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30 years later, I’m still obliterating planets in Master of Orion II—and you can, too

4X, C:ArsGames, gaming, gog, Master of Orion II, MOO2, PC Gaming, strategy / 9u50fv / September 28, 2025

I love 4X games. I’ve tried other strategy game genres, but frankly, they don’t stick if they’re not first and foremost 4X games—at the heart of it, it must be about exploring, expanding, exploiting, and yes, exterminating.

I suspect that the first 4X game most people played was some entry in the Civilization franchise—though certainly, a select few played precursors dating back to text-based games in the 1970s.

But for me, the title that kicked off my obsession was Master of Orion II (MOO2)—a game that has you develop and build up planets across a simple galaxy map, researching speculative future technologies, and ultimately wiping out your opponents and claiming dominion over the known universe. (There are other victory conditions too, but that one is the most fun.)

There is something satisfying about making a couple thousand small choices that all add up to that galaxy map gradually changing color in your favor until the final cut scene plays, declaring you the true Master of Orion.

The games I love the most are the ones where you make decisions that compound over many, many hours to a long-term payoff. I’ll take that over games with bite-sized, contained challenges and short play times any day. The deeper and longer the experience, the better the payoff can be. To me, that’s ultimately what makes 4X games great. MOO2 is no exception.

A high score screen declares the player the ultimate master of the universe — I needed this validation. Credit: Samuel Axon

Nostalgic but flawed

That said, it’s not a perfect game. It benefited from the lessons it could learn from more than a decade of 4X games before it, and its designers were clearly thinking about how to make it balanced and fun.

They just missed the mark sometimes. For example, a big part of the game is choosing perks that customize your empire from before the first turn. One of those perks is called “Creative,” which allows you to learn multiple technologies at once rather than one at a time. It’s pretty hard to imagine anyone consciously declining to choose that perk unless they’re looking to make things a lot harder for themselves.

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A question for the ages: Is The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall a good game?

bethesda, C:ArsGames, crpg, Daggerfall, gaming, gog, open world, RPG, The Elder Scrolls, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall / Shannon Garcia / August 18, 2025

Revisiting the 1996 RPG exposes both genius and madness.

A render of a book in a library in Daggerfall

Daggerfall certainly has ’90s DOS RPG charm in spades. Credit: Bethesda

Ostensibly, C:ArsGames is to some extent about actually driving a few game purchases, but in reality it’s mostly an excuse for me and my colleagues to wax nostalgic about the games that were formative for us. Case in point: This entry in our ongoing series with GOG is about a game that’s completely free. I think Ars can withstand this tiny revenue shortfall for the sake of peak nostalgia!

There are a couple of reasons I chose The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall this time around: its co-creator, Julian LeFay, recently passed away, so it seemed timely. Also, it was one of the defining games of my youth—one I have continued to revisit now and then.

But it’s also interesting because of where its developer, Bethesda—a studio people both love and hate—is at today. Going back to Daggerfall, we find a game that shows off so much of what we’ve lost from the bygone era of ’90s PC gaming, but also one that makes it abundantly clear why the industry left those sensibilities behind.

I’ll spoil the conclusion though: I still love this game. It’s profoundly not for everybody, but it’s definitely for me.

The kids don’t get it

OK, so we’ve established that I love Daggerfall. Knowing Ars Technica’s readership, some of you probably do too. So who, exactly, doesn’t like it?

Just search YouTube and you’ll find a bunch of videos with titles like:

Ouch. That’s rough. Granted, one of those isn’t actually negative if you sit through the video, but it still acknowledges that it’s not easily accessible for everyone.

Look, I get it. Daggerfall hails from an era when “game design” primarily meant “experiment with programming techniques to come up with cool, unproven stuff no one’s seen before” rather than “meticulously craft a conveyor belt of nonstop fun via proven formulae.”

Those experiments are all exciting and interesting, and it’s refreshing to go back to an RPG from this era that was willing to try some wild ideas and deep systems, as opposed to most (not all!) RPGs today, which seem to have the same basic format with talent trees and so on.

