What is the best MMORPG experience on PC? Is it one with spell-slinging and demon-slaying? Working your way through the stars as a miner or a corporate bigwig? Solving ancient conspiracies and fighting Lovecraftian horrors? Maybe it is all of them.
But hey, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. What is an MMO, anyway? Well, those oft used letters represent the words Massively Multiplayer Online, and refer to games where hundreds, if not thousands of players come together in the same world. Online MMOs like World of Warcraft offer new lands for you to live in, exchanging your regular old life for one of adventure, profit, or danger.
It’s dangerous to go alone! That’s why you should team up and play the PC’s .
Here’s our list of the top MMORPG games on the PC, kicking off with a few of the top free PC MMOs. You're sure to find something that will swallow up entire days at a time, be that the most popular MMORPG in the world, or a smaller hidden gem with a dedicated community.
StarCraft is arguably a game about being in as many places at once as possible, but as the game came together it wasn’t at all clear how that was going to happen. Two programmers had opposite ideas of how unit A.I. should behave when the player wasn’t giving orders, and they fought back and forth in the game’s code, according to David L Craddock’s upcoming history of Blizzard, Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II.
Pat Wyatt, a programmer and Blizzard’s vice president of research and development, recalled his tug-of-war with an unnamed team member over A.I. While Wyatt wanted units to behave somewhat autonomously, his interlocutor thought units should only react to player commands.
The crunch was brutal, but it led to a classic. StarCraft II is on our list of the .
"I wanted units to be smarter like they were in WarCraft, and he wanted them to be dumber because he wanted the player to be making the decisions, which provided more tactical advantage to players who were better at manipulating units," Wyatt recalls in Chapter 7 of Craddock’s book.
The two programmers would independently implement their changes, each going in and rewriting the StarCraft code to undo their competitor’s work. Neither was willing to back down, and the constant writing and rewriting of StarCraft’s A.I. system meant more work for both parties.
Deck-building roguelike Slay the Spire has sold a million copies since its Early Access launch in November. Developer Mega Crit games announced the milestone along with one of Slay the Spire’s regular updates Thursday, along with the usual list of tweaks, fixes, and additions to the game.
“Just a few days ago, we reached 1,000,000 players for Slay the Spire,” Mega Crit wrote in the Steam post accompanying Weekly Update 31, which adds a Custom game mode. “It’s been a wild ride as the two of (and a great number of collaborators!) started work on this game almost 3 years ago.”
There are some great CCGs out there. Here's our list of the .
If you aren’t one of the million players who have checked out Slay the Spire, it’s a run-based roguelike with an FTL-style system for moving through a series of dungeons, with monster encounters represented by fast-paced card combat. As you defeat monsters and find treasure, you’ll add to your deck, which changes completely based on which of three characters you pick at the beginning. It’s simple enough to pick up and play, but there’s a lot of complexity in its card synergies and building strategies.
“The feedback and reception for the game has been far more than any developer could hope for and we’d like to sincerely thank all of you for playing the game, creating amazing content, and even starting riots over boots,” . “We hope to pay you all back by working our butts off.”
If you want to create the fastest gaming PC in the world then you want to jam as many graphics cards as you can inside it, right? After all, if it’s good enough for Summit - the most powerful computer ever made, with its 27,648 Nvidia Volta GPUs, - then surely it’s good enough for your home gaming rig too.
But, outside of five figure PC builds for the spoilt rich kids of Mr. and Mrs. Moneybags there are very few multi-GPU PCs around. When the Steam Hardware Survey was still bothering to measure such things, the percentage of PC gamers using more than a single card was buried behind the decimal points of a big fat zero.
And if you want the best single GPU these are the around today.
So is there any life in the future of multi-GPU solutions or are both AMD's CrossFire and Nvidia's SLI relics of a long forgotten past? As ever, it’s a little bit from Box A and a little bit from Box B…
AMD’s CrossFire and Nvidia’s SLI are the bespoke technologies the two graphics card giants used to get their own GPUs playing nicely together in a single system. Originally both technologies demanded the use of a ribbon cable to connect the multiple graphics cards to each other, but while that is most assuredly still the case with Nvidia’s GeForce cards, AMD’s Radeon GPUs are now able to operate without such restrictions and communicate happily over the PCIe 3.0 interface.
Update, June 30: Citing ongoing launch issues, Epic says Playground mode is delayed until next week.
Fortnite players who were looking forward to checking out the new Playground limited-time mode this weekend will have to wait until next week, as Epic is still trying to solve matchmaking problems that have kept it from launching.
