Metro 2033 Redux Pc game is actually a horror game. and you have the control of character named Artyom.He moves around in the destroyed and ruined Russia and he have to fight back the mutants, zombies and other aggressive beings. Almost all the game is made in a metro system and surroundings.
Best Free PC Games #1 ArcheAge
Archeage is closest thing we’ve got to a proper pirate MMO. You can try and master the endless sea as a notorious pirate or choose to be a humble peddler of crafted goods. Its labour system - how it gates content - may take time to get used to, but nevertheless it’s a really solid free-to-play experience. There’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t give this a try..
ARK: Survival Evolved
Short answer: rideable dinosaurs. Long answer: when ARK: Survival Evolved launched as a Steam Early Access title on 2 June 2015, it did so with no publisher backing to help the unknown Studio Wildcard publicise their game. Four months later, still operating independently.
YouTuber Zephs has gone viral with a new YouTube video showing off some Star Wars: Battlefront beta testing gameplay in which Luke Skywalker is comically stomped by an AT-AT.
After taking a few shots at Skywalker from a distance, the Jedi master seems ready to take out the player when, out of nowhere, the AT-AT arrives and steps on him.
Zephs (assuming he's the one playing) seems as surprised by the event as anybody else, toggling wildly around and looking for Skywalker before the AT-AT moves it s feet and Skywalker is visible sticking just inches out of the snow, shaking.
And then, of course, stepped on again with the back foot.
Check it out below
Star Wars Battlefront allows players to immerse themselves in the Star Wars universe, fighting in the saga’s biggest battles. Players can fight for the Rebellion or Empire in a variety of multiplayer matches for up to 40 players, or in challenges inspired by the films available in solo, split-screen or through online co-op.
Star Wars Battlefront will recreate of some of the most iconic planets, weapons, characters, and vehicles in the Star Wars universe, using the original sound effects from the films, to give Star Wars fans the ultimate, authentic and immersive interactive experience they’ve been looking for.
Star Wars Battlefront will release for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on November 30.
After the catastrophic PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight, the Warner Bros. logo doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Batman’s latest outing has still not reappeared on Steam, over a month after its official launch.
With that giant mess still lingering, it’s a surprise, then, to see that the publisher’s latest PC port, Avalanche-developed Mad Max, is actually extremely competent. Even if I wasn’t comparing it to Arkham Knight, I’d consider it a very strong port.
Tested on a Intel i5-3570K @3.40 GHz, 8 GB of RAM, GeForce GTX 970, Windows 7
Like the films before it, Avalanche’s Mad Max paints a striking picture of the post-apocalypse. There’s always something impressive to gawk at on the horizon, be it a monstrous storm rolling in, the skeletal remains of a long-dead sea creature, or giant, derelict structures spewing smoke into the already ruined atmosphere.
It’s beautiful, even though it’s a hellscape.
To get the most out of this gorgeous, but dead world, you don’t need a beastly rig, either. Warner Bros. and Avalanche recommend a 3GB GPU, a GTX 760 or HD 7970 or equivalent, an i7-3770 or an FX-8350, but the range of graphics options provide a lot of room for tweaking, meaning that if you don’t hit the recommended requirements, you’re not out of luck.
The list of graphics options is both impressive and confusing. It’s a very long list, giving you a huge amount of control over how the game looks and performs, but -- and this is now extremely common -- the language used and the context of the options are a bit bewildering.
Take the presets, for example. The lowest preset is “normal”, and selecting that keeps a large number of the options below it set to “high”. If you’ve got an older machine, your best bet is to fiddle with each option rather than using the presets. Similarly, selecting the “very high” preset, the maximum, does not change every option to its maximum. For instance, anisotropic filtering will be set to 12, instead of 16.
I’m a bit reminded of Durex’s campaign to make men feel more confident about their willies. If you buy a regular sized condom today, what you’re buying is what Durex once called “small”, but they didn’t sell very well because nobody wants their contraception to judge their penis size. When they changed the name to “regular”, sales suddenly went up.
Okay, enough dick talk. Let's cool off by staring at a gruesome mutant man.
Mad Max’s graphics settings cover everything you could possibly want to fiddle with, and aside from the weird presets and inconsistent descriptions (sometimes the maximum setting is “very high” and sometimes it’s simply “max”), the only disappointment is the lack of anti-aliasing options. On or off are all you’ll get.