I love that Daggerfall includes odd mechanics that you don’t often see in RPGs, like climbing. I like its vast world and accurate representation of most wilderness as meaningless liminal space. I think its opaque and sometimes maddening faction reputation systems are fascinating. Its character progression system is detailed and interesting.

I know this is already what the game is best known for, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that the scope of the game’s map is *staggering*. Credit: Samuel Axon

For me, the most frustrating aspect to Daggerfall is not its jazzy mechanics. It’s the mechanics that aren’t explained at all.

For example, in the playthrough I started to refresh my memory for this article, I spent a couple of hours doing quests in Wayrest, one of the most prominent cities in the game. Everything seemed to be fine as I rode my horse around town helping people out, training my skills, and buying new gear. But then a guard ran up to me and arrested me for assault. Who did I assault? I had no idea, but I pled guilty in order to get a softer sentence, even though I was pretty sure I wasn’t actually guilty.

I wrote that off as a fluke, but then it happened again: assault. And a third time, again assault. I couldn’t fathom why I kept getting arrested.

To DuckDuckGo I went for a quick Internet search to see if anyone else was having this problem. It was pretty common, and the cause was something I never would have imagined: I had been riding my horse around the town, galloping for speed to complete quests faster. It turns out that galloping too close to wandering NPCs in the street registers as assault, with penalties of up to a month in prison and hefty fines.

There was no feedback about this when it was happening. I didn’t even know I was doing it. I don’t specifically remember having this problem back in the ’90s, but it seems likely I did, and I must have just shrugged it off, because back then I would have had no way of figuring out what was going on.

I get why this sort of thing is a big barrier to new players, but I also think some of the YouTubers I watched applied a double standard. One complained that the game doesn’t explain itself, but then in the same video extolled the virtues of Minecraft—a game that explains itself even less.

Save early and save often. That was ingrained in me by ’90s gaming. Watching some of the YouTubers take this game on, it stressed me out how little they saved. Credit: Samuel Axon

It may be that we’re more patient with learning games when we’re kids. I played Daggerfall as a kid (well, a young teenager) so I’m relatively chill about its opaqueness and idiosyncrasies. That YouTuber played Minecraft as a kid, so that’s the one he’s willing to gloss over.

If you’re willing to spend a lot of time on wikis (just like with Minecraft) then Daggerfall as a lot to offer to those who are patient. I often feel the most engaging games in the long run are ones that have a steeper learning curve up front.

The unspoken spiritual successor

Of course, it’s not just the learning curve or opaque mechanics that are an issue for many players. A lot of people don’t like Daggerfall‘s procedurally generated world and quests—especially players who are used to Skyrim‘s more hand-crafted environments and quest lines.

Yes, Skyrim has “Radiant Quests,” which resemble Daggerfall‘s. But with the exception of a relatively small number of main story missions, Daggerfall only has what Skyrim calls Radiant quests.

A loose modern analogue to that is Elite Dangerous, which has no meaningful story content at all. Some people might be more comfortable calling that a simulation than a game.

But there’s another modern space title that has some strong resemblances to Daggerfall: Bethesda’s own Starfield. As with Daggerfall, Starfield has a small cohort of obsessive fans amidst a much larger crowd that thinks it’s just terrible.

When people bought Starfield, they were expecting Skyrim in space. I believe that one of the reasons a lot of people were disappointed was that they actually got Daggerfall in space, and that’s a very different experience.

Like Daggerfall and Elite Dangerous, Starfield not only accepts but even centers the notion that most of the environments are filled with, well, not a whole lot. It accurately reflects what space or wilderness actually are and makes much of the game a slow-paced mood piece rather than a constant dopamine dispenser.

*Starfield* has some structural and design similarities to *Daggerfall*. Credit: Bethesda

Most of Starfield‘s dungeons are randomized. It’s more about taking in the vibes and playing with the systems than it is about following an authored narrative—though Starfield does have an authored narrative. (It’s just not the game’s strongest suit, so it explains why people who are looking for that aren’t big fans.)

