How ARK blindsided the industry to gain more Steam players than GTA 5

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, it's the fifth most played game on Steam, attracting higher daily player counts than GTA V and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Prehistoric mounts, as alluring as they are, will only get you so far up that ladder - so I sat down with studio co-founder Jesse Rapczak to discuss the other factors behind ARK's meteoric rise to prominence.

Want to customise your dino survival experience? Check out our best ARK mods.

"To get the game off the ground," Rapczak tells me, "it was pretty much self-funded. Private loans, stuff like that." That's a huge risk for any game developer, but in ARK's case it was a risk moderated by a significant amount of triple-A game development expertise gathered at Studio Wildcard's Seattle headquarters. Rapczak himself is a veteran of Microsoft Game Studios, where he worked on the augmented reality Hololens project, and Sony Online Entertainment.

Working with him are veterans of the Uncharted and Primal Carnage games, across four studios worldwide: Instinct Games, based in Egypt and tasked primarily with engineering work, Efecto Studios in Colombia working on art assets, technical art and level design, Virtual Basement owned by Primal Carnage's Ashton Anderson, producing the dino models, and Studio Wildcard itself.

"We’re very fortunate because of the amount of expertise that our team had to get a playable version of the game out," says Rapczak. "It didn’t cost us too much to get to a release, relative to big budget titles."

"Since then we’ve had to expand and spend more resources, but it’s all good because we have revenue coming in." A lot of revenue. Rapczak estimates that the seven months of development prior to ARK launching in June cost $1.5 million - by contrast, it generated $10 million in its first week of release as an Early Access title. Four months down the line, that revenue stream has "allowed us to expand in the way we want and stop bootstrapping, and for lack of a better term, working out of our basements." Ashton Anderson's Virtual Basement proving the exception to the rule.

ARK Survival Evolved interview 2

Compelled to pump the brakes on ARK's incredible success story, I ask Rapczak what his game did differently in the current landscape of ubiquitous Early Access survival games to attract such an audience. Partly, he responds, ARK proves an antidote to the "game design fatigue" currently looming over the industry by giving the player a plethora of play styles and a sense of agency over the game world. "We just keep adding in new types of gameplay elements that some players really like to grab onto."

"We’ve always said, it’s kind of like an environment where players can come in and not just play the game but also live it. All these things have contributed to its stickiness and its success. And also, just letting people play the game the way they want. Hosting their own servers, giving them all sorts of mod support early on."


ARK is currently the only UnrealEngine title with official mod support except Epic's own IPs, and that unique positioning has attracted many semi-pro and professional developers to the game's modding scene. The results vary hugely in theme and scale - baby dinosaurs, an advanced roofing system, and enormous new maps to explore and cultivate - but the level of quality seldom dips below the hugely accomplished.

With the game still in Early Access phase and several user-created mods having been adopted officially into the base game, the line between development and modding is a blurry one, I suggest to Rapczak. "Yeah, sometimes it feels that way... we had a modder that created angled roofs. We never added angled roofs to the game because we thought it’d be a lot of work and we weren’t sure how much people would use them. But someone went ahead and added them as a mod, and we’re like, ‘Hey, that actually works pretty well! Let’s get that working in the game.’"

ARK Survival Evolved interview 3

Beyond simply an opportunity to make the game better, ARK is also becoming a portfolio platform for budding devs. UnrealEngine's widespread use across the industry and limited modding opportunities means Studio Wildcard's game is a particularly attractive proposition for aspiring game makers. "[They're] using ARK as a platform to test their gameplay ideas, throw some art in, to be experienced by this vast community of players that we have. That’s why I think we’re seeing such high quality stuff come through."

It's a very different style of game development than that adopted by ultra-conservative triple-A studios funded by major publishers, and as Rapczak explains, is demands a different studio philosophy too. Hierarchy is relatively flat, individuals are left to concentrate on their particular areas of expertise, and player feedback is taken very seriously. In short, Studio Wildcard and its subsidiaries have "one goal," albeit a goal that involves considerable plate-spinning: "integrating our community feedback, integrating our gameplay designs and moving through Early Access very quickly, without ignoring our customer base and all the things you see people misstepping in Early Access."

"The only way we can really do that is with our team, and the way we have everything distributed across all of our disciplines." Colombia worries about its share of the plate-spinning, Egypt performs its own balancing act, and the remarkably swift development pace that has thus far characterised ARK continues.