Okay, let’s compare some screenshots and performance.
The below image has everything cranked right up. It’s the highest preset with a few additional elements turned up as well, along with Nvidia’s Dynamic Super Resolution. Because of my monitor, I run most games at 1920x1980, but with 2715x1527 DSR, I witnessed no performance hit, while smoothing out some rough edges.
With these settings, I’ve been enjoying 60fps with no dips, and with a different monitor and no vsync, this only increases.
The second highest preset lowers the detail of objects that aren’t right next to Max, while also reducing the quality of the shadows, and overall it just doesn’t look as sharp. In motion, however, when you’re speeding through this dead, dried up ocean, it’s not all that noticeable.
Once we get to the “normal” preset, things start to look very different. It’s flatter, with a lot less ground clutter, the shadows are noticeably poorer, and effects like smoke and fire take a pretty big hit. Note that this is the lowest preset, however, and still looks quite good.
As previously mentioned, the lowest preset still keeps a lot of options turned on or high, but all of them can be reduced manually. Here’s what it looks like when you do that.
Not too pretty. But this is good! It’s hardly hideous, and if your PC is struggling with all those bells and whistles on higher settings, then you should see a dramatic improvement by just doing some fiddling yourself.
Beyond the graphics settings, customisation is maintained, but is a little less even. The UI is ignored entirely, so you’re stuck with the mini-map and objective tracker, which does occasionally threaten to break immersion, yet the UI is not so cluttered that it quite succeeds in doing that.
Audio customisation is much better. Several audio presets allow you to fine tune the sounds, depending on your speaker setup and even if you’re playing a night and want to be a bit quieter. There’s deeper customisation outside of the presets, too.
Control customisation is similarly robust. If you’re using a gamepad, then you can choose between two different control schemes for driving and walking, and if you opt to use your mouse and keyboard, you can remap every key. I do recommend a gamepad, however, particularly for driving. It’s simply less fiddly, and really feels like it was designed for a more compact control scheme.
Regardless of whether you use a gamepad or a mouse and keyboard, Max and his trusty metal steed neither control like a dream or like a nightmare. Driving is arcadey and easy, though the inexplicable lack of a handbrake is extremely frustrating, while Max himself -- in combat -- never feels quite as empowering or graceful as Batman (the combat is similar, however, in that it’s all about rhythm and countering), though this certainly fits with his status as a brawling hard-ass.
Avalanche has clearly taken great care with the PC version of Mad Max, and if you have the option to pick up either the PC or console versions, you should definitely go with this one. Any minor niggles present in the game are there regardless of platform, while the PC boasts improved performance and graphics.
The real question is whether or not you’re tired of the open world formula that’s become… well, formulaic. Mad Max sticks to it religiously, offering very little that could be considered new or refreshing. Yet the setting, the visually arresting and empowering car combat, and the scale of the Australian wasteland are all impressive, and importantly, it’s proving to be a fun ride.
Cities: Skylines - After Dark, the first expansion for Colossal Order’s rather brilliant city builder, launches today. I’ve done my fair share of gushing about the base game – I reckon it’s the best thing since SimCity 4, maybe even better with mods – but being the horrible cynic that I am, I wasn’t really sure that a night-time expansion was something it needed.
My first few hours in my new city made me lament that my doubts may have been well-founded, but as I lost track of time and started expanding my metropolis, digging into the game’s well-refined systems, I started to change my mind.
Want more Cities: Skylines? Here are the best Cities: Skylines mods.
When the sun set for the first time, I was taken aback by how lovely my city looked. It’s always been a pleasure to gawk at, but for the first time, as my roads were lit up by hundreds of tiny points of light and the neon signs sprang to life, it actually looked like a real, honest-to-goodness city. I was staring at what could have been an aerial photograph.
It is, admittedly, trickier to build at night, as the neon-drenched streets can be a bit distracting, and outside the city plots are pitch-black, but Colossal Order seem to have taken this into consideration, giving the cursor a subtle glow that gently lights up the area beneath it. On my darker laptop screen, it was still less than optimal, but playing on my desktop, I got used to the evening.
Along with a day and night cycle, After Dark heaps new buildings and systems onto the already pleasantly plump game.
