PC Gamer shares their list of 2019 RPGs to look forward to.

The Outer Worlds

2019 | Obsidian Entertainment | Preview

Last year, Wes got a look at the next RPG from Fallout designers Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky. He described it as a "first-person RPG shooter, with a focus on roleplaying above all else." There are multiple paths through every scenario—fight, talk, sneak—and an emphasis on player choices. And, since it's a Tim Cain game, you can play as a dumbass and be gifted with appropriate dialogue options. Check out Wes' preview for all the other details we have so far.

Shenmue 3

August 27 | Ys Net | Official site

It's really happening. We're fans of the Dreamcast classics Shenmue and Shenmue 2, for reasons Andy describes well in his 2018 Personal Pick, in which he calls Shenmue "a singular game with a bold vision, and one of the most powerfully atmospheric things I've ever played." It's slow, and that's its strength: The mundanity of feeding your cat is at the core of Shenmue's appeal, even as a revenge story burns at the edges. Finally, that story will be concluded. And hopefully the cat is alright.

[...]

Thanks Farflame!

PC Gamer nominated its best writing for games in 2018.

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire

Best writing: I'm going to cheat a bit and talk about a game I helped write: Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire. In the interest of objectivity, I'm not bringing up any of my contributions.

So we have these characters called "sidekicks." They're companions you pick up along the way who don't get the full "companion treatment" of personal quests, deeper relationships, or emotional arcs. That said, sidekicks are more than just fighting mannequins—they get their own unique voices, personalities, and in some cases intellectual growth. My colleague Kate Dollarhyde wrote the sidekick Rekke, who the player discovers shipwrecked, having sailed from a distant land. He speaks Seki, a mysterious language Kate painstakingly invented, and over time Rekke learns to communicate with the player and share his story.

What I think works about Rekke is that his origins are so far removed from the context of the game that he approaches the plot as a stranger squinting at the unusual locals. While all of the other characters bicker over political alliances, cultural struggle, and religious tension, it's refreshing to have Rekke observing from the sidelines and taking it all in with a sense of lighthearted bemusement. He's a breath of fresh air when intrigue and annihilation get a little too overwhelming. It also helps that he's perfectly charming.  — Paul Kirsch

[...]

Thanks Farflame!

PCGamer has a list of the best cities in PC gaming.

Hell's Kitchen, from Deus Ex

As a series, Deus Ex has plenty of cities to choose from. Mankind Divided has Prague; Human Revolution has Detroit and Hengsha; and Invisible War made an attempt at Seattle, bless it forever. But only the original, ugly as it is, really captured the scale of a city. Its version of the Hell's Kitchen district of New York feels ominous and towering, sure, but, in comparison to the latter games, also spacious. Its streets are wide, making JC Denton feel like a small part of this huge place. Lots of games struggle with scale, but Deus Ex really captures the sense of a city's size.

Sure, it's not the most remarkable looking of the Deus Ex series' cities, and its backing music isn't as memorable as Hong Kong, but it feels like a real place. It's dark, dingy, and covered in recognisable detritus. As interesting as the paradoxically more futuristic cities of the prequels look, I appreciate how the familiarity of Hell's Kitchen serves to heighten what's different about the world. Plus, it's got a great bar. That's about 90% of the requirements of a great videogame city right there.

-Phil Savage

PC Gamer has a feature on its favourite expansions.

It's always a bit upsetting when the credits roll on our favourite games. Whether it's those short and sweet adventures that're wrapped up in ten hours or less, or the social life-devouring days-on-end epics-craving more when it's all said and done is sadly part of the process. Of course, that's where expansions come in.

And the best do more than simply extend their base-games' battery life-they develop existing ideas and features, fix what was previously broken, push plot lines in unexpected directions, and add to the original experience in such a way that the expansion stands alone on merit and in its own right. In this list, we've gathered our favourite expansions that've added meaningful mileage to some masterful PC games over the last couple of decades. Enjoy!

An academic paper on roleplaying has come out of North Carolina University. The findings might seem obvious, but it has deeper implications for how we play games.

