PC Gamer

How gambling principles and seductive animation compel players to drop cash on card packs and weapon crates.

Loot boxes are everywhere. They're in shooters, RPGs, card games, action games and MOBAs. They also take the form of packs, chests and crates. They're filled with voice lines, weapon skins, new pants or materials to get you more loot boxes. They're in free games and paid ones, singleplayer and multiplayer. They can be free to open and paid for with real money. You may feel an almost violent antipathy to the very idea of them, but you've probably also opened a fair few.

Indie sim Terroir lets you manage a vineyard and winery. We thought a retired Witcher would fit right in. 

Retiring wasn’t easy. Eventually I had to put my swords in the display case. Folk expect an old man in Toussaint to care about wine, so that’s what I did. I asked the majordomo for help, and he handed me a ledger: Terroir. Well. I’ve been brewing potions and oils for this many years—making wine can’t be that hard. I just have to get on with it.

Year 1
The majordomo taught me the basics, but he was happy to leave me to learn on my own. The first harvest was a mess. Few grapes were worth using. According to the ledger, pretty much any grape can make wine. The resulting batch is… red. It’s wine. I’m pretty sure.

After I bottle it, a few local drunks give it "FIVE PLOUGHING STARS," which I cautiously take as a compliment. I plant more vines with the extra money. The truth is, it’s an easier way to earn coin than punching an angry cyclops. Maybe retirement is going to be OK after all.

Year 3
Grapes are fickle: they need a little rain to get going, then they grow best with warm sun and cloudy days. Too much rain and the vines grow leafy and and starve the grapes, blocking the sun even when the weather is good. Not enough rain, and the leafless vines sit exposed to sun, getting scorched and turning too sweet.

This summer was dry and the grapes ripened too early. I thought about praying for rain, but I’ve never been on good terms with the gods. Long ago, I saw a Skellige druid perform a rain summoning ritual, but the majordomo said that kind of thing would upset the neighbors.

Rain finally came, and the green leaves gave the grapes enough shade to calm down. Slowly, the last of the grapes finally ripened, but the first hints of frost were only days away when I called the workers in for harvest. We made it, but it was a close thing.

Maybe it was beginner’s luck, or maybe it’s just easy to impress dockside drunks, but the local judges haven’t liked my wines from the last few years. They keep coming back with the same problem: the acidity is too low.

Year 4
Constant, dreary rain. Like being back in Velen, hip-deep in mud and foglets. The workers in the fields trimmed leaves in a downpour, but new leaves came back as fast as they could cut them. I thought about reaching for a sword and helping cut back the foliage, but Yen thought someone would end up losing a hand. She’s usually right.

It doesn’t really matter, since the rain never stopped. We trimmed leaves from early spring to late autumn, then let the small, bitter grapes die on the vine without harvesting a single one.

Year 7
Making wine is a process. The first step is to stomp the grapes into juice, which pulls out tannins, the stuff that makes red wine bitter and caustic—like Vesemir always was before breakfast. After crushing, we ferment juice and grape pulp, which trades the sweetness for alcohol. Then, some of the fermented pulp gets pressed to add more acidic juice to the wine.

The workers taste the wine throughout, looking for acid, sweetness, and tannins. Getting a good balance between these qualities takes trial and error. The majordomo, for all his good qualities, isn’t interested in keeping track of the combinations we try out. I started keeping a notebook at my desk, writing down combinations. This year’s batch will be Acid: 5; Sweetness: 3; Tannins: 4. I scratch out 5/3/4 in my notebook to remember for next year. Last year we tried 4/3/4. It was good, but again the locals thought the acid was too low.

In time, we’ll be able to afford better barrels that age wine to perfection and a big grinder that pulls more tannins out of the grapes. They seem like luxuries, but those things will help us hit recipes no matter what happens with the harvest. For now, we can only do what we can with the grapes the weather gives us. Sometimes it’s good wine, sometimes it’s bad, but booze will always sell.

Year 9
I got a note from the mayor that he’d like to visit the estate. The weather was perfect this year, so I thought we’d have wine worth showing off. Sales are fine and the weather has been good enough, but another powerful local friend would be worth the trouble—even if it meant an evening wearing tights. After the harvest, we invited the mayor to share a bottle. He loved it, and offered a hefty sack of coin as a "government grant," wink wink.

Year 12
War looms, but for once I’m not marching off to join in the mess. A stressed-out Nilfgaardian quartermaster visited the estate, asking us to donate wine to the army. Local wine distributors in Toussaint are picky—we have to be careful to send them really good wine and sell bad batches to the peasants—but the quartermaster insisted that any purple alcohol will do.

The quartermaster’s timing is good. Instead of letting this year’s overripe, sunburned grapes go to waste, we turn them into the most disgusting toilet water ever to be bottled in Toussaint. I send 3,000 bottles of the Corvo Bianco Moehoen Special 1287—named for the Nilfgaardians’ prick of a Field Marshal—to the Black Ones with my insincerest compliments.
Year 15
For years, our wines were bottled and sold year by year, with a few special cases set aside for a few years down the line. The workers just finished rolling in the new aging barrels—made of “white oak” from a far-off land, “America”—and now wine becomes a long game. Planning ahead and aging wines to be bottled five, ten, or thirty years in the future is strange for an old man who expected to die young by the sword. Most times, I made my choice and never looked back. Now, I worry. It’s a new thing.

