7.99. Game Dev Story is available on the Android and iTunes stores for $2.99.

The reviewer purchased both copies at their own expense.

If you didn’t play the first Zeno Clash, get your life together and correct your mistake immediately. It wasn’t the slickest game, but it was bursting with fascinating ideas and visual spectacle, and the sequel picks up the story from the first game’s conclusion, so it won’t make much sense if you haven’t played it.

What Zeno Clash 2 does most is turn up the scale. The original had disconnected, relatively small and linear environments, and focused exclusively on the story it was telling. The sequel, by contrast, delivers a semi-open world that dazzles with gorgeous and gargantuan vistas, and adds a scattering of side-missions, easter eggs and collectibles to reward exploring every nook and cranny.

Where the first game gives you its signature brand of high weird fantasy in concentrated doses, Zeno Clash 2 spreads out a buffet of spectacular landscapes that look like the architecture of Antoni Gaudi as viewed through the visual imagination of Hieronymous Bosch, or whatever other simile you choose for describing ACE Team’s unique mix of surreal and grotesque sights.

It’s this magnification where Zeno Clash 2 reveals its weaknesses. In the effort to make the sequel bigger and better, it seems to have lost some of the original’s focus. The brawling has changed from a precise system of short jabs, strong punches and kicks to use in a pinch, to an elaborate combo system with a power meter and special moves that must be memorised. But where the first game required specific tactics for specific enemies, Zeno Clash 2 lets you mash your way through almost every fight.

The exception is boss battles, most of which return to the first game’s cleverly-crafted encounters requiring specific tactics you’ll have to figure out for yourself.

However, the greatest sin this expansion leads to is one that strikes at the heart of what made the first Zeno Clash so compelling to play: simple familiarity robs many of the game’s elements of their weird charm and sense of wonder. What was startling when you first saw it is now safe and unremarkable, because it’s a known quantity.

This is especially true for the many locations and characters that Zeno Clash 2 revisits. The semi-open world puts those disconnected locations in a context that makes them seem more logical and less weird, and so many of the characters are made less opaque and inscrutable. In fleshing out the world, ACE Team have eliminated many of the spaces where the player’s imagination could run wild, spurred by the glimpses the first game offered.

Where the first game used Source, the sequel uses Unreal Engine 3, and the visual slickness so common among games using that engine adds to this impression: it’s almost as if the eye slides off the gnarls and knobbly bits that make ACE Team’s visual aesthetic so remarkable. And the addition of co-op is welcome, but designing for it means enemies are less distinctive and more prone to swarming tactics, as well as making a solo player reliant on sub-par companion AI.

The overall impression is of a delicious meal spread just that little bit too thin across less-interesting-but-still-tasty bread that threatens to overwhelm it. Zeno Clash 2 is not the sequel its predecessor deserves, but it’s still a worthy effort, and it’s a joy to get more of that wonderfully bizarre world.

Good:

• Bigger in every way, especially the wonderfully weird landscapes that now take on massive proportions
• More developed combat system
• Longer and more satisfying story, where the original’s felt a little unfinished

Bad:

• Familiarity breeds contempt for the wonderfully weird
• Expanded combat system makes the player a little overpowered

Zeno Clash 2 is available on Steam for $19.99. The reviewer purchased this copy at their own expense.

It’s time to finally unveil the winners of our massive BioShock Infinite PC Gaming Giveaway!

With 240 entries, we had to take our time going through them all — imagining them in action, doing Photoshop mockups, running around the room making “zap!” noises and generally thoroughly making sure that we made the right choices. But now, we’ve had to choose just two people to walk away with these most excellent prizes.

Those people are:

FIRST PRIZE: Hobomaster

MAGNETISM

Skyline Superiority
Your SkyHook(TM) may be a terrific tool, but sometimes the power of those magnets doesn’t quite give you the pull you truly desire. For a minor expenditure of salts, your problems can be solved! Any skyrail is accessible from any distance, provided you have a clear line of sight. Not only is this convenient, it can save you from a nasty fall, if you’re quick with your fingers!