A team of four researchers at North Carolina University recently wrote a paper with this impressively lofty title: “The Mimesis Effect: The Effect of Roles on Player Choice in Interactive Narrative Role-Playing Games”. Despite sounding like a PhD thesis so dry it would make effective kindling, the study itself is actually pretty straightforward. They examined how players made decisions in a simple roleplaying game of their own design, a sort of fantasy choose-your-own-adventure with visuals straight out of oldschool Zelda. They came to the conclusion that “participants role-play even if not instructed to, exhibiting a preference for actions consistent with their role.” When games give us options about how to portray a character, we try to make that portrayal cohesive. Thief players choose sneaky solutions to problems while warrior players tended to be more direct.

Everybody roleplays in games that let us. We just don’t always realize we’re doing it. Recognizing chances to roleplay and taking advantages of them is a great way to enjoy games more, but that's a skill that takes sharpening.

Players who come from a background in tabletop roleplaying games tend to be more aware of and deliberate about their roleplaying. I asked three professional RPG designers about the crossover between pen-and-paper roleplaying and videogames. Jeremy Crawford, codesigner of the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons and creator of the Blue Rose RPG, says, “Any time a videogame lets me create my own character, I can’t help but slip into a D&D mindset about the character creation process: ‘What are my character’s goals, beliefs, personality quirks, greatest loves, and deepest hates?’ It’s hard for me not to ask questions like that.”

More.

PC Gamer discusses avoiding combat in an RPG, and they do it through the lens of Age of Decadence.

I'm bored of killing people. Not necessarily bored of having people killed, but certainly of doing my own dirty work. After a couple of years of great RPGs—The Witcher 3, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Pillars of Eternity, Fallout 4, and even South Park: The Stick of Truth—I need a break from fighting. This isn't a hot take: I'm not about to decry RPG combat in its entirety. This is my problem, and it's up to me—not the industry at large—to find a solution.

The solution, it turns out, is Age of Decadence. Officially released last year after a time in early access, it's still a bit rough and unpolished. Nonetheless, it's a wilfully uncompromising RPG. There is combat, and it's extremely difficult, but, depending on the choices that you make, engaging in it can be optional.

In Age of Decadence, you're given a choice of professions, each promising a markedly different experience. A mercenary is going to get hilt deep in some jerks—it's a part of the job description. But other builds promise other ways to play. I chose a merchant, partly because it's a non-combat option, but also because, if this is truly an age of decadence, I assume having a lot of money will help.

It works because the setting favours politics and greed, rather than sword-'n'-board heroism. Because of this, I go for an extremely specific, high-risk build. My combat fatigue manifests in a character with no points in any of the combat skills. Of my dagger ability, the game bluntly states that I should "put it down before you poke an eye out." (Wouldn't poking someone's eye out be an extremely effective use of a dagger? I suppose it depends whose eye.)

Instead, I'm a master at doing words at people—more so than this sentence would imply. My primary stats are trading, persuasion and 'streetwise,' and it's interesting just how much these skills matter. I've played for a few hours, and, so far, Age of Decadence has mitigated its early linearity through contextual events and dialogue. At multiple points I'm given the option for actions that rely on my (appalling) dexterity, or conversation choices that require my (amazing) persuasion. But these options don't magically solve problems.

More.

PCGamer reports that the Hero's Song kickstarter has been cancelled. They will be using investment backing instead.

The Kickstarter for Hero's Song, the new game being developed by former SOE and Daybreak Games President John Smedley and his recently-founded Pixelmage Games studio, has been canceled. The campaign was launched last week, but after notching up just $137,000 on an $800,000 goal, the team has decided to opt for investment backing instead.

"After looking at our funding levels and the reality that we aren't going to reach our funding goals, we've decided that the best thing to do is to end the Kickstarter. We sincerely appreciate all of the support we got from the backers and the Kickstarter community," Smedley wrote in a Kickstarter update posted today. "This was our first Kickstarter and we made mistakes along the way. I want to acknowledge that right up front. We put a lot of time and effort into the Kickstarter, but it's obvious missing things like physical goods hampered our efforts. It's also fair to say because we're early that we didn't have enough gameplay to show the game off enough to get people over the hump."

