Rainbow Six turned 20 this week, yet another in a series of impressive milestones for Ubisoft’s special ops series. We could equally well say it’s 20 years since the tactical shooter genre was born, 20 years since ‘realism’ was seriously applied to an FPS, or 20 years since the ‘Tom Clancy’ name began a journey towards becoming one of the most recognisable prefixes in gaming.

Considering where it stands today, it’s impressive to think that the Tom Clancy video-game phenomenon started with just two developers at Red Storm’s North Carolina office, with little experience and no serious architecture underlying the game they were working on. “We just started building stuff, and changing it as we went along” is how Rainbow Six lead designer Brian Upton puts it. For this anniversary I spoke with Upton about the making of Rainbow Six, the unlikely role played by Quake, and just how much input the game had from Tom Clancy himself.

For a video game about shooting all manner of extremists, it’s a little ironic that Rainbow Six was so radical in its own time. You can read more here, but to summarise: it entered an FPS landscape defined by grungy, blood-strewn blasters like Quake 2, Unreal and Shadow Warrior. Rainbow Six was a different breed, forcing you to contend with reloading, one-shot kills, mission planning and squad management. Where its peers had Doom or Quake for their references, Rainbow Six had nothing.

This didn’t bother the young team at Red Storm Entertainment who, according to Upton, were oblivious about the unprecedented task at hand.

“I think our inexperience kind of blinded us to how different Rainbow Six was from other shooters,” Upton says. “We were just making the game we wanted to make, and solving design problems as they cropped up. The real pressure came because we hadn’t anticipated how much work it takes to ship a game. If we’d had more experience, we would have been able to better plan out the production and save ourselves a lot of grief at the end.”

Red Storm Entertainment was co-founded by Tom Clancy, Doug Littlejohns and Steve Reid in May 1996, and work began on Rainbow Six soon after. The game was originally called ‘Black Ops’, expanding from a concept centred around the FBI Hostage Rescue Team. Clancy loved the idea, so much so that (though Upton and Red Storm didn’t yet know this) it would go on to be directly tied into his next novel. In the early going Red Storm even flirted with a more campy 60s-style theme inspired by Austin Powers, but in 1997 started to tie more closely into Clancy’s upcoming novel.

When work began on the game, the development team consisted of Upton and another programmer, though it eventually expanded to five people. With such a small team everyone operated across multiple roles (Upton himself was designer, programmer, lead engineer and VP of engineering) and there was no particular workflow in place. “There was no object database, no standard way to pass messages between objects, no developer tools,” Upton recalls. “Even something as minor as shifting the starting location of an enemy involved running a debug version of the game, moving to where you wanted him to be, pressing a button to display the current coordinates, then manually typing those coordinates into a text file!”

Such lack of development infrastructure wasn’t uncommon back then, and had its perks as well as downsides. There was less bureaucracy, fewer hoops to jump through and, if a developer wanted to throw in a feature on a bit of a whim, they could. That’s how Upton came up with the targeting reticle, which would expand and shrink depending on whether the player was walking, running, crouching or standing still. It was a quiet revolution in shooting mechanics.

When I asked Upton about how the reticle was conceived, I was half-hoping it was based on some wisdom passed down from some of the experts that Clancy arranged to advise on the game. The reality, however, was more grounded, stemming from the relatable woes of playing a shooter against someone younger and insurmountably faster than yourself.

“We played a lot of Quake at the end of the day, and there was one young guy on the team who had amazing twitch reflexes. He could snap around and headshot you in the middle of a jump”, Upton recalls. “It was really annoying because I was in my early 30s and my reflexes were much slower, so I was like ‘I’m going to design a shooting mechanic where Juan can’t headshot me!’ That’s where the reticle came in. Afterwards we justified it because of realism, but the original idea came out of my frustration of getting killed in Quake.”

That was not the only role that Quake played in the development of Rainbow Six. Another reflection of the unprecedented nature of the project was how many familiar shooter elements it was leaving behind: Upton and the team weren’t sure how an FPS without health pickups, jumping or a substantial health bar would work.

With no comparable game to look at Red Storm created — what else? — a Quake mod with the basic rules of Rainbow Six to see whether it would actually be any fun. It passed the test, though Upton stresses that this was more a proof-of-concept than a prototype. “The whole planning interface and AI team system wasn’t prototyped at all. We just started building it,” Upton confirms, which is in-keeping with the rest of Rainbow Six’s freewheeling development.

Other happy accidents of the development process were that lack of a jump button, and visible gun model. “We were a small team on a tight deadline and having a visible gun is a fair amount of work,” Upton says. “It wasn’t just the modelling. If you have a visible gun you also have to have the bullets originate from the barrel and that has implications for how targeting works and how bullets interact with obstacles in the world.”

Meanwhile jumping (that bane of all realism) was being seriously considered for inclusion, even though Upton was secretly hoping it’d miss the cut due to time constraints. What swung this decision could be tangentially accredited to Clancy himself, who hooked Red Storm Entertainment up with technical advisers — actual former counter-terrorism operatives who could provide the kind of fine details that would make Rainbow Six shine (such as getting those tightly-packed postures and animations of the squads just right).

“I remember being thrilled when one of our technical advisers told us they never jumped because it interfered with their ability to maintain a stable firing platform,” Upton tells me. “You can’t effectively return fire if you’re in the air, so they never jumped over an obstacle if there was another way to get where they needed to go. ‘Great! That’s one more animation we don’t need to implement.”

