PC Gamer August 2021

In 2015, Games Workshop killed the Warhammer Fantasy setting, literally blowing up its world in one final campaign. So how, in 2021, does it still feel so alive? A huge part of that is the efforts of Creative Assembly, who decided GW’s apocalypse was no reason not to use the setting for one of the most exciting strategy series ever made. Now their grand trilogy comes to its final entry, and it feels bigger, more confident and more creative than ever. So, of course, we’re all over it – and we’ve got the feature to prove it. ROBIN VALENTINE Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Forged his white hot, overflowing rage into one historically bad tweet, then deleted it.…

FRASER BROWN Twitter @FraserIBrown This month Fraser eats strategy and breathes Warhammer. He also poos RAM. Doctors are at a loss to explain it. MORGAN PARK Twitter @MorganRPark This month Checked out the game formerly known as Quarantine. No idea why they changed the name. RACHEL WATTS Twitter @rachel_wattts This month Learned about the threat to society posed by the ‘druid mafia’ in Tactical Breach Wizards. STEVEN MESSNER Twitter @stevenmessner This month Remember when everyone was obsessed with Lord of the Rings? Steven remembers.…

Dream is a hugely popular YouTuber and Minecraft speedrunner who has nearly 23 million subscribers on YouTube and 1.5 million followers on Twitter. His runs break records and make the Minecraftworld speedrun leaderboard, to the astonishment of many viewers. But suspicions arose about their legitimacy and, in particular, there were accusations about tampering to get better luck. OTHER RUNS THEN CAME INTO QUESTION BECAUSE OF THE HIGH DROP RATES The controversy began in October 2020 when a speedrunner reported seeing higher RNG drops for key items in a run submitted by Dream earlier that month, which placed fifth on the world leaderboards. Various other runs then came into question because of the high drop rates of two key items – ender pearls and blaze rods – both of which are needed to…

HIGHS Phone phreaks The Epic vs Apple trial began with botched audio access, with kids able to enter and scream at the court. Appropriate? No. Funny? Yes. GPU hope Ethereum cryptocurrency will soon be based on storage instead of GPUs. Double bongcloud World chess champion Magnus Carlsen took part in an opening dubbed ‘the double bongcloud’. LOWS Calm down Paradox Interactive says the toxicity on its forums recently is driving its developers away. Chill out people. Burning bridges Blizzard continues to anger players with fees, the latest a $35 charge for WoW Classic players to ‘clone’ their avatars. The company then relented. Not-so elite Elite: Dangerous’ Odyssey expansion was a little bit of a fiasco, to the extent Frontier’s CEO apologised.…

Sorry, dear readers. Here you are settling in to enjoy The Spy’s personal brand of autobiographical hijinks and spurious gaming rumours (and absolute nonsense of course, but you love it. Well I hope so anyway), and here The Spy is with absolutely nothing to show for it. You see, once every year, the magazine production cycle conspires against The Spy, with an issue that’s made just beforeE3, but released weeks afterwards. And so yes, The Spy has rumours. They just won’t survive the printing process. Battlefield 2042? You already know about it. The Spy asks that you imagine the level of surprise you would feel if The Spy was announcing it for the first time here on this page, your face lighting up in childlike wonder (“Please sir, can I have…

ISSUE 229, August 2011 ON THE COVER Aliens: Colonial Marines IN THE CINEMAS The King’s Speech 1 “Best on PC” proclaims our cover line for, er, Aliens: Colonial Marines. All things are relative, we suppose. Obviously Gearbox’s shooter did not prove to be the ‘real’ Aliens sequel, but that’s the gamble you take when picking a game for your magazine cover. Colonial Marines had plenty of promise, it just failed to meet it. At least we still got Isolation. 2 This issue is filled with disappointments. Gracing our lead review slot is one Duke Nukem Forever. “Petty, nasty, and anachronistic,” we said. 29%. 3 What about those “10 hot WoW beaters” promised on the cover? Yeah, so, about those. A few – Guild Wars 2, The Old Republic and War Thunder – do still exist, even if WoW…