Prime Optimus - Fall of Cybertron PC Details
The eternal six-year-old in me is quite excited about Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, even though I am well aware I should have moved on to grown-up's things by now. Well, someone make me a videogame about a cheese and wine party or paying the electricity bill and I guess I'll play that too. First though, I wish to heed the call of the last of the Primes. Well, more specifically I want to play as Soundwave and Shockwave, but I suppose I can endure being the namby-pamby Autobots too. FOC has had a strange path to PC, having been initially denied to this platform after the devs admitted they didn't have time to do it well (which was presumably the case for the perfunctory War For Cyberton PC port), before an additional studio, the venerable but little-known Mercenary Technology, was drafted in to make a dedicated PC edition of the robo-biff sequel. Concrete details on just what PC-specific improvements/features it'll have are out, and it gives me hope that it might light our darkest hour.
Sez Gamespy, FOC PC will be Steamworksised (yes, That Guy In Comments, we know what you're going to say already thanks), have 'no DRM' beyond Steam's own, "enhanced textures, lighting, and shadows" and proper keyboard and mouse controls. Please remember to include an anisotropic filtering option folks. I'm amazed by how many games don't do that, given the big fat visual improvement it can offer.
FOC PC'll also launch day and date with the consolebox versions, that day and date being August 21. Less happily, it won't have DX11 bells and whistles or any kind of modding/map-editing support. That latter is a terrible shame - given the ever-changing nature of the Transformers, it only makes sense to let people create their own bots and maps. Incompatible with the flogging of DLC, I suppose. Speaking of DLC, apparently PC is getting all of that too - unlike War On Cybertron, where I had to stare jealously from afar as consolekin had exclusive play-rights to Shockwave.
Interestingly, in the US it'll be a download-only PC game. Publisher Activision (as in the sub-arm of Activision Blizzard, not the whole shebang) has been, arguably, the most resistant of the big boys to the digital slow revolution, with most of its money coming from COD boxed sales and the associated in-store promotion, so this is an interesting sign of forward-looking life. Does it imply a growing involvement with the latest PC renaissance, or just that they don't want to spend money on a boxed version of FOC PC? Oh, I don't really care about that, I've just too much inertia to end this post so I guess I'll just stop right