Scrapping these elements afforded more development time to the parts of the game that would ultimately define it, like the level design, camera and AI behaviour; wounded enemies would flee and fetch backup, while spooked ones could execute hostages if you weren’t careful. The open levels were painstakingly handcrafted with little repetition of textures and geometry, giving each one a unique and organic feel. Where levels in other shooters could often blur into one, and this is more difficult to appreciate two decades later of course, Rainbow Six had the feel of a globetrotting spy thriller.

Rainbow Six was unforgiving. Its permadeath campaign meant that your supply of skilled, named operatives could whittle down as the game progressed (unless you repeatedly reloaded a mission to get the perfect run). “It was just the result of us being really bloody-minded about realism,” Upton says candidly. “We had decided that part of the Clancy brand was letting players think they were getting a window into ‘how it really was.’ So what do you do if a character gets killed? Well, dead is dead.”

Rainbow Six did tone down the realism in other areas, but only when it could easily be hidden, such as operative movement speed, which Upton says is “about twice as fast as operatives would move in real life.”

Beyond providing Red Storm with specialists, Clancy didn’t get involved much with the development of Rainbow Six. “He wasn’t a gamer, so he didn’t have any meaningful feedback on how the game played,” Upton says. “He was there at the original brainstorming session where the idea originated, but he didn’t come up with it. I wrote the original draft of the story, not Clancy.”

According to Upton, Clancy in fact used the game’s premise of counter-terrorists vs eco terrorists for the Rainbow Six novel, then went on to build a more elaborate story around it which Red Storm had to adapt to (the game and the novel were timed to release at the same time). When a draft of the final novel arrived late in development, Upton found it wasn’t too dissimilar to the game. “Fortunately he followed our plot pretty closely because at that point the levels were already all built and we couldn’t have accommodated any major changes,” Upton says. “Most of the changes were just in names and mission briefings.”

Another thing that arrived late in development was the name of the novel, and subsequently the game. It seems a distant worry today, but Upton wasn’t convinced at the time. “‘Rainbow?’ For a gritty realistic shooter? And the number on the end was going to make coming up with a title for a sequel tricky! I was overruled though.” In fairness to Upton, the original title of Black Ops would eventually prove itself as very marketable when Call of Duty used it 12 years later.

Upton’s reservations about the replacement title would of course prove unfounded. Rainbow Six launched on 21 August 1998 to critical acclaim and excellent sales, kickstarting a hugely successful series and arguably an entire gaming genre. He did, however, have a point about the title, with the series shying away from numbers barring Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. The latest iteration, Rainbow Six: Siege, sits pretty as one of the world’s most popular online shooters with over 35 million players. Rainbow Six came up with its own rules, its own style, and its own way to play. Say what you will about the name, but it certainly led to gold.

With Nvidia’s recent announcement of its new RTX graphics cards, keeping up with the price of GPUs can burn hole in your pocket. And if you’re not on the PC bandwagon already, the entrance fee will just burn your pants right off.

However, with Shadow, a cloud gaming service, you can play the most graphically intensive games on the cheapest laptops around. To test this, we used the service on an Asus VivoBook E203NA, an Acer Chromebook Spin 11 and a Samsung Galaxy Tab S4.

First, let’s break down what you actually get with the Shadow service. Currently, the Shadow cloud gaming service costs $34.95 a month and is accessible via Windows, macOS and Android (iOS support is coming soon). The company has a computer dedicated solely to you, and you will basically be streaming the entire thing.

MORE: Highest Resolution Screens

A Shadow machine comes with a 2.1-GHz Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4 processor, 12GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and an “Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 equivalent” GPU (aka, a Quadro P5000). When I benchmarked Rise of the Tomb Raider on Very High at 1080p, that power translated to a smooth 61 frames per second. The internet service from the company’s dark server room registered a 860-Mbps download speed and a 106-Mbps upload speed on Speedtest.net. The company also offers free upgrades to the system “for life.”

Look Ma, No GPU!

The first laptop I tested was the VivoBook, which comes with an Intel Celeron N3350 CPU, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of flash memory. When I booted up Rise of the Tomb Raider, it looked absolutely gorgeous and didn’t suffer from the quality of the stream whatsoever.

However, the speed of the stream itself was the problem, as I was plagued by constant stuttering and lag while trying to properly aim my bow. It was enough to make the game unplayable. Changing the graphic settings didn’t fix anything, and when I tried to alter the Shadow’s settings to Low Connection Mode, it effectively made everything worse. I could barely track my own movements in game, and I actually heard my footsteps 5 seconds before they happened on screen.

The service worked better when I tested it with The Witcher 3. There was some stuttering, but because all I did was chop people in half with my sword, it wasn’t as bad. I was able to bob and weave through a bunch of demon Nekkers until they eventually murdered me, but they got the best of me due to my lack of skill, not because of the lag.

However, when I pulled out my crossbow, I noticed that the cursor wasn’t stuttering as much as it had in Rise of the Tomb Raider. This improvement allowed me to hit some small trees in the distance. Despite the joy I found in this smooth connection, everything suddenly came to a slow crawl like before.

MORE: Best and Worst Laptop Gaming Brands

From there, I decided to do the ultimate test: Ethernet. That brought my computer from 65 MBps to 120 MBps. Even though the cap on the stream is 50 MBps, I think the stableness of the Ethernet is what completely transformed Rise of the Tomb Raider and The Witcher 3. There was the occasional stutter, but it wasn’t a deal breaker, especially while I aimed.

The Crashbook

Next up was the Acer Chromebook 11, which packed an Intel Celeron N3350 CPU, 4GB of RAM and 32GB of flash memory. The Shadow app literally crashed every time I tried to start Rise of the Tomb Raider and The Witcher 3. It did manage to stream the computer’s desktop, but it was incredibly blurry. Keep in mind that this is a Chromebook running an Android app, a pairing that continues to be finicky even now.