Fantasy and post-apocalyptic settings are great, but is there another setting you'd enjoy for an RPG?  Maybe Terry Pratchett's Discworld?  PC Gamer makes a list with some fun ideas.

More information.

PC Gamer made a big list for the best 2016 PC Games:

Guide to the games of 2016

2015 is now receding into the past—goodbye, old friend!—but the inevitable march of time only brings us even more games to play. We got ‘em all in 2016: the kind where you shoot, the kind where you talk, or walk, or fly, and the kind where you do all that but have to take turns. This year, we’ll even have the kind where you’ve got goggles on your face. What a world! Here’s your guide to the games of 2016, loaded into genres for easy browsing.

RPGs

Action RPGs

[...]

PC Gamer has updated their list of the best RPG's of all time.  Some of their choices may come as a surprise. (Undertale?)

The best RPGs of all time

The role-playing game is the cornerstone of PC gaming. Long before shooters or real-time strategy, the earliest PC developers replicated their tabletop RPGs on the PC, building sprawling adventures filled with orcs and wizards and foul dungeons. Those early games slowly built on their tabletop origins, and RPGs eventually became so popular, their elements spread to other genres. Here are our favorites: the RPGs we’d tell anyone to play right now.

Our Criteria

Whenever we sit down to argue our way through a list of the best games, our first step is deciding what “best” even means. In this case, we’re identifying which RPGs are fun right now. Games age; they’re products of the technology they were built on, and the technology that seemed cutting edge 25 years ago may be junk today.

We value fun more than the historical significance of a game, and doing so helps us build a list that recommends what’s great today rather than publishing a popularity contest. But we don’t ignore a game’s impact completely—innovation and influence just has a lesser weight under our criteria.

The RPG genre is tough to boil down: by the most literal definition, every game is a role-playing game. This list represents our best definition of the canonical RPG—games that emphasize story; that let you inhabit a customizable character through skill points, inventory, and dialogue decisions; that include complex, controllable relationships with companions or non-playable characters. That leaves flexibility in how the game is controlled, what perspective it uses, or what setting it takes place in. Drawing these kinds of lines helps us provide a better service to you, we hope—though we've made some exceptions where we think it's worth it.

More information.

PC Gamer's Andy Chalk talks about the boxes, packaging, and sentimentality of old PC classics in his piece "Boxes, Feelies, and the Good Old Days of PC Gaming".

Consider the box. A humble holder of stuff. Usually (but not always) cardboard and cuboid, and alas, often held in a certain kind of dismissive contempt in this era of digital delights. They're still on shelves, for the benefit of those who can't or won't download their games, but they're pissy little things: a cheap DVD case, with a lazy swipe at cover art—"angry man with gun," again and again and again—and a half-page insert explaining how to shove the disc into the machine, at which time it will get most of what it needs from Steam anyway.

But there was a time when the box was more than just dumpster stuffing. When it contained not just the entirety of the game, launch-day bugs and all, but the things that brought them to life in ways that digital just can't replicate.

The loot, the swag, the tchotchkes, the feelies, the stuff that made it all real, and demonstrated to the outside world—should any member of the outside world happen to stumble into your room—the depth of your dedication to these wonderful worlds and adventures that came inside a humble cardboard box.

More information.

PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon offers some compelling arguments for playing your PS2 games on your PC, instead of re-buying them for PS4. A lot of it is old news for those of us using emulators already, but there are some fun new tricks you may not have considered...

Admittedly, this all takes a bit more work than spending $15 to re-buy a PS2 game on your PS4, which you’ll inevitably be asked to re-buy on the PlayStation 5 or 6. But that’s the nature of the PC platform. With a little work, you can play just about anything.

And with a little more work, you can make the games better than they were on the original hardware. It becomes part of the fun: you can usually get a game to run without too much trouble, but making it look as good as it can, and run as smoothly as possible, is a satisfying tinkering process.