Granted, there’s little crossover between the original Daggerfall team and the folks who made Starfield. Daggerfall was pre-Todd Howard-as-creative-director and pre-Emil Pagliarulo, the two main creative leaders at Bethesda Game Studios since the Morrowind days.

But that’s why it’s all the more surprising that Starfield is, at best, a hybrid of the sensibilities of Daggerfall and Skyrim. Given those YouTubers trying and failing to play Daggerfall in 2025, it’s no wonder that Starfield didn’t land for a lot of people.

(I quite like it, personally, but I also like Daggerfall, so I’m either a masochist, old and archaic, or just plain wrong, depending on who you ask.)

A pure expression of one of gaming’s oldest dreams

There has long been a recurring dream in PC gaming of one super game that would allow you to fully live out a particular fantasy life of your choosing. Whether it was intended by developers, promised in marketing, or just in hopeful players’ heads, there’s an appeal to the idea of living an alternate existence in a sophisticated simulated world that’s so immersive in its escapism that you reliably forget your real life for hours on end. The idea is “I want to be a space trader,” or “I want to be a wandering fantasy adventurer,” and the game gives you a toolkit that’s both wide and deep to experience that entirely on your own terms.

A lot of times, the titles that went for this on some level seemed more like simulations than games or stories. They were less consistently fun than other games, but they were often profoundly ambitious.

Since they were all about helping a player live out something in their imaginations, they were also prone to viscerally negative reactions at launch from people who had personal expectations that didn’t map to the reality of what a game can actually do or chooses to focus on. (This continues today: look at the reactions to No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, and yes, Starfield.)

Daggerfall is one of those games. It is not for everybody. But for that niche group of players who are up for something jazzy and simulation-y that takes risks to let them live an alternate fantasy life that’s as much in their head canon as on the screen, it’s one of the best games of all time.

I strongly believe it’s important to judge a game (or any other art or media) more on whether it achieves what it’s going for than whether it meets whatever external expectations you might bring to it. If you agree, then that puts Daggerfall in a better position than if you have a more prescriptive attitude about game design.

The fidelity expectations of modern AAA titles and accompanying scope and cost make the kind of experimental, life-sim focus of a game like Daggerfall all but impossible to pursue now, but I miss it. Personally, I’ll usually take a deeply flawed work of sheer ambition over a retread of proven ideas I’ve already experienced before, no matter how skillfully crafted and consistently fun the latter is.

Yeah, I enjoy a good formula game now and then; my point was exactly that when I wrote about Assassin’s Creed Shadows a few months ago. But as much as I have enjoyed Shadows, it won’t stick with me for 30 years. Daggerfall has, and revisiting it this week, I can see that’s not purely because of nostalgia. It represents a maximalist philosophy of game design I feel is sorely underrepresented in today’s market.

A screenshot of a town from Daggerfall Unity — The Unity version of *Daggerfall* installs on top of a normal DOS installation, and it makes the game much, much more playable in 2025, with additions like long view distances. Credit: Samuel Axon

If that’s your inclination, too, it’s worth giving Daggerfall a shot. Just make sure to use the far more accessible Daggerfall Unity remaster on top of the GOG classic version you download, and be ready to look at the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages wiki a lot. Make sure you have a couple hundred hours to kill, too.

Oh, that’s all, eh? Hey, you could always make it a project in your retirement.

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Samuel Axon is the editorial lead for tech and gaming coverage at Ars Technica. He covers AI, software development, gaming, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

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Remembering Descent, the once-popular, fully 3D 6DOF shooter

C:ArsGames, descent, eCommerce, gaming, gog, GOG-Ars, partnership, shopping / Beth Washington / July 26, 2025

Descent is a big part of gaming history, but not many people talk about it.