No Touchpad, No Problem

The best part of testing Shadow was running it on the Samsung Galaxy Tab S4, which has a Snapdragon 835 CPU and 4GB of RAM. It felt so good to see Witcher 3 run silky smooth on that vivid display, and it ran even better on Wi-Fi with the S4 than with the Vivobook. Nothing was sweeter than galloping toward a Drowner-ridden river and destroying their way of life. Rise of the Tomb Raider also ran better on Wi-Fi on the S4 than on the Vivobook, allowing me to accurately snipe some intimidating concrete walls in the tomb I was exploring.

Doing all this on a tablet wasn’t that bad either, as the desktop registered Samsung’s pen perfectly, and connecting my Xbox One controller via Bluetooth was easy. There were a few issues though; I couldn’t put the app in fullscreen while in DeX mode, and trying to switch tabs with a hot key actually switched tabs on the Galaxy itself as opposed to the computer I was streaming.

Additional Notes

There are a lot of things I like about Shadow, but there are a few improvements I’d like to see implemented as well. It’d be nice if two people could access the stream at once, which would allow for local co-op games. I encountered another issue when I tried to scale apps; the mouse didn’t adjust accordingly, so it was way off course when I attempted to click anything. When you use your physical audio slider, it will affect both the computer you’re using and the one that you’re streaming. However, since the service is new, these are things I hope get addressed sooner rather than later.

Bottom Line

Paying $35 a month for Shadow may seem like a steep price, especially for a service that still needs to work out a few kinks. But when you do have that sweet-spot connection, it’s very impressive to see gorgeous games run on a sub-$300 laptop.

A service like this is revolutionary in what it can bring to people who can’t afford a premium PC, and I am genuinely surprised that it works as well as it does right out of the gate. Of course, there are connection issues, but as long as the service improves with time, it will better accommodate poorer internet connections and thus create a better experience for all.

 Credit: Laptop Mag

Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey has announced he will have a solution for virtually reality locomotion sickness available via open-source later this year.

Next five years:1) Universal solution for vestibulo-oculular mismatch in virtual reality2) Superhuman sensory perception/reaction for a handful of people3) Predictive analytics indistinguishable from time travel in some cases4) VTOL air taxis5) 0 to 60 in 0.8 secondsAugust 21, 2018

When pressed to elaborate on the original claim, Luckey clarified (Reddit, via Resetera) that the solution would include “hardware and software” and that he aimed “to open-source the design later this year”. 

Hardware and software. I am aiming to open-source the design later this year. Not aware of anyone else working on this branch of the problem.August 22, 2018

He added that he was “not aware of anyone else working on this branch of the problem”.

And that’s not all. In the same series of tweets posted earlier this week, Luckey also predicted that within the next five years, not only would there be a “universal solution for vestibulo-oculular mismatch in virtual reality”, but also “superhuman sensory perception/reaction for a handful of people”, “predictive analytics indistinguishable from time travel in some cases”, “VTOL air taxis”, and “0 to 60 in 0.8 seconds”.

When a Twitterer responded that VTOL air taxis already existed in the form of helicopters, Luckey replied: “I have a few helicopters. They are not sufficient.”

Remember The Last Remnant? Square Enix’s role-playing game will soon be discontinued on PC nearly a decade after it came out.

In Europe, The Last Remnant will be delisted at 5pm UK time on 4th September, which means you have just over a week to grab it from Steam before it’s scrubbed forever. Of course, if you already own the game you will be able to play as normal.

In its note on Steam, Square Enix failed to explain why The Last Remnant was being delisted on PC, but it did thank players.

The Last Remnant was notable for being Square Enix’s first title built with the Unreal Engine. It was designed to appeal to the western market, and launched first on the Xbox 360 in 2008 before later coming out on PC. A PlayStation 3 version was announced but later cancelled.

The Last Remnant was criticised at launch for poor technical performance, with extreme cases of texture pop-in and long loading times. The battle system went down well, though.

Keza Macdonald reviewed The Last Remnant for Eurogamer, awarding it 6/10.

Hearthstone has shifted and bent its shape a handful of times over the years. When its first Naxxramas-themed “Adventure” expansion released in 2014, it took the shape of a single-player strategy game. Most recently, with Kobolds and Catacombs and The Witchwood, it took the form of a dungeon-crawling roguelike. And now, with the launch of The Boomsday Project’s Puzzle Lab, Hearthstone is a puzzle game too — and a pretty good one at that.

Framed as a new “Solo Adventure” in the game’s interface, the Puzzle Lab is surprisingly fleshed-out in the way it’s presented. While Hearthstone’s somewhat-static interface doesn’t seem to leave much room for the features you care about in one-off puzzle games, like the ability to quickly restart a level or transition between puzzles you’ve already unlocked, the Puzzle Lab has been carefully designed to feel like its own thing; rather than a variation on the Hearthstone formula, it feels like a full-on puzzle game in and of itself.

The puzzles themselves are similarly thoughtful, and are sorted by their different objectives. Some puzzles are “Lethal” puzzles that challenge you to deal lethal damage to the enemy hero using the cards available to you, while others make you try to “Mirror” the opponent’s board or clear the board of minions entirely. As static, self-contained puzzles, they’re crafted in such a way that you really have to think about what a card is going to do. If you’re completely at a loss, you can experiment with different interactions and see what happens.