Hobomaster walks away with:

• SAPPHIRE HD 7970 3GB GDDR5
• BioShock Infinite PC Ultimate Songbird Edition (Completely sold out in Australia, no longer available to the public)
• The Ultimate Songbird Edition includes: a PC copy of the game, a Songbird Statue, art book, Handyman figurine, lithographic print, a ‘Murder of Crows’ keychain, downloadable content – including the soundtrack – and three pieces of in-game gear
• Replica Skyhook (Do not insert it into the faces of your enemies)
• BioShock Infinite action figure
• 2 x BioShock Infinite T-shirts

SECOND PRIZE: doublefrost

Introducing, ‘Dustman’:
Flavour Text: ‘No Palm Without Dust’

Hold: Booker siphons every hotdog, booze-bottle, and silver dollar from his surroundings into a swirling vacuum of trash. All items in the area will be torn free of their moorings and whisked away into his waiting coat pockets.

doublefrost takes home:

• SAPPHIRE HD 7790 1GB GDDR5
• BioShock Infinite PC Premium Edition (Completely sold out in Australia, no longer available to the public)
• The Premium Edition includes: a PC copy of the game, art book, Handyman figurine, lithographic print, a ‘Murder of Crows’ keychain, and downloadable content, including the soundtrack and three pieces of in-game gear
• BioShock Infinite action figure
• 2 x BioShock Infinite T-shirts

Please join me in congratulating Hobomaster and doublefrost on their win!

But that’s not all!

Runners-up

Unfortunately we only have two prizes to give away, but there were some great entries that deserved to be shared.

tin-snips

Introducing the ‘Stooges Vigor’.

When using the Stooges Vigor, enemies will drop their weapons and act like they’re in a routine from The Three Stooges. They’ll poke, slap, punch and brawl themselves to death for your amusement! A handy trick when you want to explore a level unmolested, or just need a little entertainment after all of those near death experiences.

Tracer

The Higgs Vigor manipulates the Higgs Field around any object, decreasing or increasing it’s interaction, effectively meaning you can increase (primary mode) or decrease (secondary mode) mass. This changes the effects of gravity – enabling levitation or the reverse, including crushing bones and pulverizing objects. A particularly strong Higgs Vigor could possibility effect the interaction of celestial bodies, although no-one capable enough to make such modifications has ever survived long enough to harness this power.

A number of side effects occur when using the Higgs Vigor. Since all bodies without mass essentially travel at light-speed, it is also possible to increase or decrease the velocity at which an object and/or person can travel. The immediately practical outcomes are bending time (the theory of relativity) and manipulating light (increasing light particle mass to the point where it effectively stops); plus any other creative manipulations the user can dream of. Mastery of this Vigor requires significant practice and patience, something oft ignored leading to the downfall (and death, more often than not horrific in nature) of many ambitious users.

Kinky Kel

To assist in the need for a less violent and more infiltration based approach I’d set my Doppelganger Vigor to good use. Upon use of power on an enemy it would transform them to look like Booker so the enemy would spend time chasing and capturing them, allowing me easier movement throughout the city. Affects up to two people at one time. Duration lasts for 5 mins.

A side effect of this vigor sends a panic into the mind of the person changed causing them to run, thus creating a ‘chase’ for the authorities. Two levels of upgrades simply allow it to affect double the original amount affected and the second increases duration.

caitsith01

Enlightenment – unlike possession, which temporarily overwhelms the mind, enlightenment opens it and allows Booker to permanently recruit followers to his cause. A quick blast of knowledge instantaneously reveals the error of their ways to them, leading to a moment of epiphany. Naturally, as the deliverer of enlightenment the newly intellectually free citizens will follow Booker in his quest.

Using similar AI to Elizabeth, they will choose to fight by his side in increasingly huge mobs, reminiscent of the results of using the persuadertron in Syndicate. Booker can use his leadership to develop tactics for his new followers – such as asking them to take and hold a position, or create a distraction – adding significant complexity to the game. He can even ask them to use their apparent (to other citizens) normality to carry out actions which he would be unable to carry out without being attacked.

Timmy_Tim

My Vigor would be ‘The Vortex’. You may simply launch a small purple projectile at any direction which would have a momentary force explosion, pushing and stunning all those around it. This would affect both people and objects.

The wielder can choose to utilise this ability more cleverly. You can use this to collect enemy projectiles flying at you, or push victims into dangerous locations filled with traps.

manutd58

The “Spare Parts” Vigor. Depending on your location within the game:

Hold Click: Your arm mounted device will power up, the heat is almost too much to stand but just before it becomes too much a pulse wave is unleashed from the device, all hostile weaponry is stolen from your foes and turned into simple compounds (a Dust of some-kind) that integrate into your arm mounted device and superchargers the damage output for 3 seconds.

Yurtles

Twister: Unleash a miniature tornado that wanders the area at its own whim. The closer anything gets to it the stronger the pull. Bullets fired directly at it will be consumed, but further out it will apply a bend to their trajectory if they’re passing by it.