Let’s start with the buildings. These are possibly the least exciting aspect of the expansion. Cities: Skylines has been blessed with a hard-working community of modders – just check out our best Cities: Skylines mod list for proof – that have diligently crafted some properly impressive structures, both cosmetic and functional. I can plonk down a lovely German castle next to McDonalds or a redesigned power station next to my Soviet-era Russian statue, and none of this requires me to spend money on DLC or an expansion.
There’s simply a mind-boggling array of mods, many of them of professional quality, and After Dark’s new tourism-focused buildings aren’t particularly impressive when compared to some of the stuff modders have been working on. You’ll be able to unlock niftier ones as you build up tourist districts (more on them shortly), but they don’t feel particularly new, since there have always been buildings that draw visitors into the city.
Building variety is certainly greater than in the base, modeless game, however, particularly when it comes to growable buildings. This conveniently leads us to one of the most notable new additions to the game: more district customisation. Now it’s not just industrial districts that can be specialised; commercial ones can be given a focus too.
These areas can now be zoned for tourism or leisure. The former makes hotels, souvenir shops and tourist traps spring up, while the latter makes casinos, restaurants and other nightlife spots sprout out of the ground. They give cities a new visual identity, particularly at night when they are all lit up. You can tell that an area has been designed for tourists just by looking at it, as they all ooze unnatural blue light, beckoning travellers and visitors.
Specialised commercial districts each affect the city income differently, as well, depending on how you’ve built the rest of your metropolis. If you’ve built some of the new tourism buildings, for instance, and plonked down lots of monuments and impressive buildings, you’ll be able to make a boat load of dosh from all the holiday makers who make the trek to your city and splash out in your hotels.
All this extra control over how cities grow is what ended up engrossing me, much more so than the new buildings or the, albeit pretty, visual transformation. It goes beyond new district focuses, as well. When that big ol’ ball of hydrogen and fire sinks below the horizon, another type of transformation grips the city. Crime increases, traffic decreases and people start spending time in different areas.
It’s a bit like running two cities, which is why there are now budget sliders for both day and night. I always end up struggling to deal with rubbish and corpses. At a certain point, my poor planning and road construction means that the bin men and hearses end up spending most of their time in traffic. Night changes all of that. The streets get a bit quieter when the sun’s down, so I increase the budget for those services at night, when the roads are clear. I also increase the public transport budget, so midnight revelers are more likely to take the bus.
There are taxis and roads with taxi lanes now, too, offering more options when planning your elaborate, serpentine road network, easing the pressure on all that tarmac that cuts through your city. And it’s just as well, because the new specialised commercial districts draw in big crowds, creating traffic jams everywhere if you’re not careful.
So it’s not just new solutions to old problems that After Dark addresses – it creates fresh, and more interesting, issues that require a city-planner’s attention. Take supplying energy: now that cities aren’t forever trapped in daylight, a city running exclusively on solar power is going to take a hit after dark.
One of the most meaningful new challenges is dealing with crime. There’s the aforementioned rise in crime that occurs at night, but there’s also a new crime model that changes its impact and how it’s dealt with. In the base game, crime was tied to the city’s happiness, but now it’s more elaborate than that. There are actual criminals, and police have to visit locations and investigate criminal activity, ultimately arresting crooks and taking them to the new jail. It’s no longer abstract.
My new city is still growing, and I feel like I’ve only just scraped the surface of the changes. Cities: Skylines was kept fresh thanks to its army of modders, but After Dark tweaks every single element of the game so that, once you start rooting around the budget panel and customising districts, it starts to feel new again. And it will probably feel new all over again once the modders get their hands on the expansion.
Everyone has their own way of playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. That's one of its best qualities: its versatility. I always take a sniper rifle - just in case - but I like to get right in there and weave between patrols, crawling along the ground like my namesake. It's the fear of being caught - I'm like a weaponised flasher.
I knew that we would see people doing some incredible stuff in the game. So far, I've already seen perfect airport assassinations with a single sniper round to the skull, and I've personally managed to S Rank the Skulls truck mission (you know the one if you've played it) by going in guns-blazing in a gold-plated tank, while listening to Spandau Ballet through the iDroid's speakers.