Starting off with easy, self-explanatory situations any Hearthstone player has probably seen hundreds of times, The Puzzle Lab quickly escalates in difficulty as it forces you to consider the sequences and positions in which you play your cards. By confronting you with fringe situations you might rarely, if ever, see in the context of an actual game, it tests your ability to think laterally with tools you’re already familiar with. Some puzzles even introduce mechanics that don’t exist as standard Hearthstone cards, providing possibilities that would be extremely overpowered in the context of the standard game itself, but which make the puzzles much more compelling to unravel.

Hearthstone has always had this element to it: situations where you could take a thousand different paths and only one would be truly correct. Seeing it all in front of you this clearly, though, is a reminder of how nuanced Hearthstone can get when you’ve got a limitless turn timer and a complex board state in front of you. There’s no luck involved here — just you, an awkward rat’s nest of cards, and hopefully, enough ingenuity to unlock what’s next.

The only part about the Puzzle Labs that’s somewhat difficult to reckon with is one that should be familiar to any person who’s played a puzzle game in the recent past. Since these puzzles are all specifically authored and static, there’s almost no replay value, especially when compared with a randomised mode like the Monster Hunt or Dungeon Run. Still, with its carefully curated challenges and parade of inventive new mechanics, The Puzzle Lab is an up-close encounter with some of the best interactions Hearthstone has to offer, and one of the game’s most refreshing single-player offerings to date.

The Warcraft series has always been a little weird. The core conflict of the game, orcs versus humans, comes about from inciting factors like “portals opened between worlds” and “demons empowering orcs with their blood.”

We’ve been hanging out with Draenei and their crashed spaceship since World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. With all of that in mind, it says a lot that World of Warcraft’s story has gotten unusually bizarre. It isn’t a bad thing, necessarily — there are a lot of times that the odd twists and turns the story is taking work well or are fun… but each time the writers make a decision to head off-road through the wild undergrowth of plot mechanics like time travel, alternate dimensions, cosmic forces and World Souls, you can see the foundation start to tremble, just a little.

World of Warcraft has gotten weird as hell, and there’s no turning back now. All that’s left is to see how this gamble shakes out.

How weird are we talking, exactly?

The Warlords of Draenor expansion gets a lot of heat from the community. There are a lot of factors here: an unsatisfying Garrison system, a missing tier of raid content, a lack of player agency and the entire premise of the expansion. Warlords of Draenor starts off-screen, with heroes from both the Horde and the Alliance coming together to hold a trial for Garrosh Hellscream and his war crimes.

War crimes is an unusual charge for Hellscream, because if that is a thing in the world of Warcraft, the player should probably be up for trial as well. We’ve tortured NPCs to get answers, burned people alive, killed civilians and bombed settlements. If you’re a Death Knight, you’ve also engaged in fun things like torturing people’s souls, necromancy and slaughtering allied red dragons en masse so that you can enjoy a sick mount. (All of these things are no-nos.)

In the end, Hellscream never receives his sentence, because a dragon smuggles him out and takes him back in time to an alternate dimension, where he takes over an RTS-era Horde on the planet of Draenor and uses it to invade Azeroth.

This is probably the turning point for where World of Warcraft got really absurd. Legion reins the premise back in, bringing players back to Azeroth and then sending them on a quest for the Pillars of Creation throughout the Broken Isles. It’s good, clean fun… and then the planet of Argus, the Draenei homeworld, becomes our next tactical target. We team up with the Army of Light, led by two Alliance war heroes who have been locked in space combat for one thousand years, and get on a spaceship to head to Argus with the goal of fighting the planet’s soul.

Cue Battle for Azeroth, where we’re back on our home planet worrying about things like farmers’ crops and local politics.

Blizzard Entertainment

Wait, what?

The last few expansions have really taken things off the rails, and what’s more, every time things get reined back in, bits of the previous storyline come along for the ride. Alleria Windrunner is still helping the Alliance out, which is great, except she ate the essence of a corrupted Light God and is now irrevocably tainted by the Void. She’s also recruited a small faction of Blood Elves who dabbled in the Void themselves; the Alliance now has Void Elves as an Allied Race. These former Blood Elves have stars falling from their hair, constantly hear the whispers of the void and seem to exclusively travel by ripping holes in time and space.

This is problematic, because players are learning about the existence of things called Void Lords, great cosmic forces that seek nefarious goals. Sargeras, the Fallen Titan, was the previous end boss of Warcraft. Eventually, we discovered that Sargeras had fallen because he had discovered Void Lords; he was so terrified of these beings that he created the Burning Legion to stop them.

There’s also the opposite of Void: the Light. Since the Warcraft RTS games, the Light has been painted as a benevolent force, worshipped as a religion. World of Warcraft is informing us that the Light is actually dangerous in equal measure to the Void, with Warlords of Draenor’s Yrel using the Light as a tool for genocide and conscription.

Blizzard Entertainment

House of cards

To borrow a phrase from Battle for Azeroth’s marketing campaign: It matters. While there will always be a portion of the player base who clicks through quest text until they get their purples, it’s clear Blizzard is working hard on making the Warcraft universe sustainable storywise. None of these changes are a death knell for the game; in fact, the story is the best it’s been for some time. Every time Blizzard makes a story decision, they need to live with that for years. Sometimes, they can’t find a way to make that work.

Take the Vindicaar, the spaceship we took to Argus in Legion. The Alliance is engaged in a war against the Horde, and they have a spaceship capable of making orbital strikes from space in their arsenal. They’re not using it. Why? Well, that wouldn’t be interesting. The Vindicaar goes back on the shelf until we need to invade another planet.

Blizzard needs to take care that its story choices, no matter how wild, stay sustainable. The more we have to shrug off or justify, the harder it is to buy into the World of Warcraft that it’s painstakingly building.