The sound these enemies make is an instant hit of menacing nostalgia. Credit: GOG

I maintain a to-do list of story ideas to write at Ars, and for about a year “monthly column on DOS games I love” has been near the top of the list. When we spoke with the team at GOG, it felt less like an obligation and more like a way to add another cool angle to what I was already planning to do.

I’m going to start with the PC game I played most in high school and the one that introduced me to the very idea of online play. That game is Descent.

As far as I can recall, Descent was the first shooter to be fully 3D with six degrees of freedom. It’s not often in today’s gaming world that you get something completely and totally new, but that’s exactly what Descent was 30 years ago in 1995.

Developed by Parallax Studios and published by Interplay, the game was a huge success at the time, moving millions of copies in a market where only an elite few had ever achieved that. It was distributed in part via shareware and played a role in keeping that model alive and bringing it from the just-retail-and-friends-sharing-floppies era to the Internet-download era.

And fittingly for this list, Descent is also a part of GOG history. For one thing, it was one of the launch titles for GOG’s open beta in 2008. Later, it and its sequels mysteriously disappeared from the platform in 2015. It came out that the game’s publisher had not been paying royalties as owed to the developer, leading to a breakdown in the relationship that resulted in the game being pulled from all storefronts. In 2017, the Descent titles returned to GOG and other digital sales platforms.

Unfortunately, the story of the studio that evolved from the one that originally made Descent ended sadly, as is so often the case for classic studios these days. Parallax morphed into Volition, the company that most recently made the Saints Row games, among others. Volition was acquired by Embracer Group, a holding company that has made a reputation for itself by gutting storied studios and laying off industry luminaries. Volition was among the ones it shuttered completely.

So, let’s pour one out for Parallax->Volition and take a flight through the memory of Descent‘s evil-robot-infested mines.

Single player

I played Descent when I was a teenager. Obviously, some of you were older, playing it in college or well into adulthood. Others reading this probably weren’t even born when it came out. But for me, this was a defining game of my teenage years, alongside Mechwarrior 2, Command & Conquer, Meridian 59, Civilization II, and The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall.

I remember my friend giving me the shareware demo, telling me that it was the most technically impressive and visceral thing he’d ever played. I installed it and launched it, and the whole vibe immediately resonated with me: It was just the kind of gritty, corpo-sci-fi I loved then and still do today.

It took some getting used to, though. The default keyboard controls were not great, and it was a lot to learn trying to operate in so many axes of movement and rotation. I’ll admit I had trouble making it stick at first.

That changed a few months later; the same friend who was obsessed with Descent often played the tabletop game BattleTech with his brother and me, and so we were all eyeing Mechwarrior 2—which launched not long after Descent—with great interest. I had never purchased a flight stick before, but that seemed important for Mechwarrior 2, so I did, and that was the secret to unlocking Descent‘s charms for me.

(Of course, the GOG version of Descent and various community patches offer mouse support, so it’s far easier to get into without extra hardware now than it was back then.)

Once my flying went from chaos to control, I became completely hooked. I beat the game more than a dozen times, though I’ll admit in the later playthroughs I made liberal use of cheats (gabbagabbahey!).

I loved the loop of destroying the reactor then escaping through the labyrinthine tunnels—something I don’t think many other games have truly copied since then. I loved the music (though Descent 2‘s astoundingly good soundtrack by Skinny Puppy far surpassed it) and the process of getting better at the movement through practice.

The story is minimal, but something about the vibes just work for me in that ’80s anti-corporate sci-fi sort of way. Credit: GOG

I played so much that as I improved, I found even the harder difficulty levels were not enough to challenge me. That’s when the world of online deathmatches (or Anarchy, as Descent called the mode) opened to me for the first time.

Multiplayer

To be clear, I had played some multiplayer games online before, but up to that point, that only included text MUDs. I loved MUDs and still do, but there’s nothing like a fast-paced, action-packed online deathmatch.

It started with playing with my friends via direct dial-up; I have distinct memories of Descent Anarchy matches that were interrupted at pivotal moments by parents picking up the phone to make a call and inadvertently killing the connection.