This silenced rocket launcher exploit video was quite enjoyable, and this next thing looks like it could equally break the enjoyment of the game, but it's still cool that someone even thought of it.
It's jeep stealth. Using a combination of smoke grenades and a jeep, this YouTuber completes Mission 5 by driving into a base, putting the prisoner in the jeep and driving back out again. He isn't spotted once. Have a look:
I don't know what's more impressive: that the YouTuber came up with the method, or that they pulled it off when playing with mouse and keyboard.
What do you think of the crazy stuff we're seeing coming out of the game? Have you seen any others? Let us know in the comments.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain launched yesterday, quite a bit of time ahead of its original release date. Surely a sign of confidence, no? It’s well earned, considering that its predecessor, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, was a lesson in how to do a good PC port.
Now, less than a year later, its beefy successor is available for consumption by the masses. But have Kojima and Co managed to work their magic a second time, in what is undeniably a much more ambitious game? Yes, they absolutely have.
Tested on a Intel i5-3570K @3.40 GHz, 8 GB of RAM, GeForce GTX 970, Windows 7
The Phantom Pain begins with what might be the series’ most memorable opening chapter, a dramatic and disturbing jaunt through a burning hospital that walks you through the absolute basics. It also showcases the Fox Engine, as the whole prologue is a beautifully lit, silky smooth experience.
It’s not until we get into the game proper, with Big Boss hitting Afghanistan, that we can truly appreciate The Phantom Pain, though. The arid expanse of the war-torn Middle Eastern nation stretches as far as the eye can see, punctuated by striking ruins, imposing cliffs and military bases. The sun beats down on the landscape, bright and almost oppressive, as Big Boss takes his first ride on his horse.
Impressively, the system requirements for The Phantom Pain are almost exactly the same as its much smaller predecessor. In fact, the only difference is the recommendation that your rig contain 8 GB of RAM instead of the 4 in Ground Zeroes.
Like Ground Zeroes, The Phantom Pain’s list of graphics options is neither remarkable or terrible, though they could do with more explanations and context. One of the issues with the last game was that a single options actually bundled in lots of different options, removing the ability to fine tune the game to a massive degree, though they still offered plenty of opportunities for fiddling. This is still the case in The Phantom Pain, though not to the same degree.
One thing that’s immediately noticeable is that, despite the comparable system requirements, you shouldn’t expect to get exactly the same performance. The Phantom Pain is a dramatically different gamespace, and considerably more dynamic. The weather and special effects put more strain on PCs than Ground Zeroes’ more static base, and I did notice more fluctuations this time around.
That said, I was still able to enjoy solid performance with even the highest settings. The below image is everything maxed out, with Dynamic Super Resolution smoothing the image out even more. With these settings I was able to get an average of 50fps, only a little lower than Ground Zeroes. At night, in large camps with lots of lighting, it dipped to the mid-40s, but only briefly.
Turning a few options down to high and medium dramatically improved the performance, allowing me to get 60fps consistently unless there was some crazy weather and a lot of individual lights, where it would dip down into the mid-50s. Because I was happy with the performance with everything turned up, I didn’t feel the need to use these settings after testing, but honestly, the sacrifice is so minimal that knocking things down a notch for that 60fps sweet spot isn’t necessarily a bad idea.
On the lowest settings, The Phantom Pain can still paint a striking scene, but texture pop-in and ugly foliage can be occasional eyesores. I recommend dropping effects, SSAO and other bells and whistles like volumetric clouds before reducing texture and model quality and see if that helps if you’ve been having performance problems.
It’s outside of the graphics options where The Phantom Pain, like its predecessor, really shines. The degree of fine tuning that you’re able to do is quite impressive, whether it’s tweaking the camera, the control scheme or what information (if any) is displayed on the UI. I found it particularly enjoyable to remove the UI entirely, and just depend on my wits. Sure, I died a few times because I didn’t have much information on my screen, but I felt a lot more like Big Boss.
If you opt for mouse and keyboard controls, you’ll benefit from greater precision when it comes to shooting and the ability to remap the keys, though using a gamepad is just as viable, and it comes with multiple control schemes. I prefer the gamepad because I like to play from my sofa, but really it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Players with older CPUs have been reporting some crashes, but an official fix is apparently on the way, while there have been some online issues that have already been addressed. Take some time when you start up the game to read the notices about online play to get up to speed. I've yet to experience any problems myself, though I've only been playing the campaign. It is, at least, bug free for the most part, and the only time I noticed any oddities was when I turned the settings way down and was assaulted by lots of ugly texture pop-in, which is not a surprise.