As for the future of World of Warcraft, it seems obvious we’ll be heading back into some pretty out-there territory soon. The Old Gods are stirring, Azshara is bringing the vengeance of N’Zoth to Azeroth, and priests are running around Kul Tiras with squids for faces. We’re carrying the heart of our planet around our neck and feeding it the planet’s lifeblood. It’s not a matter of if something completely wild is going to happen — it’s just a question or whether the game will be able to justify that narrative choice.

Super Patriotic Dating Simulator, which began its Kickstarter campaign on Saturday, is your typical romantic story of an elite spy infiltrating, seducing and then killing members of ISIS.

Karlee Esmailli, who wrote and is developing the game, is a first generation Iranian-American who works at Cards Against Humanity and is involved with the Chicago area comedy scene. She sees Super Patriotic Dating Simulator as a game that coalesces her heritage, her politics and her background in comedy.

The idea for this game came out of Esmailli’s reaction to Trump’s travel ban in February, which has impacted her family in Iran. “That really, that really brought a lot of anger out of me as a writer,” Esmailli said over the phone. “Like I mentioned, I have a background in comedy and when I feel that kind of anger, what it makes me want to do is satirise it, is make fun of it, to find the humour in the ridiculousness of the situation.”

“I don’t think I’m the most well-versed person to quote statistics, but it’s just a matter of public record that the countries that were listed in the travel ban are not countries that are historically associated with terrorist attacks on American soil,” Esmailli went on. “It is a ban that reflects so much of the prejudice of a lot of Americans attitudes towards Middle Eastern people.”

Esmailli said that she feels like ISIS has become a common political talking point for talking about the Middle East, but that much of the discussion about ISIS does not accurately reflect the attitudes of Middle Eastern people.

“ISIS is just so often used in political debate as a boogeyman for all Middle Eastern people,” she said. “It really bothered me that this group that is not representative of Middle Eastern people or my family or Muslim people in general is so often held up as a political example for why all Middle Eastern people are dangerous.”

Combining her anger about the travel ban with a sexy dating sim was a natural choice for her. Esmailli said that without the sexual aspect, the game wouldn’t feel satirical anymore, and would become just a reproduction of ISIS propaganda.

“I didn’t want to reproduce their imagery and continue to give them credibility or space in the conversation that they’d previously taken up,” she said. “So that is where the objectification of the male characters really came into play for me.”

Screenshot: Super Patriotic Dating Simulator (Immigrant Father Studios)

The game includes seven love interests, several of whom are shirtless men with glistening washboard abs. “My intention as an artist is: these guys are so sexy that you know this is a joke,” she said. “It’s a big fuck you to ISIS, that a group that is so strategically focused on intimidation and fear and legitimacy would have their legitimacy taken from them using the same tactics of objectification and dehumanisation.”

That objectification also gave Esmailli a chance to write sex scenes that centre women and women’s experiences during sex, which she said she finds lacking in other dating sims.

“From both my upbringing in Iranian and American cultures, I really was dissatisfied with the sexual education I received about my own body and the portrayal of women’s pleasure in general,” she said. “One of the bones I’ve always had to pick with the dating sims that I’ve personally played is that they never really seemed to represent a depiction of female pleasure.” She said that Super Patriotic Dating Simulator, which will show nudity and does get explicit, strives to show the experience of having sex from a female perspective.

Super Patriotic Dating Simulator is spinning a lot of plates. It’s a satire of ISIS, a parody of dating sim tropes, and also a game that aims to open people’s eyes about the Middle East and be a genuine exploration of women’s sexuality. Esmailli theorises that she’ll be able to get players to engage with the deeper themes after first luring them in with fluff. When asked what her favourite love interest was in the game, she had an answer ready.

“So unlike most dating sims, you can’t really just commit to one character, you have to make enough dents in this organisation that they eventually collapse,” she said. “The kingpin is the Caliph himself. You know, leader of the caliphate, the imam of imams. I wrote him with a lot of love. I tried to make him as good in bed as possible and horrible in every other way that he could possibly be.”

The planet will be structurally similar to Destiny, World of Warcraft and Monster Hunter: World. It can be gorgeous and dynamic, with intelligent wildlife and a variety of enemies. Just don’t expect to blow up half the map, or cause a giant earthquake that is visible until the end credits.

Fort Tarsis, though, will change. That’s because no one else can venture inside your version of the city. You’ll be able to talk to NPCs, discover more of the game’s lore, and see the consequences of the story and choices you’re making. It might seem restrictive, but keeping the narrative heavy-lifting here — in a self-contained, private microcosm — limits the opportunity for unwanted spoilers that might occur while playing missions in the wild with other people.

Your hunting group will always be you and, if you choose, other player-controlled javelins.

If you don’t care for the story, you can simply enter the town, re-equip your javelin and head straight back out again. It will also be possible to maintain group chat while you friends are stocking up or experiencing story beats in their respective versions of Fort Tarsis. “There are certain game conventions that you just [have to] embrace,” Warner said.

The dual structure of Fort Tarsis and the lethal wilderness, which BioWare calls ‘Our World, My Story,’ affects the role of NPCs (non-player characters). In previous BioWare games, like Mass Effect: Andromeda and Dragon Age: Inquisition, you would meet and converse with characters who later became your party members. In Anthem, though, your hunting group will always be you and, if you choose, other player-controlled javelins. That will limit the presence that BioWare-written characters have in the field. Remote ‘Cyphers’ will chat to you throughout each mission, highlighting key objectives, enemy forces and ancient relics, but that’s about it.

The hope, of course, is that organic player moments will fill the void. The first time you perform a combo takedown, for instance, or push through a stronghold with minimal health, should be just as memorable as BioWare’s traditional storytelling.