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Saints Row 3 and 4 are Steam weekend freebies

You already know, if you hung out with us here yesterday, that XCOM is free on Steam until Sunday morning. But what to do, you ask, if you already own XCOM and all things related? Perhaps you could give some Saints Row a try instead.

I've always been fascinated by the way the Saints Row series evolved from a low-rent Grand Theft Auto ile La-Z-Boy armed with chain guns. And it somehow got better along the way, too: Saints knock-off to become a game about wreaking havoc in hell from the comfort of a mobRow 4 earned an Editor's Choice award in our 2013 review. (Alas, the follow-up, Gat Out of Hell, didn't fare quite as well.)

The announcement of a free Saints Row weekend didn't come with quite the same level of fanfare as that of XCOM, probably because there's not a new Saints Row game currently available for pre-purchase. But free they are, "they" being Saints Row: The Third and Saints Row 4, until 1pm PDT on September 13. During that stretch, you can score those games and all the other Saints Row releases on Steam, plus the mind-boggling array of DLC, for up to 80 percent off. The sale prices will remain in effect until 

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Dota 2 Reborn is here—but is it ready?

Dota 2 just underwent the most substantial update that it has received since the game entered closed beta. Suddenly and without fanfare, the Reborn beta test came to an end and the new game client took over. Custom games are there to try, the UI and new player experience have been completely refreshed, and the world has its first officially-released Source 2 engine game.

I think everybody was expecting more spectacle. The launch of Reborn hasn't been accompanied by a balance patch, a new hero, or even a new section on the website. Relative to comparatively unimportant updates, Valve have put almost no weight behind this moment. Perhaps that's deliberate: maybe they want this to feel like just another day in the history of the game, to play down the hype so that any problems—and there will be problems—emerge against a backdrop of relative calm. Nonetheless, it's a surprise that Reborn has been launched so quickly and so quietly—like returning home to find out that somebody has updated the operating system on your PC without asking, with a lot of the same attendant concerns.

When I spoke to Erik Johnson from Valve at the International, I was surprised by how confident he was that Reborn would launch shortly after the event. My experience with the beta to that point hadn't been fantastic: stuttering on my PC at home, inputs sometimes failing to register on my PC in the office. Admittedly I'd mostly played the beta to try out custom games, where Dota 2 is at its most unstable, but my experience was of a litany of problems with lobbies, match stability, the interface, and so on.

It has improved a lot since then, and playing today I've experienced no significant performance problems—but there are bugs and absences, lots of them, and I can't help but feel that Dota 2 has been less reborn and more restarted. There are undoubtedly many updates to come, and this new client gives Valve more power and freedom when it comes to creating them, but that's not quite where we're at yet. This feels less like Reborn leaving beta and more like Dota 2 as a whole heading back.

It's the stuff that's missing that most concerns me—and I'm not just talking about that silly item-building quiz that you used to be able to do while queuing. Formal team functionality has vanished overnight. As far as I can tell you can no longer create your own teams, set custom graphics for banners and base logos, or queue specifically to be matched against another stack. I can't find my team MMR anywhere on my profile, although my 'pro info' (their words, not mine) is still there. My team still exists, I think, but there's no obvious way to access that information.

Valve haven't done much with the team ranked ladder over the last year, and given how buggy it used to be I get the impression that it was never a priority. Yet it was an important part of the game for me and for others: a way to bridge the gap between ranked pub games and in-houses, a convenient source of organised opponents to practice against. Setting custom team logos was a fun addition to the amateur tournaments I've played, and it no longer appears to be possible. There could well be a brilliant replacement for these old features coming down the line, but there's been no guarantees and no communication to that effect.

Although I like the new interface for cosmetics—particularly the new shuffling system—I understand why traders are upset about it, particularly the sorting systems that have been lost. You can also no longer manipulate or reset stat-tracking gems. It feels like whatever form your hobby took before, something is quite likely to have suffered in the transition to Reborn. Team matchmaking is my gripe, but every player will encounter something they miss. That's understandable, given the magnitude of the task that Valve have taken on, but it distracts from the genuine good that this update promises.

Custom games, as I've written before, could represent an epochal shift for Dota 2. The new engine runs faster on better hardware and supports a much improved spectator experience. It looks and feels more modern, and with this change Valve free themselves up to focus on the really exciting stuff: new heroes, new events, and so on. I'm trying to focus on all of these genuine benefits even as I encounter small gripe after small gripe.