Before I wrap things up, I am a man who knows what you want, and what you want is lots of lovely bottoms. Come on, don’t be coy. Big Boss and his clones sport excellent posteriors, and we should take a moment to enjoy them. Here’s a two for one, with bonus crack.
Marvelous!
As hoped, The Phantom Pain is another excellent PC port. Performance isn’t quite as good as Ground Zeroes on the same hardware, but given the game’s greater ambitions, that’s really to be expected. Regardless, if you could run Ground Zeroes, you’ll be able to run The Phantom Pain without too much of a performance hit using similar settings.
If this is to be the last Metal Gear, and it certainly looks like it will be Kojima’s last, then at least it went out with a bang, with the definitive version undoubtedly being the PC version.
There aren’t many turn-based tactics games that can lay credible claim to e-sports’ turf - but equally, there aren’t many turn-based tactics games that can say they’ve had sports telly embedded in their lore for the best part of 30 years. Beside everyBlood Bowl pitch there’s a box, named after the Campaign for Real Arcanery (CAMRA). In it sits a spirit: compelled to look out in one direction only, and have its mind’s eye transmitted to fans by a team of crack magicians casting the spell Cabalvision.
It’s an uncannily perfect framework on which to build the case for Blood Bowl 2 as a spectator sport - especially after the quiet YouTube revolution of streamers likecKnoor. But PC gaming has changed since Cyanide released Blood Bowl 1, in three large chunks across three years. E-sports games now feed updates and information to players on a monthly, sometimes weekly, basis. Can the Parisian studio match the expectations of players weaned on the drip-feed of League of Legends? Just how long does it take to develop a high fantasy football team?
Speaking with lead game designer Gauthier Brunet on the day Cyanide unlocked their pre-order beta, I ask what the atmosphere’s like at the studio. He exhales through his nose - half-sigh, half-laugh. There’s a lot of work to do - patching the beta in response to fan feedback; bracing for a sudden influx of new players at launch; picking over Twitch streams in the evenings at home. And a number of Cyanide’s staffers have dedicated themselves to plotting post-release plans.
“The game is in good condition right now, we think,” says Brunet of Blood Bowl 2. “We want to make it even better, and we want also to bring more content to the game as quickly as possible - more teams and stuff like this.”
When pre-orders were first announced, there was grumbling in the stands - particularly from Lizardmen and Wood Elves supporters. Of the ten teams available at launch, those two would arrive first as pre-order bonuses. Some were suspicious that Cyanide were holding them back, but Brunet says that wasn’t the case.
“When we added these new teams, it was a change of plan for us,” he clarifies. “The game was supposed to come out with eight teams, but it was pushed back [from June to September]. We wanted to bring more content to apologise to the public.”
The deal has since been sweetened further: pre-orderers on Steam have access to both Lizardmen and Wood Elves, rather than just the one, and all players who bought Blood Bowl 2 within a week of release will be fielding skinks and sauruses too.
There’s still an expectation in some quarters, though, that the game should have 23 teams. After all, the board game did. Blood Bowl 1 did, by the end. But as Cyanide and Focus wrote in July, “as enticing as it sounds, it would require us to delay the release of the game by at least 12 months, while doubling the development budget!”
Building a team, it turns out, is a drawn-out and costly process - and there are a couple of reasons for that. While Blood Bowl 1 settled for uniformly rubbish AI, Cyanide have introduced a layered intelligence that takes the character of each race into account.
Every team shares a scaffolding for their behaviour: they all want to score touchdowns, and to leave you short on players by causing as much injury as possible. But on top of that there’s a racial layer, which tells each team to use their specific skills and strategies. Elves play a passing game, for instance, and attempt ambitious runs far more often than the orcs.
Then there are a sprinkle of traits which don’t necessarily make the best tactical sense on a given turn, but bring out the flavour. Take the Dark Elves, who are, in Brunet’s words, “completely psycho”. In Cyanide’s game, they’re more eager than most to foul your players when they’re on the ground, risking a send-off “even if this decision is not the best right now”. By contrast, the knightly Bretonnians are proud, and consequently less likely to stick their boots in your face.