The critical path story will have a beginning, middle and end. The larger word conflict, though, will be left unresolved. It has to be, so players can continue adventuring and shooting monsters in the wild. Warner sees the world of Anthem as a “stage” to tell fascinating stories well after release. Like Destiny and The Division, it will be continuously updated with new missions, challenges and gear to keep fans interested. “It’s a really exciting prospect,” he said.

Blending single-player storytelling with co-operative, shared-world action is tough. Warner said BioWare has learned from the mistakes of similar games. “We’re always mindful of our craft,” Warner said.” Just looking at how you engage with your community, whether it’s the type of content that you’re releasing, how you manage your community, and the community tools that you release. These are all things that we think about. And I think that there have been some valuable lessons learned for all game developers over the past several years.”

We’ll see if BioWare has pulled it off next February.

Follow all the latest news live from Gamescom here!

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F1 2018

F1 2018 strives for authenticity. In our first race, Lewis Hamilton took first place, and Fernando Alonso had to retire half way through due to engine trouble — so it looks like they nailed it! In all seriousness, this is one of the most entertaining and realistic racing simulators we’ve tried. It’s sure to please fans of the sport and challenge diehard racing game enthusiasts.

Open wheel race cars are feisty. A bit too much vigor on the brakes or throttle, a barely mis-timed shift, or a small jerk of the steering wheel in response to a bump can all easily upset the car enough to send it spinning into the run-off zone. It’s a high-adrenaline experience that demands an almost physic connection to the car.

Perfectly capturing the danger and speed of real-life gaming in a simulation is an unattainable goal, but it’s possible to come very, very close. F1 2018 comes closer to real-life F1 racing than any game we’ve tried and improves simulation in other aspects of a racer’s career – though you can’t emulate Kimi Raikkonen by catching a nap under a table.

A promising, but sometimes awkward, career mode

Career mode is where most players will spend the bulk of their time. It offers a sense of continuity provided by the voices of your crew and management, as well as the progression of R&D research for your car. Each race becomes important, because each contributes to your overall career.

Unlike many games with career mode, F1 2018 lets you adjust difficulty not just with a setting, but also your team choice. Top-tier teams like AMG Petronas or Scuderia Ferrari will expect consistent podium results, while Williams and Force India have more modest goals. It’s a natural and realistic way to scale the difficulty of the game and offers a great sense of achievement. You’ll feel proud when you improve enough to meet a top-tier team’s expectations.

For the first time, F1 2018 adds dialogue options to career, offering a bit of light role-playing. You can choose how the media and world will get to know you as a driver. Will you be a gentleman who thanks your team in the image of Sir Stirling Moss, or a cocky narcissist, like a certain driver whose name rhymes with “Clamilton?”

While we love the concept and appreciate that different choices not only affect the overall relationship with your team, but also different departments within your engineering team, the choices offered could feel restraining. There were a few moments where all the available dialogue options felt like gaffes, or like Codemasters was trying to force a decision. Why can’t you thank the entire team for getting the driver on the podium, rather than being forced to choose a specific group? Codemasters has promised a launch day patch that will “re-balance” dialogue, so we’re hopeful to have a few less awkward moments come release day.

We also noticed that the facial animations don’t quite sync up with the audio, and there’s a discrepancy between the visual quality of the people and the cars. Codemasters has paid obsessive attention to the cars, but the people could use some work. Thankfully, you don’t spend much time looking at characters, so this issue isn’t too distracting.

A simulation with a real sense of speed

Eccentricities of Career Mode aside, F1 2018’s primary goal is to simulate piloting one of the world’s most impressive racing cars. That’s not an easy feat. In the previous iteration, F1 2017, cars felt weirdly stiff and almost clinical. When you hit a bump in a race car—especially an open-wheel car—there’s a unsettling feeling of wiggling from the chassis, like the car itself is a hyped-up crouching kitten that hasn’t yet decided which direction to pounce in.

That’s a difficult feeling to capture even when gaming on a high-end simulation rig with racing wheel and chair. A game needs the right combination of not just force feedback, but also audio and graphical signals to impart a feeling of uneasy lightness at high speed. It’s one of the most distinct feelings when racing or lapping, and how the driver reacts is a big part of what separates the good from the great. No lap is perfect, but skill comes from correcting small errors without significant loss of speed or control. The fastest racer speeds along just a hair slower than necessary to avoid a crash.

F1 2018 nails that feeling like few racing games ever have. If you’re using a racing wheel, you’ll receive gobs of intuitive feedback from it, but even standard controller imparts plenty of information. When one wheel pops up over the uneven curb, you know just how much of risk it is and just how much further it can be pushed — because you feel it.

The game also nails the sensation of speed. When you can’t feel the G-forces pushing you back into your seat, and the objects around you aren’t life-size, it’s easy to feel slow no matter what speed the game claims you’re doing. F1 2018 uses a lower camera angle and use of race-side objects to impart a sense of how ludicrously fast F1 cars are (they easily top 200 miles per hour). We felt a real sense of danger when coming into curve at the end of a long, fast straightaway, and that’s something few racing games manage to inspire.

Of course, not every gamer has the same expectations. Hardcore driving enthusiasts want to turn all the driver’s aids off to feel the full experience, but others will want to keep the aids on and go for a more forgiving race using a gamepad. Crucially, the game remains exciting no matter how you play. It feels fast and dangerous even with the driver aids turned on.

