Have your say: what do you want from Battlefield 3′s single player campaign?

Battlefield 3 is finally out next week. We’re excited. We can’t wait to get into some jets and crash them new and exciting ways in Battlefield 3′s largest multiplayer maps. But amidst the videos of frantic firefights beneath Paris and news that one map features a half-kilometre base jump, it’s easy to forget that there’s a single player campaign as well.

We’ve seen bits of it, in the early trailers, the Thunder Run video and recent footage of Operation Guillotine, but we don’t yet have much of an impression of what it’ll really be like, which raises an interesting question. What do you want to see in Battlefield 3′s single player campaign? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.

And in other PC gaming news…

Tau in Last Stand! This announcement was music to my ears, as I’ve just started collecting the little space commies myself. I love Last Stand mode and I’ve been desperately hoping that Relic would consider the idea of DLC heroes to expand the best part of Dawn of War 2 further. What could we see next? Gothy space elves Dark Eldar seem most likely, either that or more varieties of the inexplicably popular Space Marines. Here’s hoping for something creative instead, like an Imperial Assassin. The world needs more insane fanatics so hopped up on combat drugs they occasionally explode from it.

Check inside for a grimdark future of PC gaming news.

• ABC report on that Australian games studios are shutting down in droves.
• Eurogamer tell the unusual tale of the man who tried to fight piracy by uploading his own pirated version of Deus Ex.
• Massively look into Star Trek Online’s upcoming event system.
• DICE tell IGN they consider the Battlfield 3 beta a “huge success”.
• Rock Paper Shotgun let us know you can get all the GTA games for under £9 at Gamersgate.

Introversion submitting new game to IGF, Subversion on hold

Chris Delay of Introversion has just posted a surprising blog entry on the Introversion site. “A few hours ago I submitted Introversion’s latest game to the IGF 2012,” he writes. “This game was NOT Subversion.”

Subversion is the game that the creators of Uplink, Defcon and Darwinia have been working on for the last few years. They’ve shown tech demos here and there, revealing an incredibly ambitious project in which players must rob bank vaults in procedurally generated cities. It’s gorgeous, exciting, and now on hold for the foreseeable future.

Delay says that the project lost momentum when they showed a demo at the World Of Love conference in London. “Internally we had come to realise that somewhere along the 6 years of part-time development, we had lost our way. We couldn’t even remember what sort of game it was supposed to be anymore,” he writes.

“We’d ended up with a game that looked and sounded brilliant, classic Introversion with its blue wireframe and sinister faceless characters. But there was a massive gaping hole where you would normally see a “core game”. We’d tried and tried to fill that hole with ambitious tech and experimental systems, but you couldn’t escape it.”

August last year, Delay went on holiday, and came back with an idea for a new game, writing it into a ten page document on a freshly bought notepad on the flight home. “That was when the next game idea arrived. This new idea was fully formed, just like DEFCON, just like Uplink. I could see most of the core game design straight away. I could see how much of the tech that we’d designed for Subversion was directly applicable, if properly turned on its head. And within an hour or two, I’d made up my mind,” he says.

“And like that, the decision that should have been incredibly difficult was made. We don’t have the manpower to do multiple projects, so it was one game or the other, and I had no trouble convincing Mark and Tom which way I wanted to go.”

Delay says that Subversion hasn’t exactly been cancelled, but we shouldn’t expect to hear anything about it anytime soon. “Without a core game it’s all a worthless distraction, and I will NEVER again spend so long making tech for a game without having a solid core game in place first,” writes Delay. “Subversion needs a total rethink from top to bottom, and some long standing sacred cows need slaughtering.”

NVIDIA improves depth perception with 3D Vision 2

Just when you thought it was safe to put your regular sunglasses back on, NVIDIA releases a sequel to its stereoscopic rendering technology 3D Vision. It’s called 3D Vision 2, and funnily enough doesn’t have much to do with graphics cards.

The current crop of 3D Vision cards and drivers are already more than competent at adding a second camera angle to games, and work with pretty much any DirectX game. For 3D Vision 2, then, NVIDIA have focussed on the supporting hardware.