In a tweet to the official Fortnite account Friday evening, Epic said there are still problems to resolve before the Playground LTM can go live, and the Fortnite team is working through the weekend to get them fixed.
"We'll update you with any additional information July 2," Epic said in a follow-up tweet.
Get the greatest free stuff your lack of money can buy with the .
Playground mode was originally scheduled to launch Wednesday, but technical difficulties have temporarily spoiled the new mode’s debut.
Matchmaking issues throughout the game caused the closure of Playground earlier today after patch 4.5 went live. The issues appear to be resolved across standard modes of play, but the Playground mode requires further fixes - which have now been in progress for a number of hours, with no clear timeline for the mode’s return.
Epic has provided a new trailer for the mode - check it out below - offering a preview of what to expect when Playground LTM finally goes live. The new limited-time mode lets you and three friends drop on a private island to build and fire at one another for up to an hour before the storm closes in.
We’ll update you with any additional information on Monday, July 2.
There are plenty of cancelled titles in Blizzard’s history, but Project Nomad is one we don’t often hear about. The squad-based sci-fi game was canned and the team behind it moved on to World of Warcraft - but it turns out WoW wasn’t the only game to swallow up Nomad’s developers.
As StarCraft development reached its most intense points, with developers lengthening their days and working into the weekends, the team started picking people off from other projects to assist in development. Former programmer Rob Hueber, for example, was hired to work on ‘Team 2,’ the group behind Nomad - until he was pulled to the StarCraft team.
Don't focus on what might have been - enjoy what was with the .
“As tends to happen at Blizzard,” Hueber says, “whatever project gets ahead starts to pull people from the other team, and other teams die from attrition and things like that. That's not a bad way to do things. It definitely hurts the project that gets resources stolen away from it, but it's for a good cause, obviously.”
That comes via an excerpt from David L Craddock’s upcoming Blizzard history, , which is currently seeking funds on . Craddock helped bring Project Nomad to light years ago, telling about internal struggles as the Blizzard team attempted to figure out exactly where to go with the game.
Several members of the team wanted to do something else entirely, so Kevin Beardslee and Bill Petras pitched a more accessible version of EverQuest. Nomad was scrapped and development on World of Warcraft began in a matter of days.
Every year, E3 presents the Games Critics Awards to recognize the best upcoming titles showcased at the event, and 2018’s nominees have just been announced. Selected by a panel of 51 publications worldwide - including your friends at PCGamesN - the awards recognize the best games playable at E3.
“Playable” is an important distinction, because to qualify each game must be playable for the voting publications during E3. That disqualifies major titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Remedy’s Control, Fallout 76, and quite a few more. These games are still eligible for Special Commendations in graphics, sound, and innovation, which will be announced with all the winners this Monday.
Stay current with these titles and many more by following our list of the biggest .
Anthem leads the nominees with picks in five categories and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice follows with four - both of them qualifying for Best of Show among other honours.
There are 55 PC titles among the nominees, seven more than last year. That puts our preferred platform between the major consoles, with PlayStation 4 titles enjoying 58 nominations and Xbox One games getting 51. Ubisoft leads publisher nominations with 11 titles selected, and EA ties Sony Interactive Entertainment in second place with 10 nominations.
Best of Show
Anthem (BioWare/EA for PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Marvel’s Spider-Man (Insomniac Games/SIE for PlayStation 4)
Resident Evil 2 (Capcom for PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (FromSoftware/Activision for PC, PS4, Xbox One)
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Bandai Namco Studios/Sorta Ltd./Nintendo for Switch)
Crunch in game dev has been a hot topic in the past year, but it’s certainly not a new phenomenon. In Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II, author David L Craddock details the development of the original StarCraft, including the long hours and strained relationships it took to get there.
Jeff Strain, the person behind the free StarEdit tool players could use to create and share their own custom maps, was behind schedule on his project leading up to launch. That led him to carry his laptop and devote spare moments to coding - and as Craddock writes, that was “a decision that didn't go over well with his wife.”
Keep yourself sharp with the .
“I was writing code while she was in labour,” Strain says. “Here it is, twenty years later, and I'm still paying for that. That's her trump card, right? Maybe in another ten years I'll have made it up to her.”
Even so, StarCraft veterans suggest those long hours were self-imposed. “We wanted to perfect our cinematics,” artist Harley Huggins says. “That's why we ended up separating stuff into layers later on. You'd render the whole [cinematic] and go, ‘There's something that's flashing’ or ‘Maybe you could go in and change the frames.’ Instead of just saying it was good enough, we'd go in and redo the whole thing. Sometimes that meant not going home. Everybody just did it because they wanted to do it.”