If you want to get into the nitty gritty of tuning your car and its strategy, you can do that. You can choose the tires you want to use for each practice session, what fuel ratio you’re burning, and all the usual customizations, or you can leave that up to your AI team and still be competitive. The digital engineers do a good job of making suggestions, and it means that if that’s not the fun part for you, there’s no need to worry; you’ll still get what you want out of the game.

Whether you’re a serious sim enthusiast who wants a new challenge, up to date with all the current F1 regulations, or a guy who wants a more serious racing game but doesn’t necessarily want to have to study real-world racing strategy and technique, you’ll enjoy this game.

Microtransactions? Nope, not here

Thankfully, microtrasactions haven’t invaded F1 2018. Buying the game bags you the entire thing for one set price. It’s a refreshing change of pace, as sports games often have annoyingly aggressive in-game item stores.

Our Take

F1 2018 is an excellent simulator with an engrossing career mode that can challenge newcomers and skilled players alike. The career mode can feel awkward at times, but also has strengths, and the game offers gobs of racing excitement for your $60.

Is there a better alternative?

If you want a game that nails the feeling of racing an open-wheel car, it’s either this or the much more expensive subscription-based iRacing. While iRacing is extremely realistic, it doesn’t have the game modes you’d expect or even AI drivers.

How long will it last?

When F1 2019 gets released in a year you’ll be tempted to buy, and there will no doubt be improvements, but F1 2018 isn’t going bad any time soon.

Should you buy it?

Yes. Racing around a track in F1 2018 is fundamentally enthralling, even if you don’t closely follow the sport.

Queen Azshara is one of the most dangerous villains in World of Warcraft. A Night Elf monarch and mage who struck a deal with the Burning Legion, she was stopped 10,000 years ago by Tyrande Whisperwind and the brothers Stormrage. After her reign ended and the Sundering tore the world apart, Azshara and her followers were swept under the waves. There, she struck a bargain with an Old God, and they rose again as the powerful Naga. We’ve known these details in the abstract, but the newest Warbringer short shows the moments of truth where Azshara drowned and was reborn, and it’s some of the most compelling cosmic horror around.

Since World of Warcraft’s debut, Azshara has been present on the fringes of the game. The Naga have been an enemy in zones as far back as vanilla WoW, and statues of her litter the Night Elf ruins. One of her generals, Lady Vashj, made a play at stealing the water of Outland in The Burning Crusade. We saw a vision of her past back in Cataclysm. Now, in Battle for Azeroth, she finally makes her debut. We also get to see her Old God patron, N’Zoth, and the entire experience is as compelling as it is unsettling.

If you’ve felt like the threat of the Naga has worn off after mowing down hundreds of them to collect their scales and protect villagers, Warbringers: Azshara will put a healthy dose of fear back in your heart. This is, by far, the most terrifying of the three shorts … and that’s pretty impressive, considering the other two had ghosts and genocide. Pull up a seat, prepare for a jump scare or two, and settle in for the last of the Warbringers series.

World of Warcraft’s first raid, Uldir, goes live on Sept. 4. Azshara is set to debut in a future raid, which will likely have more in-game events surrounding its launch.

Unless you’ve been avoiding any of the new story-centric trailers for Destiny 2‘s upcoming Forsaken DLC expansion, you know Cayde-6 is in a bad way. A new trailer for Forsaken that debuted at Gamescom 2018 has revealed exactly what precipitated our previous look at Cayde’s apparent final moments. And if Destiny’s most interesting character has to go out, at least he’s doing so like a badass.

Created in collaboration with Blur Studio, the trailer shows Cayde fighting off numerous enemies who have escaped the Prison of Elders. While he’s often used as the comic relief (thanks to the excellent voice acting of Nathan Fillion, who has been replaced), here he’s fighting for his life. And while he holds his own for a while, his Ghost is ultimately destroyed and he finds himself on death’s door.

We’ll have to wait for Forsaken to find out exactly how things play out from here and if Bungie has some kind of swerve up its sleeve. The DLC will bring much more than just a possible conclusion to the tale of Cayde; this is the biggest expansion to date, appearing to be on par with the original Destiny’s acclaimed Taken King DLC. It includes new superclasses and Supers, weapons and gear, locations, and more.

Another big component of Forsaken is Gambit, a hybrid PvP/PvE mode that was revealed back at E3. Those eager to try it fortunately won’t have to wait to do so, as a limited-time free trial will be held just ahead of Forsaken’s launch. PS4, Xbox One, and PC players who own the game will be able to jump into Gambit on September 1 at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET / 6 PM BST until the same time on September 2.

Forsaken releases on September 4. Unlike the first two DLC expansions, it’s not included in the original Expansion Pass. You can read more in our Forsaken pre-order guide, and find out exactly how and when the day one patch will be rolled out.

In some freak accident of time travel I seem to have found myself in ye olde medieval times, and I’ve fallen into the role of proprietor of some town’s graveyard. It’s seen better days. I’m given my first directions by, naturally, a disembodied talking skull. But I’ve played the part of an outsider tasked with reinvigorating an abandoned property before, so I don’t plan to ignore the big farm sim-shaped elephant in the room.

If first looks could kill

My first order of business is repairing my dilapidated graveyard. The grave markers are falling over and little stone fences crumbling to bits. To fix the graves I need wood repair kits. To craft wood repair kits I need nails, which are crafted at an anvil, which I’ll need simple iron parts in order to build. Oh, and the iron parts are made at a smelter which of course I need to have iron parts to build! Welcome to Graveyard Keeper.

I spend my first two hours digging further and further into the resource rabbit hole, which feels like could have been avoided if one of my new neighbors would lend me a damn cup of sugar and some ever-elusive simple iron parts. I finally scrounge together the cash to just buy some from the local blacksmith. Later, I discover that chopping up the broken-looking buckets in my own cellar would have netted me at least some of the parts I needed. 