For starters, there’s a new set of active shutter glasses, with larger lenses for larger screens and a new, apparently more comfortable, frame. The new lenses are also better at blocking out light, which should make it less likely that you see left eye pictures in your right eye and vice versa.

Perhaps more interesting is a new feature for monitors called 3D LightBoost. This ups the brightness and contrast levels, in order to overcome the fact then when you look through the dark lenses of a pair of 3D glasses, everything goes, well, a bit dark. The new spec also covers better antighosting.

I’ve unknowingly tested one of these screens in the last week, on the Toshiba X770 laptop which was sent in for a group test appearing next month. While I’m still not personally sold on 3D, it is probably the best laptop screen I’ve ever used for 2D – especially on a 17inch machine.

Other screens which will support 3D Vision 2 and 3D LightBoost include the 27inch ASUS VG278H.

Is 3D there yet? NVIDIA’s general manager of 3D Vision, Phil Eisner, reckons that people who have the hardware use it stereoscopically about 50% of the time, and that there are 60 plus screens and laptops which support 3D Vision on sale.

My concern is that the new 3D Vision 2 spec doesn’t cover graphics hardware – and Eisner says there are no plans to in the future either. In his place, I’d consider that just as important as getting the screens right.

The reason is that there’s a trend with gaming laptops at the moment for manufacturers to kit out machines with expensive screens and glasses, and then use a second tier GPUs to keep the price down. Like putting a GeForce GTX 560M in a £1,500-ish laptop, when AMD’s Mobility Radeon HD6990 is available in competitors for the same price. In my experience so far, the GTX 560M is not a chip which can produce playable framerates consistently in native resolutions with 3D on. The worry would be that if anyone is buying a laptop specifically for 3D gaming (does such a person exist?) they’re going to find it hard to get games running smoohtly, and be put off the technology for several more revisions.

At this stage, where the technology is way ahead of consumer demand, it would make more sense to ensure the best possible experience at the expense of getting the 3D Vision logo onto everything. That’s my two penn’orth, anyway.

Like it or not, though, 3D is here to stay and with near ubiquitous hardware and software compatibility it’s likely just a matter of time before everything is 3D compatible. And if things like 3D LightBoost benefit us all, maybe it’s not such a bad thing.

NVIDIA says there are over 550 current PC games compatible with the 3D Vision and 3D Vision 2, by virtue of the fact it works with almost any DirectX software. They’re doing all they can to ensure new releases are supported at launch too, so Batman: Arkham Asylum, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and LA Noire will (should) all work with your 3D specs straight away.

Special Report – Project Zomboid

This article originally appeared in PC Gamer UK issue 231. Yesterday, a burglary at The Indie Stone HQlost the team two vital laptops that have delayed the latest patch, but Project Zomboid has endured many dramas before then, here’s the story so far…

Project Zomboid is a great game born from a passion for zombie fiction, piracy, panic and corporate generosity. Of all the drama indie devs face, little comes close to the police breaking into your flat because a car is about to explode.

Chris Simpson is one sixth of The Indie Stone, the team behind the free-roaming isometric zombie shooter that’s about narrative, not headcounts. He explains his game: “We’ve tried to turn the genre towards the survival aspect and away from the focus on combat. It’s not just about seeing how many zombies you can kill. It’s holding up in a house, going on raiding missions, trying to trade with NPCs and making friends. It’s dealing with trust issues between people. This is the ultimate plan, seeing as it’s currently a Minecraft-style alpha tech demo.” His partner in crime, Andy Hodgetts, elaborates: “Basically if you’ve ever read World War Z or the The Zombie Survival Guide or I Am Legend you’ve read the blueprint of the game.”

Things didn’t go smoothly for the fledgling developer. The team were forced into releasing a ‘pre-alpha tech demo’ state to avoid eviction from their Hartlepool homes. “We thought we could scrape up enough cash for rent by borrowing money from our parents and announcing the game early,” Andy says. “We had a couple of screenshots, a bit of text, and some bullet-pointed plans. “We were taking shifts through the night to try and get the tech demo ready. We’d be doing it together for a bit, then I’d grab a few hours sleep, then Chris would carry on. We’d gone to bed at six in the morning. A few hours later we were rudely awoken by a policeman looming over our beds. He said, ‘You’ve got to get out man!’ We were like, ‘What the hell?’”