It’s deployable cover, crowd control, damage dealer and area excluder all at once. But beware, the power of the tornado is only exceeded by how exceptionally double edged it is. Make sure you’ve got a plan before letting one (or more?) of these loose.

xanarax

Bullet Magnet: When cast upon an enemy your bullets will always arc into them giving you 100% accuracy. Hide behind cover and fire your bullets out on a parabolic arc, stay hidden and stay safe.

As for it’s trap, drop it on the ground and fire into it, it will absorb all bullets and when an enemy stumbles into it the bullets will fire out in a large explosion of hot lead death, while the person who steps into it now becomes the bullet magnet.

Xebozone

RE-ANIMATION SALVATION! (That second chance to say goodbye)

[Target disintegrates into bones/ash after use]

Winners, look out for a PM from me shortly to grab your details. Congrats to everyone who won, and thanks to everybody who entered!

Look out for a new competition later in the week!

Spellirium has that feeling of a game from my childhood re-imagined and upgraded to fit into todays times. It’s a point-n-click adventure, but without all that silly ‘make sure you click here and combine the turkey and the jackhammer’ nonsense, it’s also a word puzzle game that actually has a story and purpose. Finally it has a charming atmosphere coupled with amazingly witty dialogue. Sold yet?

If not, let me attempt to persuade you more eloquently. You play as Brother Todd, the youngest member of a secret society known as the Runekeepers. The Runekeepers are some of a small handful of individuals in the world who actually know how to read. Reading has been forbidden by the potentially nefarious Lord Steve (who I’m not entirely convinced isn’t the monkey from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs).

When Brother Todd leaves his home to shear some sheep, a tragic event strikes, leaving him saddled with a strange device capable of using words to create, manipulate, or destroy. Brother Todd then sets out into the world proper for the first time, hoping to find out exactly what the device is, and why people are so desperate to prevent him from having it.

The world isn’t like today. A cataclysmic event tore the world asunder, and left most of the technology we use as detritus. Trash is everywhere, and is so abundant that the inhabitants of the world have made just about everything out of it. This recurring theme, dubbed “trashpunk” by creator Ryan Creighton, adds a distinct flavour to the game that hasn’t really been explored anywhere else.

Spellirium is an absolute blast. I haven’t enjoyed the dialogue in a game this much since playing a certain Ron Gilbert adventure in the early 90’s. It’s witty and goofy, while still maintaining an element of maturity that keeps it from getting out of hand. I have honestly not found myself laughing or smiling in a game in the last decade as much as I have with Spellirium.

The word-puzzle elements are very interesting. You have a standard 7×7 grid of letters to make your words from, and you can swap tiles anywhere on the board… they don’t have to be adjacent, although the further away they are the more energy they will use. While creating words like this is straightforward, their application isn’t. Need to shear a sheep? You’ll be wanting to make words like “cut”, “shear”, or “denude”. Dying said wool red might mean only using red letters, and spinning the wool into a garment presents a directional challenge instead.

You also get various companions along the way, such as Lorms, the giant fluffy blue monster who is extremely fearful of small insects. These companions will give you additional abilities to use throughout the puzzles, and add an extra dimension of tactical flow when working through them.

It’s in these ways that the game is kept fresh. Even when Spellirium has you pitted against more generic puzzles, there are specific challenges to aim for, and words to find that can cause an enemy to flee in terror. It’s all a lot of fun, and backed by a story that is actually worth paying attention to, if only for the fourth wall humor the game throws in at regular intervals.

It’s important to note that Spellirium is still heavily in alpha. I don’t mean the kind of Aliens: Colonial Marines ‘pre-alpha’ that is actually better than the finished product, either — Spellirium is definitely unfinished. While there are a few spoken lines of dialogue as placeholders, there is pretty much zero sound in the current product. There are a number of bugs, ranging from simple graphics issues to more complex game logic problems, but in my experience nothing truly gamebreaking ever occurred.

But for an alpha, it shows an awful lot of polish already. The word puzzle element is strongly fleshed out, there is a lot of depth there in addition to things I have already mentioned, and some of the instances can be both fiendishly difficult and incredibly rewarding. The environments and overall look are thematically awesome, and the self abasing humor never gets old.

So, if a trashpunk point-and-click adventure word puzzle sounds like a rollicking good time to you (and it is), you could do a heck of a lot worse than snagging a copy of the Spellirium alpha. The game might be a sizeable way from being finished, but what is there, is absolute gold polished to a mirror sheen. And besides, who wouldn’t want to back a game studio run by someone who tastefully shaved balls onto his face for Movember? That’s pure dedication right there, folks.

You can (and should) pre-order Spellirium from the developer’s official site. $15 gets you into the alpha, and a bunch of other goodies too (including a Steam key).