What it comes down to, I think, is that the communication surrounding this week's changes simply hasn't been good enough. Valve have said that they'll be iterating based on feedback and that there are features to come, but they haven't said what or when. I think the community deserves better than that, particularly when functionality is being refactored or removed. There needs to be an acknowledgement of what Dota is losing along with what it has gained, ideally with a sense of which features are due to make a return—and if they're not coming back, some reasoning why. Otherwise you have a situation where Dota 2 is ready for Reborn, but the Dota 2 community isn't. That's what we're seeing now. Reborn doesn't need marketing, perhaps, but it does need transparency—even if the most honest thing to say at this point is "relax, guys, we're back in beta."

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Five stories of tactical comedy in Metal Gear Solid 5

Big Boss may not talk much in Metal Gear Solid V, but if he did, he'd have some stories to tell. We'll be his voice today, then, with some of our favorite, stupidest, funniest moments from all the free-form infiltrating and extracting we've done for the past week. These unexpected narratives caused by systems and simulations bouncing off each other are best thing about MGS V, so keep it going with your stories in the comments.

As always, if you're extra sensitive to spoilers, proceed with caution, but we've kept it really light. We talk vaguely about missions we've done, but not any cutscenes or dialogue or characters other than the well-known ones.

Where eagles dare

By Tim Clark

Before Metal Gear Solid V, this was the greatest shot I’ve ever pulled off in my life: I’m in bed on a Greek holiday (not a euphemism) with my then girlfriend, and we hear the telltale EEEEEE of a mosquito. I react particularly badly to their bites so hate them worse than war. In the halflight it flits over the bed and I throw the book I’m reading—a horror short story collection, as always—at it, making a snapping motion with my hand as the book exits at speed. It slams shut in mid-air and falls back to the bed. “No fucking way”, she says. Excited, I flick through the pages, find the bloody insectoid mulch and grin: “Way.”

Here’s my MGS V shot that’s better: It’s Afghanistan. Broad daylight. I spot the circling silhouette of what I immediately realise is an eagle. It’s a long, long way off and I don’t feel like I’ve got time to pop a Pentazemin to steady Boss’s hand. I need the eagle badly because at that point my offshore menagerie resembled a dilapidated municipal park in which two mangy jackals are the big crowd puller. I swing the tranq sniper in a lazy arc, trying to lead the target, and squeeze the trigger a single time. THWIP. The mighty eagle is a puff of falling feathers. Before you can say 420 blaze it MLG no scope (okay, technically I scoped) I’m jogging across the desert to retrieve my avian prize. And… it’s another raven. Well goddamn. I jam it in my pocket anyway, reasoning that London Zoo wasn’t built on eagles alone. And at least I can say I’ve nailed the company emblem. Remember: when it comes to conflict, logo choice is important.

A little overprotective

By Tom Marks

I was sneaking through an enemy outpost, silently incapacitating each guard under the watchful eye of my newest buddy, Quiet. They would make fine additions to my totally-not-kidnapped army at Mother Base, but the specialist I really wanted was just ahead. He was the last guard awake and was getting suspicious, so I had to move fast. I turn a corner and sprint straight towards him which, understandably, startles him quite a bit.

The slo-mo kicks in as Reflex Mode begins and I bring the iron sights of my tranquilizer gun up to Big Boss’ one good eye, centering the specialist’s head as the target. But then, quietly off in the distance, I hear a gunshot. Where did that come from? Did I miss a guard? I couldn’t have. I realize there was only one other option, as I notice Quiet’s laser sight trained squarely on the guard I am trying to extract—preferably with his head still on his shoulders.

Everything is still in slow motion as I squeeze the trigger and my target instantly falls asleep. He begins to limply fall towards the ground in a race against Quiet’s pinpoint aim. There is a pregnant pause as I think maybe I prevented the inevitable. I watch his sleeping head explode through the sights of my gun. Captured guard post. Thanks for the backup, Quiet.

This happened while I was streaming on our Twitch channel, the webcam in the top right was my genuine reaction the moment it happened. It was startling.

A Murder of Crows

By Chris Livingston

I’ve only just begun playing Phantom Pain, having spent most of the past two weeks on Mad Max, so I’m still firmly in the You Can Attach Balloons To Everything? phase of the game. After ballooning friendlies, enemies, bears, sheep, and one adorable dog, I naturally became curious as to whether I could attach a balloon to a crow.