Rob Huebner speaks similarly, comparing the experience to his time at LucasArts on Jedi Knight. “It was a self-demand more than an external demand. Maybe at a higher level it was from management and they stealthily made it seem like it came from grassroots, but if so, they succeeded at that. There were still long hours, but to me, a sweatshop is like a producer coming in and mandating these hours, or you hear horror stories about L.A. Noire developer Team Bondi. That definitely wasn't at all like what Blizzard was.”
Diablo II is one of the most beloved entries in the Blizzard canon, and at least part of that is due to its memorable monster design. The game’s creatures are typically threatening, demonic, gross, or otherwise unpleasant, but a select few fall into an extra category - sexy.
That includes Andariel, the final boss of the game’s first act, who appears with some monstrous appendages, but the general shape of a Frank Frazetta-approved human woman, complete with bits of a metal bikini and a superfluous chain connecting nipple piercings. Kris Renkewitz did the initial design, emphasizing Andariel’s size and silhouette, while Phil Shenk reworked that design into the metal album sex symbol the demon eventually became.
We've got a list of the whenever you're in the mood. No demon sex, but there is an encounter with an animated corpse.
Making monsters sexier was a directive during the game’s development. A spreadsheet from design lead Erich Schaefer specified certain types of monsters that were needed for the game, across categories ranging from “small” and “large” to “spell-casting” and “melee.”
“And then one of the categories was Topless,” Phil Shenk says. “They said, 'Yeah, we need a certain number of topless monsters,' because they'd all liked the succubi in Diablo.”
This comes via an excerpt of David L Craddock’s upcoming Blizzard history, Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II, as published on .
Based on the teases so far, Fortnite’s next season to be heralded by the launch of rocket in the evil lair near Snobby Shores, and Epic wants to make sure you don’t miss the occasion. An in-game message has specified exactly when that rocket lifts off, and the event is coming very soon.
Specifically, it happens June 30 at 10:30 PDT / 13:30 EDT / 18:30 BST. Epic recommends you “get in-match on Saturday” by those times “and look to the sky. It only happens once!”
This week’s update seems to have paved the way for the rocket’s launch - and fall - with the remnants of a crashed rocket briefly appearing at Anarchy Acres, as captured in the video below. That appearance seems to have been a glitch, but it does indicate the rocket’s falling somewhere. Whether that somewhere is indeed Anarchy Acres remains to be seen.
The ten parachute onto an island...
The rocket is launching soon, but it’ll likely be a bit longer before we find out what exactly it does. The is scheduled for nearly two weeks from now, so the rocket probably won’t have an immediate catastrophic effect on the map, but it should make for a very pretty light show.
Here's your preview of what that rocket landing might look like.
The Brotherhood of Steel plays a part in Fallout 76, though the exact size of that part remains to be seen. The organization has, at least, made its way out to West Virginia, and left evidence of its visit behind - though how this fits into the lore remains to be seen.
Bethesda’s been releasing some of those E3 gameplay videos in high quality pieces over the past week, and with the benefit of 4K quality and pause features we’ve gotten to examine that footage in exquisite detail. In the multiplayer gameplay video - which you can see below - some remains from the Brotherhood are visible.
There are plenty of wastelands to live through in the .
If you zoom in real close to the shot starting at 1:45, and squint very hard at the barricades next to the downed vertibird, you’ll see a familiar logo painted there. A winglike pattern, a sword in the middle, and a handful of gears in the background - the emblem of the Brotherhood of Steel.
Now, things start to get a little weird once you tie this into proper Fallout lore. The logo shows the larger gear on the right side of the sword, which indicates that this is specifically the East Coast chapter of the Brotherhood - the one depicted in Fallout 3. This part of the organization gets founded in 2254, over 150 years after Fallout 76 takes place.
The Brotherhood proper was founded in 2077 in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear war which wiped out civilization, but as far as the Fallout story so far has gone, they had been locked up in a California military shelter since then.
Corsair’s K70 mechanical gaming keyboard has finally evolved. The K70 MK.2 takes the well-known - and well-loved - classic from Corsair and moves components around like a painting by Picasso. But has it all been worth it? No, not really.
It’s no secret that we love the Corsair K70 at PCGamesN. The usual clatter of keyboards all day every day is made up of a choir of K70 keyboards, all bought and paid for. Its robust aluminium design, fantastic scroll wheel, and stellar RGB lighting has been an obvious standard bearer for the many keyboards we’ve had in the office since it first launched back in 2013.
Corsair still holds onto the top spot in our roundup, but for how long?