“A small tweak to make each race feel like they are from this universe,” notes Brunet.
If the variations in AI haven’t left Cyanide with enough on their plate, they’re also determined to convey the crunch of a good block in a style befitting contemporary PC gaming. An average team requires five new character models, and each model is now made up of more than 50 animations.
“We try to find a way to make it not much more expensive,” says Brunet.
Some new animations add a lot - ball fumbling, for instance, is an important element in Blood Bowl’s pratfall comedy of errors. But as Brunet points out, when you’re intending to make 23 teams of five different kinds of player, you can save quite a lot of money by taking three unnoticed animations out of a set.
Are Cyanide prepared for the potential years of work involved in pumping extra teams into the game?
“More races will come, and we’ll make it as quick as possible,” affirms Brunet. “I can assure you of our intentions. We want to have at least as much content as Blood Bowl 1, and if possible, even more.
“Nothing is set in stone yet, but we are doing everything possible for it.”
Brunet describes some of the production choices Cyanide made during development to ensure they had enough time to create assets for eight teams. They picked an elf side early on, and the points of commonality between pointy-eared folk allowed them to rattle off both High Elves and Dark Elves before the June delay. Wood Elves followed afterwards.
Even so, the work is long and hard - not the stuff of fortnightly updates. What sort of update model can Blood Bowl 2 realistically adopt in this new age of constantly refreshing e-sports games?
“I think it’s tough to define yet,” admits Brunet. “We still have some different solutions up our sleeve. We are thinking about which direction we are going to go.
“Time has changed since the last game so we have to stick to the new standard and try to make everything as acceptable for the public as possible.”
Elsewhere, Cyanide have embraced the idea of Blood Bowl as a streamed sport. An in-game spectator tool - Cabal TV - handles live matches and makes top community replays available to watch on its front page. Camera angles are designed to take viewers through every stage of an action, so that they can understand how an interception happened.
They’ve done their best to shorten game length, too - matches sometimes spiral to over an hour - by removing the “dead time” of Blood Bowl 1.
“These are small tools, but we think it’s going in the right direction, and making the competition as enjoyable as possible for passive viewers,” says Brunet. “The game is full of crazy events and every match has its own soul, so that’s something that’s good for e-sports.”
It seems fitting that upon Gone Home’s release in the summer of 2013, The Fullbright Company threw a house party to celebrate. Gone Home, Fullbright’s debut venture into the world of independent development, tells an enthralling tale of love, life, family and relationships as the player leads 21-year old-protagonist Kaitlin Greenbriar around her seemingly abandoned family home in search of her absent relatives.
Littered with sticky-note memos, audio cassettes, answer phone messages, and ostensibly innocuous diary entries - consistent with the game’s mid-'90s chronology - Kaitlin must scour the abode in order to piece together the game’s narrative. As such, the house becomes as much an integral character to the game as the Greenbriars themselves.
“When the game came out we had a party in the backyard of the house we were staying in,” Fullbright co-founder Steve Gaynor tells us. “We had friends and people from Portland that we knew, and also family and friends that drove up from San Francisco.
“We projected the game from a laptop onto a sheet on the wall at the back of the house. People were playing it and the fact that [our] friends were there, liking it and excited that we’d finished the thing, was a great feeling.”
Although used as a recreational hub in this instance, the house Gaynor speaks of was more than just a party headquarters - it’d doubled as Fullbright’s home and office for the duration of Gone Home’s development. Whilst environmental artist Kate Craig worked remotely in her native Canada, the rest of the team - Johnnemann Nordhagen, Karla Zimonja, and Gaynor himself - shared rent expenses by setting up shop under the same roof.
Doing so led to many perks otherwise unattainable within the perceived orthodox studio setup. As a team, they could bounce ideas off one another face-to-face without the hassle of organising formal meetings; they could pick and choose working hours based on how much time and energy they had round the clock; they formed a sense of unity that wouldn’t necessarily have been forged whilst cooped up in an office. As such, the house became as much a part of Gone Home’s development as the direction from Fullbright themselves.
