PC Gamer (US Edition) July 2021

“we’ve gone behind the scenes to test its turn-based chops”

Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Was reminded of some of the boys he used to play rugby with at school… for some reason. There’s something wonderful to me about an idea as ridiculous as ‘what if orcs played football?’ enduring for 35 years and counting. Thriving, in fact, with a new edition on the tabletop and a new PC game out this year. Of course, you need more than a sublimely silly premise to make a good strategy game, which is why we’ve gone behind the scenes of Blood Bowl 3 to test its turn-based chops, grill the developers, and even chat to the guys at Games Workshop about their bizarre creation. robin.valentine@futurenet.com TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Email us at letters@pcgamer.com…

sex doesn’t sell

The major digital storefronts have faced reckonings in recent years, and haven’t always come out of them smelling like roses. This is partly because they have kicked certain decisions into the long grass, but are now being forced to come down one way or another. The other side, sadly, comes down to political pressure to de-list games that certain regimes, in this case the Chinese communist party, don’t like. Recent months have seen some of these issues come to a head when Valve, notoriously reluctant to intervene in the content available on Steam, refused to sell a game called Super Seducer 3. SS3 is a full-motion video offering that uses multiple-choice dialogue for the player to go through dates with women. These are, in other words, rather shoddy FMV games about ‘pickup…

highs & lows

HIGHS Accept Cookies Final Fantasy XIV director Naoki Yoshida showed off his lalafell black mage in a seven-hour Twitch stream while baking coffee cookies. Total domination The Total War series has sold over 36 million copies. Prepare for Titanfall Respawn has announced it will be bringing Titanfall content into Apex Legends, beginning with season 9. LOWS Sub standard Blizzard’s changed how it sells WoW game time, so players can no longer just pay for 30 days up-front: It has to be a minimum of 60. Among duds The long-awaited Airship map arrived for Among Us and… it’s not great. The huge space makes it trivial for imposters to win. Cyberfunk Cyberpunk 2077’s latest patch fixes 484 issues—and it’s still buggy.…

face the music

Metallica never scored a Legend of Zelda game, but it sounded like it when Twitch replaced Metallica’s BlizzCon 2021 concert with cheery midi music. The biggest streaming platform in the world had to censor its own broadcast or risk upsetting an already aggravated music industry. In 2020 the music industry attacked Twitch in a letter claiming it “continues to turn a blind eye to the same users violating the law while pocketing the proceeds of massive unlicensed uses of recorded music”. After largely ignoring Twitch for years, the music industry started sending thousands of DMCA takedowns for copyright violations. So Twitch reacted—dramatically. In October, it forced streamers to delete thousands of old VODs, with no good tools to determine which files were problematic. The music industry is upset with copyrighted music in…

keeping watch

JUNE 2011 Justin.tv spins its gaming content off into a new division called Twitch—its popularity leads it to subsume the company. AUGUST 2014 Twitch first starts using software to automatically detect and mute copyrighted music in archived streams. JANUARY 2015 Twitch offers a library of royalty-free music for creators to use in their streams. JUNE 2020 Twitch receives a huge amount of DMCA takedown notices related to copyrighted music in archived content. SEPTEMBER 2020 Twitch Soundtrack is announced—a library of pre-approved music to use in streams. OCTOBER 2020 Streamers are forced to delete archived streams featuring copyrighted music at short notice. NOVEMBER 2020 Twitch issues a sort-of apology for DMCA issues and publishes a guide for creators on avoiding them. FEBRUARY 2021 Metallica’s BlizzCon performance is dubbed over with what sounds like easy-listening elevator music.…

altaïr-nate past

History loomed over the young Patrice Désilets. Aged three or four, he would meet his mother as she came off the boat from the French fort where she worked on the Richelieu River. The Quebec waterway had been a crucial path for French and English armies in the era of European colonization, and the scene of several battles. But for Désilets, these ruins represented a kind of reverse science fiction. “The past is like a fantasy land,” he enthuses these days. “It’s so different. Where we are now, it’s as if it’s on a different planet. The 20th century just changed us, totally. But this is where I’m fascinated by us—we think we’re at the end of it. I like to look behind and let a player experience how we were.”…