An uncannily familiar sight for the apocalypse enthusiasts followed. “The thing is we were basically the last people to be evacuated from the building, so when we walked out it was like the opening scene from 28 Days Later. There was like nobody around and police vans and police tape everywhere and it was like, ‘Oh my God, what the hell’s going on?’”

A car bomb had been left outside the developer’s flat. It eventually exploded, killing a 58-year old man. But the team resisted any free publicity and, although mainstream media journalists pestered the team for the name of their game, they refused to give any details. “We felt it would be a bit tacky to try and capitalise,” says Chris.

Such tactics weren’t required anyway – the PC gaming community came to The Indie Stone’s rescue, purchasing pre-orders in droves, and Andy is still grateful: “We woke up that day scared about rent, but we went to bed with two months of development time in the bag, along with our rent and living costs sorted.”

Will Porter, The Indie Stone’s writer and PR-type figure, and former PC Zone editor, offers his theory on the community’s passion so early in development: “We’re making it for the traditional PC gamer. A lot of people see their first screenshot and say, ‘Bloody hell that looks just like X-Com’. They assume it’s going to be turn based because of our old school visuals and those sorts of sensibilities. I think that’s what a PC audience really likes.”

They were making money from the pre-alpha tech build of Project Zomboid. Enough to cause new problems. Chris is honest about the team’s early naivety: “We know how to make games, but we are not born businessmen. We didn’t pay close attention to terms and conditions in PayPal or Google Checkout.”

The Indie Stone were selling preorders for a game that didn’t exist yet, and PayPal and Google Checkout didn’t like that. “Notch had the same problem,” admits Chris. If a lot of people buy the game then we get hit by a bus, PayPal would be liable for the refunds. God bless ’em, a lot of people came to our defence and called out the companies for being evil, but I guess they were only protecting their own interests.”

The team needed a quick fix. One came just in time. To avoid legal issues, The Indie Stone bundled their early Project Zomboid build with what Andy describes as “the world’s worst games.” We thought, OK, we’ll sell products that do exist and the PZ licence will just be a freebie!” Chris wrote a Rock Paper Scissors console application and sold it for £15.

It was a messy situation. I asked Andy whether the Minecraft model (where initial pre-orders fund early development) is a necessity for today’s indie developers: “The reason we’re doing indie stuff is that we don’t like the separation between studio and players,” he says. “It’s an impenetrable wall. When we first decided to do an indie we wanted to have absolute communication. We said we’d have a Twitter account, a forum and an IRC chat; anything we could do to make people feel part of the game they were funding.”

And it’s worked. Although the game is still far from final release, there are already fan fiction sites, a dedicated wiki and YouTube tutorials on how to play the soundtrack on piano. A cult following has begun.

But some people still aren’t happy about the funding part. Pirate copies of Project Zomboid ended up online. The team were using a cloud service to host their patching process and getting charged every time a player received an update or installed the game. Pirates were not only stealing Project Zomboid, they were driving The Indie Stone into bankruptcy.

Then, in July this year, a troup of digital distribution knights in shinning armour appeared. The team received offers of support from Steam, indie and mod download portal Desura and the digital distribution service FilePlanet. “In the case of Steam, we’re getting all their perks apart from being on the store, and it’s all via redeem code,” says Chris. “We get to use their servers, we get to update and we get to be in their library.

“As far as I can see they’re not getting a penny from this. Perhaps it’s in preparation for when we do get on Steam, but they’re doing us a huge favour.” Desura and FilePlanet also made similar offers to help the team, solidifying their base infrastructure for future updates.

Visit projectzomboid.com/blog for more on Project Zomboid. There’s a lot of love for The Indie Stone, but we still recommend you bring an axe or chainsaw. And possibly a shotgun.