Fast forward just eight months and Gaynor et al were on stage at the British Academy Games Awards accepting the Best Debut Game BAFTA for Gone Home. Although most would class this as whirlwind success - from the game’s humble beginnings, to its multitude of glowing reviews post-release; from debut basement project, to prestigious award winner in less than a year - Steve Gaynor is used to working fast.
For as long as he can remember, Gaynor has played videogames. He doesn’t recall a time prior to owning a Commodore 64 upon which he enjoyed titles like Muppets On Stage and Godzilla, and remembers being influenced by an “archetypal 80s nerd” next door neighbour in his earliest years. He spent a lot of his youth reading Nintendo Power and playing games on the NES, however also made time for PC classics such as Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego, Space Quest For Glory, Monkey Island, Sam And Max, and Day Of The Tentacle, to name but a few.
His love affair with videogames carried on through the 80s, 90s, and into the 00s, and after graduating from college in 2005, Gaynor moved from his hometown of Portland to San Francisco, following his now wife who was set to start grad school. Here, he became a certification tester at Sony but quickly worked towards the field he was most passionate about: design.
“I was a tester for a year and a half and I was making my own levels for things in my spare time,” explains Gaynor. “I wanted to get into design and I knew someone online who worked at Timegate Studios - a small games studio in Texas. My contact knew that I made levels for F.E.A.R. and they were making an expansion pack for F.E.A.R. He recommended that I apply because they needed somebody, they needed more coverage to get the expansion pack done.
“Having someone say, ‘hey, you should apply for this job at this place that you never would’ve thought of applying to before’ - that was my first in, as far as getting my first design job was concerned.”
After spending six months working in Texas, Gaynor moved back to San Francisco, where he continued to work for Timegate remotely. In 2008, he went to GDC and met up with friends Chris Remo and Greg Kasavin.
Remo, a games journalist at the time, had an appointment with Irrational as they geared up for BioShock 2 and suggested Gaynor tag along. Kasavin, who hadn’t long made the jump from games writing to development, knew 2K Marin were in the market for designers. He also knew Gaynor loved BioShock, thus thought he’d be a perfect fit for Marin.
Gaynor visited the Irrational booth, struck up a conversation with developer Jordan Thomas, and was shortly after offered a job. He accepted, naturally, and joined 2K Marin. By 2010, Gaynor was a senior level designer at Irrational working on BioShock 2, before assuming the role of writer/lead level designer on the Minerva’s Den DLC, during which time he met Nordhagen and Zimonja.
The trio worked on BioShock Infinite, before leaving the Bay Area in 2012 to form Fullbright in Portland and work on their first independently developed game, Gone Home, free of the constraints levied by AAA companies.
Phew. Let’s take a breath. I told you Gaynor worked fast, didn’t I?
For those of you who’ve played Gone Home, it may come as a surprise to hear that it was originally supposed to include robots. In its first guise, gone was the wonderful 90s nostalgia and in its place a sterile, automated house with patroller bots and a sentient AI CPU.
“The first idea that I had still took place in a house, but it was a house of the future, basically, a computer-controlled house,” says Gaynor. “It was dealing with the systems that ran the house and the player would be able to change the state of it. It was closer to a non-combat System Shock game.
“Then we started talking through it - with the number of people we have, that’s a whole lot to get done...what if it was just a normal house? What if it was just a normal house and we could make it interesting enough just to explore it to find keys and things like that to get into more of the house to find more of the story?”
In essence, Fullbright played to their strengths. It was a small team, therefore narrowing the scope of the project ensured everyone ascertained their roles within the process from the off. There’d be one programer who’d control the game’s systems. There’d be one writer who’d script the entire project. There’d be a 2D artist who’d handle the game’s deluge of notes and documents and keys. There’d be a 3D artist who’d handle environments and lighting.
On the face of things, Gone Home had evolved into a much simpler, relatable and streamlined exploration game, but behind the scenes it very much portrayed the mechanical, robotic nature resonant of its original iterative guise.
Pragmatism became a key theme within Fullbright’s development process. The 90s motif that heralded such critical praise was in fact born out of technical necessity and practical considerations. Digital communications - computers, cell phones, emails, text messaging - tend to be more centralised, thus Fullbright wanted to avoid a present tense scenario, where the majesty of note collecting and puzzle solving would be lost. Going back to a time period they’d experienced themselves, then, just made sense.
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