The K70 has been through many iterations over the years, too. There’s the LUX, with new bold keycaps; the logo changed from a sail to a strange lower back tattoo and then back to the sail design Corsair brandishes today; and the brought with it new speedy key switches. Yet, this is the only time Corsair has seen fit to change the nomenclature, stitch a two on the end, and proclaim this to be the true second generation of its crown jewel: the Corsair K70 MK.2.
Sadly, what you get from the second generation is little more than what was introduced with the few iterations of the K70 prior, which strangely weren’t worthy of the significant and coveted title of MK.2. So let’s take a look at what’s new, and what all this fuss is supposed to be about.
In the years since Battlefield 3, and especially since the launch of Battlefield 1, DICE’s first-person shooter series has substituted silliness for seriousness. Battlefield 5 bucks the trend a little by establishing a robust blend of old and new. The sandbox of destruction that defined the Bad Company years now finds equal space alongside the slick UI, fluid animations, and sharp gunplay of recent Battlefield games. It’s a vast improvement on Battlefield 1’s warped interpretation of World War I, but it’s held back by one exceptionally tedious new mechanic.
For even more on the upcoming WW2 shooter, here are all the latest details on the , setting, and battle royale mode.
The culprit is the new Bleeding Out phase, which removes the option to hurry back to the deployment screen and respec ahead of your next life. Instead, you remain in the first-person perspective, bleeding out on the floor and screaming for a medic to wander by and save you - which, of course, never happens. If you are revived it’s seldom worth it: you have the same amount of ammo you died with, you are often in a pretty hairy situation, and, worst of all, if you die again you’ll be forced to endure the same tedious Bleeding Out phase all over again.
Previous Battlefield games let you hop back to the deployment screen and make key loadout changes or switch your spawn point all while the necessary respawn timer counts down. So while it doesn’t necessarily take longer to die and respawn in Battlefield 5, the process feels much more laboured than ever before. This sounds like a minor gripe, but when you consider just how much time you spend downed in an hour-long match of Conquest, these gory intermissions are a real problem.
Star Wars Battlefront II was the game which stirred the most vociferous action against loot boxes, but it wasn’t the first EA game to make use of the random blind purchase model. EA Sports titles - FIFA in particular - have offered similar purchases for years as part of the wildly popular Ultimate Team mode. They aren’t going away, but EA does plan a significant change for them starting this year.
Starting with this year’s EA Sports titles, EA will now disclose the odds for Ultimate Team packs. That change will affect FIFA 19 and Madden NFL 19 most obviously, and could indicate that EA plans to move toward more transparency for this monetization scheme across any future titles - though don’t expect them to drop the loot box model entirely.
There's plenty of sport to be had in the .
“Our model is sustainable,” EA Sports vice president and COO Daryl Holt tells . Holt says that the controversy over Battlefront II has “certainly changed us - in the way it always does in terms of anything you hear from a player or from the industry - in how we all react and adapt to it.”
The disclosure of pack odds for sports titles is one such change coming as a result of that feedback, and Holt says it’s an indication of “how we communicate and we deal with live service models and how we test things and implement feedback across all of EA.”
What is the best gaming graphics card? The video card’s GPU is the heart of your gaming PC and here at PCGamesN we review and benchmark all the latest AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. So, should you go for a cheap graphics card or go all in for 4K? We can help…
Of course if you want the absolute pinnacle of graphical prowess you could drop a cool $3,000 on Nvidia’s Titan V, but now the GTX 1080 Ti is actually starting to come down to a more reasonable price, serious 4K performance is actually within reach. Radeon fans might have hoped the AMD Vega cards would have made more of an impact on the gaming world, but they’re still too expensive and too slow to really matter in the final reckoning.
Make sure to pick the to go with your new graphics card.
But what should you buy right now? Well, with graphics card pricing starting to stabilise there is more choice than ever, though it’s still heavily weighted on the Nvidia side.
But whether you’re chasing a good, cheap graphics card, a top-end 4K graphics card, or just simply the best overall card, we’ve got you covered.
The best graphics cards are:
David L Craddock has almost completed the second part of his trilogy documentaing the formation of Blizzard Entertainment and the studio's biggest games. Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II covers the creation of StarCraft and Diablo II, detailing the crunch and challenge of starting a new series in a saturated genre, and building a sequel worthy of the original game's fame.
Craddock has allowed us to publish a chapter of his book here on PCGamesN. Chapter 7: Hubris or Fear focusses on the 14 months of crunch the StarCraft team put themselves through in creating their classic RTS game. Members of the StarCraft team tell him how the work brought them closer together, while putting significant strain on their health and their relationships outside of work.
StarCraft isn't on our list of the , but its sequel certainly is.