I’ve spent all this time expanding the vineyard and perfecting one type of wine, but some nearby soil might be good for different types of grapes: merlot, chardonnay, pinot noir. I’ve only just started to fill in the bestiary for my new world.

Micromanaging the vineyard workers is still a pain in the ass, and the majordomo still isn’t interested in keeping track of important details, so my notebook has grown thick and dog-eared. Still, watching the years roll by over these lovely hills with a glass of wine in-hand—well, life could be worse. It pretty much always was.

Year 20
We won an award today. Finally nailed down the perfect recipe, and last year’s batch got happy reviews from the royal court. I set aside some for this year’s local wine awards, and the Corvo Bianco Red 1295 was named the best in all of Toussaint. People are offering absurd prices for the remaining bottles, so I’m releasing them a dozen at a time to help the 1295 grow into legend. Dandelion isn't the only one who can build a myth when he wants to.

Corvio Bianco now has its own tavern where I can sell wine directly, and a few years of good harvests have filled my pockets and spread our reputation. Not bad for an abandoned boy raised on the stone floor of Kaer Morhen. Not bad at all.

Look for more information in the coming months.

Blizzard has been busy in the last few weeks finally shedding some light on the teams that will be competing in the upcoming inaugural season of the Overwatch League. The San Francisco team's roster was announced last week (featuring appearances by Shaq, J.Lo, and Marshawn Lynch), while this week two more teams were unveiled: the Shanghai Dragons and the Dallas Fuel.

It will contain six golden cards from the Classic set.

Building on last month's Oktoberbrawl offer, Blizzard announced today that Twitch Prime subscribers will get a free Golden Classic Card Pack as part of the Prime gaming loot from November to January. And it's not just a pretty thing to look at—every card in the pack will be golden!

It'll probably look much nicer, too.

If you've wondered where legendary Counter-Strike map Dust2 has been since it left competitive matchmaking in February, here's the answer: Valve has been rejigging it. Following similar revamps, an "updated and refined version" of Dust2 will be available for testing in the next CS:GO beta depot.
Valve has yet to publish anything elaborating on the updates and refinements, though they did tweet out the picture you can see above.

Bomber Crew is an upcoming "strategic survival sim" about building and piloting bomber planes. At first blush, it looks like FTL set in World War II instead of space, but a few wrinkles distinguish this neat-looking game from its procedurally generated brethren.

It's obligatory for every article on Overgrowth to start with a bit on how long it has been in development, so here's mine: When Wolfire Games first started work on the rabbit beat 'em up, George W. Bush and Gordon Brown were still in office, the first Android phone had not yet launched, and there was only one Marvel Cinematic Universe movie. The Humble Bundle was a spin-off project from Overgrowth—that is how much the industry has changed while this game's development trundled on.

In his first column for PC Gamer Indie, creator of the original X-COM Julian Gollop argues his game has become a genre of its own.

I still remember the first time I used a hex-core processor. It was in early 2012, and I got to test a high-end desktop from a system builder. My own PC at the time had an i7-920 'Bloomfield' processor overclocked to 3.2GHz, and I thought it was pretty potent (I still have that PC kicking around today). Going from a quad-core system to a 6-core PC, complete with liquid cooling and a healthy 4.5GHz overclock, delivered a knockout blow to my poor system. It was very nearly twice as fast in many benchmarks.

I've been hearing complaints about Core i5 'only' having four CPU cores ever since Ryzen 5 came to market, and for good reason. If you're just playing games, the chips are good and have arguably been the best value Intel processors, but do something more complex than gaming (like livestreaming or CPU-based video encoding) and a 4-core/4-thread (4C4T) chip can really start to bog down. With AMD offering 6C12T Ryzen 5 parts for around $200, Core i5 has become increasingly difficult to recommend. Intel's solution to this problem is now here, thanks to its 8th Gen Core i5 processors (aka, Coffee Lake or CFL).

Poor frame pacing means you shouldn't play Forza with an uncapped framerate. 

One week after its debut on PC and Xbox One, Forza Motorsport 7 continues to leave me baffled when it comes to performance. If this is the promised DX12 land of milk and honey, I'm not buying it. Microsoft and its partner studios have a lot of work to do, with performance that is consistently inconsistent. I had initially hoped to have a full performance analysis up by today, but I ran into anomalies that delayed things as I tested and retested on a variety of cards and systems. And then AMD and Nvidia just released new drivers yesterday, and at least the Nvidia drivers have invalidated all my existing results.

I will play Forza Motorsport 7 for years, but I will never drive all of its 700-something cars. I won't drive every circuit under every possible weather condition, or during every night and day variation. I won't ever turn off all the driver-assists or know how to properly homologate vehicles on my own, which is an actual thing. Instead, I'll continue my quest to catch them all (the vans, specifically), tricking them out with anime liveries and critiquing their intricate dashboard designs.

Ostensibly FIFA and PES are trying to simulate the same sport. In reality they both approach football in a radically different way—it’s the difference between watching Brazil and Germany. They’re both good, but they’re playing a fundamentally different game.