(Valkyrie Profile 2 with SweetFX shaders. Image via NeoGAF member Boulotaur2024.)

More information.

PC Gamer has an interview with Brian Fargo that outlines his thoughts on the two franchises as well as some of his thinking on Bards Tale IV.

"With Wasteland, we kind of bent over backwards to ensure that everybody can be killed in that game. And you know what, it's a pain in the ass to design for that, because from beginning to end, there's all those NPCs and all those characters, and every single one of them can be killed," he continued. "And they're not fodder, they're people that have conversations and plot and reasons to be there. So when you account for being able to shoot and kill everything, it makes your design multiply."

It also potentially exposes game makers to backlash from over-excited parents and tut-tutting Fox News commentators if they take things too far. Fargo said game makers "ride this line" between immersion and caution, and reminded me that this isn't the first time Bethesda has opted for the latter: In the first two Fallouts, players who killed children were tagged with the "Childkiller" reputation, penalizing their NPC reactions and exposing them to bounty hunters. In Fallout 3 and beyond, Bethesda opted to simply make kids invulnerable.

[...]

The return of Wasteland was met with excitement and accolades as well, enough to take it from niche PC RPG to a "Director's Cut" release for consoles. Fargo acknowledged that some of that durability is the result of Fallout keeping the genre in the public eye, but he attributes much of it to the depth and complexity inXile layers into its work, citing as an example a payoff scene for the shotgun-toting boozehound Scotchmo that most players won't ever see. Most of them won't even finish the game, he said. And he's not wrong: only 7.5 percent of Steam players have earned the "Back Where It All Began" achievement, an unavoidable late-game marker-but this stuff is in there, bringing a "subtlety" to the game world, as he put it, that makes the experience more rewarding for everyone.

Brian also hints at other project developments in the works as well as announcing a new studio.

It'll be awhile yet before we see much of substance from the new Bard's Tale, though Fargo likened it to Interplay's 1995 dungeon crawler Stonekeep. "You compare Stonekeep to Bard's Tale, and graphically it was-well, now it doesn't look so great-but it was like a big leap forward from the original ones. So we're just continuing on from that tradition." InXile's focus has been primarily on the Wasteland 2 Director's Cut, and it's also elbows-deep in Torment: Tides of Numenera. And there are "other production plans that we'll be announcing soon that I think people will find very interesting," he said. The California-based studio just recently announced its first expansion, a satellite office in New Orleans expected to grow to 50 people.

"They'd shoot me if I start talking about other things," Fargo said. "But I will soon. It's never dull around here, I'll tell you that."

Richard Cobbett's funny glossary of PC terms:

The language of gaming is constantly mutating. For instance, "lag" used to refer to delays in client/server communication, but lately we've heard it used as if it's synonymous with "low framerate." Baffling. To help clear some things up, we've asked regular PC Gamer writer and all-round lexical savant Richard Cobbett to create a brief glossary of PC gaming's most important terms and their modern definitions (with a few additions of our own).

Example:
Quick time event: An innovation in games that helped developers offer exciting, thrilling battles filled with action, which nobody is watching because they’re too busy looking out for button prompts and flashing arrows. Named for the quick time in which they stopped actually being an event, and for being about as interactive as the average .mov.

PC Gamer published a new article this week where they list which Star Wars game is better in celebration of all the games being released on GOG from last month.

In late January, some of the long-missing Star Wars classics of the LucasArts library made a triumphant debut on GOG. For the first time, TIE Fighter and X-Wing and Rogue Squadron and more were available as digital downloads. Some of them are the best Star Wars games ever made. A few of them are some of the best games ever, period.

With Star Wars buzzing on the brain, the PC Gamer crew assembled a list of our favorite Star Wars games: the ones that made us believe we were Jedi, ace pilots shooting down the Death Star trench, pod racers rocketing over the surface of Tattooine. These are the 11 best Star Wars games on PC (we had a couple ties).

Richard Cobbett posted an interesting editorial on PC Gamer about Personal Quests. 