Dawn of War 2 Last Stand Tau Commander DLC to add Crisis Battlesuits and huge lasers

Dawn of War 2′s fantastic Last Stand mode will get a new hero later this month. The Tau Commander is the imperious leader of Warhammer 40,000′s race of technologically advanced space-communists, the Tau. They stomp around in huge, customisable mech suits, which makes them perfect for Last Stand’s loot driven progression system. With every level, new wargear is unlocked, opening up new build options that can completely change each warrior’s role in the three-man team. See one in action in the trailer above, spotted on Reddit.

Going by the video above, it looks as thought the Tau Commander will play as a devastating artillery specialist, with some area of effect support abilities thrown in to keep team mates happy. It’s fitting. In 40k lore, the Tau are one of the few races still making new tech, and the Crisis Battlesuit the Commander hides inside carries some of the best. Expect jump jets, drones and great big energy beams.

The trailer says that the Tau Commander will “be available for purchase at the end of October.” There’s no price yet. The Last Stand mode is available as a standalone purchase now on Steam and is on sale now as part of the tail end of a weekend Steam deal.

Own a slice of Azeroth: Blizzard selling World of Warcraft server blades for charity

Here’s your chance to own and hold a physical chunk of World of Warcraft. Evil Avatar note that Blizzard are selling off hundreds of server blades and donating the proceeds to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Each blade comes housed in a smooth special case with a plaque signed by the World of Warcraft team.

Each server blade was once used to support one of WoW’s many, many Realms. Blizzard say that the blades on sale are from World of Warcraft’s early days, and were been “honorably discharged” when they upgraded their server infrastructure. Check ebay for details on when each Realm is being auctioned off.

The sale is set to run from today through to November 14, and the blade that once housed Steamwheedle Cartel, the home of our enormous and ever-growing WoW guild, is on the list. If you’re a long-time WoW player, all of the adventures you’ve had in Azeroth once likely took place in one of these bits of hardware. It’s a great keepsake for dedicated fans, and they’re helping charity as well. How much would you pay for a WoW blade?

Three way battles between Mercer, the armed authorities and rabid mutants were a big part of the first Prototype. The three way fights were the best way to try out Mercer’s equivalent of stealth, jumping an unsuspecting guard distracted by mutant rampage, absorbing his appearance and then strolling through the chaos to your objective. Most satisfying. The new protagonist, Heller, replaces Mercer’s mopey angst with PURE RAGE. Perhaps that’s what gives him the ability to turn a soldier into a boot-able tentacle bomb. Evil experimental war-serums do strange things to people.

Project Zomboid robbery delays latest update, Zomboid “will come back stronger” says dev

Another setback has hit Project Zomboid developers, The Indie Stone. Over the weekend a burglary at the Newcastle home of two of the developers saw two laptops stolen. Months of work on the latest build of Project Zomboid were lost.

Project Zomboid writer Will Porter broke the news officially on the Project Zomboid blog. “We are gutted, we are despondent and – most of all we are sorry that this has thrown yet another bump into the road towards PZ completion,” Will writes.

“We also REALLY want to wring the neck of the arsehole that did this to us,” he adds.

The blog post mentions that the only two machines that held the work on the latest update were both stolen. “Project Zomboid was regularly backed up from machine to machine, but rarely – sadly and infuriatingly – externally. We have lost an awful lot of work.”

“This will clearly severely delay the next update, which was very near completion. I personally only just finished my work on it today (one of the final things on the ‘to-do’ list) and had it ready for input tomorrow.”

This is the latest in a long series of setbacks for the indie developers. Project Zomboid was taken offline by pirates who hacked auto-updating versions of the software that threatened to bankrupt the Indie Stone. They’ve also had problems with Paypal, and at one point had to resort to “selling the world’s worst games” to distribute their Zomboid.

The Indie Stone have been resilient in the face of all of those setbacks. Hopefully this latest stroke of terrible, terrible luck won’t derail them either. Will Porter assures fans that Project Zomboid “will come back stronger.” Hopefully, it does. The procedural zombie-apocalypse survival sim is incredibly promising. Read our Project Zomboid preview to find out why.

You Need to Check This Out — Why Digital Storm

Watch this informative video by Digital Storm which goes over why you should consider them to build your next PC.