As a side note, it turns out that my colleague Lee Hutchinson was also heavily into Descent matches with his friends, and he was so kind as to provide a short clip of one of those original matches from 30 years ago to include here, which you can watch below. (Unfortunately, I was not so forward thinking as Lee, and I did not preserve my replays for posterity.)

Lee Hutchinson attempting to defeat his friend with flares

I was the first of my friends to put in the effort to test my skills against the wider world. My memory of the details is fuzzy, but as I recall, online matches were arranged through Kali, an MS-DOS emulator of the IPX protocol for TCP/IP connections. It was nontrivial to set up, but it could have been worse.

I still remember, like it was last week, the Friday night I spent playing Descent online for the first time. It was a defining moment of my gamer origin story.

I’m not saying it was the best-balanced game in the world; balance was barely a thought then, and multiplayer game design was nascent. But the range of skills, the trash talk (which I’m not into now, but at the time I enjoyed, being the young punk I was), the rage-inducing lag: these were all a taste of an experience I still enjoy to this day in games like Call of Duty, The Finals, and Overwatch 2, among others.

Maybe it’s pure nostalgia talking, but there was nothing quite like playing Descent on Kali.

Entering the mines in 2025

For this article, I spent several hours playing Descent for the first time in I don’t even know how long. It was just as fun as I remembered. I was surprised at how well it holds up today, apart from the visual presentation.

Fortunately, the game’s community has done an amazing job with patches. DXX-Rebirth and DXX-Redux add support for modern display resolutions, bring much-needed quality of life and input changes, and more. In my opinion, you shouldn’t even launch the game without installing one of them. The GOG version has the essential tweaks to make the game run on modern systems and input devices, but these community patches go the extra mile to make it feel more like a modern remaster without sacrificing the art or vibe of the original release in any way.

Single-player is easier to get into than ever, and you might be surprised to learn that there are still people playing multiplayer. A “getting started guide” post by Reddit user XVXCHILLYBUSXVX lists Discord channels you can join to arrange games with other players; some have regularly scheduled matches in addition to impromptu, ad hoc matchups.

If you give it a shot, maybe you’ll run into me there. Or at least, you’ll run into my mega missile!

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

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Ars Technica and GOG team up to bring you a pile of our favorite games

eCommerce, gaming, gog, Good Old Games, partnership, shopping, Star Trek, star trek 25th anniversary, Star Trek The Original Series, Star Trek TOS, The Original Series, TOS / DJ Henderson / July 10, 2025

That changed with the 1992 release of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, or ST25 to its friends, which brought the original series Enterprise and its crew to life in glorious 256-color VGA. And to players’ vast relief, it was not a half-baked effort—locations like the Enterprise bridge were lovingly recreated, with beautiful atmospheric sound effects lifted straight from the TV show permeating every scene. The character art is sharp, and it’s easy to tell Bones from Spock. The entire game is like a love letter to OG Trek.

Screenshot of ST25 showing bridge crew — Ah, that old *Enterprise* bridge feeling. Credit: GOG / Interplay

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the time, ST25 is a mouse-driven point-and-click adventure game. It’s broken up into seven discrete chapters, with each chapter being a self-contained mission with problems to solve and objectives to accomplish. Starfleet Command is always watching—complete the minimum number of objectives and an admiral will give you a middling performance review. Go above and beyond and do everything, even your bonus objectives, and you’ll have lavish praise heaped upon you by a grateful admiralty.

The missions themselves tend to follow a pattern. Each starts with the crew of the Enterprise on the bridge as Kirk makes a log entry. Starting with the CD-ROM issue of the game, all the lines are fully voiced by the original cast, so every mission kicks off with Bill Shatner’s familiar “Captain’s log…” lead-in telling us what we need to examine, investigate, locate, or shoot at. (Sadly, the only major voice cast omission in this one is Majel Barrett as the computer.)