What makes personal quests tricky to look back on is that they're simultaneously one of the best and worst things that ever happened to the genre. Without them, MMOs would be lesser experiences, and it's hard to imagine them being as successful. In their success though, they offered a template so easily copied and safely implemented that they largely killed the point of their genre. It's as if, say, Quake had taught the world to crave flashy 3D graphics, but in doing so decided to remove the guns in favour of a debate system where you talk the monsters out of their evil, and that rather than deathmatch had come to define what modern shooters are. Call of Reason: Advanced Diplomacy would be high in the charts. It would be madness.

PC Gamer has news that a Hack & Slash game called Hellblade is getting a PC release.

Ninja Theory’s Hellblade is coming to PC, PC Gamer can exclusively reveal. The third-person hack-and-slash game from the DmC and Enslaved studio was previously announced for PS4 at Gamescom, but it’ll also arrive on PC with possible mod support and more.

“I think PC offers us a level of freedom that we haven’t had before,” the studio’s creative chief Tameem Antoniades told me. “We’re looking at everything we do on this project and figuring out better ways of doing things compared to how the traditional AAA console model works. And consoles are following suit with PC, but I think they’re years behind what things like Steam are doing. If we want to do an open beta right now, it’s a little bit trickier to do that than on PC. Playtesting is a huge thing for us. Usability testing, getting people hands-on to try things out, get feedback, then roll that back in and improve the game... it’s always been essential for us to do that. Not every publisher has let us, because of the secrecy that goes into consoles and publisher-based businesses. As an independent we have the freedom to do that.”

They also have an old trailer for everyone to watch if you're interested.

PC Gamer has another interesting article this week with a guide to RPG games of 2015.

2014 was brilliant for RPG fans. We had Divinity: Original Sin, Dragon Age: Inquisition and Wasteland 2 to keep us going. 2015 is looking good, too. The Witcher 3 could be superb, Pillars of Eternity looks gorgeous and played well in alpha and we can look forward to Bioware's experimental multiplayer RPG, Shadow Realms.

PC Gamer posted a new article about 2014 being the year of the CRPG renaissance.

I like to imagine that when historians of the medium of gaming look back on 2014, they will see it not as the year of half-baked “AAA” games, not as the time when microtransaction profits surged further ahead, but rather as the first year of the CRPG renaissance.

Asking a fan of the CRPG genre—that is, old-school computer RPGs—about when it reached its peak, you’ll likely get a large range of answers, from the late 80s up until the turn of the century. What you won’t hear is any year from, say, 2004 to 2013. While the genre has not died entirely over the past decade, it was kept alive on a sparse diet of shoestring-budget indie titles, and the very rare larger highlight, such as 2007’s Mask of the Betrayer.

All of this changed in 2014, and it’s not looking to stop any time soon. Even genre aficionados might have had trouble keeping up with the deluge of great games throughout the year—these are generally not short games—and it seems all but impossible for the casual fan. As such, I want to close out the year by providing a quick look at each of my personal highlights, and an even quicker overview of some other worthy candidates.

Thank you HiddenX for sending in the link.

This little news-bit is a few days late as I rarely check PC Gamer for news due to hating the sites new layout, but the site has started their game of the year awards.

They gave Dragon Age: Inquisition the Best Single-player 2014.

Phil Savage: It’s a story about Thedas, and about reshaping the structures and politics that define a world. It’s also a story about people, and how they respond to tragedy, hope and faith. Inquisition is a proper roleplaying game: one that asks you to not just create a character, but to let their motivations and investments grow over time.

Chris Thursten: I made a decision in Inquisition that was so painful I had to go back and undo it, breaking a rule that I’ve held myself to since the first Mass Effect. When its narrative engine kicks into gear, Dragon Age: Inquisition is among the best work BioWare has ever done.

They also gave Divinity: Original Sin the Spirit of the PC Award 2014.