Unfortunately, I became curious about this while I was in the middle of a mission. I’d been tasked with rescuing an engineer from a camp, and as night fell I crept past the barricades, marking foes and planning my approach. That’s when a crow flew over my head, and while my first thought was “Why are there only ever crows in games? There are a billion kinds of birds, but in games it’s always crows.” My second thought: “Hey, can I balloon that crow?” The crow landed on some tanks on a raised platform near me, so shot it with the tranq gun and it fell asleep.

Problem: it didn’t fall to the ground, and there didn’t seem to be a way to climb up onto the tanks to attach a balloon. There was no ladder, and nothing adjacent I could use to climb and jump over. I wondered if I could steal a truck, drive it over, and climb on top of it, but I wasn’t sure. The Russian soldier who walked up behind me while I was standing in the middle of the street staring at a sleeping crow wasn’t sure either, but he was pretty sure I shouldn’t be there at all.

The alarm was sounded, and I was ripped up by bullets and forced to dodge mortar rounds. Also, I stopped to mark the crow’s location (with a ‘C’ appropriately enough), and taking the time to do that got me shot up even more. So, I did what any grizzled veteran would do when he’s almost dead because a napping crow distracted him: I called in air support. As the chopper arrived, I noticed with horror that I’d summoned it to the exact spot where the crow was sleeping, so rather than help the chopper fight the Soviets, I just watched worriedly from a distance, hoping my feathered friend wouldn’t get hurt.

The crow was unharmed. The helicopter, however, was completely shot to shit. It limped through the air across the valley and exploded against a cliff as 5,000 BossBux were immediately deducted from my bank account to buy a new chopper. (Also, two of my men were needlessly dead due to my crow fixation. Eh, I’ll just balloon a few more.)

Eventually, I shot everyone dead, and still unable to reach my sleepy crow, I gave up and entered the compound. I suddenly heard “Caw, caw” as two more crows flew over my head. Another chance! As I took aim I heard another sound, the iconic exclamation point sound of a guard spotting you while you shoot darts at crows. Oh, come on. I’m trying to perform important balloon science, here! After killing everyone, I looked around for the crows, and saw one land on top of a pole. I tranq’d it, it flopped to the ground sound asleep, and I finally got my answer. When ‘rescuing’ a sedated crow from a war zone, no balloons are allowed. Big Boss apparently just shoves it in his pocket. I got a ‘C’ on the mission.

The final viscount-down

By James Davenport

There’s a mission in the first half of the game where you’re tasked with tailing a Russian interpreter as he walks around a massive camp between several prisoners. You’re to listen in on his translated interrogations in hopes of singling out a specific viscount. The guy is valuable for a reason I lost between all the acronyms and war monologuing, but none of this mattered after I set off an alert state almost immediately. Doing so starts an indeterminate timer during which the prisoners are killed off one by one. Since I hadn’t tailed the interpreter to each prisoner’s location, I had no idea where the viscount was. I kept searching, figuring the game would tell me if I failed the mission. After two hours of desperate smoking and searching, nothing. I turned off my PC in frustration.

The next day, I finished the mission in ten minutes. (If you don't want it spoiled, stop reading and skip to Sam's story.) After heading to my favorite vantage point, I chanced to look behind me. Just 100 yards north of where I spent most of the previous evening was a shack and two figures. A quick scope informed me that, hoo boy, there he was, the viscount, and guarded by a single soldier. That poor soldier. He was probably the lame duck of the bunch, assigned the easy gig, left on his lonesome in the middle of nowhere. I shot him in the knees and sent the viscount back home via fulton. S-Rank.

As it turns out, my video game conditioning worked against me. The viscount might have been dead during my first playthrough, but the biggest revelation was that he wasn’t just spawning in. I thought he’d just apparate when needed, but his character existed in the world persistently through day and night, and he was simply transported between the Jerry shack and interrogation room on a schedule. The problem was I’d interrupted it with an early alert state. Probably that other guy I shot in the knees and left in the road. So, the proclamation holds true: Metal Gear Solid 5 respects a player’s intelligence. Inversely, it also respects a player’s lack of intelligence.

Sorry about the leg

By Samuel Roberts

The goal? Extract an Afrikaans interpreter and send him to Mother Base where he can be brainwashed into joining my cause of extracting bears with tiny balloons and shooting Soviet soldiers in the head for no reason. To get to him, I have to follow a guy who can lead me to his location—I follow him across a dark field and even rescue a prisoner along the way, because I’m just a bloody good guy like that. After sniping a guard in a watchtower with a sniper rifle, I sneak around the back of a well-lit house where the soldier I was following and my target are talking. I dart one in the head then the other in quick succession, then hop over the window to retrieve my target.