Craddock has almost completed the book and is funding the final stages through a Kickstarter campaign. To read more about Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II and support the project head over .
This chapter was prepared for us to publish but may change between now and publication. Also, we've emphasised the next with pull quotes and added in imagery.
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds had a big day a week ago with the launch of the new Sanhok map and, alongside it, the Event Pass system. This is designed to give you a chance to earn premium loot faster during PUBG events and to be able to hold on to that loot in future seasons.
You earn that look by completing daily and weekly missions that earn you experience. There are missions available to every PUBG player, but some are exclusive to Event Pass holders, who also get an experience boost, and are able to earn a few rewards that aren't available without the Pass.
If you're after more freebies then here are the .
Why wouldn't you buy an Event Pass then? Well, it's the cost, of course - this first one will set you back $9.99 / £7.49. Not that much, really, if you're really into PUBG and Hawaiian shirts (plenty of those to win). But if you're a little skint or not sure whether the crop top and bikini bottom look is for you then perhaps that price is intimidating.
If you haven't got an Event Pass yet for one reason or another then that's cool, don'ot worry, we're here to help you out. We can't make you instantly better at PUBG, unfortunately (though our should help), but we can give you an Event Pass.
The Crew 2 might be out today, but there’s an even hotter racer out there right now - Overwatch. That’s right, the arrival of newest hero Hammond (also known as Wrecking Ball, but that’s a lot less adorable) has got Overwatch players feeling the need for speed.
If you somehow missed the reveal and subsequent PTR release last night, Hammond is a super-intelligent hamster who pilots a mech. His machine is similar to Overwatch’s D.Va, but there’s one key difference - Hammond can curl into a ball and roll around to move about faster.
Ok, maybe I'm reaching with this one, but if a mech piloted by a hamster isn't a good reason to share our list of the , what is?
On top of that, he has a grappling hook, which he can use to swing into hard-to-reach spots. Alternatively, however, he can use it to speed himself up as he rolls along. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Overwatch’s community has adapted to this by creating ‘Hammond Racing’. If you’re wondering exactly what that is, you’ll be pleased to learn it’s almost exactly what it sounds like.
In a video posted to Twitter last night, Overwatch streamer Daniel Fenner posted a clip of Hammond Racing. Taking place on the Junkertown map, it tasks two full teams of Wrecking Balls with making their way from one end of the map to the other. Fastest hamster wins.
Razer has joined the optical switch revolution with its latest keyboard: the Razer Huntsman Elite. This keyboard utilises Razer’s own Opto-Mechanical switch, a rather interesting take on the optical key switch. No really, it’s quite something.
The Razer Huntsman Elite and Razer Huntsman both feature RGB per-key lighting, onboard storage, 10-key rollover, and a simple yet rather appealing aluminium plate design. The Elite model also features media keys, a multi-function dial, and Razer Chroma underglow lighting around the entire board and included wrist rest, which the cheaper model forgoes for a friendlier price tag.
Looking for the ? Here are the best ones we’ve taken for a spin.
Both come with Razer’s new Opto-Mechanical switch. Optical key switches utilise light rather than metal contact points to make a connection every time a key is pressed. There are a few benefits to this design, too. Anti-chatter measures are out the window, they’re swappable without any soldering, and due to the lack of contact points to wear out, optical switches are often rated for over 100 million clicks.
Razer is focused on one benefit of the optical switch for the Huntsman, and that’s speed. The is the quickest Razer has made to date, with an actuation point at just 1.5mm.
When is The Division 2’s release date? Loads of The Division 2 trailers and gameplay details have been revealed at E3 2018 so we have gathered them all up for you here.
The Division 2 is well on its way, kickstarting months of speculation in the run-up to its debut reveal during Microsoft's conference at E3 2018. The official reveal of the game was short and sweet; there was some fake stage banter between a group of four playing the game, as well as a brief introductory trailer detailing how America began to rebuild in the wake of the deadly virus that caused the events of The Division.
The Division 2 will be best with some squad mates, so while you're waiting for it get ready by checking out the on PC.
It did, however, disclose enough information to allow us to start piecing together some details about the game - now we know much more about The Division 2’s setting, new specialisations, and the much better expanded endgame. Find out all about this and our guide to everything we know about The Division 2. We've even got a Division 2 release date.
The Division 2 release date
The Division 2's release date was announced at E3 2018 - we go to post-apocalyptic Washington DC on March 15, 2019.
Ubisoft does not keep its hype trains running as long as it once did - Watch Dogs 2 was announced at E3 2016 and released later that same year. In contrast, the original Watch Dogs took two years to launch after its debut announcement, and there was an almost three year wait for The Division.