Chris Thrusten: The funny thing about Divinity is that it’s a throwback to a classic form of the genre that nonetheless feels like it’s from the future. Its big new ideas are part of that—two protagonists, you controlling both; campaign-wide co-op; a complex combat system grounded in emergent interactions—but the crucial thing is the sense of freedom that complexity gives you. It’s not afraid to let you break things, or try. It gives you ownership over your experience.

Tom Marks: I’ve spent almost every weekend of the past four months playing this. I’ve played over 80 hours and every minute has been co-op with the same person. It’s a game designed from the ground up with co-op in mind, and that has created interactions unexpected and exciting. When playing alone, you’re often presented with the option to disagree with yourself. Those moments help define your characters’ personalities and are mostly for show, but when playing with my girlfriend—who sits five feet away from me—we can discuss the choice we want to make before selecting our answers. A plan that often falls apart as we determine the best choice out loud before one of us secretly changes their mind and puts their character at odds with the other.

Thank you Sloth for the information from another thread.

A build of Windows 10 has been leaked, revealing a built-in "XBox App" that tells you what's going on on XBox.  Really, Microsoft?

Is this what Microsoft's Phil Spencer was referring to last week, when he said it was "time for us to talk about gaming on Windows"? If nothing else, it would be the perfect culmination of Microsoft's attitude towards PC gaming if, for them, "gaming on Windows" meant an app that tells you what's happening on Xbox. Hopefully they have something more substantial planned.

More information.

King's Quest is getting a reboot?  It sure looks that way, and the art style is interesting too.

We already knew that the King's Quest reboot wouldn't be a point and click game, but I'm not sure we were prepared for just how not-a-point-and-click-game it appears to be. Shown last night at The Game Awards, this first trailer for the new King's Quest reveals platforming, action, stealthy bits and traps, all things you mightn't expect from one of the most fondly remembered adventure game series around.

It's certainly nice to look at, though, with a lovely, Gallic cartoon art style, an adorably hapless main character, and a big scary dragon for him to have a bit of a barney with. I'm not a fan of sequences where you have to time jumps over approaching logs, so hopefully there won't be too much of that sort of thing in the game. Not pictured: puzzles, story or conversation, but there will be further trailers detailing all three in due course.

More information.

PC's Gamers Richard Cobbet has penned an editorial about how Bioware handles sexuality
in their games.  At first, he talks about Dorian, the first full gay character in a Bioware
game.  Cobbet writes that:

I don't want to reduce the character down to just his sexuality, because as you'd expect from both Gaider and Bioware, it's not particularly what defines him - nationality, magic, friends, family all play a far larger role in his conversations and snarking, as you'd expect for a world where nobody particularly cares who you sleep with as long as it doesn't create a terrible god-baby. Sometimes not even then.

Another comment from Cobbet is this:

The fact that Bioware's push for inclusiveness and increasingly not defining characters by their sexuality first makes for better and more well-rounded games though isn't the real reason we should be glad that they do it. The big advantage is that in doing it, it demonstrates to the rest of the world that it can be done......The result of this is that smaller, more vulnerable companies get to see directly that even if someone does make a flap, it doesn't actually mean a damn thing, as well as being able to point to an increasing range of high profile examples of different character types, sexualities and storylines.

Do you agree with Cobbet?

Early Access has created a lot of cynicism within the PC gaming community.  And for good reason.  According to one study, only 25% of early access titles make it to release.

Early Access has become a very popular method for releasing games, and it's not hard to understand why: Developers can make money on their games while still developing and shaping them based on feedback from their audience. But it's not an unqualified success, as thus far only one-quarter of games put out on Early Access have been given a full release.

The GamesIndustry report, by EEDAR Head of Insights and Analytics Patrick Walker, acknowledges that the percentage could be weighed down by recent Early Access releases that simply haven't had time to be developed into a state of full readiness. But the percentage of Early Access titles from 2013 that have made it to full launch isn't much better, standing at less than 42 percent, and of the first nine games to appear on Early Access when it debuted in March 2013, only three have been released as full games.