I manage to repeat the same mistake several times over the next several hours: buying or crafting supplies that might have been more within my reach if I’d finished an NPCs quest or explored more diligently. Although this is partly my own ineptitude, I find the sheer number of avenues available in Graveyard Keeper, all of which tendril out into lengthy tech trees, at fault as well. 

My new friend the talking skull now wants a bottle of wine before he helps me further. Do I grind out the technology points needed to make my own wine? Find a way to garner additional friendship with the barkeep so he’ll sell me some? Or will one of the locals decide to just throw a bottle my way as a reward? I haven’t yet figured it out, but I’m prepared to go about it the hard way and only find out what I was supposed to have done later on. 

Right out of the gate I was vaguely pointed in the right direction to progress, but every new NPC I spoke to would propose their own errand and the rewards were often unclear. Whose random task might earn me a bit of traction in my growing list of woodworking equipment to build? 

Jack of too many trades

Graveyard Keeper’s crafting and questing in a village setting demand comparison with games like Stardew Valley and My Time At Portia, despite its macabre tone and shifted setting. Instead of farming (though you do have a small garden on your land for growing crops), Graveyard Keeper’s main objective is of course rebuilding and running a successful medieval graveyard. Aside from the resource management and crafting, Graveyard Keeper ditches the more social and character-based elements of other life sims. If you’re looking for Stardew Graveyard, you’ll find it only partially incarnated here.

Daily tasks in Graveyard Keeper range from the familiar cutting trees and mining ores, to writing new sermons to perform in the church, to disemboweling and studying corpses. Tasks require energy, which can be regained by sleeping, though running out of energy has no consequences and you’re free to stay awake for days if you want. Progression is driven by unlocking crafting recipes in a number of technology trees for each of the main vocational skills in the game, allowing you to build crafting stations like a carpenter’s workbench and anvil, but also embalming tables and alchemy racks. 

Unlike Stardew Valley, in which any profession can potentially carry you through the game, Graveyard Keeper demands that you give equal attention to each of the many disciplines as failing to progress one will likely block you from pursuing others effectively. You’ll need to have unlocked high level Building blueprints and workstations in order to properly build advanced components to your Church, for instance.

It’s a juggling act in which you’re required to keep every ball in the air. I wouldn’t mind the challenge nearly as much if I were given a friendly nudge in the right direction. With a more defined quest order, perhaps provided by my friend the talking skull, I would feel less frustrated by the time I spent stubbornly blazing my own path—then at least I’d have done it knowingly.

Can anybody hear me? 

Compared to Stardew Valley and My Time At Portia, which each spend a good amount of time encouraging you to pursue friendships and relationships with NPCs, Graveyard Keeper feels almost clinical. Its characters are amusing, certainly. There’s a donkey with an Eastern European accent possibly in need of a labor union, a vain Bishop equipped with his own pocket mirror, and plenty more. 

Where other life and town simulations often include gift-giving and cutscenes diving into the personality and backstory of each villager, Graveyard Keeper features a dispassionate smile meter for each character. The depth of personality exhibited by each NPC is surface level, a sort of rote line recital that reminds me of a pull-string toy with five total pre-recorded sayings. 

I’ve felt an equal inability to leave my mark on my own territory, let alone the town at large. My slowly-expanding front yard has become a sloppy assortment of crafting stations that looks suspiciously similar to the lawn of a rural hoarder. My graveyard looks nice enough, though that’s largely incidental. It just so happens the grave markings that most improve the quality of my property are the nicest-looking. Everything I do in Graveyard Keeper is chosen for its practicality, with no thought spared for aesthetics. Crafting stations and grave decor are either functional or useless, with no room for individual taste in the middle.

No rest for the wicked

I wanted Graveyard Keeper to feel personal in some way. Without customizing the appearance of my character, investing in the story of any NPCs, or being invited to turn my property into anything more than an appliance dumping ground, I feel like my graveyard will end up awfully similar to anyone else’s. It checks all the boxes: crafting, gathering, and a seemingly endless hunt for resources. What it lacks is anything that allows me to make my graveyard uniquely my own.

Graveyard Keeper is ultimately a utilitarian approach to town and life simulation. NPCs are more dispensers of quests and rewards than they are friends. The town itself is a series of areas that slowly become accessible as your crafting prowess increases, but not a place it seems I’m meant to care about. I have plenty of complaints, but despite all of them I still hear that siren song I’ve been lured by before: “Just one more day. One more day, and maybe I’ll finally be able to build that circular saw.”

For more on Graveyard Keeper, check out our diary Graveyard Keeper turned me into the most evil character I’ve ever played.

During Gamescom 2018, Bandai Namco revealed a new gameplay trailer for Tira, who’s day one DLC for the upcoming SoulCalibur 6. The company also unveiled a new trailer that details the game’s second story mode.

First introduced in SoulCalibur 3, Tira has since become a veteran of the franchise and appeared in both SoulCalibur 4 and SoulCalibur 5.

In both SoulCalibur 4 and 5, Tira’s fighting style was transformed to match how her personality unexpectedly changes. She has two different states, Gloomy and Jolly, with the former allowing her to dish out more powerful attacks at the cost of her own health. Some of her moves allow you to switch Tira’s states on the fly, but she can also just change whenever she feels like it or after she’s struck by certain attacks. The new trailer suggests Tira maintains this fighting style in SoulCalibur 6, but Bandai Namco hasn’t confirmed whether or not that is the case.

SoulCalibur 6 is launching for Xbox One, PS4, and PC on October 19.