I decide to try throwing him out of the window, which is a little brutal but makes a nice thud when they hit the dirt.

D-Dog is in the field with me. He tells me there’s a guy patrolling just outside the front door, so that’s a no go for a silent route. I decide to leave the way I came in, over the window sill, and consider how I can drop my guy over the ledge. I decide to try throwing him out of the window, which is a little brutal but makes a nice thud when they hit the dirt. Sadly, instead of getting him out the building, throwing the interpreter gets the guy jammed on top of a shelf right next to the window. He’s stuck!

Normally in this situation when you want to wake a guy up in MGSV, you just have to melee attack them. Unfortunately, Snake can’t reach the interpreter that high up, so that doesn’t work. The only solution is to wake him up by shooting him with a real bullet. Sadly, I’m only carrying a loud sniper rifle and a grenade launcher, and I neither want to attract the guards’ attention nor blast the interpreter to kingdom come with an explosive. My only choice is to call in a silenced pistol from a supply drop and try shooting the guy in the leg. I head outside and do just that, picking up my pistol and heading back indoors.

I shoot the interpreter in the leg. He wakes up and falls off the top of the shelf immediately, and spots Snake just in time for me to slam him to the ground, knocking him straight out again. I decide to just carry the guy out the front door this time and shoot the nearby guard in the head. I call in a chopper, pile the guy onto it and complete the mission without getting caught. My new recruit may not be walking for a while, but I like that MGSV let me solve my own blunder by shooting someone to wake them up. GOTY.

Share your best stories and mishaps in the comments (link to a screenshot if you like), and we may put them in another article!

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Clash Of Kings

Clash of Kings is a new RTS for Android, iOS and PC platforms that lets you battle for control of the Seven Kingdoms in real time against your friends and enemies from all over the world! This game features an expandable world in which you can build armies, upgrade buildings and attack and conquer! 

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Game of War

Game Of War - Fire Age the first truly global online game. Befriend, chat, help, and destroy people from all over the world in this real time game of global conquest!

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How Star Citizen is going to happen: Chris Roberts on the grand assembly of his capital ship

In a nondescript corner of a packed Cologne show floor stands a temporary outpost of Cloud Imperium. Inside, silent staffers sit facing blank partition walls, clutching keyboard and mouse as if involved in a kind of digital seance. Their monitors reveal that one is piloting a ship; another drifts in space nearby; a third walks around the ship’s interior, occupying a different version of gravity.

This is Star Citizen’s live multi-crew ships demo, but it represents much more - the efforts of Cloud Imperium to glue together the disparate parts of their sprawling space simulation.

“Pretty much most of the technology that we need to deliver Star Citizen as promised, as some people doubt whether we can do, is in place,” says Chris Roberts, in a laid-back transatlantic drawl that belies the expectations on his shoulders. “Now it’s just a matter of pulling things together, getting them working properly with the polish level, and then delivering a load of content.”

As the multi-crew demo begins, players potter out from the bowels of a space station and up a ramp to their ship. They’re exploring what Cloud Imperium call a “large world” - now possible thanks to a monumental effort that’s seen Star Citizen’s engine shunted over to 64-bit.

“In most engines, everything’s 32-bit,” explains Roberts. “And it’s fine for an FPS or a cover-based shooter where you don’t have areas more than a few kilometres in size. But for us, you know, we’re in space - we’re gonna have thousands, millions of kilometres.”

In a 32-bit engine, there’s a tradeoff made between range and precision: the further you end up from your point of origin, the less able the engine is to put its finger on exactly where objects are. Fly a long way out into open space, and the game might have trouble remembering the handful of centimetres between your visor and your face, for instance - introducing a worrisome shaking effect.

“When you need millimetre precision, you can’t get it,” says Roberts. “It’ll drop to centimetres, then metres, then tens of metres. That was a big endeavor to move it to 64-bit vector math.”

The vector upgrade is one corner of the tech intended to support the weight of Roberts’ ambition. Another is Cloud Imperium’s new zone system.

“Most engines, including CryEngine and Unreal, spatially partition all the graphics data in a very regular manner,” expands the CEO. “Because basically an FPS level is this constant - rooms, walls, graphics, everyone running around. But we can have large areas of space and then lots of areas of density.”