"While there are clearly many benefits to an Early Access model, there is also the possibility of a broken promise to the consumer. This is not unlike other models in the games industry, such as crowdfunding through Kickstarter or selling a DLC Season Pass, where the consumer pays up front for promised content," Walker wrote. "A notable difference between those particular models and Steam's Early Access program is the lack of a firm release window; on Early Access, a game could theoretically stay in development and be sold to consumers indefinitely, whereas a Season Pass is rolled out within a specific time frame and all Kickstarter projects are presented with an estimated 'delivery date'."

More information.

There aren't many PC gamers that don't use DirectX.  But the next generation of DirectX won't be available for those of us who use Win 7.

Speaking at a PDXLAN presentation earlier this month, AMD's Chief Gaming Scientist Richard Huddy said Windows 7 remains Microsoft's most popular operating system: 52 percent of all Microsoft OS users are still on Windows 7, and that number is actually growing. "It's a very, very popular operating system," he said in comments starting around the 20:30 mark of the video.

But in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, he continued, "One thing that's not going to happen to it is DX12. Yup, DX12 is not coming to Windows 7."

More information.

Ben Griffin of PC Gamer posted a new article that takes a look back at the 90's RPG game called Silver. As usual here is small sample of the article.

My abiding memory of Silver, however, is the controls. Over the course of this 15-hour RPG you battle werewolves, dragons, imps and summoners, but the scheme particularly excels during swordon- sword encounters. Particularly memorable is the boss battle with the dual-wielding Fuge, requiring you to master on-the-fly duking and moving in energetic bouts.

Admittedly, the magic has slightly dimmed in the light of today’s controls. The lack of lock-on makes targeting more difficult than it should be, and special moves you can learn from weapon trainers, like a figure of eight slash, miss a trick by not making you perform that motion on your mouse. Still, in my mind, Silver’s fast death dances are comparable to circle-strafing in Unreal or Quake, and why it never caught on in later action- RPGs is anyone’s guess.

So, will we ever see a sequel? Possibly. Last year Nordic Games snapped up the rights to the dormant Atari franchise. Then again, whether they’ll just create a new franchise rather than roll with a name that’s unGoogleable remains to be seen. But for those who do remember it—its great characters and innovative controls—Silver shines bright.

PC Gamer has interesting news about a new survey from analyst firm Superdata Research that has the data on what gender plays more games on the PC .

For all practical purposes it's a 50/50 split, but once you get into decimal places, female PC gamers do slightly outnumber males. Women represent 50.2 percent of PC gamers across all genres, including social (Facebook, Kongregate), versus 49.9 percent for men. The scales dip slightly further toward women when it comes to the RPG genre, with 53.6 percent of the market made up of women, while men represent 46.5 percent. In the FPS and MMO genres, however, 66 percent of players are men

A Senior analyst Stephanie Llamas posted a blog update with her opinion.

"It is true that 58 percent of mobile gamers in the US are women. But it is also true that just over 50 percent of American PC gamers are women," she wrote. "In fact, women are the largest gaming demographic for PC role-playing games (54 percent) and they represent almost 40 percent of MMO and digital console gamers. So to say that women are just casual gamers is empirically false."

Enjoy everyone and please keep it civil this time.

Jennifer Hale was interviewed on PC Gamer to talk about her career in voice acting, and the characters she wants to play. I found it interesting but some of you might not.

You've talked before about the rigid adherence to the script that was required for Mass Effect. Was there any ad libbing here? Do you have a preference? 

We are dealing with a different technical setup so there's more room to play around a bit. I like the collaborative nature of that and the potential that polishing things in the moment brings.

Do you have a favorite type of character or subject matter? 

Anything with a cool dev team, anything outside of what people are expecting from me

How has video game voice acting changed in the past few years?

I've seen a fantastic evolution as the visuals have progressed, we as actors are able to bring the acting style along to one that's more film-like, less pronounced. It feels more honest to me and I'm loving where it's headed.

What kinds of characters do you wish there were more of in video games? 

Average people doing extraordinary things, women playing an even greater variety of roles, though that's changing. Some body types that are more normal and less fantasy/perfection based. Games have a tremendous amount of potential to make the world better and I look forward to how they do that.