Then there’s what I always felt was the weakest part of the game: Most missions kick off with some sort of space battle, where the player has to awkwardly maneuver the Enterprise with the mouse, dodging phaser blasts and photon torpedoes (or just eating them because the controls are just that awful) and trying to blow the other ship up before it does the same to you.

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GOG revamps its “Dreamlist” feature to better pry old games out of publishers

black & white, black & white 2, Command & Conquer, Command and Conquer, dino crisis, dino crisis 2, discworld, game preservation, gaming, gog, Good Old Games, Peter Molyneaux, video game preservation / Shannon Garcia / January 29, 2025

Black & White was intriguing; it had classic Molyneaux over-reach and deserves, in the words of one Ars staffer, a re-release so that “a new generation can realize just how janky it is.” As detailed in a documentary by Noclip, the B&W games are stuck in publishing purgatory. Microsoft acquired Lionhead’s IP and assets, while Electronic Arts retains the publishing rights to the B&W games, and nobody has yet been able to align those two very large planets.

GOG has added its own “Our Pick” tag to games it wants to see brought forward onto modern systems. Among them is Freelancer, which Ars’ Samuel Axon described in our 2024 roundup of non-2024 games as “a sincere attempt to make games like Elite (Dangerous) and Wing Commander: Privateer far more accessible.” GOG selected Freelancer as one of its staff picks for the Dreamlist, citing its “dynamic economy and engaging storyline.”

The main thing GOG would be fixing with Freelancer, as with many games, would be simple availability, as the game is not available on any proper digital storefront. Axon reports that, in having an original disc, installing Freelancer was not too hard, with the installer working in Windows 11. You can apply community patches, like an “HD Edition” mod, but Axon preferred playing at a non-native resolution (1024×768) at 4:3 and adjusting his monitor.

Other notable games GOG and its voting public want to see brought back are Final Fantasy VII (the original, not the remake), the point-and-click Discworld adventure, Command & Conquer: The Ultimate Collection, and The Operative: No One Lives Forever.

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Blizzard’s pulling of Warcraft I & II tests GOG’s new Preservation Program

Blizzard, DRM, DRM-free, game preservation, gaming, gog, video game preservation, Warcraft, warcraft 3, warcraft 3 reforged, warcraft II, Warcraft III / 9u50fv / December 2, 2024

GOG’s version goes a bit beyond the classic versions that were on sale on Blizzard.net. Beyond the broad promise that “this is the best version of this game you can buy on any PC platform,” GOG has made specific tweaks to the networking code for Warcraft I and fixed up the DirectX wrapper for Warcraft II to improve its scaling on modern monitor resolutions.

It’s quite a novel commitment, keeping non-revenue-generating games playable for buyers, even after a publisher no longer makes them available for sale. The Warcraft titles certainly won’t be the only games for which publisher enthusiasm lags behind GOG and its classic gamers.

As noted at the Preservation Program’s launch, for some titles, GOG does not have the rights to modify a game’s build, and only its original developers can do so. So if GOG can’t make it work in, say, DOSBox, extraordinary efforts may be required.

A screenshot from Blizzard's Warcraft II: Remastered release, showing brick keeps, archers, footsoldiers, dragons around a roost, and knights on horseback units. — *Warcraft II: Remastered* lets you switch back and forth between classic and remastered graphics and promises to offer better support for widescreen monitors and more units selected at once. Credit: Blizzard

Beyond being tied to Blizzard’s Battle.net service in perpetuity, there are other reasons Warcraft fans might want to hold onto the originals. Blizzard’s 2020 release of Warcraft III Reforged was widely panned as uneven, unfinished, and in some ways unfair, as it, too, removed the original Warcraft III from stores. Reforged was still in rough shape a year later, leading Ars’ list of 2020’s most disappointing games. A 2.0 update promised a total reboot, but fans remain torn on the new art styles and are somewhat wary.

Then again, you can now select more units in the first two Warcraft games’ remasters, and you get “numerous visual updates for the UI.”