A planet will be a zone. An orbiting space station might be another - and each of the rooms within it their own, separate zones. Approach any of them in Star Citizen, and the game will know to start streaming in the required detail.

“That’s one of the goals of Star Citizen, to be fairly seamless as you’re moving around,” says Roberts. “No loading screens, just stuff streaming in the background.”

These are the foundations required to support Star Citizen’s absurd scale - a game both sprawling and granular, sparse and dense. And to hear Roberts tell it, the concrete is already laid.

“Those elements are the things that were needed to deliver the promise of a big persistent universe,” he says. “The zone system and the large world are the two things that we had to get built to basically do what we wanted to do with multi-crew and ultimately with the persistent universe.”

Right now the studio - with offices in several cities, most recently Frankfurt - are bringing delayed FPS module Star Marine back under the main development branch. The modules share the same codebase - meaning the zero-g antics shown in the multi-crew demo are simulated in exactly the same way as those in Star Marine’s sci-fi sports mode. Roberts expects to fold all of the currently-developed FPS features, as well as the game’s social module, into multi-crew 2.0.

“The only reason we have Star Marine is to have a mode that will allow players to test some of the FPS mechanics for the game itself,” reveals Roberts. “I’m looking forward to the Arena Commander 2.0 setup, where people can just move around, and the FPS part and the dogfighting - or goofing around meeting people - will be just something you can go and do.”

After that comes the biggie - planetside exploration, which Roberts plans to make seamless too.

“We probably won’t let you fly yourself directly down to a planet for the reason that we don’t want you to be crashing into things,” he explains. “But you’ll see the planet, and there won’t be a loading screen - essentially we’ll control the path. Everything will stream in and land and you’ll walk out.”

It’s always been the plan to do it this way - to craft Star Citizen’s component parts separately, taking care to carve out sockets so that it can be assembled later like interstellar flat-pack furniture.

“I kind of feel pretty good with everything,” muses Roberts. “We have a lot of people who work really hard on this, they're very passionate about making everything possible for people that have backed it. Maybe it's taking a bit longer than people want it to, but I think it's going to be really good and it’s also expanded in terms of scope.

“I think the game’s going to speak for itself. I definitely know that what people care about is a good game more than anything else. At the end of the day, if it's a bit late but it's great, that's what counts. If it's crap and you push it out the door, it's crap forever. It always has been.”

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Best Free PC Games #10 TRY STAR TREK ONLINE

Star Trek Online

Who wouldn’t want to take control of a starship, explore the fringes of the galaxy, battle dangerous aliens and train an elite crew of pangalactic professionals? This is your chance to show the internet that you’d make a much better Picard than Picard. Or, at least, than they do.

TRY STAR TREK ONLINE

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Best Free PC Games #9 League of Legends

League of Legends

Inspired by the original Dota, this takes the same concept but introduces a different roster of playable characters that is constantly being expanded. Many players find League of Legends is both easier and more accessible than Dota, but it’s still extremely nuanced. 12 million players play it every day. You won’t struggle to find a game.

TRY LEAGUE OF LEGENDS 

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Best Free PC Games #8 TRY WARFRAME

Warframe

Everything’s better in space, as Warframe proves with its Ninjas in space theme. It’s a co-op third-person game where teams of ninjas suited up in powerful ‘Warframe’ armours head out to slice up bad guys, or just hang out at the dojo. It blends some MMO elements with the sensibilities of a more straight-forward action game, creating something slick, exciting, and very sociable. 

TRY WARFRAME

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Best Free PC Games #7 TRY SMITE

Smite

Following the same formula as League of Legends and Dota 2, Smite has teams of five gods trying to fight their way into their opponent’s base. Rather than giving players a top-down view of the battlefield, it chooses a third-person perspective, switching the focus of the game from tactics to action.

TRY SMITE

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Best Free PC Games #6 Nosgoth

Nosgoth

A free to play combat game set in the Legacy of Kain universe, Nosgoth pits vampires against vampire hunters in tight deathmatch arenas. Asymmetrical abilities and diverse tactics keep the action as sharp as the bloodsuckers' pointy fangs.

TRY NOSGOTH

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Best Free PC Games #5 Star Wars: The Old Republic

Star Wars: The Old Republic

After a long, slow start, SWTOR is now actually pretty good. It’s a fast-paced Star Wars RPG with lightsabers and space combat and Jedi houses and bounty hunters and, if you go full dark side, you can fire lightning from your fingertips. Really.