This week’s best free PC games

This week’s pick of free games includes Nous, an abstract and colourful top-down blaster that manages to tell an engaging sci-fi story about psychology. It’s thoughtful and immensely good fun, merging its various styles to present something that’s both unique and accessible. Elsewhere, there’s a Braid-influenced puzzle-platformer and a zombie survival strategy game, and we revisit BeGone, a browser-based multiplayer shooter that’s undergone quite a transformation since we first looked at it in March. Read on to discover some of the best freebies currently doing the internet rounds.

Nous

Awesome Shark Volcano/DigiPen. Download it from the official website.

It’s a top-down blaster in which you attempt to kill enemies or convert them into health. You can rack up combos while trying to avoid spiked squares that seek to squish you from every direction. But that’s only scratching the surface. As well as being an entertaining, high-speed arcade shooter with a twist, it’s also an engaging science-fiction story and an experiment that examines the nature of videogames and technology. It is, essentially, a deeper beast than a mere description of the game mechanics would let on.

You’re being psychoanalysed by a computer program – one that breaks down, gets confused, and alternates between seeming like it wants to help you, and becoming seethingly angry with you. This program thinks that maybe it’s a guidance counsellor, but it appears to need some counselling itself. As you progress through the story, the program sets you action-centric tasks that supposedly will teach you something about yourself. Whatever you do, don’t admit that they didn’t.

At once unsettling and amusing, and both wildly entertaining and quietly artful, Nous is an absolutely essential play: a game that proves thoughtful storytelling, smart game design and heaps of fun can go perfectly hand-in-hand.

One and One Story

MaTX. Play it on Armor Games.

Clearly influenced by the likes of Braid, this silhouetted puzzle-platformer tells a story of love between a boy and a girl. Both inhabit each level, and your goal is to get them to meet. To begin with, a quick press of the Z key switches between the two characters as they work together, navigating the obstacles that stand between them.

But the game grows in complexity as the story progresses. Quickly you’re denied the ability to switch between the two as the couple’s relationship becomes turbulent. The game is always about moving boxes, which is disappointing, but it plays smartly with movement. Its simple presentation works remarkably well, the snowdrifts and soft colours creating a gorgeous scene behind the silhouettes. It isn’t a long game – you can go through it in ten or fifteen minutes, easily – but it’s a pleasant journey with some creative ideas.

BeGone

NPlay. Get involved on the NPlay website.

The last time we visited BeGone, back in March, it had just a single map, and was limited to five-versus-five action. It was fun: the game’s combination of careful tactics and fast-paced play, somewhat reminiscent of Counter-Strike, hit home in all the right places. But it lacked the variety or scale to have any real staying power.

Since then, the game’s been updated. There are now five maps, all of which are carefully designed, and most of which look surprisingly pretty for a browser game. The action’s been scaled up, now allowing for up to 16 players on a server, instead of the previous ten. The game’s economy has been tweaked to allow players to store up money, saving it to buy weapons for the most important matches, and a host of other minor additions – such as head-bobbing and ironsights – make this a far more polished game than it was seven months ago.

What was once a technically impressive and entertaining diversion is quickly becoming a fully-fledged, highly enjoyable multiplayer game in its own right. Give it a go.

Rebuild 2

Sarah Northway. Play it on Armor Games.

The zombies have attacked, but you’ve made it to the city, and there’s a fort waiting with your name on it. There’s just one problem: you and your fellow survivors are a little short on supplies, and horribly short on land. You’ve got a small area walled off, but the city surrounding you is swarming with the undead, and they’re blocking your access to the good stuff: food, equipment, weapons.

So far, so standard zombie apocalypse. But this turn-based strategy sequel is compulsive playing. You’ve got allocate tasks to those under your command: who will go and kill some zombies? Who will scavenge for supplies? Who will go looking for other survivors? Your aim is to collect, kill and expand. Doing so takes time and patience, rather than a great deal of skill, but it’s one of those games that’ll have you clicking on the ‘end day’ button again and again, not realising how much time has passed. This is a slickly presented, very engaging freebie.