Richard Cobbett of PC Gamer has a new retrospective of the classic wasteland spin-off game called Fountain Of Dreams, and the title of the news-bit says it all.

Certainly, it's very obvious why nobody involved in Wasteland wanted to be even tangentially associated with this, and why even EA ultimately decided to try and pretend it never happened. There was only one Wasteland, and then there was Fallout. Now there is Wasteland 2, and it's the true successor.

Some games are better forgotten. Some wastelands, simply a waste.

Let us never speak of Fountain Of Dreams ever again.

PC Gamer interviewed Jane Jensen about the revival of her classic adventure game.

PC Gamer: Why did you decide to remake Gabriel Knight?

Jane Jensen, game designer, Pinkerton Road Studio: I don’t own the license, and I’ve gone in to pitch various GK ideas probably three different times over the last 20 years. We just never got very far with it. And then, when we were doing our Kickstarter, I had somebody from Activision contact me. And this was a producer who was really interested in bringing back some of the Sierra titles. And so I met with them and discussed what would be good to do and I really thought if we wanted to kick off the GK series again it would be a good idea to redo the first one.

PCG: Why did Activision approach you? Did they tell you?

Jensen: Well, like any big company, it’s really a matter of somebody in-house being passionate about something, and this producer was passionate about seeing some of the Sierra stuff, and I think, eventually, that morphed into them refreshing the whole Sierra brand, which they’re just starting to do. But when I was first talking to them, that hadn’t happened yet and he was still trying to feel out ways to bring some of these titles back.

PCG: How did you feel about the announcement that Sierra Entertainment’s coming back?

Jensen: I think it’s great. I think it’s way past time that they did something with that wonderful franchise that has been passed around, and I’m happy to see somebody paying attention to it again and looking forward to hopefully lots of new titles.

While I'm not a white knight of the internet I know when a segment of gamers need a smackdown , and it's right now.  So moving on PC gamer has a new article about Anita Sarkeesian being forced out of her house by that small segment of gamers.

Thank you Thrasher for the link to the story.

The latest Tropes vs Women in Video Games video continues the analysis of the objectification of non-playable female characters—this time with an eye to exposing common traits of violence against sexualised NPCs. Depressingly, its release prompted a torrent of misogynistic abuse made against creator Anita Sarkeesian, her family and her supporters. In their attempts to prove that sexism in video gaming isn't a problem, Sarkeesian's harassers posted threats that compelled her to alert authorities and leave her home to stay with friends.

PC Gamer is the next site to release a list of the Best RPGs of All Time.

The best RPGs of all time

The role-playing game is the cornerstone of PC gaming. Long before shooters or real-time strategy, the earliest PC developers replicated their tabletop RPGs on the PC, building sprawling adventures filled with orcs and wizards and foul dungeons. Those early games slowly built on their tabletop origins, and RPGs eventually became so popular, their elements spread to other genres. Here are our 25 favorites: the RPGs we’d tell anyone to play right now.

Our Criteria

Whenever we sit down to argue our way through a list of the best games, our first step is deciding what “best” even means. In this case, we’re identifying which RPGs are fun right now. Games age; they’re products of the technology they were built on, and the technology that seemed cutting edge 25 years ago may be junk today.

We value fun more than the historical significance of a game, and doing so helps us build a list that recommends what’s great today rather than publishing a popularity contest. But we don’t ignore a game’s impact completely—innovation and influence just has a lesser weight under our criteria.

The RPG genre is tough to boil down: by the most literal definition, every game is a role-playing game. This list represents our best definition of the canonical RPG—games that emphasize story; that let you inhabit a customizable character through skill points, inventory, and dialogue decisions; that include complex, controllable relationships with companions or non-playable characters. That leaves flexibility in how the game is controlled, what perspective it uses, or what setting it takes place in. Games such as Borderlands 2 or BioShock include some of those elements, but are better defined as shooters. Drawing these kinds of lines helps us provide a better service to you, we hope.

Thank you Thrasher and Kordanor for the link.