PLAY STAR WARS NOW

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Become a Metal Gear expert before The Phantom Pain comes out

Metal Gear Solid is a consistently great stealth action series, but it’s best known for Hideo Kojima’s bonkers creative direction. It’s a decades long socio-political drama about nuclear powers, magical realism disguised as pseudoscience, relationship problems, ninjas, military and government conspiracy, mullets, and death. The franchise spans 12 games, not including spin-offs and iterative releases, and the canon timeline covers 100 years of alternate world history. To put it lightly, there’s a lot to know. Not knowing won’t leave you treading water during Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, but it sure doesn’t hurt having a loose idea of where the Metal Gear north star lies while playing any game in series.

Rather than writing yet another Metal Gear story recap, I’ll point you toward some of the best that are already out there, with a wide range of time commitments and depth. You’ll also get my personal take on what I think happened in each game, which is still enough to enjoy the series on its most basic level. Metal Gear may have a dense narrative—I’ve read and watched recaps at least once a year and still have trouble—but its inherent absurdity and hard-to-follow story are part of its fascinations. I don’t really care about the minutiae of Kojima’s nuclear character drama, but I do care about the puzzling sincerity with which it’s all expressed. Put the notebook away and just let whatever sticks, stick. This is Metal Gear, gaming’s spaghetti on the wall. 

A massive warning: Spoilers for the entire Metal Gear series (except MGS5) beyond this point.

All dates refer to when events transpired in the Metal Gear timeline.

Series overviews (1918 - MGS3, supporting info through 2018)

Most of what I point to comes from these Metal Gear deep dives. I recommend at least giving the timeline a read before spending too much time watching anything. Build yourself some scaffolding before you start to construct a beautiful, useless Metal Gear castle in your mind.

Metal Gear Timeline: This self-explanatory website is a great summary of everything that happens in the 100 years (!) of Metal Gear so far from 1918 to 2018, on and off screen (excluding the events of The Phantom Pain, of course).

Metal Gear Wiki: I mean, it’s a wiki. Folks have crowdsourced everything there is to crowdsource about Metal Gear here. Just be warned, that means some Phantom Pain spoilers have likely found their way in there. Might be one to visit after finishing MGS5.

A beginner’s guide to Metal Gear Solid V: PC Gamer’s own Andy Kelly made a guide a few months back to ease people into Ground Zeroes, and it’s still helpful today. He covers only the necessary characters and events in a frugal space, so give it a shot whether you’re short on time or not.

GamesRadar+ Metal Gear story summary: David Roberts put together a convenient way of reviewing the story over on our sister site. The format is slick, gives me study guide vibes and college flashbacks. The Phantom Pain is our final exam. Study buddies?

KefkaProduction’s Metal Gear Movies:If you don’t have the systems to play the older Metal Gear games, don’t have much time to play them anyway, but still want the closest approximation to doing so, then KefkaProduction’s ‘movies’ are the way to go. They leave all important story beats intact and edit down extended gameplay sequences to quick montages.

Metal Gear Scanlon - Giant Bomb: Game recognize game. It’s locked behind a subscription, but I think Metal Gear Scanlon might be my favorite way to watch full length playthroughs of the MGS series. Both sides of the MGS player coin are represented: One is Dan Ryckert, the child at heart who wholly embraces MGS absurdity and acts as the story cipher for Drew Scanlon, a newcomer to the series and Dan’s foil. There’s something voyeuristic to watching Drew bear witness to MGS’ convoluted mechanics and narrative for the first time. But stick with the series. In MGS, he’s cursing and frustrated, but by MGS4, he seems to be a total convert.

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Best Free PC Games #4 TRY WAR THUNDER

War Thunder

A massively multiplayer World War 2 combat game that effortlessly encompasses all of the explosions and excitement that tanks and planes are capable of generating. War Thunder's recent updates lavish the fast-paced battler with dozens of new vehicles and game modes. It's a free to play gem.

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Best Free PC Games #2 World of Tanks

World of Tanks

One of mightiest free-to-play games there has ever been, World of Tanks is an accessible and exciting tank simulator that hides some complex game mechanics. It pits two sets of tankers against each other in team deathmatch. There are hundreds of vehicles to unlock across ten different tiers, from speedy scouts to hulking heavies. You’ll never believe so many tanks existed.

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