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GOG’s Preservation Program is the DRM-free store refocusing on the classics

game preservation, gaming, gog, Good Old Games, video game preservation / 9u50fv / November 13, 2024

The classic PC games market is “in a sorry state,” according to DRM-free and classic-minded storefront GOG. Small games that aren’t currently selling get abandoned, and compatibility issues arise as technology moves forward or as one-off development ideas age like milk.

Classic games are only 20 percent of GOG’s catalog, and the firm hasn’t actually called itself “Good Old Games” in 12 years. And yet, today, GOG announces that it is making “a significant commitment of resources” toward a new GOG Preservation Program. It starts with 100 games for which GOG’s own developers are working to create current and future compatibility, keeping them DRM-free and giving them ongoing tech support, along with granting them a “Good Old Game: Preserved by GOG” stamp.

Selection of games available in GOG's — Credit: GOG

GOG is not shifting its mission of providing a DRM-free alternative to Steam, Epic, and other PC storefronts, at least not entirely. But it is demonstrably excited about a new focus that ties back to its original name, inspired in some part by its work on Alpha Protocol.

“We think we can significantly impact the classics industry by focusing our resources on it and creating superior products,” writes Arthur Dejardin, head of sales and marketing at GOG. “If we wanted to spread the DRM-free gospel by focusing on getting new AAA games on GOG instead, we would make little progress with the same amount of effort and money (we’ve been trying various versions of that for the last 5 years).”

GOG Preservation Program’s launch video.

Getting knights, demons, and zombies up to snuff

What kind of games? Scanning the list of Good Old Games, most of them are, by all accounts, both good and old. Personally, I’m glad to see the Jagged Alliance games, System Shock 2, Warcraft I & II, Dungeon Keeper Gold and Theme Park, SimCity 3000 Unlimited, and the Wing Commander series (particularly, personally, Privateer). Most of them are, understandably, Windows-only, though Mac support extends to 34 titles so far, and Linux may pick up many more through Proton compatibility beyond the 19 native titles to date.

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Fallout: London is a huge Fallout 4 mod that is now playable—and worth playing

bethesda, Fallout, fallout 4, fallout london, gaming, gog, Mods, steam / 9u50fv / October 26, 2024

The UK equivalent of a Pip-Boy 3000, which is nice to see after so many hours with the wrist-mounted one. Team FOLON

‘Ello, what’s all this, then?

Fallout: London takes place 160 years after the global nuclear war, 40 years before Fallout 3, and in a part of the world that is both remote and didn’t really have official Fallout lore. That means a lot of the typical Fallout fare—Deathclaws, Super Mutants, the Pip-Boy 3000—is left out.

Or, rather, replaced with scores of new enemies, lore, companions, factions, and even some mechanics picked up from the modding scene (ladders!). It’s a kick to see the across-the-pond variants of wasteland stuff: tinned beans, medieval weapons, the Atta-Boy personal computer. There is at least one dog, a bulldog, and his name is Churchill.

As for the story, stop me if you’ve heard this one before: You, newly awakened from an underground chamber (not a Vault, though), enter a ruined London, one riven by factions with deep disagreements about how to move things forward. You’ll take up quests, pick sides, befriend or blast people, and do a lot of peeking into abandoned buildings, hoping to find that last screw you need for a shotgun modification.

London falling

When you first start Fallout: London, you’ll see a London that looks like, honestly, crap. Whatever London did to anger the nuke-having powers of the world, it got them good and mad, and parts of the city are very busted. The city’s disposition to underground spaces has done it well, though, and you can often find yesteryear’s glory in a Tube tunnel, a bunker, or a basement.

As you move on, you’ll get the surge of seeing a part of London you remember, either from a visit or from media, and how it looks with a bit of char to it. The post-war inhabitants have also made their own spaces inside the ruins, some more sophisticated and welcoming than others. Everywhere you look, you can see that familiar Fallout aesthetic—1950s atomic-minded culture persisting until its downfall—shifted into Greenwich Mean Time.

Fallout: London is a huge Fallout 4 mod that is now playable—and worth playing Read More »